London Sinfonietta/Sheen evaluate – ghostly microtones and heartbeat rhythms | Music

The London Sinfonietta’s final Southbank Centre programme of the yr was bookended by works it had freshly commissioned, from Jack Sheen, who additionally carried out the live performance, and from the Latvian composer Justė Janulytė. Sheen opened together with his personal Phant Heap Render, three brief actions of ghostly string repetitions and sustained notes from the wind that step by step sink in pitch, in opposition to a harmonic background blurred by microtones. It creates music that strikes slowly on the floor, whereas internally seeming busy.

The place Sheen’s textures are sparse and fragile, Janulytė’s Sleeping Patterns presents a dense, always altering musical flux. A lot of her output consists of items for monochrome collections of devices, so writing for the multicoloured lineup of the Sinfonietta and their co-commissioners, Ensemble Intercontemporain and Remix Ensemble, supplied her a brand new problem.

Because the title suggests, Sleeping Patterns is impressed by the totally different rhythms of a human physique – respiratory, heartbeat, eye actions, and so forth – which function concurrently however are unsynchronised. Janulytė mirrors these in her use of musical patterns in seven totally different tempi that weave via the ensemble. They create an intense and compelling micropolyphony, a kaleidoscope of instrumental color and shifting views.

Nothing else within the programme, although, was as absorbing as these new items. Älv Alv Alva by Lisa Streich – composer-in-residence on the Huddersfield up to date music pageant final month, the place the Sinfonietta first carried out this programme – was a curious combination of the intense and the twee, with folksy, Greig-like riffs interrupting its sustained spectral harmonies. Tyshawn Sorey’s For Olly Woodrow Wilson, Jr was a memorial piece that stretched some unmemorable musical materials over an unnecessarily prolonged timeframe.

However the nearest to a up to date basic within the programme, Salvatore Sciarrino’s Da un Divertimento, no less than had historic curiosity. It’s very early Sciarrino, composed in 1970 when he was simply 23, however the originator of the wispy, weightless textures, combining pitched and unpitched sounds, is immediately identifiable.