‘Brace yourself,” the concert programme warned. “This is music that refuses to behave.” After more than 10 years and some 350 world and UK premieres, we’d expect nothing less from Riot Ensemble. This is a group whose promo images once saw them brandishing drumsticks as clubs, music stands as Kalashnikovs, that treats new music as a bloodsport: they like to be in at the kill.
Fresh on the slab were four works from across the spectrum of scope and mood – “music of maximal difference” as conductor Aaron Holloway-Nahum put it – a playlist designed to bring a polite midweek audience up to frenzied, club levels of intensity before cooling us down and sending us out dazed and disoriented.
It was hard to find much purchase in the introspective scrabblings and mutterings of Corie Rose Soumah’s Limpidités IV for violin. Performer Marie Schreer gradually appeared from darkness for this UK premiere, coming into focus like a score whose seven episodes seem to take a solo Bach suite and distil it down to essential gestures: finger motions; bow movements; double-stopped chords; breath. Often soundless (or all but), bow whispering back and forth over the fingerboard, left-hand pizzicato barely audible, this is hypothetical music, speculative, ultimately noncommittal.
What a shock, then, to be plunged without pause into the ecstatic assault of Anna Meredith’s 2015 Brisk Widow. Scored for electronics, spotlights and two drum kits (the super-slick Sam Wilson and Jack Ross) it’s a no-holds-barred sonic battle for supremacy in which duelling rhythms – aural and visual – punch back and forth across the space, casting the audience as the pinball in an arcade game of quickfire pulses, liquid electronic peals and hammering beats.
Upping the maximalist ante, Alex Paxton’s Shrimp BIT Babyface is a musical supermarket sweep. A swirling big-band fantasy, cartoonish and candy-bright, it seizes great handfuls of musical experience – mariachi, swing, Christmas carols, school recorder ensembles, a baroque jig – and flings them all together in a heap, inviting the listener to pick through at their leisure. It’s an enticing invitation, made with swagger and plenty of groove here by Holloway-Nahum and his musicians.
Which left it to Eden Lonsdale’s Tränen und Ozeane (also a UK premiere) to calm the pulse with glassy skeins of sound. Harpsichord, strings and accordion spun horizontal chordscapes: counterpoint in slow motion, polyphony left out in the rain, dissolving into smudgy microtones. Strangely gorgeous, a meditation in greys and silvers after the blinding lights of the Meredith and Paxton’s pastel hit, it took us full-circle back to the start: whispers now concrete, with something real to say.
