Sound Within Sound, Southbank Centre ★★★★★
A sound within a sound – it’s a strange idea. How can one sound contain another? As the first concert in Sound Within Sound – the Southbank’s festival of experimental music from around the world – unfolded, it became clear. It means sounds of bewitching unfamiliarity: the booming and gurgling and hissing of water and insects and bells, intricate and many-layered, like one shape unfolding to reveal another. Sounds which – after a moment of resistance – you sink into pleasurably, with a mysterious sense of connecting with something age-old.
This was the sound of Jitterbug by New Zealander Annea Lockwood, who back in the heady late 1960s became briefly notorious for recording the sound of burning pianos. “Not very green!” she confessed in her post-concert chat with the festival’s curator Kate Molleson, though she has more than made up for it since by settling in Montana and turning to nature for inspiration. Lockwood is one of many “outsider modernists” who were just as bold in their reinventions of music as any of the lustrous names of the West who dominate the official histories. Ten of them, including an Ethiopian nun who went to a Swiss finishing school and a Brazilian composer who created an entire menagerie of new instruments, are revealed in Molleson’s 2022 book (which gave the festival its name) – at the Southbank, the music of all of them is being heard, some of it for the first time in the UK.
Many of the mysterious sound-within-sounds of Lockwood’s music turned out to be field recordings of rivers and insects, subtly altered and diffused by the Queen Elizabeth Hall’s superb sound-diffusion system. Layered above them were plaintive notes and almost-mute sighings and scratchings from violinist Angharad Davies and cellist Anton Lukoszevieze. They played these tiny sounds with the same delicate care as a pianist would place a note in a Mozart sonata, with expressive results that were just as potent – but in a different way. A Mozart sonata arouses memories of all the other sonatas one has ever heard. Here, the cello and violin keenings seemed new-minted and yet old, like a voice of nature.
After that, it was a shock to be plunged into the jangling, hard-edged, clockwork world of Music for 5 Pianos by Cuban composer José Maceda. Maceda was inspired by folk music from across the world, not just his native land, but he was also a dreamer of new musical worlds as bold as any in the West. This piece, played by superb precision and sensitivity by five pianists of the group Apartment House conducted by Jack Sheen, revealed both sides of this extraordinary man.
The rhapsodic flurries tossed from one piano to another sounded like a village fiesta; the bell-like chords and interlocking patterns seemed to point to the stars. It was miles from Lockwood’s nature mysticism, but the grandeur and innocent freshness were the same. In all, it was a wonderful beginning to a festival that harked back to the days when the Southbank was habitually bold. Let’s hope it’s a sign of things to come. IH
Festival continues until July 7. Tickets: 020 3879 9555; southbankcentre.co.uk
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