The intention behind the Barbican's onlyconnect programme is that imaginative collisions of creative talent should spark extraordinary results. Barry Adamson and Russell Maliphant worked together last year on Broken Fall, which premiered at the Royal Opera House with Sylvie Guillem, Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, but here the choreographer was very much on the composer's turf. If he was to make an impression on the music, and send the Adamson faithful home with something to think about, he was going to have to dig deep. In the event, it was a bit like the Kon-Tiki raft ramming a cruise liner.
In response to Adamson's musical collage - a garishly eclectic cocktail of dive-bar, early John Barry and saxophone noir - Maliphant offered six dancers in dingy T-shirts. All the familiar tropes were there - the swimming-through-treacle dynamic, the unvarying pace, the zoned-out faces - but where in the past his work has shown a distinctive edge and aesthetic, here it just looked lost. Maliphant seemed serenely indifferent to the layers of irony, nostalgia and self-mockery in Adamson's compositions. Where the music begged for a theatrical response and choreographic wit, he unspooled yet more unsmiling dips, swings, contractions, knee-turns and over-the-back rolls.
This was well enough rehearsed and danced but it was Maliphant-by-numbers, and had the dour air of the classroom. Maliphant seems to have painted himself into a corner here, and it's not much fun watching the paint dry.
AS
Bass guitarist Barry Adamson makes music that sounds like lots of bits of other things: low-rent mood music, fake jazz and imaginary soundtracks framed by wry titles such as Les Matin des Noire and From Rusholme With Love. For this one-off concert, his steamy studio concoctions were transcribed for large forces: the BBC Concert Orchestra, Adamson's own band and a sample-laden laptop. For the first and third sets, all the musicians sat on a high black riser while Russell Maliphant and his dancers performed in front under stark white lighting: a dramatic, noir-ish setting for the "extraordinary live event" promised by this latest collaboration in the Barbican's onlyconnect series.
The middle set featured four numbers, without dance, from the band. The fine BBCCO players, who had had to twiddle their thumbs during a lengthy opening jazz odyssey, added string pads and brass punctuation to Jazz Devil, for which the leader parked his bass and grabbed the microphone to talk entertaining nonsense over pastiche swing. Adamson looked pretty cool in his shades, suit and open-necked shirt, but when he laid on the vibrato to croon Cinematic Soul, there was a touch of Harry Hill.
The dance pieces featured more close-mic narratives over repetitive two- or four-bar vamps, seasoned by kitschy quotes and allusions - Gershwin's Summertime for high strings; brooding, Herrmann-ish brass; John Barry-like twanging bass. The lush yet two-dimensional feel is part of the music's appeal, reminiscent of 1950s TV shows that used the same ripe cues again and again, and cult "library music" albums. Fleshed out in this manner, however, Adamson's tasty collages sounded curiously bland.
LJ
