VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

There’s always a risk with a contemporary music event like Tectonics that you can get too much of the same thing. The most refreshing aspect of Day 1 in this year’s two-day festival was the varied extent of its content. 

Whether it was the passing tilt towards traditional music in the BBC SSO strings’ collaboration with two folk musicians, the club vibe of a concerto for turntables, or visceral spirituals-based improvisations of performance artist Elaine Mitchener, a “fun” side complemented the hard-edged avant-garde experimentalism more associated with this perennial event by joint creators Ilan Volkov and Alasdair Campbell.

What it avoided was any lull in momentum whatsoever, Saturday’s experience amounting to a continuous stream of mid-afternoon to late-evening performances, the sizeable cult-like audience processing seamlessly from one City Halls venue to the next. 

There was a touch of the weird in the series of six improvisations – Common Sense Will Not Prevail – delivered in what seemed an ironic setting, the bijou elegance of the small Recital Room. Billed as featuring Kate Armitage & Co, its eponymous leader had called off due to illness. What remained of her “entourage” were the performers Dave Jackson, Helmut Lemke and one Miss Vymethoxy Redspiders, whose extemporised delivery – both vocalised and aided by an assortment of manipulated objects – was strangely mesmerising in its collective bizarreness.  

In a similar vein, and equally ritualised, Eiko Yamada’s solo recorder (descant and tenor) improvisation – Traces of Air – seemed proportionally out of place in the main Grand Hall, its fluttering pianissimos and ephemeral multiphonics like cries of despair from a far-off world.

Yet both of these offered vivid contrast to the energised magnitude of two feisty performances in the Old Fruitmarket. Mitchener’s solo programme showed this gritty solo performer at her eye-catching best: her singular presence mid-stage within a halo of smoke and dramatic lighting hauntingly reminiscent of a Samuel Beckett scenario; her penetratingly deconstructive, electronically-enhanced musings on the spirituals Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child (Olly Wilson’s Sometimes) and Amazing Grace viscerally engaging. 

As for that incursion by the SSO strings into the extended folk idiom of participating Norwegian-based fiddle-guitar duo, Sarah-Jane Summers and Juhani Silvola, they had the joint jumping with Summers’ The Spirit Multitude. In a work, directed by Volkov, that fused racy, foot-stamping reels with evocative excursions into the realms of the truly surreal, the temperature of this festival jumped to mercury-busting heights. It wouldn’t have been out of place in Glasgow’s Celtic Connections.

The main evening concert by the full SSO was equally inclusive. The first half opened with the world premiere of Marc Yeats’ spatially-conceived A Point in the Landscape, in which order is sought out of chaos. With the orchestra divided into mixed groups, on and off stage, and the process governed by the timers on the players’ own mobile phones, the effect was remarkably liberating, not to mention admirable in this conductor-less entity’s success in finishing as one. 

It wasn’t a beautiful experience, a quality subsequently delivered by violinist Ilya Gingolts in his breathy, sotto voce unaccompanied performance of Salvatore Sciarrino’s solo Caprices.

But it was the 6 Scenes for Turntables and Orchestra, jointly composed by Mariam Rezaei and Matthew Shlomowitz with the former as soloist, that finally brought the house down. Rezaei’s spellbinding floor show – like a DJ on speed – elicited rhythmic bite and stratospheric sound effects that added ecstatic overlay to Shlomowitz’s free-flowing, hi-octane orchestral score. It was an exhilarating climax to an illuminating day.

Ken Walton  

(Photo: BBC/Alex Woodward)