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‘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 past 12 years it has led a peripatetic life around some unlikely London venues. The 2024 festival last month was based in Hackney, but one event was left until the new year, and that took place in the Wigmore Hall, bringing the slightly chaotic and distinctly anarchic character of the LCMF to one of the capital’s most respectable concert halls while halving the average age of the audience there in the process.
The concert ended with the world premiere of Éliane Radigue and Carol Robinson’s Occam Delta XXIII, a collaborative drone piece for baritone saxophone, trombone and percussion, inspired by the colours and wave patterns of the North sea. Here it was performed from memory and with immense concentration (there is no written score) by members of Ensemble Klang.
The first half of the programme, meanwhile, looked back a century to the futurist composers of Italy before the first world war, and to an extraordinary orchestra of homemade instruments that their leader, Luigi Russolo, devised: a collection of intonarumori (“noise intoners”) that could evoke the noises of the street and the factory.
The original set of instruments disappeared during the second world war, but it was recreated for the 100th anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto in 2009, and brought to London for the first time for this concert. It’s a collection of 16 wooden boxes of varying sizes, each with a megaphone at the front, which can generate rumbling, crackling, gurgling and whispering sounds. Conducted by Luciano Chessa, who was responsible for recreating the instruments, nine short pieces were played by members of the Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (AKA the New Music Society of the Guildhall School), including works by Paolo Buzzi and Russolo written for the original ensemble.
The more recent works, all of them receiving world or UK premieres, ranged from the banal (Pauline Oliveros’s Waking the Noise Intoners) to the abstract (Peter Ablinger’s Weiss Weisslich), the witty (Chris Newman’s boozy People) to the idealistic (Jennifer Walshe and Tony Conrad’s Fancy Palaces).
Walshe also performed some sound poems, a form that the futurists invented, though these examples were written by Irish dadaists, most of whom worked in the Guinness brewery – exactly the kind of little extra that makes this festival so provocative and unpredictable.
