FESTIVAL directors are becoming very frisky in their choice of venues. These days you clearly aren’t regarded as being at the cutting edge if you haven’t sent a string quartet to play down a disused mineshaft, or staged Chekhov in a railway station. But I don’t think I have ever reviewed a concert in a department store before. Not one involving six pianos anyway.
And so to Sloane Square, where the Chelsea Festival borrowed the top-floor “atrium café” of Peter Jones to mount an after-hours gig by Piano Circus: six pianists seated at six electronic keyboards. The venue was well chosen. The atrium has a big escalator shaft in the middle, leading down to haberdashery, lingerie, men’s socks, electrical goods and all points south. So if you got bored you could peer down to catch a glimpse of this summer ‘s fashion in futons; or out of the window and over the rooftops to where the sun was setting over the Albert Hall.
Believe me, I peered for England. I don’t say that Piano Circus’s repertoire is all mind-bogglingly dull. Just that if I had a choice between sitting through this concert again and watching milk curdle, I would joyfully embrace the yoghurt.
I might have enjoyed one, or perhaps two, endlessly looping pieces of minimalism, had they been interspersed with contrasting pieces. But as well as Terry Riley’s imperceptibly evolving Keyboard Study No 3, and Steve Reich’s even more gradually shifting Six Pianos — both of which have the merit of being pioneering works written more than 30 years ago — we were treated to much more recent pieces trawling the same once-hip Californian groove. Pieces such as Totti, by the Cornish composer Graham Fitkin. Or Max Richter’s heartfelt but interminable Mazuzu Dream, a tribute to the murdered African writer Ken Saro-Wiwa that seemed to comprise about a thousand repetitions of the same four-note bass line, albeit with some appealing steel-band-style sonorities on top.
Only two pieces broke away. One was Miguel del Aguila’s Conga Line in Hell. That rounded up every conga cliché in the universe, before imploding in an apocalyptic climax that was straight out of Ravel’s La Valse.
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The other was Yumi Hara Cawkwell’s Groove Study — a piece which, despite its title, was much more unhinged, jazzy and violent than the minimalist stuff around it. But even this was blandly delivered by the Piano Circus team who, for all their rapport and precision, seem far too cool to convey any passion for their work.