Dillon/Ferneyhough – review

Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival

4 / 5

    • The Guardian,
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The eye-catching UK premieres from Huddersfield's final weekend both came from British composers who now live and work in the US. Brian Ferneyhough and James Dillon share the same publisher, and find their music routinely consigned to the stylistic drawer labelled "new complexity". But as these performances reiterated, they really don't have that much in common, apart from some surface similarities and a fondness for opaque programme notes.

  1. Dillon/Ferneyhough
  1. Broadcast on Radio 3's Hear and Now on 10 December.
  2. Link to website

Dillon's Sixth String Quartet ended a superb recital by the Quatuor Diotima, one of the three groups who introduced it at the Donaueschingen festival last year. It's dedicated to the Scottish trade union leader Jimmy Reid, who died just as Dillon was completing the score, but the music is in no sense elegiac. The taut single movement lasts around 13 minutes and forms a five-part arc, dominated by the teeming central section and with the last two revisiting the musical territory of the beginning; it's a lucid structure, filled with bold, striking gestures and not a note wasted.

The Ferneyhough work, brought by the French group Ensemble Linea, has taken longer to reach the UK: Chronos-Aion was completed five years ago. Scored for 17 instrumentalists and lasting more than half an hour, it comes with a typically impenetrable manifesto from the composer. But, as so often in Ferneyhough's music, what is introduced as impossibly intellectualised turns out to be vividly direct and compelling in performance. The dense thickets of the opening, connected by delicately coloured threads of sound, give way to explosive instrumental solos and finally to isolated sound events separated by menacing silences, as the music's energy seems to ebb away.

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