London Sinfonietta/Collon – review

It is sometimes said that there is such a thing as a London Sinfonietta Piece, written to tick boxes with the new music establishment – whatever that is. If this concert suggested anything, it was that this is a myth. Three new Sinfonietta commissions were crammed into an eclectic programme of six works. The most striking came from the youngest composer, Martin Suckling, whose Candlebird is a song cycle to five poems by Don Paterson. Each song is immediately characterised with a new musical idea; the writing is tangibly evocative. The third song, Motive, centres around a storm conjured in buffeting knocks on the instruments; in the title song, sliding, indistinct string melodies sound like a Brahms sextet melting in extreme heat. Baritone Leigh Melrose rose superbly to the music's demands. Also under Nicholas Collon's propulsive baton, Colin Matthews's Night Rides made an absorbing debut: a sinister, galloping movement that pays homage to Sibelius, perhaps, and to Strauss in its downward-sweeping sunset music. Philip Cashian's Bone Machine, for piano and three others, was a pleasing if throwaway overture to the second half: the applause lasted longer than the 90-second piece itself. Two works sounded more academic: Christopher Fox's KK, an itchy little number for saxophone and cowbells, and Bryn Harrison's Six Symmetries. The latter offered complex textural sweetness, though the idea behind it – a musical representation of the curves in a Bridget Riley painting – dominated the music and ultimately stymied it. More intriguing was Laurence Crane's Movement for 10 Musicians, a slow succession of sweet and piquant chords that took on their own suspended beauty; imagine an empty hall that has seen 1,000 Beach Boys concerts, yielding up all its ghostly echoes at once.