Though not quite the force in British contemporary music it once was, the Society for the Promotion of New Music is celebrating its diamond jubilee this year with a series of concerts in which each programme is conceived by an important figure from the organisation's history. Richard Rodney Bennett was in charge for the Spitalfields festival concert, framing the clutch of works by unestablished composers that have always been the raison d'etre of the SPNM with a premiere of his own, and works by Judith Weir, Thea Musgrave and the conductor of the Britten Sinfonia for the evening, Richard Baker.
It didn't turn out to be the most joyous anniversary. Perhaps the raw acoustic of Wilton's Music Hall was to blame, but Weir's King Harald Sails to Byzantium, which one remembers as a pithy tone poem, seemed grey and uneventful, and the bright colours of Musgrave's Lamenting with Ariadne merged into an amorphous sound mass, hardly projecting the drama of its scenario. Baker certainly gave both works the energy and precision needed; his own piece, Los Rabanos, an economical, effective trio that moves elliptically towards the Mexican carol revealed in the final bars, faired much better.
The three pieces taken from the SPNM's shortlist of works for performance also made little impression. The tangled instrumental surfaces in Iain Matheson's Pieces of Pieces could have come through the society's selection process anytime in the past 30 years. Stephen Roberts's The Next Stop Is . . . Angel is a vertiginous musical ride occasionally halted by a Bernstein-like riff, while Phillip Neil Martin's Long Under Darkness heaves itself from the lowest registers to the highest and then subsides again, though the rather formulaic scheme does capture some striking sonorities along the way.
Bennett's new work rescued the concert. He is a wonderfully natural lyric composer. His Songs Before Sleep were written for the rapidly rising Jonathan Lemalu, and these six settings with piano of texts from the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes fit the young baritone's easy, honeyed voice like a glove. They are firmly rooted in the English song tradition, with just occasional nods towards Broadway (later in the evening, Bennett presented a cabaret, mixing his own material with that of song writers like Coward, Gershwin and Sondheim). The highlight was his version of the full text of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, conceived as an exquisite, dreamy ballad, which Lemalu floated magically.
