In its heyday in the 80s, the Almeida Festival was the leading showcase for new music in London - an annual extravaganza that embraced operas and concert pieces, which introduced the work of many important living composers to this country. When it was reborn as Almeida Opera in 1992, however, there was less room for concerts: operas good and bad (and a bit too often the latter) were the raison d'etre . But this year the season has acquired a new satellite, the Hoxton New Music Days, which promises to supply some of what has been missing over the last seven summers.
The Hoxton series is the brainchild of the composer John Woolrich, and the concerts take place in Hoxton Hall, a beautifully preserved old music hall in a decidedly untrendy part of north London. Its intimacy is perfect for concerts like these, which inevitably are only going to attract a small audience, and Woolrich has chosen his first series with great skill. Alongside the more familiar names there were important chances to hear showcases of two figures who are hardly ever performed here, Vinko Globokar and Salvatore Sciarrino.
Globokar is a trombonist as well as a composer, and was a familiar face at international new-music events in the 60s and 70s, giving the first performances of works by Berio and Stockhausen, which often gave free rein to his histrionic abilities as well as his virtuosity. His own music, though, has always been less familiar in Britain, and here members of Woolrich's Composers Ensemble offered a neat little survey, while Globokar himself performed a solo trombone piece, Oblak Semen, and the extraordinary Corporel from 1985, in which his own bare torso is the instrument, pummelled to produce the soundscape.
Theatricality ran through the whole programme. In Letters (1994) a soprano (the excellent Mary Wiegold) sits at a desk writing letters, thinking out loud while five instruments eavesdrop and comment; in its sequel Second Thoughts (1995) she reads and reacts to the replies; in Dos A Dos (1988) two clarinets conduct what seems to be a passionate affair.
There's something charmingly old-fashioned about Globokar's music; it's real Sixties stuff, but his own charm and humour come through.
The 52-year-old Italian Sciarrino is a more important figure, but the range of his music wasn't so well illustrated by the programme he had concocted for Hoxton, interleaving original music with his own rather plain arrangements of Bach, Mozart and medieval songs. Sciarrino's fondness for wispy, fragile textures, either in solos for wind instruments or to surround a solo voice, is certainly beguiling, but palls after a while on such a small canvas: somebody should take on one of his big orchestral pieces here, or perhaps Almeida Opera could mount one of his stage works. In the meantime this Hoxton initiative offered a glimpse of his distinctive voice, and deserves to carry on doing that for many more neglected composers.
