The Red Brick Sessions is a new form of concert experience devised by the University of Salford and the BBC, combining live streams with digital programme notes. Though the experiment in connectivity has potential, the rogue tweet notification that preceded the first downbeat is the price you pay for requesting that the audience switch on their mobile phones.
This part of the series was a collaboration between the Manchester-based new music group Psappha and the Hebrides Ensemble, who marked their joint 25th anniversaries with a substantial new work by David Fennessy entitled Panopticon. If the piece took its name from Jeremy Bentham’s idealised, circular prison then the cimbalom – a heavy-duty dulcimer of Hungarian Gypsy origin – was cast in the role of governor. Psappha director and cimbalom specialist Tim Williams hammered out canonic orders which the string ensemble obeyed by feverishly strumming their instruments with plectrums.
The evening also provided a tribute to the late Salford-born Peter Maxwell Davies, whose string sextet, The Last Island, was accompanied by a film shot on the remote Orkney islets that inspired the piece. Though Davies’s rugged soundscape of rare seabirds and ruined chapels scarcely required further visual illustration, the footage of the composer walking along the beach near his home was a poignant enhancement – as was the incongruous addition of the cimbalom to a new arrangement by David Horne of Davies’s beguiling traditional air, Farewell to Stromness.
Scots fiddlers and Hungarian Gypsies may seem poles apart, but it was a measure of Davies’s profound sensitivity towards folk traditions that made the unlikely pairing sound entirely natural.
- At Howard Assembly Rooms, Leeds, on 11 November. Box office: 0844-848 2720. At Pontio Arts Centre, Bangor, on 12 November. Box office: 01248 382828.
