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Berio, Feldman, Lachenmann etc
Mark Knoop (piano & accordion) & colleagues at Café Oto, Dalston, London

KAMMER KLANG PRESENTS: SEB ROCHFORD / LEO ABRAHAMS / TIM HARRIES / NEWTON ARMSTONG / LUCIANO BERIO / MORTON FELDMAN / HELMUT LACHENMANN / MARK KNOOP / LUCY RAILTON / VICKY WRIGHT

4th May 2010 £5 Ticket on the door Only; Time : 8pm

This fairly new arts venue (named noise/sound/music in Japanese !) has a particular focus on new music and tonight's concert was certainly a cutting edge event. Café Oto is a little spartan, perhaps, but with no fixed and numbered seating (so you can organise your own sight-lines, and long legs aren't cramped) it creates an informal and pleasantly relaxed environment for an evening, a lot of it spent drinking whilst listening.

I'm told it is like 'the bare bones quality of a Lower East Side bar in New York...' [CS]. I liked it !

We arrived in good time, only to find the cafe closed "for sound checks". The concert was scheduled for 8 p.m. but that proved to be an approximation, as it did not get going until more than a half hour later, with a feeling that that was usual there...

Gradually the cafe (not open for food) filled with a dedicated new music audience, whose silent concentration on some throughly difficult music was impressive; no shuffling around or mobile phones to disturb us - the only frequent competition was from police sirens in the main road, which must have affected recordings and a video being made. Do watch an entertaining YouTube video featuring Mark Knoop and showing yet another aspect of his versatility.

Lachenmann's Ein Kinderspiel (1980) explores sounds within the piano, released by filtering fierce percussive attacks on the keyboard; subtle and fascinating once you'd got your ears attuned, and impressively realised at Café Oto.

Knoop was joined by cellist Lucy Railton for Feldman's Durations II which served to demonstrate that the unfolding of his unique method actually thrives better at greater length (qv. his String Quartet No 2).

Newton Armstrong's Three Windows for piano and electronics mixed live electronics with the piano's natural sound.

A high point of the first half was Aisha Orazbayeva's assured account of Berio's Sequenza VIII for solo violin. (We had enjoyed this up-come violinist in a recent Kreutzers concert at Wilton's.) By the end of this punishing work Aisha's bow had lost a significant proportion of its c.200 horse-tail hairs !

Same Steps (2007) for clarinet and modular ensemble (Mark Knoop on accordion!) introduced the young Australian composer Morton Ricketson to many of us.

Its first half, in "open-form" required improvisation, whilst the more formal second part was kept together by members of the group nodding with their heads.

This linked with the extraordinary final improvised set by SEB ROCHFORD drums LEO ABRAHAMS guitar TIM HARRIES bass. It seemed obvious that the three had worked together a good deal, because they produced a ‘whole’ sound rather than three musicians taking their solo turns. That built into several thrilling crescendos and you could really sense the excitement generated between the three of them.

Peter Grahame Woolf & Fern Bryant