by “A home for the promiscuous music lover” is how the London Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF) describes itself, but in fact it is a festival that has no permanent home of its own. Over the last 12 years it has led a traveling life in some unusual venues around London. The 2024 festival took place in Hackney last month, but one event was postponed until the new year, at the Wigmore Hall, bringing the slightly chaotic and distinctly anarchic nature of the LCMF to one of the capital’s most prestigious concert halls, while halving the average age of the audience there.
The concert ended with the world premiere of Occam Delta XXIII by Éliane Radigue and Carol Robinson, a collaborative drone piece for baritone saxophone, trombone and drums, inspired by the colors and wave patterns of the North Sea. Here it was performed from memory and with great concentration by members of Ensemble Klang (there is no written score).
The first half of the program looked back a century at the futurist composers of pre-World War I Italy and an extraordinary orchestra of home-made instruments assembled by their leader Luigi Russolo: a collection of intonarumori (“noise toners”) that could produce street and factory noises.
The original set of instruments disappeared during the Second World War, but were recreated for the 100th anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto in 2009 and brought to London for the first time for this concert. This is a collection of 16 wooden boxes of different sizes, each with a megaphone on the front that can produce rumbling, crackling, gurgling and whispering sounds. Under the direction of Luciano Chessa, who was responsible for recreating the instruments, nine short pieces were played by members of the Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (also known as the Guildhall School’s New Music Society), including works by Paolo Buzzi and Russolo, the were written for the original ensemble.
The more recent works, all of which received world or UK premieres, ranged from the banal (Pauline Oliveros’ Waking the Noise Intoners) to the abstract (Peter Ablinger’s Weiss Weisslich), the funny (Chris Newman’s drunken People) to the idealistic (Jennifer Walshe). ). and Tony Conrad’s Fancy Palaces).
Walshe also performed some sound poems, a form invented by the Futurists, although these examples were written by Irish Dadaists, most of whom worked at the Guinness brewery – exactly the kind of little something extra that makes this festival so provocative and unpredictable .
