Richard Morrison, The Times
Wednesday 14 December 2011

Some people can’t see a mountain without wanting to climb it. The players of Hugh Brunt’s terrific London Contemporary Orchestra give me a similar impression: that they are game for any avant-garde musical challenge, the tougher and craggier the better.

Opening what looks like being ten days of dizzying eclecticism at the Spitalfields Music Winter Festival in East London, the young players tackled not one daunting mountain but three — the second never scaled before. This was Martin Suckling’s Violin Concerto, commissioned by London Music Masters (via an ingenious “buy a bar” fundraising campaign) for the fine Polish fiddler Agata Szymczewska, who tore into its fiendish challenges with huge energy and technical resource. The piece is titled De sol y grana — a reference to a Machado poem in which the poet compares his songs to bubbles glinting scarlet in the sunlight. Here the bubbles become musical segments, nine of them, some languorous or even lugubrious, others violently eruptive.

Rather than being the dominant force, the soloist is first among equals, fizzing in and out of weirdly imagined string and wind textures that are sometimes soured by quarter-tones. Disconcertingly, Suckling is fond of piling up disparate ideas or layers, then moving on. Yet, under trills or quivering oscillations from the soloist, the strands are finally gathered into a superb finish: a birdsong-like crescendo of ecstasy.

There was more virtuosity later, in Gérard Grisey’s magnum opus Vortex Temporum. A spectral-music pioneer who died in 1998, Grisey wasn’t the best advocate of his own pieces. It’s wisest to ignore his programme notes, with their mind-numbing references to “stretched disharmonics” and “sinusoidal waves” and simply let the music — volcanic, clangorous, hypnotic, nightmarish or eerie — assail or seduce you. The pianist Antoine Françoise, required to deliver fistfuls of notes (or sometimes simply to slam his fists on the keys) was rightly acclaimed at the end. But under Brunt’s immaculate direction the entire ensemble was heroic.

And I am delighted, too, that this rising new generation is rediscovering the soundworld of Claude Vivier. His Bali-inspired Pulau Dewata — hard, percussive, jangling refrains organised according to ancient modes — was a reminder of what a genius the world lost when the Canadian was brutally murdered in 1983 at the age of 34.

Hugo Shirley, The Telegraph
Tuesday 13 December 2011

There might have been mince pies in the interval of the first evening concert of the 10-day Spitalfields Music Winter Festival, but there was nothing cosy about this bracing programme of music in Shoreditch Church by Claude Vivier, Martin Suckling and Gérard Grisey, performed by the fiercely bright young things of the London Contemporary Orchestra under conductor Hugh Brunt.

Suckling’s de sol y grana, a violin concerto commissioned by the music charity London Music Masters, was here receiving its first performance. It was inspired by Antonio Machado’s poem, in which songs become bubbles, floating away on delicate, short-lived trajectories, refracting colours as they go. It’s a delicate little conceit, but one that gives little hint of the sometimes forceful nature of the work.

Its opening section was tautly controlled and powerful, soloist Agata Szymczewska dispatching volleys of notes with concentrated virtuosity against a feverish orchestral backdrop.

The technique and imagination on show throughout Suckling’s score was enormously impressive, but the piece was most memorable in the later sections. An elegiac strings-only passage, played in heavy, long bows, made way for a brief, unexpectedly moving duet, Szymczewska’s trills flitting playfully above a melancholy bass flute line. A tense build-up, with the violin increasingly insistent, led to the work’s throwaway conclusion – a final bubble gently popping, one imagined.

Suckling’s new work seemed a great deal more composerly than the other works on the programme. But it worked well after the rhythmic insistence of Vivier’s Bali-inspired Pulau Dewata, which, scored for “variable ensemble”, was here shared between violin, cello, percussion and piano. Brunt drove the rhythms hard, and the vibraphone-and-piano textures often seemed more reminiscent of urban frenzy than an exotic island. Leavened by occasional lyricism, though, Vivier’s recurrent patterns were hypnotic but never numbing.

The arpeggios of Grisey’s remarkable Vortex Temporum swirled hypnotically after the interval, too, but the Frenchman also allows himself daring amounts of time and space in this longer work. There’s a formidable solo for the subtly detuned piano (dealt with magnificently by Antoine Françoise), as well as clock-stopping spectral experimentation elsewhere. Brunt controlled it all brilliantly, and his players excelled themselves.

Photo: © Luke De La Nougerede

© Bruce Atherton / Jana Chiellino 2011. All rights reserved.

© Bruce Atherton / Jana Chiellino 2011. All rights reserved.

Vivier Pulau Dewata
Martin Suckling de sol y grana (world premiere, commissioned by London Music Masters)
Grisey Vortex Temporum

Agata Szymczewska (violin)
Antoine Françoise (piano)
Hugh Brunt (conductor)

★★★★

Some people can’t see a mountain without wanting to climb it. The players of Hugh Brunt’s terrific London Contemporary Orchestra give me a similar impression: that they are game for any avant-garde musical challenge, the tougher and craggier the better.

Opening what looks like being ten days of dizzying eclecticism at the Spitalfields Music Winter Festival in East London, the young players tackled not one daunting mountain but three — the second never scaled before. This was Martin Suckling’s Violin Concerto, commissioned by London Music Masters (via an ingenious “buy a bar” fundraising campaign) for the fine Polish fiddler Agata Szymczewska, who tore into its fiendish challenges with huge energy and technical resource. The piece is titled De sol y grana — a reference to a Machado poem in which the poet compares his songs to bubbles glinting scarlet in the sunlight. Here the bubbles become musical segments, nine of them, some languorous or even lugubrious, others violently eruptive.

Rather than being the dominant force, the soloist is first among equals, fizzing in and out of weirdly imagined string and wind textures that are sometimes soured by quarter-tones. Disconcertingly, Suckling is fond of piling up disparate ideas or layers, then moving on. Yet, under trills or quivering oscillations from the soloist, the strands are finally gathered into a superb finish: a birdsong-like crescendo of ecstasy.

There was more virtuosity later, in Gérard Grisey’s magnum opus Vortex Temporum. A spectral-music pioneer who died in 1998, Grisey wasn’t the best advocate of his own pieces. It’s wisest to ignore his programme notes, with their mind-numbing references to “stretched disharmonics” and “sinusoidal waves” and simply let the music — volcanic, clangorous, hypnotic, nightmarish or eerie — assail or seduce you. The pianist Antoine Françoise, required to deliver fistfuls of notes (or sometimes simply to slam his fists on the keys) was rightly acclaimed at the end. But under Brunt’s immaculate direction the entire ensemble was heroic.

And I am delighted, too, that this rising new generation is rediscovering the soundworld of Claude Vivier. His Bali-inspired Pulau Dewata — hard, percussive, jangling refrains organised according to ancient modes — was a reminder of what a genius the world lost when the Canadian was brutally murdered in 1983 at the age of 34.

Hugo Shirley, The Telegraph
Tuesday 13 December 2011

★★★★

There might have been mince pies in the interval of the first evening concert of the 10-day Spitalfields Music Winter Festival, but there was nothing cosy about this bracing programme of music in Shoreditch Church by Claude Vivier, Martin Suckling and Gérard Grisey, performed by the fiercely bright young things of the London Contemporary Orchestra under conductor Hugh Brunt.

Suckling’s de sol y grana, a violin concerto commissioned by the music charity London Music Masters, was here receiving its first performance. It was inspired by Antonio Machado’s poem, in which songs become bubbles, floating away on delicate, short-lived trajectories, refracting colours as they go. It’s a delicate little conceit, but one that gives little hint of the sometimes forceful nature of the work.

Its opening section was tautly controlled and powerful, soloist Agata Szymczewska dispatching volleys of notes with concentrated virtuosity against a feverish orchestral backdrop.

The technique and imagination on show throughout Suckling’s score was enormously impressive, but the piece was most memorable in the later sections. An elegiac strings-only passage, played in heavy, long bows, made way for a brief, unexpectedly moving duet, Szymczewska’s trills flitting playfully above a melancholy bass flute line. A tense build-up, with the violin increasingly insistent, led to the work’s throwaway conclusion – a final bubble gently popping, one imagined.

Suckling’s new work seemed a great deal more composerly than the other works on the programme. But it worked well after the rhythmic insistence of Vivier’s Bali-inspired Pulau Dewata, which, scored for “variable ensemble”, was here shared between violin, cello, percussion and piano. Brunt drove the rhythms hard, and the vibraphone-and-piano textures often seemed more reminiscent of urban frenzy than an exotic island. Leavened by occasional lyricism, though, Vivier’s recurrent patterns were hypnotic but never numbing.

The arpeggios of Grisey’s remarkable Vortex Temporum swirled hypnotically after the interval, too, but the Frenchman also allows himself daring amounts of time and space in this longer work. There’s a formidable solo for the subtly detuned piano (dealt with magnificently by Antoine Françoise), as well as clock-stopping spectral experimentation elsewhere. Brunt controlled it all brilliantly, and his players excelled themselves.

Thursday 1 December 2011

In his book The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross suggests: “One possible destination for 21st-century music is a final ‘great fusion’: intelligent pop artists and extroverted composers speaking more or less the same language.” What he didn’t mention was that, since any language needs its interpreters, intelligent, extroverted orchestras might be required to communicate that fusion.

Step up the London Contemporary Orchestra. Its directors – 25-year-old conductor Hugh Brunt and 26-year-old violist Robert Ames – established the outfit in 2008 with a mission to “think very differently about what people want to listen to”. They themselves listen to everything from Aphex Twin to Brahms, Foals to Xenakis, and it shows in the range of their work. Over the past year they’ve curated concerts featuring pieces by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and turntable-manipulating young composer Shiva Feshareki alongside Messiaen and John Cage, toured with Belle & Sebastian and recorded a new version of Foals’ Spanish Sahara. “The crossover that happens between popular and more formal music is really natural to us,” says Ames. “We pinpoint where it happens.”

They’re not the only ones. The Heritage Orchestra, which came together in 2004 as the rather large house band of a classical/jazz/electronica club night, can be heard on Spotify performing Gabriel Prokofiev’s Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra and seen next week sharing a stage with indie band the Leisure Society. Meanwhile, the London Sinfonietta has been working with experimental pop band Micachu and the Shapes and jazz musician Matthew Bourne to expand the contemporary classical repertoire, enabling that “great fusion” of which Ross dreams.

In some ways, the boundaries between the three orchestras are blurry – the LCO and London Sinfonietta share the same pool of musicians; the LCO and the Heritage both perform with pop bands. Yet there are also differences between their approaches to pop-classical fusions: they might all be fluent in the musical language, but their translations vary.

You feel those differences as soon as you meet the people in charge of each orchestra. Brunt and Ames are poised and thoughtful, friendly but restrained. The pair met as teenagers, performing with the National Youth Orchestra. From there, Ames spent six years studying at the Royal Academy of Music while Brunt went to Oxford. If their backgrounds suggest elitism, the mantra of the LCO is accessibility. They seek out “the kind of spaces where you can make an audience feel comfortable”, Brunt says: not traditional concert halls but more rough-and-ready venues such as the Village Underground in east London, or the Old Vic Tunnels, beneath Waterloo station. The atmosphere here, says Ames, is more like that of “an event or a gig, so you can clap along, or go and have a drink if you don’t want to listen to the piece”.

A typical LCO show, says Brunt, is like “a mixtape”: its programme for Reverb at the Roundhouse next March, for instance, juggles new work by Greenwood and Prokofiev with a dramatic concerto by Vivier, one of Xenakis’s experiments in sound and an electronic breather from Stockhausen in the middle. This suggests a question: when the LCO’s musicians are more used to performing the challenging contemporary-classical repertoire, aren’t they bored when it comes to playing pop arrangements? “It uses a different set of skills,” says Ames, tactfully. At the romantic end of the spectrum, players aim to create “a golden, silky-smooth sound – and doing that is really difficult. While rhythmic music is incredibly hard to get in time.” The LCO’s leader, violinist Daniel Pioro, is more open. For him, the “technical ease” of playing with Belle & Sebastian, say, is as good as a holiday. “Soloists go through this incredibly rigorous training: sometimes we forget that the ultimate purpose of music is entertainment,” he admits. Looking at footage of the LCO dancing along to The Boy With the Arab Strap on stage, you can see why Pioro, a 25-year-old who started playing violin when he was four, says: “That kind of gig makes you younger.”

Click here to read the article in full.

Radiohead star goes classical in new festival

Louise Jury
Thursday 13 October 2011

A composition by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and a Concerto for Bass Drum by Sergei Prokofiev’s grandson are among highlights of a new season of unconventional classical concerts in London.

The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm is to mount the festival of contemporary classical works next February and March on a theme of love and truce – chosen for the Olympic year. Roundhouse artistic director Marcus Davey said Reverb 2012 celebrated a new generation of performers who had broken out of the “traditional” concert mould.

The London Contemporary Orchestra will perform the Greenwood piece called Doghouse. The same programme will include the European premiere of East End composer Gabriel Prokofiev’s Concerto for Bass Drum and Orchestra. Other parts of the programme include the young London orchestra, Aurora, singer Imogen Heap and the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment.

Saturday 3 March 2012, 7pm
Roundhouse, London

The Roundhouse presents Reverb 2012, celebrating a new generation of performers who have broken out of ‘traditional’ classical concerts, redefined the rules and shattered boundaries.

On Saturday 3 March, the LCO perform works by some of the 20th century’s most iconic composers including Xenakis’s Metastasis and Vivier‘s Orion. This is set alongside Doghouse by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, a 20-minute orchestral work forming part of the composer’s film score to Norwegian Wood; and the European premiere of Gabriel Prokofiev’s Concerto for Bass Drum and Orchestra, with soloist Joby Burgess.

Throughout the evening, Nonclassical presents DJ sets from Richard Lannoy and Gabriel Prokofiev, featuring the latest from the label and live sets by soloists from the LCO and Roundhouse Music Collective, bringing the unique atmosphere of their classical club nights to the Roundhouse.

Click here for more information and to book tickets.

London Evening Standard:
Radiohead star goes classical in new festival (Thursday 13 October)

Twitter: #reverb2012 | Blog: reverb2012.wordpress.com