The black suit, shiny shoes and silver tie stood out among the heatwave shorts and general dress-down-Friday vibe of most London Contemporary Music Festival performers. Pianist Andy Ingamells played through the first page or so of the Moonlight Sonata just fine. Then he started to remove his left shoe. With his right hand still arpeggiating, his left fumbles with the laces. There's a few fudged notes when he pushes the heel off but he carries on gamely. It's the buttons on his claret-coloured shirt – especially the cuffs – that cause the real problems, playing fingers now stumbling and flailing all over the place.
Belt and tie get whipped off with a smooth flourish. Then a page of score is plucked from the stand with a similar gesture. As it flutters to the ground besides the mounting heap of clothes, I'm momentarily embarrassed at the thought of the piano itself being denuded as well. But the big laugh comes when Ingamells pauses before the final chord, now fully bare-arse naked, to remove his glasses, placing them carefully on the lid of the instrument before completing the cadence.
When Nam June Paik originally performed his version of Beethoven's Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia at Düsseldorf's Neo-Dada In Der Musik festival in 1962, he managed to keep his briefs on (though he did cut several holes in them and smear himself in tomato paste). But Ingamells here goes the full monty with stoic indomitability, as if locked into some peculiar personal ceremony.
After a two-and-a-half-year break, during which audience and performers alike were probably spending more time than usual indoors and isolated, the LCMF returns with a long weekend full of private rituals and intimate gestures. For five nights, a blandly gentrified former weapons facility in South London became the unlikely location for a séance into which a rotating cast of ornery and often intractable spirits emerged bleary-eyed and cabin-feverish, each from their own domestic bardo. Few of those who appeared on stage looked quite like they belonged there, nor did they seem to know how they got there. The resulting performances were all the better for it.
Think of Katalin Ladik calmly and meticulously spraying her entire face with grey paint in a film from 50 years ago then striding on to the stage in a bright red cape to read poems about birds and forests and mushroom caves in a succession of wild and uncanny voices pulled from deep inside herself, like a woman possessed. Or Mimi Doulton singing the morbidly introverted music of Arvo Pärt as if sleepwalking through a high-rise apartment towards an open window. Or Japanese artist Stom Sogo, whose films speak of a life lived through screens, obsessively rephotographing mundane acts and mass-cultural detritus until the artefacts clump into something unspeakably violent and vertiginously psychedelic.
Many past composers have taken inspiration from birdsong, but Evan Johnson's bass flute solo émoi seems to be fashioned after the whole avian lifeworld. It starts off with a whistle from flautist Richard Craig's mouth (flute still some inches away), but not so much like a referee signalling kick-off: more like a gust of wind. The piece is full of gentle swoops and subtle slides, as if soaring through open space. At times it seemed to be just kind of hovering there, with little more than a pfft or a whk escaping from Craig's lips to suggest the work's continuing passage. It felt very much like a piece composed out of long hours spent indoors, staring out of a window, dreaming of escape.
Conducting his own Five Views of the Path on the Thursday night, composer Frank Denyer beckoned the audience to come closer to the stage: ‘you'll hear more of it’. The wisdom of this advice soon became clear as a piece of music of almost unbearable delicacy soon unfolded like the silken threads of a spider's web. It felt almost rude when, a few minutes in, the percussionists came in with a series of great thumps. They were, I'm sure, the only people onstage with any fs on the page in front of them. With the eight-member Octandre Ensemble onstage, but rarely more than two or three playing at any one time, there was a relay-like quality to the piece, with each member of the group carefully passing forward a baton of great value and incredible fragility, like a single thought, haltingly expressed (with occasional abrupt interruptions).
With its eerie music-box melodies and brittle squeaks eked from the rims of wine glasses, Clara Iannotta's Eclipse Plumage would not have sounded out of place in a haunted house. The whole piece was full of creaks and wails and things going bump in the night. Composed around an ensemble of strings, flute, clarinet and piano with something called an ‘antimachine’ – a jury-rigged contraption which used a kind of a spooky action-at-a-distance to set the piano strings buzzing. There was a whole host of other little devices and bits and bobs on stage too. It looked rather more like a carpenter's workshop than a concert. That didn't make the piece any less creepily effective.
Rebecca Saunders’ Dust II was about as grand and spectacular as you can get with just two percussionists in matching blue shirts. There were a good half-dozen timpani, on and off the stage, several huge bass drums, a whole smorgasbord of other bells and triangles and metal sheets. But the moment that got to me was one of the smallest, simplest gestures in it. It came quite near the beginning, as the two players made their gradual way from the auditorium to the stage. One stopped to activate a large lampshade-sized singing bowl with a softly howling thrum. Once he walked off to mount the stage, the other player then approached the bowl holding a snare drum, allowing the resonance from the former to animate the drum's rattles with a gentle rush of white noise. It was only a small thing, quickly dwarfed by the bravura of the rest of the piece. But it spoke of a certain snatched intimacy, like waking up after your partner has left for work but finding the toilet seat still warm – a little gentle magic in a piece which sometimes left its two performers looking like they were beavering away in their own little worlds.
A full evening of orchestral commissions on the Saturday night, opened with most of the LCMF Orchestra already in place but a few seats onstage still empty. Those missing players soon emerged in procession, passing through the aisle, tossing coffee grounds left and right as they went, like a bishop with a censer. Such was Ben Patterson's (1964) First Symphony. Led to expect a rich aural experience, we got an olfactory one in its place. The smell of coffee hung in the air for the rest of the evening. But few of the Orchestra's own commissions quite hit the spot, with the musicians in works by Elvin Brandhi and Cerith Wyn Evans seemingly left to do whatever they felt like, while the two composers either noodled about with a big gong (Evans) or stalked the back of the room yelping and screeching (Brandhi). The exceptions were Oliver Leith's smudged take on grand martial music, Pearly, goldy, woody, bloody, or, Abundance, with its microtonal fuzziness and ironic gunshots (a nod, presumably, to the building's history) and Mariam Rezaei's astonishingly virtuosic turn behind the decks for hew new work, SADTITZZZ, a piece which built a sort of glitchy, twitchy take on Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee out of just a few furiously crab-scratched orchestral samples.
It was an elegiac close to the festival on Sunday night, as we all wandered down to the riverfront for Tom Foulsham's Bb Arrangement for 3 Musicians and 1300 Meters. The sun was setting beneath the clouds, casting a purple hue upon the Thames, where just a few metres out from the south bank three small dinghies bobbed gently on the water. On each boat was a brass player (trumpeters Christopher Vickers and Dylan Kirk plus trombonist Michael Tasker), each with a specially adapted instrument that lit up concentric halos of light around the bell when played. Together, in tight synchrony, they played a single triad chord. Then the boats drifted off in different directions, pulling further and further apart, with one of them getting halfway to Canary Wharf. At intervals, as they parted, they played the same chord again – the lights signalling their continued simultaneity even as the sound we heard became increasingly broken and staggered. It's a neat image to bookend a two-year period during which the apparent simultaneity of light-speed communications couldn't mask our ever widening apartness.
