MUSIC

St George’s Bristol (Thur 29 Sept) What is it about Wales and contemporary music? Along with the first cuckoo of spring, Bangor New Music Festival’s sap starts to rise; in autumn there’s the ‘only works by living composers’ Vale of Glamorgan Festival – about to relocate to May from 2012 – and in high summer, festive Presteigne sets its clock to ‘now’. This year though you didn’t have to head to the Welsh Marches for a piece of the action since the obliging Presteigne Festival Soloists are hitting the road to proselytise in Cardiff and Brum as well as Bristol.

Two Waltzes by Shostakovich allowed the more wary lunchtime regulars at St George’s to acclimatise gently – Joanna Shaw’s detached flutey understatement the perfect foil to the cafe-style bonhomie that followed. Then the here-and-now took over. Joseph Phibbs’s Flex, a series of differently-configured trios spiked by pivotal four-instrument interjections inspired by physical movement, handled the transitions between textures adroitly, but seemed well-crafted rather than urgently communicative.

The opening of John Hawkins’s Palinode (a 2011 Presteigne commission), struck a welcome earthier note, and as with the Phibbs the odd whiff of Gallic sensuality was inescapable, though its promiscuously chameleon language made the piece harder to pin down. Lithuania was one of Presteigne’s themes this year and Zita Bruzaite’s Cum Spe was another Festival commission. Her opaque programme note wasn’t exactly giving much away, yet there was some ear-catching music as a sort of ritualistic ferment cornered into a riff on American minimalism complete with Lithuanian accent. And the ending for solo piano was as effective as it was unexpected.

To conclude there was the Suite from Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale. No one would call it ‘major’ Stravinsky, but suddenly you were aware of a huge musical personality in the room – as musically pungent and unmistakeable as the scent of a fox in a garden’s that’s had it’s nocturnal visitation. It took a moment or two to find its feet - Sara Trickey’s violin a tad buttoned-up – but the panache crystallised so that the Petit concert caught fire and the tango tantalised. (Throughout the entire concert, incidentally, Alissa Firsova’s top-drawer pianism sparkled and seduced). ‘Normal’ chamber music lunchtime service resumes at St George’s later this week with the BOS Chamber Players in Mozart and Brahms, but full marks to St George’s for going off-piste by way of series launch – and to Presteigne for sharing summer’s spoils. (Paul Riley).

Copyright Paul Riley 2011