Helmut Lachenmann is a distinguished elder statesman of the German avant garde, yet we hear relatively little of him in this country. This is partly due to the fact that performing Lachenmann's work does not require rehearsal so much as intensive re-training, in which violinists experiment with bowing their tuning pegs and trumpeters with blowing into the wrong end of their instruments.
The concluding weekend of the HCMF was a mini-Lachenmann festival in honour of the composer's 70th birthday, culminating in the British premiere of his massive new orchestral work, Concertini. It began with a duet for guitars in which the guitarists flip the instruments over on to their laps and attack them with an array of metallic implements.
There's nothing particularly new about this. WC Handy provided the first account of an early bluesman dragging a knife across the strings, calling it "the weirdest music I had ever heard". However, he never heard Lachenmann. It's a piece that operates at the extremes of the instrument's tolerance and at times, it must be said, of the listener's patience, but is a staggering display of stamina on the part of the players.
The Ensemble Modern, under conductor Brad Lubman, confirmed their status as the pre-eminent exponents of Lachenmann's music in a programme that paired his classic Mouvement from 1982-4 with the newly minted Concertini. It really requires a specialist's ear to determine how the work has actually developed over 20 years, both pieces having gestures in common, most notably the wind players' instruction to blow furiously without producing an actual pitch. The experience is a bit like walking into a gale. It's bracing but disorientating, and leaves you - not to mention the flautists - feeling more than a little light-headed.
