A nicely programmed Sinfonietta concert, featuring Xenakis’s Aroura from 1971 and Claude Vivier’s Zipangu from 1980 alongside two new pieces by George Friedrich Haas and Mica Levi, exceeded expectations for two reasons. First, the young capacity audience – mostly there for Levi, who fronts experimental pop outfit Micachu and the Shapes and composed the score to Jonathan Glazer’s film Under the Skin – clearly infected the players with their open-eared enthusiasm. Second was a change in the running order from chronological to thematic. The cause may have been arbitrary (it takes longer to tune up for Haas’s contribution than to play it, so best to perform it first), but it yielded fabulous results: the Haas freshened up the Xenakis, while the splintered lyricism of Levi’s Greezy found reassuring echoes in the Vivier. Indeed, this was one of the best played Sinfonietta performances I’ve heard in years.
Haas’s Open Spaces echoes its dedicatee, James Tenney, in its formal immediacy: the music just “happens” and there’s no hidden structure to be perceived or recognised. With the string orchestra (and limited percussion) arranged in two symmetrical halves, and instruments in either natural temperament or a sixth-tone lower, the oscillating timbres frequently sound more like a synthesiser than a string orchestra.De Ridder’s clear and admirably ambidextrous conducting helped keep the shapes clear and vivid. The Xenakis’s more abrasive surfaces, too, were teeming with life.
Levi’s piece is called Greezy, which apparently refers to the quality of remorselessness. Her interest is in the desensitisation to unpleasantness that being “greezy” requires, but her piece seems more to be a study of swaying in pitch, harmony and timbre, and of perception being gently unsettled rather than radically altered. Its pendulous effect is impressive and unexpectedly comforting (especially after Haas and Xenakis) and certainly didn’t suffer by comparison with Vivier’s early attempt to do something similar.
