The late night, “Afterhours”, concert by the GGS New Music Ensemble in the Temerty Theatre is something of a fixture of the 21C festival and it’s almost always fun.  Last night was no exception.  There were four contrasting pieces conducted and introduced by Brian Current, with his usual gentle erudition on the theme “all music was new music once”.  Which is worth thinking about!

The first two pieces on the programme were acoustic, in the sense that no electronics were involved.  Tanya León’s Indigena is a kind of high culture homage to salsa.  It’s highly textured and brightly toned with variations on Latin dance rhythms and an extended part for solo trumpet.  Skilfully composed, very well played and well within the mainstream of contemporary music.

Žibuoklė Martinaitytė’s Ping Pong Concerto, on the other hand was anything but conventional.  Challenged, during an after dinner table tennis game at an artists’ retreat to write a “ping pong concerto”, she eventually did.  An ensemble of strings, winds and percussion is fronted by a quartet with a ping pong table and cymbals.  It’s unclear to me how much was prescriptively scored and how much aleatoric but whether the multi coloured balls were in and out of play seemed to be triggering the cymbals and, maybe, the ensemble’s playing.  Play switched backwards and forwards between singles and doubles while the ensemble played densely textured music demanding weird things from the strings.  Forgive the sparseness of this desription.  It’s really hard to listen closely when a ping pong game is going on a few feet in front of one’s nose.

The second half featured two works incorporating electronics.  Chaya Czernowin’s Habekhi (The Crying) evokes loss and grief.  The ensemble includes some very low instruments like bass clarinet, double bass and trombone and the colours are very dark and sombre even with the high strings chattering away in the background.  At times it sounds almost like Fafner waking up in Siegfried.  Eventually, the instrumentalists are all banging sticks together to the background of electronics and some brutal percussion.  Then the voice comes in.  Mezzo-soprano Maria Milenic is required to make weird otherwordly sounds somewhere between singing and crying.  I wondered how prescriptively scored this was and looking at the score after the show with Maria I learnt that the answer is “very”.  Which makes her performance all the more remarkable.  A truly disturbing piece.

The final piece was Pierre Jodlowski’s Respire.  This is in two parts.  The first explores “breathing” and the second “beat” or maybe especially heartbeat.  There are lots of electronics and video of dancers’ bodies.  There’s some interesting extended techniques for the strings and some vaguely arpeggio like structures in the second half but it wasn’t really capturing my attention.  maybe I was just tired by this point.

So, overall, another fascinating “Afterhours”.  Challenging but rewarding music, expertly played and introduced in a truly informative way.  Surely the best way to experience new music.