By Jack Marley
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
On Thursday evening the London Sinfonietta presented two large-scale world premieres in the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. The first was a multimedia work created by Ashkan Layegh, performed by a string quartet of Sinfonietta players alongside Layegh’s own Phemo Quartet (alto saxophone, piano, electric bass, and drums), with the composer at the piano. The second half was a 50-minute work entitled Changes by saxophonist Marius Neset, performed by a chamber ensemble of Sinfonietta players, percussion by Anton Eger, and Neset improvising wildly on soprano and tenor saxophone. The music was preceded by a brief Q and A with Neset and Layegh, which was a nice touch, bringing a sense of occasion to these premieres and giving the audience a glimpse into the creative and collaborative processes behind both works.
The pairing of the two pieces makes clear sense – both made their place in the liminal space between jazz and classical: simultaneously both, and neither. I was amused by the sartorial contrast between the Sinfonietta instrumentalists and visiting jazz players – the former in neutral blacks, ready for Wigmore Hall or the such, the latter dressed as if heading for a pint in a trendy London pub. Layegh’s work found an innovative musical approach to such integration, locating commonality between a maximalist avant-garde jazz group improvisation sound and the micropolyphonal textures you’d find in post-serialist works by composers like Ligeti or Xenakis.
The combination of two abrasive musical worlds didn’t make for easy listening, but the energetic almost-grooves of the jazz quartet’s backline and the sharp textural blocking between chaos and silence, unity and dispersion, made for a compelling piece. The work did, however, outstay its welcome. The 8 x 8 numerical array visible on Layegh’s music stand and featured in the projections pointed towards a mathematically derived formal process akin to those in compositions by Boulez or Stockhausen, which took the piece’s 30-minute duration to play out. This process did entail textural variety, as outlined above, but its permutational nature deprived the composition of a broader formal trajectory to hold the audience’s interest. The projections seemed a missed opportunity on this front, maintaining a directly synchronous relationship with the musical gestures throughout rather than at any point being afforded a greater autonomy. One wonders if the composer became the prisoner to his own formal design.
The integration of jazz and classical elements in Neset’s work was less convincing. Neset played in the style for which he is known – wild and instinctual maximalist lines flying around the instruments’ range. Particularly engaging was his tendency to start out lines silently and then find his way in a different direction – constantly hinting at musical paths not taken, improvisational decisions being made before us. Long-time collaborator of Neset and fellow Nord Anton Eger’s percussion was similarly visceral, a dance-like manoeuvring around a vast set up of rumbling bass drum, throbbing toms, tinkling triangle. By comparison, the composed instrumental parts were conspicuously tame. Promotional text for the concert spoke of “lush orchestration”. In reality, the music for chamber ensemble verged on a Pixar sound, relying on unconvincing melodic and harmonic clichés that jarred with the immediacy of Neset and Eger’s playing, and the hard-line sound of Layegh’s earlier composition. The instrumentalists occasionally catching Neset’s freewheeling lines created moments of magic, fleeting doublings that coloured the saxophone sound. But overall, the work didn’t make a convincing case for the inclusion of Sinfonietta players into Neset and Eger’s musical partnership.