Last night was a busy night for classical music in London, with the Simón Bolívar Orchestra of Venezuela, the LSO and Bernard Haitink all performing in various places around the city. But the smart kids were avoiding all that at The Forge in Camden, chilling to the sweet, complicated sounds of Christopher Redgate and his microtonal oboe.
Redgate plays a newly designed instrument called the 'Redgate-Howarth system oboe', which drastically increases the oboe's suitability for playing microtones, multiphonics and the high register. Bookending this recital were works for the instrument by both Redgate himself and his brother Roger, which brilliantly demonstrated its capacity for intense and hyper-virtuosic showcasing. Between these pieces were a number of student compositions from students of the Royal Academy of Music – two for Redgate's oboe with electronics, and several more for other combinations of instruments – but it's the fireworks of Redgate and his oboe which linger in the mind.
Both of Christopher Redgate's compositions, Microboe and Multiphonia, were clearly the work of a man who knows his instrument. Microboe is not as diminutive a piece as its title implies, and moves from an exploratory opening section which teases out the microtonal possibilities of the instrument into a complex, rapid section. It was surprisingly skittish for such an obviously cerebral piece and left me fairly convinced that developments in oboe technique are in fact worthy of general attention.
Multiphonia was devoted to exploring multiphonic possibilities within the instrument – Redgate boasted that his new oboe could produce around 2,500 different multiphonic sounds – and, consisting of an entirely continuous flurry of rapid passagework, it also required circular breathing. Again, the composition was far wittier than it might have been, and was always entertaining as well as impressive. It was refreshing to see such unabashed delight in virtuosity, and Roger Redgate's Ausgangspunkte added to this delight, being shrill, intense, just as difficult as the others, and a bit modernist. Whether the fiendishly tough piece was a product of sibling rivalry or not, the real winner was the microtonal oboe.
Christopher Redgate also played two pieces written for him by RAM students: Grigorios Giamougiannis' The Summoner and John Goldie-Scot's Experiment 3. The Summoner featured a returning stuttered fanfare of pretty, trippy broken chords which played with microtonal aspects to a certain degree but seemed just as involved with the electronic element to the composition – as, in fact, did Experiment 3, which extracted an odd watery gurgling sound from the speakers, placed in uneasy opposition to the live oboe playing. Both pieces were impressive explorations of various things, but I wondered if perhaps a few too many ideas had been thrown into the pot; certainly, they lacked the clear sense of focus of the Redgates' compositions.