James Dillon's New York Triptych is the last in a series of three musical triptychs. In common with the previous two – the Leuven (2009) and Oslo (2011) triptychs – the piece is in three parts, or panels, and trace elements of the outer sections feed into the longer, meditative central part. There are no pictorial elements as such (though perhaps a day/twilight/night division is implied), but the surface is organised into clear blocks of colour, which, when viewed close up (as it were), teem with restless activity. As in all of Dillon's work, the musical ideas have a tendency to dive back beneath the surface before you can catch them, but his sense of place is anchored by reminiscences of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and a beaten-up recording of Marcel Duchamp speaking. Lasting 40 minutes, though feeling more like 20, this is among Dillon's finest work yet.
First performed at Darmstadt last year, it received a wonderfully concentrated performance from the Red Note Ensemble in the first of their concerts at this year's Huddersfield festival. The Dillon followed the premiere of David Fennessy's Hauptstimme, for amplified ensemble, in which the lone voice of a solo viola (Garth Knox) struggles to emerge from the (very noisy) group sound, eventually prevailing in a short concluding passage of great intimacy and peacefulness.
The 2013 festival opened the previous evening with another upbeat programme from the Arditti Quartet, presenting the first two string quartets – Leaves of Reality (2007) and Fragments on Fragility (2009) – by composer in residence Hèctor Parra. Like Dillon's, Parra's music has an unreachable quality to it, but the material is more diffuse still. Taking inspiration from particle physics, but marked by a tremendous nervous excitement, it received a memorably animated performance from the Ardittis.
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