Now five years old, the London contemporary music festival has lost none of its ability to intrigue, surprise and irritate in equal measure. Programmes follow their own very distinctive paths, which may sometimes feature established composers but generally move well away from the repertory explored by most new-music outlets in the capital.
The concerts tend to be long, the audiences unfailingly curious, enthusiastic and large. The cavernous underground space of Ambika P3 was filled to overflowing for the penultimate night of the 2018 festival, which featured 10 composers and seven premieres of one sort or another in a marathon three-part programme.
The concert saw the debut of the LCMF Orchestra, set up to push the envelope of what orchestras can do and what should be expected of them. Conducted by Jack Sheen, it gave the first performances of works commissioned from Neil Luck and Elaine Mitchener, as well as the striking UK premiere of Chaya Czernowin’s Day One: On the Face of the Deep, an extraordinary slow-motion eruption of dark orchestral sound, commissioned for the 40th anniversary last year of Ensemble InterContemporain.
True to form there were works from a real mix of performing traditions. Claudia Molitor and Joseph Kohlmaier’s Die Gedanken sind Frei had members of the choir collective Musarc carrying shovelfuls of soil across the hall while chanting to themselves and Annea Lockwood’s Gone! saw a toy piano carried into the air on helium balloons from the inside of a concert grand. The Prelude and Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc by Julius Eastman, whose music was first championed by LCMF two years ago, followed an impassioned declamation for a solo singer, Sofia Jernberg, with a typically angry, motoric piece for 10 cellos, played by Apartment House.
And then there was the world premiere of Gerald Barry’s The Destruction of Sodom, for eight horns and two wind machines, which took its title from a last, unfinished play by Federico García Lorca, and in which the horns represent the “everyday Sodom” and the wind machines the “wrath of God”. In any other context its slender material would have seemed quirky and eccentric; here it seemed strangely conventional.
