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Perhaps it was anniversary fatigue, or perhaps it was half-term. Either way, the latest instalment of the Barbican’s celebrations for the centenary of 20th-century musical giant Pierre Boulez featuring Ensemble intercontemporain (his own crack team for new music) drew only a paltry audience. The man himself was dismissive of such difficulties: “You always find 200 fanatics,” he once observed. “What is important is to increase the number.” (Composer, conductor, visionary – but Boulez was no PR maven.)
The fanatics, at least, were there – though they hadn’t come for Boulez himself, if the polite response to a thrillingly anarchic performance of his Sur Incises after the interval was anything to go by. Under rising-star conductor Nicolò Umberto Foron, its moments of freefall reverberation were a delicious release from the ultra-precise rhythmic flurries of three pianos, thunderous in their lower register.
Instead, it was the first half that generated excitement: a taut, intensely focused performance of shouting forever into the receiver, for which British composer Hannah Kendall won an Ivor Novello award in 2023, followed by the world premiere of composer, saxophonist and bandleader Cassie Kinoshi’s [Untitled].
Kendall’s piece is a haunting exploration of Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s concept of the “Plantation Machine”. Much of the finely textured score functions as pitched white noise around crackly walkie-talkie speech in French and English. At its most memorable moment, the orchestral instruments fall silent, leaving only music boxes cranking out extracts of classical hits and harmonicas producing vivid note-clusters on every exhalation like an ethereal musical life-support machine.
Kinoshi’s [Untitled] was a noisier, funkier affair, incorporating virtuosic live turntabling by NikNak, whose whirlwind scratches cut deeply across the orchestra’s dense textures, as well as video by French artist Julien Creuzet and solo choreography from tyroneisaacstuart. Musically, it was exquisitely paced. Momentum gathered through the hefty bass of lower strings, fiendish trumpet curlicues were picked up by a cello screaming high up the fingerboard and two flutes combined in a moreish, barline-defying groove. At the heady climax, the orchestra was suddenly cut, leaving only a symphony of squelches, echoes and loops from the turntable, spinning out overhead.
