Spitalfields Summer Music Festival starts tomorrow

Despite rain and cold, it's summer! The Spitalfields Summer Music Festival starts Friday. Spitalfields Music Festivals have always been an eclectic mix of early music, baroque and up to the minute contemporary. Sturdy foundations, like Christ Church itself, a Hawksmoor structure that's survived despite travails. Good solid period music, done without affectation in simple but dignified surroundings. Modern music sounds good here too, benefitting from the clear, unfussy lines.

Tomorrow,  Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra in an all Bach programme, (incl cantatas) which should be glorious. Interesting to realize that these works were written at the same time that Christ Church was being built. Get there early and hear the new Howard Skempton work for church bells. It's called Five Rings Triples, which might express what it sounds like.

Even bigger highlight on Monday 18th, when John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir do an a Capella Pilgrimage.  Tallis, White, Tomkins and Byrd. Sold out ages ago - returns only. This weekend, though, Harry Christophers and The Sixteen do an all-English selection - Tallis, Tippett, Byrd, Britten.

Next Tuesday 12th, Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen.  Don't miss The Fairy Queen at Glyndebourne because it's an amazing theatrical experience, (possibly less so on film). But get to Spitalfields for this concert performance because it should be musically rewarding. Paul McCreesh conducts the Gabrieli Consort. Good soloists including Sophie Bevan (currently Donna Elvira at Garsington Opera) and Ashley Riches (a favourite from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama). More baroque and the Stravinsky Mass with the Gabrieli Consort, On Thursday and Friday 14th/15th, La Nuova Musica presents two oratorios, (Charpentier, Carissimi,)  in a staging by Vignette Productions. 

Wednesday brings a Harrison Birtwistle rarity, Bow Down. This is an early experimental piece where musicians (members of the London Sinfonietta) and actors combine to act out a story of love and murder. Primeval saga in tight, intimate form. Very Birtwistle. It's staged by The Opera Group, under their new director Frederic Wake-Walker. The Group has always been innovative and communal, so even without John Fulljames, they should be very interesting.  I can't make it, but anyone who can, please let me know. Two performances, early and late on 13th. It should be interesting heard with Samuel Beckett's Old Earth, with music by Alec Roth, which includes a chorale for The Sixteen. It's a world premiere, staged, with actor Alan Howard. Four performances, 15th and 16th, La Nuova Musica (new music of the 16th century) presents "a staging of two trailblazing oratorios" (Charpentier and Carissimi) with Vignette Productions. Imagine "immersive sound installations".

Melvyn Tan, Matthew Barley, John Tavener's The Protecting Veil, the Heath Quartet (Nicola LeFanu premiere) and  the Schubert Ensemble premiering a new piano quartet by Huw Watkins.  My old favourites Exaudi, singing John Cage, intrducing Cage as "a creator of ravishingly beautiful, mysterious music, from a spatial performance of Four² to the “plain harmony” of Hymns and Variations. Thursday 21st.

You can have the London Handel Players play Tafelmusik while you dine at The English Restaurant. This sold out fast, but you can go to the restaurant at any time, without music. Fantastic menu, which might convert even me to English food. "In a world seemingly in love with novelty and fads and gimicry, we aim to offer simple integrity, in never purchasing ready-made, in cooking always and only from fresh ingredients, and in rediscovering the noble and rich traditions of the English kitchen.", they say, which fits in well with the spirit of Spitalfields Music Festivals.

Spitalfields Winter Music Festival - Grisey Vortex temporum

Magical night of a different  kind when Hugh Brunt conducted the London Contemporary Orchestra at the Spitalfields Winter Music Festival. (Read more about it HERE)  Gérard Grisey's Vortex temporum (1996-7) was the centrepiece, for it's one of the classics of contemporary music, brilliantly conceptual, yet rich with imagery and feeling. It's is seminally important and any performance is an event. 

Wisely, Hugh Brunt and the London Contemporary Orchestra eased into it with Claude Vivier's Pulau Dewata (1977). Vivier was thoroughly grunge, frequenting rough dives and wearing a sheepskin coat that smelled bad. Then he goes to Bali and immerses himself in a totally different culture. Indonesian music wasn't new to western composers but for Vivier it crystallized ideas. In Pulau Dewata, Vivier uses simple quasi-melodies which pass from player to player, adapting imperceptibly. The music seems to levitate. Imagine a ball parried constantly back and forth until the movement seems to sustain itself.

Gérard Grisey's Vortex temporum is like a perpetual motion installation in sound, infinitely multi-layered. Spiralling patterns, the long planes that stretch plaintively outwards, the piano providing a varied "heartbeat". Incredible incident, suggesting in Grisey's own words, human breathing, sleeping whales, the movements of birds and insects. "In this imagined microscope", he said, "the notes become sound, a chord becomes a spectral complex, and rhythm transforms into a wave of unexpected  duration".  Much is written about spectralism, but its essence is in exploring  the whole spectrum of sound, dissected even beyond normal perception, assembled in music of refreshing freedom. Messaien's legacy, via Stockhausen (Vivier's teacher), expressing the "rhythm of life". 

Different concepts of time and consciousness, but other levels of meaning  Each of the three parts is dedicated to a composer and references his own music. The first part honours Gérard Zinsstag, and the second Salvatore Sciarrino about whom there is a lot on this site, like HERE and HERE) and the third Helmut Lachenmann (also lots on this site HERE and HERE). Vibrations, oscillations, percussive dotted rhythms, parallel but contrasting tempi, instruments played in unorthodox ways so you hear sounds from new perspectives. Grisey embeds temporal continuity into this work, like spreading ripples. Ostinato suggests intervals of time being measured, as the music shivers off into infinity. Ironically, Grisey died soon after Vortex temporum was written. His three friends are all still alive. To quote Grisey again, "Vortex temporum is perhaps only a history of the arpeggio in in time and space - from the point of view of our own ears".

The London Contemporary Orchestra are young, so it wouldn't be fair to expect a performance that really does justice to the piece, but they deserve respect. The piano part would tax a Nicholas Hodges or Rolf Hind, so Antoine François did well indeed. At times he made the piano resonate like an organ. Perhaps Grisey was thinking of Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum? It's perfectly valid. (read more HERE). But these works are very much chamber pieces, so much credit to to the way these musicians interacted. Congratulations to them for having the guts and committment to tackle this demanding music!

Martin Suckling (b 1981) is one of the rising stars of this generation of composers, and it was good to hear his new de sol y grana. It's based on a poem by Antonio Machado, about bubbles rising into the sunlight. It's written in nine segments, as individual as each bubble. It's closer to a concerto than Grisey's unclassifiable work, and Agata Szymczewska played the violin part vivaciously. This piece reflects Grisey and Vivier in the sense that Suckling develops the idea of perpetual motion and interchange. It's joyful, with nice colours, though could do with more translucence. Suckling is very promising indeed, and definitely worth hearing, but no-one compares to Gérard Grisey. On the other hand, I suspect that Grisey would have been delighted to hear this concert at the Spitalfields Winter Music Festival for it proves the basic premise of Vortex temporum, that creativity is a continuum. Artists die, but their ideas pass on to others.

Fun Winter in Spitalfields

You could spend December with Messiahs back to back. But the Spitalfields Winter Music Festival offers festive cheer and fun music. It even kicks off with a Christmas Market with Outdoor Puppets,  early music, story telling, brass bands and gospel choir. Much livelier than commercial tat. And the money goes to Crisis, to help the homeless, not a remote "theoretical" situation these days. That's the real spirit of Christmas, caring for others.

Lots of singing and community events but Spitalfields isn't the average type of place. It's eclectic! The big event on 16/12 is the 25th anniversary of I Fagiolini: Monteverdi, Striggio, Janequin, Britten and "three musical soufflés".  I Fagiolini under Robert Holllingworth have a reputation for adventure. Early music isn't "safe". Also off the beaten track is Joglaresa's Yoolis on 19/12. Medieval  instruments and quirky medieval humour. "Early music's bit of tough" they describe themselves.

Early music is a Spitalfields thing, but so is contemporary avant garde (it's that kind of neighbourhood). Tickets almost sold out for the London Contemporary Orchestra, whose conductor Hugh Brunt has impressed me a lot in the past. They're doing Claude Vivier Pulau Dewata and Gerard Grisey Vortex  Temporum  Lots about Vivier and Grisey on this site - my favourites!

Even more eclectic is thew Tom Waits Project. Veteran composer Gavin Bryars has created a "circus band" to bring together "ten songs by Tom Waits, two by Kurt Weill, a sea shanty, a hymn, a couple of instrumental gypsy tangos and a classic Fellini film score", This should be very interesting indeed. Bryars's Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet was the first new music surprise I had when I first came to London, but I took to it like a natural. About ten years ago it was recorded again with Tom Waits singing the slurred drunken refrain, instead of the original loop tape of a London tramp. So Bryars and Waits relate to each other well.  Tom Waits is unique. He used to cultivate a street bum persona like someone out of film noir. Now he lives on a ranch near my Dad, but someone like that can't tame at heart. Tom Waits's music is poetry, true art song, but with attitude. Waits himself doesn't deign to tour in London to big houses. So get the experience at Spitalfields.

Oh, and they are doing a Messiah, too!

photo by Steve Cadman