State of the Nation, the London Sinfonietta's weekend of music by young composers, has always been about more than conventional concerts in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. But this year, with the emphasis on fusing electronics and live instruments, experimental and collaborative events took centre stage as never before.
The most innovative project of the weekend did not even happen on a concert platform. Line Up, composed by Fraser Trainer and Sound Intermedia (David Sheppard and Ian Dearden), was performed in the vast atrium of Southwark underground station. Scored for five wind and brass players, the piece consisted of fanfares written for each of the stops of the Jubilee line. This was a piece of serious and complex modern music and its itinerant audience were transfixed by the performance, the electro-acoustic accompaniment, and the music's unique relationship with the space.
Back in the confines of the QEH, many new pieces found inspiration in electronic wizardry. Dai Fujikura's Blue Sky Falling was an energetic workout for acoustic quintet playing against a taped version of itself. The music was chaotically dense, its frenetic activity relenting only towards the end, as the ensemble focused obsessively on individual pitches.
The most striking fusion of acoustic and electronic elements was Sound Intermedia and James Crabb's Helix for solo accordion. The physicality of Crabb's performance turned the contrast between live and taped sounds into an expressive drama. It was as if he were trapped in a hall of mirrors, caught between the sound of the accordion and its electronic reflections.
Sarah Nicolls provided some of the highlights of the purely acoustic events, in her outstanding recital of piano music by the latest generation of composers, including Luke Bedford and Paul Usher. The Sinfonietta's concerts were all conducted by Martyn Brabbins, and the players were superbly committed. They revealed the ambition of David Gorton's Oblique Prayers, a delicate setting of poems by Denise Levertov for soprano and ensemble. And James Olsen's The Fall of Cracker Castle, the last piece of the weekend, was brilliantly imaginative. Scored for wind band and percussion, the work dramatises and parodies the disastrous first performance of Handel's Fireworks music. Using and abusing Handel's original themes, Olsen's piece transcends its source material, and creates music full of flair and clarity.
