New music group Apartment House celebrates its 30th birthday this year, but this is no cue for nostalgic introspection. With four world premieres and a trio of UK first performances, this was a concert rich in discoveries by an ensemble at the top of its game.
The programme was bookended by two UK premieres from Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith, perhaps the most familiar name on the bill. Flowers of Emptiness opened proceedings, a melancholy, gently discordant hymn for string trio, its phrases hovering in the ether like the faintest of sighs. At the other end of the evening, Waterlily, her fifth string quartet, breathed slowly in and out, its drifting chords conveying a quiet beauty.
Remarkably, the third UK premiere was written in 1927 by Daniël Belinfante, a Dutch composer killed in Auschwitz. Simply labelled Quartet, its rocking lines and angsty dissonances gave way to Bohemian dance rhythms with an occasional whiff of Janáček. The playing throughout was unimpeachable.
The world premieres ran the gamut from A to Z. Paul Paccione’s string sextet, After Ventadorn, reworks fragments of a song by the 12th-century Occitan troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn. Spiked with scrunchy modal harmonies, its austere string lines entwined in an intricate tapestry of haunting grace. Eden Lonsdale’s A Thousand Autumns pits rippling figures on piano against elongated strings, its inner workings shapeshifting in a hypnotic kaleidoscope of patterns.
Described as a six-part magical ritual, Adrian Knight’s Charm for the Protection of a Child had the comforting feel of an old familiar song plus the odd passing blue note. Meditative episodes for string quartet were juxtaposed with shimmering passages for synchronised piano, vibraphone and singing bowls.
The most magical work, though, was Lithuanian composer Ramūnas Motiekaitis’s My Fragile Moments. Framed by murmuring chords on piano, the quartet swapped bows for tiny sticks with which they struck their strings. Almost imperceptibly quiet at times, the effect lay somewhere between the imagined sound of nerves stretched to breaking point and a troupe of increasingly emboldened mice tiptoeing across an attic floor at midnight.
