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| Okeanos Plus
Rolf Hind, who curated it, stressed how harmony and counterpoint dominate western art music, whereas melody, rhythm and sonority are explored centrally in other cultures, and only during the last century have they been developed in the West; to some listeners colour is still a little suspect as decorative but inessential. On both sides, people can be a little puritanical about how their instruments should be treated. The line-up as listed above was an unique one; Etsuko Takezawa, a notable innovator in new music for her instruments, came over specially from Japan to participate. She took a full part in ensemble music by SPNM short-listed young composers, and gave us traditional Japanese koto music as well as a ground-breaking composition of her own for koto and bass koto; she is also adept on the shamisen [illustrated]. The instruments were excitingly new and unfamiliar for several of the younger composers, who relished their possibilities. The event was enhanced by their informal spoken introductions (not everyone had afforded the £4 festival programme) and those of the musicians, especially the idiosyncratic off-beat remarks of British shakhachi virtuoso Clive Bell. The general conviviality was helped too by the ambience of Wilton's Music Hall, whose split level stage was exploited to such extent that I wished cameras had been present to capture the scene for DVD. The new music heard is a little hard to characterise and, for those of us who have devoured non-Western music over the years, the excitement was the natural blend with Okeanos's core instrumentation, and not the exoticism of the mixture. One surprising innovator was the Japanese born Dai Fujikura, now well established in international new music circles, who told us that he had never heard traditional Japanese instruments until he heard them at a Darmstadt summer school when he was 20! A no-nonsense and practical composer, he addressed his commission with a will, and took to the vibrato-free sho, and the harsh attack of the koto, to produce a viable work which can be heard again in London next month. But the first half had been unalloyed delight, perhaps more so after a surfeit of minor baroque opera by Handel, Vivaldi and child Mozart, with predictable patterning and multitudinous da capo arias! Nadja Plein's sunlight at the waterfall was delicious, and Christian Mason succeded well in under heaven: sometimes... , elucidating relationships and connections between the instruments which formed his rich tapestry. There is the making of a great Okeanos Plus CD if someone can come up with the money to record the best of this sequence? Okeanos are well known as pioneers of contemporary chamber music, and though I had not encountered them live, I have commended a fairly recent Metier recording of music by two fine British composers, "Elizabeth Maconchy (Mrs Lefanu, 1907-1994) to whose centenary in 2007 we can look forward, was a notably uncompromising pioneer in British musical life during a period of persistent prejudice against women composers and her daughter Nicola Lefanu, who has carried the torch for emancipation of women composers, many of whom are now well established in no small part due to her efforts." I fervently hope that there will be an opportunity for audiences farther afield to savour what these adventurous musicians are now doing, and its real originality. Meanwhile, Okeanos Plus should not be missed at City of London Festival on July 7th.
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Wilton’s Music Hall 7 June 2006 
Last night Okeanos Plus made a huge impression with a concert of "music together" - not "cross-over", which generally entails minuses as well as pluses! This was a complex collaboration between spnm, Asian Music Circuit and Spitalfields Festival.