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Roundhouse concerts 23 & 24 January 2010

The Guardian
Financial Times
mapsadaisical blog
The Telegraph Music Blog

Andrew Clements guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 January 2010 
Britten Sinfonia/Muhly/Collon
Roundhouse, London

Muhly, who shared conducting duties with Nicholas Collon, had planned the programme, framing four of his own works with pieces by the two composers who perhaps have influenced him more than any others: Philip Glass (the solo-piano Hot Rocks, played by Muhly), and Steve Reich (the ensemble piece City Life). In Muhly's music, though, there seems more of Reich's rougher-edged sound than of Glass's suaver pulsations, especially in the rhythmic dislocations of a piece such as Step Team, written for the Chicago Symphony three years ago. For a composer still in his 20s, By All Means, from 2004, seemed almost prehistoric, but its quizzical attitude towards the world of serialism suggests that Muhly's musical personality was already distinctive.

That personality seems most impressive when confronted by other sensibilities. In his arrangements of three songs for the Vermont folk singer Sam Amidon, who was joined for the third by Beth Orton, Muhly surrounded the originals with apparently unlikely cocoons of orchestral pulsings, and shimmers from a celesta that he played himself. In The Only Tune the process of dislocation was taken further, deconstructing the folksong The Two Sisters, and surrounding it with sampled sound in an extraordinarily powerful way. There were echoes of early Reich and of other American experimentalists like Robert Ashley, but the result was original and utterly personal.

Reverb, Roundhouse, London
The Financial Times by Richard Fairman
Published: January 28 2010 22:13

It was back in the 1970s that the old railway shed of the Roundhouse started to reverberate with classical music. Alongside the naked bodies of Oh! Calcutta! it became the venue of choice for the late-night Proms – a perfect fit, as its domed roof made it look like the smaller sister of the Royal Albert Hall.

Now, four years after its £30m refurbishment, the Roundhouse is host to classical music again. Over a period of 10 days “Reverb” is looking at every possible shade of classical music through a prism, culminating this coming weekend in the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment playing Beethoven, a capella Pink Floyd, and an evening of new music for seven pianos, all streamed live online.

The usual ways of dressing up classical music for a younger audience are here – drinks in the auditorium, coloured spot-lighting and video screens showing the performers (always a second behind, which is very irritating) – but nowhere has a better atmosphere for contemporary music than the Roundhouse.

The early evening concert on Saturday brought together pianist Joanna MacGregor and the versatile Britten Sinfonia. This was a programme well tailored for the occasion: a pair of Bach’s keyboard concertos found MacGregor big on ebullience, though amplification made the piano sound horribly hard, while short pieces by Egberto Gismonti and Piazzolla showed how neatly these highly rhythmic South American composers can be made to fit with Bach. The best was MacGregor’s own arrangements of three Dowland songs; highly atmospheric.

The late evening concert featured the London Contemporary Orchestra under Hugh Brunt. The centrepiece was a high-octane performance of Reich’s Different Trains, a modern classic for string quartet and tape, featuring sampled voices. Then the sampling idea was picked up in Shiva Feshareki’s Konzert for turntables, saxophone quartet and orchestra, with the composer doubling as DJ sampling barely recognisable soundbites of LPs – interesting for five minutes, not for 25, an experiment better left to the privacy of one’s own home. At either end came minimalist simplicity in Biosphere’s naive Shhoctavoski – “Rubbish!” shouted one aggrieved listener – and John Cage’s more thoughtful Seventy-Four. Hit or miss, it is good to be back at the Roundhouse. And these days everybody gets to keep their clothes on. ()

www.roundhouse.org.uk

Nico Muhly and the Britten Sinfonia at the Roundhouse, 24/01/10
Blog: mapsadaisical , found sounds for lost minds

A couple of days ago Nico Muhly posted a rant on his blog about how London was a complete logistical nightmare, how Londoners were too accepting of this fact, and how they just shouldn’t take it any more, god damn it. What a load of rubbish, I thought. How dare these New Yorkers come over to London and traduce our fine city just because they don’t happen to know the best places to eat/drink/get free wi-fi within 100 metres of every tube station in Zone 1. However, as I stood in the pissing rain waiting for a rail replacement bus service to ferry me up to the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm (the Northern Line having been crudely disembowelled at Camden Town), glancing anxiously at my watch as the scheduled 7.30 start time loomed ever nearer, I began to think he may have had a point. Revolutionary thoughts began to foment in my mind, imagining myself marching on city hall with a flaming pitchfork and an Evening Standard-sponsored “TF-HELL” placard, desperately trying not to set one on fire with the other. But then the bus came, and I forgot all about it.

On the evidence of this remarkable performance, revolutionary thoughts of a different kind are occupying Nico Muhly. Accompanied by members of the Britten Sinfonia, the way he set about the partition between the worlds of traditional folk and contemporary classical music (using a distinct pop sensibility) was, at times, quite breathtaking. He bookended the show with works by two of his biggest musical influences, starting with a solo piano performance of a piece by his “mentor”, the American minimalist composer Philip Glass. “Mad Rush” is actually a fairly traditional piece by Glass’s standards, romantic-sounding even. It was to give Muhly his only real opportunity to demonstrate his proficiency as a musician (as opposed to composer/conductor), with cameras projecting images of his fluttering fingers, reflected waterily via the instrument’s black surfaces. Moments of gently rippling gracefulness were interrupted by abrupt torrents of notes, like throwing a rock into a lake and observing the patterns on the surface.

The Britten Sinfonia’s performances of Nico Muhly’s own pieces were superb, particularly “Step Team”, composed in 2007 when Muhly was a mere 25 years old. (25? Good god. I’m ten years older than that already, and how many pieces of classical music have been commissioned from me? Not enough, frankly). Now this was some seriously clever stuff, sounding like a heavily fragmented piece of Glass, or even Stravinsky. Based loosely on the idea of a translation of jumping and clapping to music, Muhly’s piece has the feel of a communal dance in which the actions of each participant make sense only in the context of those of their colleagues. Serrated sections of melody were passed around the nonet, deploying Reichian repetition, and incorporating pop ideas of call-and-response and almost vocal brass interjections. These jerkily syncopated rhythms would speed up and slow down at unexpected moments, with the conductor Nicholas Collon pivoting frantically as the completed, collective tune whirled round the ensemble.

Another facet of Muhly’s talent was displayed next, as his Bedroom Community label colleague Sam Amidon joined him for versions of old American folk songs “Pretty Saro” and “I See The Sign”. Amidon’s ageless voice is used as a framework for Muhly to drape some wonderful arrangements around, heightening the mood of the piece with subtlety and drama as required. Muhly was both conducting and playing celeste, musically patting his head and rubbing a stomach hidden under yards of flowing black smock (good, typical New York street-style clothing, you know the sort of thing). The Sinfonia were kept unobtrusive and understated, softly smoothing the song’s flow, but as “I See The Sign” grew more apocalyptic, Muhly summoned violent flashes from the strings; likewise during the following piece (in which Amidon was accompanied by Beth Orton), using thunderous drums to stress the phrase “you’ll have to give an account at the judgment”.

I’ve written about my awestruck reaction to a performance of Muhly’s “The Only Tune” before, and tonight it did similar things to me. It is a story of a girl who was drowned and how her bones were used to make a violin, but Muhly’s arrangement gives it a fractured, nightmarish quality, using a clever song-within-a-song device. It started in a haze of free banjo from Amidon and fizzing static from the laptop of Valgeir Sigurdsson (also from the Bedroom Community stable). Amidon recounted the tale from broken and distressed memories, with Sigurdsson feeding in snippets of lyrics from a recording of the song’s second half, an ominous foreshadowing. When Amidon finally put the banjo down to holler the haunting song, the “only tune” the macabre fiddle would play, despite the number of musicians around him, he looked totally alone, with a fragile and childlike air. “Oh the wind and the rain” he cried, wringing such emotion from that seemingly simple and almost meaningless phrase. Muhly’s arrangements are tormented throughout, huge droning rumbles of bass and cello underpinning violins which seem trapped, unable to escape from their own repetitive cycles.

The evening ended with Muhly conducting a performance of Steve Reich’s City Life. On record, I’ve never been a huge fan of it at all, finding its central conceit (classical music interspersed with and interacting with the sounds of New York streets – traffic, mainly) a little too obvious to render it of much interest. But there was something about this performance tonight which was different. Was it the context – a love letter from a homesick Muhly? Or the volume? This felt like a piece which was designed to be loud and amplified, to immerse you in those city streets, to overwhelm and confuse with its echo and overlap, and sudden shifts in direction from one section to the next. That volume seemed to give it new and unexpected connotations, with the vocal loop “can’t take no mo” spliced and repeated to give what sounded like a cry of “TECHNO! TECHNO! TECHNO!”, set amongst thumping rhythms. Or was it just the way it seemed to be referencing my own day of traffic-related chaos (not just the rail replacement malarkey, but earlier on in the day I had been stopped by the police for cycling the wrong way down a one-way street in Soho, erk)?

As the puppy-like Muhly bounded off the stage at the end of this wholly convincing demonstration of his considerable talents, we were sent out to play with the traffic in our own city. I shuffled in confusion from Camden bus stop to Camden bus stop in the drizzle, with Amidon’s voice still haunting me. Oh, the wind and the rain indeed.

 Nico Muhly: a wonder-boy winner at the Roundhouse Reverb Festival  
Telegraph Music blog By Michael White January 27th, 2010

Critics spend their lives throwing around adjectives after concerts, usually in the nature of good, bad or indifferent; and in my case, thrilling is a word that doesn’t surface too often in the vocab. But it did on Sunday at the Roundhouse. Three decades on from its glory days as a centre for cutting-edge contemporary music courtesy of Boulez, Stockhausen and other giants of the 60s avant-garde who played there, Camden Town’s iconic fringe venue for all things new and alternative is hosting the kind of contemporary music festival it might have been built for (instead of trains).

Like most contemporary music festivals, the repertoire of Reverb (as it’s called) is hit and miss. I was there on Saturday and thought too much of the programme fell into the category of interesting failure.

But Sunday night was different. Sunday was Nico Muhly. And if you don’t know who he is, neither did I, really, beyond a vague understanding that he was the current boy-wonder of American new music and someone to investigate. I’d heard and liked his score for the film The Reader. I knew he’d written something for the choir of Clare College, Cambridge. And I knew there was a buzz about him that some of my colleagues in the British music establishment dismissed as hype. That was it.

So when, last night, he bounced onto the Roundhouse stage cross-dressed in what might have been a Nicole Fahri frock – exuberantly camp and introducing himself, the Britten Sinfonia, and his work through a microphone like the compere of a Christopher Street drag show – I was slightly taken aback. Things don’t happen that way at the Wigmore Hall.

I wasn’t keen about the way it started either, with Muhly playing a piece of keyboard froth by Philip Glass (worryingly described, through the mike, as ‘my mentor’) followed by an orchestral score by Muhly himself that ran like sub-Stravinskyan reflections on the methodology of Steve Reich: edgy, streetwise, second-hand Americana, and not put together too convincingly.

But then the programme took a different turn. And with Muhly conducting the Sinfonia alongside a compellingly passive American folk guitarist/singer called Sam Amidon, there came a succession of what I guess you’d call song settings – although that wouldn’t give much sense of how extravagant they were as statements or how far the settings travelled from the texts they framed.

They were perhaps a 21st century American equivalent of orchestral songs by Mahler, embedded in symphonic texture. And like so many of Mahler’s texts, they were darkly portentous folk songs – the kind of thing you’d hear in a log-cabin in Vermont – transformed into the most bizarre, extraordinary and memorable flights of fantasy.

Somewhere in the antecedents of this music lay the American pastoral of, say, Aaron Copland’s song-settings. But so did the urban chic of Steve Reich. And so do plenty of other things that lie beyond the realms of ‘classical’ tradition. There’s a wild (deranged) eclecticism in the writing that resists nomenclature and staggers back and forth across the formal boundaries of art music, commercial music, rock, folk or whatever.

The one certain thing is that these songs are powerful, visceral, and brilliantly imagined in the way the music wraps itself around the solo voice, partly-supportive, part-subversive. I’d dare to say there’s no greater invention even in the Britten folk-song settings. And the truth is that, compared to Nico Muhly, Britten’s folk songs sound tame.

Maybe I lead a sheltered life, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite like this music; and I was mesmerised by it, by the singer (whose blank-faced delivery was unaccountably poignant, like a country boy who’s stumbled on some deep truth), and by the energy of Muhly’s direction – which then applied itself to a raw but heart-stopping account of Steve Reich’s City Life that ended the show and sent me out into the street on a crazy high.

Muhly and Amidon are back in Britain in the spring, to give a concert at the Barbican. And my hot tip for the year so far is that if there’s one concert you put in your diary it’s this. April 20th, 7.30pm. It won’t be Wigmore Hall-nice. But it will be something you should hear.

Tags: Nico Muhly, Reverb, Roundhouse, Sam Amidon