Saxony Blues
ELIZABETH ALLEN
Each performance in Max Baillie’s programme of St Leonard’s Concerts has offered a fascinating extension of musical possibility in terms of unusual instrumentation and juxtapositions of the familiar and the less familiar. Last week’s Saxony Blues concert at Christ Church presented the strongest challenge yet to our preconceptions of a ‘classical’ concert.
Billed as ‘new music for mixed ensemble straight from the Wigmore Hall’, it certainly fulfilled what has sometimes been declared as the primary purpose of art: to defamiliarise, to make strange. In a recent Radio 3 interview, Max Baillie talked of his fascination with re-connecting music across times and genres, re-scoring and provoking unexpected responses.
This concert offered points of classical reference – a line of a Hildegard von Bingen composition, and T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding’s use of the mediaeval mystic Julian of Norwich’s famous assertion that “All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” These, though, were presented in a context of all-new compositions by the ensemble: cellist Colin Alexander’s Moonrise/Alva’s Riff, Max Baillie’s Make Sweet Floods to Run, percussionist Angela Wai Nok Hui’s Just let me die.
When guest curator and soprano Heloise Warner sang lines from Rimbaud’s Illuminations, these were deconstructed, reconstructed, made new. In his radio interview, Max Baillie suggested that it may help those of us with limited experience of more modern or experimental musical forms, to use visual images to engage. During the evening I found myself alternately mesmerised, intrigued, enchanted, baffled – and magicked into visions of skies and oceans. And once, in a probably less appropriate response, as the ensemble blew and threw a whole hail of cardboard whistles, mildly concerned about reuse and recycling.
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