The London Sinfonietta
(Picture: Monika S Jakubowska)There are times when contemporary classical music seems sealed off from what’s going on in the world outside. Not here. This concert, conducted by Sian Edwards, was part of London Sinfonietta’s Writing the Future programme for emerging composers; the two pieces it featured were head-on confrontations with everyday politics, and I don’t mean illicit parties.
Alicia Jane Turner’s Tell Me When You Get Home might have been ripped from the headlines we’ve been reading for months, not least since Sarah Everard’s murder. Their (Turner’s preferred pronoun) music often presents itself as something close to an installation; here what we got was a miniature opera.
Much of Turner’s text consisted of advice, given by the police and sundry well-meaning but often misguided organisations, about how women could deal with sexual harassment: “Try not to leave your drink unattended. Go out at night only if accompanied by a man you know”, and so on. Alongside these were some of the wheedling, threatening phrases often uttered by predatory men: “You’re looking lovely tonight. What’s under that dress? Come on, smile.”
With the accompaniment of five musicians, Turner made this into a monodrama, acted out by soprano Ella Taylor. The sung lines, spoken passages and abstract vocalising were delivered with straightforward directness, reaching an almost overwhelming intensity towards the end of the piece, when the composer’s attention shifted to embrace those “monstrous femme figures”, witches.
The instrumental writing, meanwhile, had the dramatic flexibility of the best film scores. Unfortunately, amplification gave Taylor’s voice a harsh edge that sometimes threatened to bury the more delicate instrumental passages. Still, it was impossible not to feel the power of Turner’s – and Taylor’s – musical rage.
Alan Lomax, the American ethnomusicologist, is probably best known as the first man to record Muddy Waters, in Mississippi in 1941. He travelled far and wide in search of “authenticity” in music and, in the 1950s he recorded Welsh miners singing, storytelling and reminiscing. Those recordings were an integral part of Luke Lewis’s new work, The Echoes Return Slow. As Lomax only recorded men, Lewis added the words of the the community’s women, collected by London Women’s Film Group for the 1973 documentary Women of the Rhondda. Both sources were juxtaposed in Simon Clode’s video, projected behind the onstage musicians.
Lewis’s music derived its timbres and rhythms from the film’s spoken words: this was no sentimental evocation of the past, but a hard-hitting account of tough work, harsh conditions and resilient people. Again, though, amplification ramped up the soundtrack volume so that it wasn’t always easy to make out Lewis’s inventive score. What the amplification couldn’t obscure was the anger that fuelled both works in this challenging, rewarding programme.
