Music We’d Like to Hear, an annual series of concerts curated by the composers Markus Trunk, John Lely and Tim Parkinson, has reached its ninth year of sharing an eclectic, often esoteric selection of experimental music with its small but loyal following. As one of the few chances to be immersed in this strange, provoking, sometimes infuriating musical world outside of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, these concerts deserve to be much better attended than they are.
The music of Swiss composer Jürg Frey has featured heavily in this year’s set of concerts. In addition to the pieces chosen by Tim Parkinson here, two relatively recent works for solo violin had been heard as part of a stunning recital by Mira Benjamin of the Montreal-based Bozzini Quartet the week before: WEN 3, in which a single double-stop is presented again and again, surrounded by the huge, gaping silences that make up the fabric of so much of this composer’s work; and A Memory of Perfection, a piece which utilises one of Frey’s favourite string techniques – an unstable, ghostly harmonic produced by gently pressing on the string a semitone above the place where a harmonic is already being made (the acoustic turbulence of which, Benjamin remarked afterwards, can be felt on the fingertips). In tonight’s performance of Two Pieces for cello and piano – written towards the beginning of Frey’s work list in the early 90s – the influence of Webern via Morton Feldman was more clearly apparent, though already this music seems to breathe even more slowly and deeply than in that of either of the other two composers. Only in the second piece was there any hint of a disturbance – the mumbling of a sleeper barely disturbed.
Feldman also influenced the concert’s opening work, Matteo Fargion’s 11 Notturni for solo piano. In it, rich and resonant tonal chords interrupted the cool, still, Feldman-inspired status quo like wild flowers sprouting up through a long-neglected floor mosaic. Parkinson found an utterly convincing way to articulate the work’s many contradictions, drawing out melodic and rhythmic echoes of Chopin and occasionally puncturing the piece’s smooth surface with gestures of unexpected ferocity and bite.
A Bach masterpiece was the inspiration and raw material for Christian Wollf’s Cello Suite Variation, though here the results were best when a healthy distance was kept from the orginal source. The second part – based on a Sarabande – worked best, not least as a result of Lukoszevieze’s intimate, inwardly projected playing and his incredibly sensitive control of tone colour.
Another work for solo cello, Julia Eckhardt’s speling#4 (“speling” meaning “scope” in Flemish), proved to be another perfect vehicle for showcasing Lukoszevieze’s musicality. From its almost inaudible beginnings through stratospheric, bleached-white descants and otherworldly triple stops which seemed somehow to totally engulf the space whilst being almost unbearably fragile, this was a totally compelling performance.