Apartment House’s day of delight, insight and excellence (2024)

For almost 30 years the London-based collective known as Apartment House has cultivated a very refined sense of musical adventurism, creating their own idiosyncratic navigational tools to explore the sounds of a diversity of genres, tropes and trends. From their travels they always return with fascinating collections of curious objects: things that are well-crafted from base metal; semi-precious stones rich in magical associations; and creations of magnificent materials which, like the very best poetry, add to our store of available knowledge about the world. All this was in evidence at their all-day event at Wigmore Hall, where three concerts were united by performances demonstrative of the group’s reputation for insight and excellence.

There were five UK premieres in the pre-lunch concert; three from east of the Danube, one from Iceland and one from the USA. Marek Piaček’s Canzonetta, a piece for solo piano gnomic in construction and expression, was given a crisp performance by Kerry Yong. Hard on its heels came Adrian Demoč’s Zamat (Velvet), and Šarūnas Nakas’ Cenotaph, both for small ensembles: the former had the players communing with nature (probably in a mountain retreat), while the latter contrasted primary colours in broad strokes with scintillating slivers of silver and gold expressed in harmonics. Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson used a “digital dynamic score” to animate his material in Sitt hvoru megin við þilið, a piece for string quartet, It was like Macbeth’s brief candle, flickering tantalisingly before being extinguished when the fingers stopped moving. Only Music Can Save Me Now could not have been uttered by the Thane of Cawdor and Glamis, but David Mahler summoned it to express a world-weariness on the piano, with Yong a willing and eloquent accomplice.

Amongst those fine things was something even finer; Heaven as a scroll, by Christopher Fox, whom Ian Pace once dubbed a Northern Light but who now is a star on the international stage. With the imaginative device of aligning the tuning of stringed instruments and bells, Fox weaved a fabulously rich sonic fabric illustrating a passage from the Book of Revelation. It was, fittingly, the day’s first world premiere, written for Apartment House and a given deeply-felt performance by five members of the group: Mira Benjamin (violin); Bridget Carey (viola); Anton Lukoszevieze (cello); Heather Roche (bass clarinet); and Simon Limbrick (bells).

The concert after lunch opened with Michaël Levinas’Les lettres enlacées IV, an instalment of his exploration of the quintessentially French concept of “spiral polyphony”. Scored for string quintet with two violas (Relad Chibah joining Carey), it is based on a series of overlapping serpentine glissandi which might be an unflattering portrait of one of the founders of a fictional school of wizardry and witchcraft. Unconcerned by that, the players gave it a highly-polished performance. The attention to detail in that piece was replicated in Dubravko Detoni’s Zaboravljene Muzike (Forgotten Music), a study for string quartet. Detoni is one of any number of composers whose work suffered the oppressive weight of the Soviet iron fist; however, with a performance such as this, one can appreciate the fine sense of irony characteristic of his surreal music – an irony that is also present in his poetry. Piaček is the only composer to have two works on the programme. His 5 Studies, for piano and string quartet is a life-affirming piece, full of the joys of spring, given an appropriately warm and lively treatment. The stand-out work in this concert was Hrdy-Grdy by Jem Finer, a former member of The Pogues. As the title suggests, the piece was originally written for the Hurdy Gurdy; it was here played in a great transcription by Yong, using a string quartet and pipe organ to magically enhance the enigmatic sound of one of nature’s strangest instruments. This was another worthy claimant of the “world premiere” tag and brought a glowing heart to the day’s proceedings.

Opening the final concert was the one work that was not a premiere. Go, Said The Bird, by Elisabeth Lutyens, is a curious piece (with an Eliotic title) for electric guitar and string quartet, first performed in 1975. Sam Cave joined Benjamin, Gordon Mackay, Cary and Lukoszevieze to give a thoughtful reading of a piece honed from base metal and stamped with the composer’s fecundity. Lutyens’ sound world was in stark contrast to that of Rolf Hind’s Blue to the Throat, an elaborately structured new work in eight sections, for voice – Elaine Mitchener – and ensemble. The title refers to Shiva, the god whose throat turned blue from drinking all the evils of the world. Hind assembled a text that includes a Czech tongue-twister, the wisdom of Rumi and Kabir, the Rig Veda, and a new poem by Dante Micheaux; it traces the voice’s journey from the guttural to articulate speech and to full-blown lyricism. Mitchener’s versatility was to the fore in a graphic rendition of the piece, producing a tightly controlled primal scream as she literally found her voice, all aglow with the light of her upper range. The ensemble, conducted by Jack Sheen, was a supportive collaborator, for which Hind provided crunching chords and melodic lines with serrated edges.

Sheen had the last word of the concert, and of the whole day, with an utterly compelling first performance of his new work Press, for piano quintet. The bare facts of the 50-minute piece are that the strings each have different microtonal tuning, and they use metal mutes; the material largely consists of harmonics arrayed in layers of obsessive rhythmic patterns; and the piano, when it is given a chance, invades the harmonics with wave upon wave of arpeggios. None of that gets remotely close to giving an impression of what this fantastic piece is like.

****1