Apartment House

An annual visit to the Octagen Chapel is always a treat for heathens such as I, whose worship is otherwise confined to the secular pleasures of art and music. It's a fine building and a delightful venue for intimate concerts showcasing boundary pushing music. Last hear it hosted an extraordinary eight hour Jonny Greenwood marathon that made good use of its imposing organ pipes. This year the organ served as a dramatic backdrop to Apartment House's bold program of music that spanned a hundred years of composition, each piece having an oblique but tangible connection with the next.

First up was Harmonies by John Cage, a piece based, as Anton Lukoszeviezo explained, on American Hymns, the twist being the random notes Cage chose to admit. Performed by Lukoszeviezo on Cello, Bridget Carey on Violin, with both Gavin Morrison and Emma Williams on flutes, it's a disconcerting listen, a piece most notable for the silences between notes. It is, as

Lukoszeviezo quipped, after all, silence that John Cage is best known for. Given that Apartment House are arguably best known for performing his work - I presume it's from Cage that they get their name - it made for a brief but diverting start to the evening.

Brief too, was Cassandra Miller's composition, Grace's Amazing Imitation Apartment, but to my mind was more worthy of our attention, not least as this performance was its first public outing. We subsequently learned that Miller was influenced by Satie, but as Lukoszeviezo extracted extraordinary sounds from his Cello, and Kerry Yong's extraordinary fingers skittered across the keys of the grand piano, it was Benjamin Britten, and specifically the haunting music of Peter Grimes that sprang to mind. Notwithstanding her Canadian roots and French inspiration, her music seemed locked into a very British sensibility.

And what of that inspiration? Satie also greatly informed the work of John Cage, so an inclusion of a piece by the man himself made perfect sense. Prior to the performance I would have described myself as an admirer of Satie, but perhaps his better known pieces are atypical. Perhaps Socrate is. In any event, I struggled through this one. It was a pleasure to see Mark Knoop and Eliza Mccarthy complete the Apartment House line up on keyboards, but despite Kerry Yong making up the trio - that's an awful lot of keys, after all - I was underwhelmed with what they did with them. Apparently, this was a transcription of John Cage's transcription of a Satie original, so maybe something was lost in translation. Certainly,  it would be unreasonable to blame the composer for a result that lacked trajectory or momentum. The hesitant applause that followed suggested that no one seemed sure if we'd heard a movement or the whole thing. I doubt I was the only one grateful when it turned out to be the latter.

I therefore had a lot riding on the final piece, with thankfully delivered. The idea that a composition from a major 20th century composer can be lost for fifty fears sounds apocryphal, but shortly after the 1970s performance of Music in Eight Parts, the manuscript was bundled up with other papers and sold off to pay Philip Glass's mounting debts. Composed right in the middle of Glass’s Minimalist period, it was music he insisted wasn't meant to last, hence this seemingly cavalier attitude to the score. As a card-carrying Glass completist, it was thrilling to hear it performed live, its mesmerising, cyclical patterns proving engagingly hypnotic. Mark Knoop appeared to take the lead on this one, his subtle hand signals directing his fellows as nigh on imperceptible gear changes shifted tone in a way that provided exactly the trajectory the Satie piece lacked. Glass minimalism isn't for every - even for devotees prolonged listening carries with it the risk of going just a tiny bit mad - but for me this was the outstanding performance of my festival experience.

A footnote: During the Glass piece, a woman in the front row became profoundly distressed. Half standing from her wheelchair, it was unclear what was wrong, but she needed to be restrained by her carer. Presumably a relative, the carer was obviously upset as well, caught between concern for her relative and disturbing the performance. In my view, the woman's well-being should have taken precedence, particularly as her wheelchair's path was blocked by Kerry Yong's keyboard stand. After an age, a steward appeared and assisted in her exit, but given that the musicans had a uniquely clear sightline of this poor woman's circumstance, I thought it poor judgement on their part to plough on. I can only imagine how this must have exacerbated this family's distress and embarrassment. The music should have stopped, allowing the woman to leave with dignity, and then we start again. I hope the festival takes note and clarifies protocol should something like this happen again.