★★☆☆☆
Halfway through this concert — in which the chamber group Apartment House played four world premieres and two UK premieres, plus another piece in which the musicians shouted items from newspapers at each other — I felt like echoing Mr Bennet’s remark to cut short his daughter’s piano recital in Pride and Prejudice: “You have delighted us long enough.”
It wouldn’t have been entirely sarcastic. There was some delight here. The shouting, done with verve, came in John White’s entertaining 1971 avant-garde classic Newspaper Reading Machine. We should have been sprawled out, stoned, in a Greenwich Village loft. Equally surreal, though written only last year, was Leo Chadburn’s Freezywater: a euphonious litany of place names around outer London, interspersed with musical snippets that subtly grew then shed their origins.
Far less gripping were two string quartets by Luiz Henrique Yudo, the first inspired by a 16th-century garden labyrinth, the second by a modern abstract artist, yet both opaque and charmless.The Lithuanian composer Egidija Medekšaite intriguingly connected her new piece Pratiksha to the “ancient Sanskrit roots” of the Lithuanian language, but the Indian raga was disappointingly buried under harsh pulsings. On the other hand, Martin Arnold’s Stain Ballad belied its unappealing title with gentle syncopations, hazy harmonies and even the odd wisp of half-remembered melody.
Had Apartment House existed 300 years ago, would it have paraded those nascent geniuses Bach and Handel in a single concert? Unlikely. Astonishing though it seems, it’s quite possible that the music of these two German composers born in the same year was never performed on the same occasion during their lifetimes.
Very different today. In the Wigmore on Friday, John Butt’s spirited Dunedin Consort contrasted the two men with solo cantatas and concertos by Bach in the first half and Handel in the second. I confess I enjoyed the latter far more than the former. Maybe that shows what a superficial mind I have, but possibly it was also because the soprano Sophie Bevan sounded much more at home in Handel’s extrovert showcases — especially the Gloria, rediscovered in 2001, in which the 21-year-old composer ostentatiously but irresistibly parades his virtuosic credentials.