Too Much Is Never Enough

The four pieces in tonight’s concert inhabit that fuzzy boundary where excess becomes form; where the memory of a moment dwells in the over-saturation of a Polaroid photograph, or over-simulation springboards the senses onto an entirely new plane of experience. We begin with a solo violinist, and Corie Rose Soumah’s Limpidités IV, composed for the Canadian violinist Gillian Smith. Written in the form of seven cadenzas, each in relationship with the voices of the composer, performer and violin itself, it explores improbable and fictional landscapes in which the soloist’s voice spills over, around and through her violin. Entwining memory and dance, these ‘espaces fictifs’, as the composer calls them, melt away to recall the hushed breathing of a lover’s body.

At the opposite end of the sonic spectrum, Anna Meredith’s Brisk Widow – written for and devised with her bandmate (and Riot percussionist) Sam Wilson – is a spiralling, video game-like deconstruction of an English folksong for two drummers, electronics and lighting. ‘The Brisk Young Widow’ seems to have been first collected in 1905 by Cecil Sharp (who heard it sung in Somerset by one George Radford), many musicians have made arrangements, since including Benjamin Britten. None, however, have sought to give it the same energy as Meredith’s duelling drummers and chip-tune synthesizers.

One step further still, composer and trombonist Alex Paxton stretches technicolour hyper-activity into the realm of the truly surreal. Shrimp BIT Babyface was commissioned by Riot Ensemble in 2022 (with Switzerland’s Nouvel Contemporain Ensemble) and, in Paxton’s typically joyous fashion, applies every available topping by the scoopful, until the dense layers of ornamentation – like a coral reef – become the thing itself.

If Paxton is encrustation and accumulation, Eden Londsdale’s Tränen und Ozeane – also composed for Riot Ensemble in 2022 – is its foggy opposite; form made of hazy recollections of Renaissance motets, chords that hang like clouds of incense, and melodies that melt like candle wax. On the comedown from all the preceding activity, its faltering, circling instrumental lines gather meaning and salvation even as they dissipate and dissolve.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson