Walking into the auditorium for the London Sinfonietta’s Notes to the New Government concert, the first thing you noticed was the slogan “Hope. No War” graffitied on a screen over the platform. An exploration of the relationship between politics, music and inspiration, the programme consisted of 16 new pieces expressing the composers’ hopes for the future of society in the wake of the election.
The format was informal – unreserved seating, no platform dress code – and most of the composers were interviewed after their premieres by a panel consisting of broadcaster Samira Ahmed, Southbank artistic director Jude Kelly and writer Paul Morley. The dominant mood was reflective. Much of the work had been written in anticipation of a hung parliament or a coalition, and with it the potential for greater dialogue and co-operation than we now possess: had the project been commissioned after the election, the overall tone would, I suspect, have been much angrier.
The music was variable. Some pieces had an abstract quality that impeded their immediacy; others really hit home. Gavin Higgins’s sorrowful Visitors meditates on his parents’ move from their home, thanks to the bedroom tax, while singer-songwriter Gwyneth Herbert’s Tick Tock, gloriously done, inveighed against educational conformity.
The two standout pieces inhabited opposite ends of the stylistic spectrum. Anchored in the British song tradition, Emily Hall’s Higher Ground, for treble (Duncan Tarboton) and strings, evokes the legendary sunken town of Aberdovey as a metaphor for the engulfing consequences of climate change. Philip Venables’s Illusions, a collaboration with performance artist David Hoyle, batters at the limits of form, emotion and sexuality in a ferocious assertion of LGBT individualism in the face of establishment nihilism and uncertainty – a brilliant, extreme work that grips like a vice and won’t let go.
