AN ENTERTAINING EVENING FROM LONDON’S NEXT GENERATION OF COMPOSERS

By Rachel Cameron-Potter | Stuff Rachel Says ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | Press Invite

In this year’s annual concert, five fledgling composers from the London Philharmonic Orchestra showcased their debut works at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall — with a creative twist.

‘Sound in Motion’ is the latest project from the LPO Young Composers programme, challenging five talented composers to each produce an 8-minute score for a 16-piece orchestra. This year’s creative brief: to compose a work inspired by and created for dance in collaboration with choreographers from Trinity Laban.

Under the mentorship of Composer-in-Residence Tania Léon, both composers and choreographers set out to create works influenced by one another in tandem, taking into account the dynamics of movement, tempo and visual composition that would be showcased side by side on stage.

Conducted by LPO Fellow Conductor Luis Castillo-Briceño, ‘Diásporas’ by Eliana Echeverry opened the show, accompanied by a fluid, dynamic dance by Valentina Vidal and James Adamson donning a single garment joined together by a long strip of blue fabric. Inspired by the composer’s migration from her homeland in Colombia to London, the score starts with sounds of the tide before moving on to a melody that brings the folkloric cumbria rhythms of Colombia to the London stage.

‘Salt’ by Crystalla Serghiou was the next piece to be showcased, this time with two dancers dressed in white. This piece evokes the evolution of a wave, starting with the gentle rise and fall of the tide before building up to a crescendo as the wave breaks, leaving only a spritz of salt spray behind.

There was a flowy quality to this piece, accentuated by the graceful movements of the dancers, as well as a circularity that didn’t feel too repetitive. In particular, I enjoyed the lightness of the strings and the flutes, and the twinkling percussion perfectly captured the freshness of the salty ocean spray as it settles on the rocks.

The next three pieces were conducted by LPO Fellow Conductor Charlotte Politi, starting with Zhenyan Li’s ‘Extrapolating’. Inspired by London, the structure, though repetitive, captured the humdrum of city life, every now and again punctuated by the sounds of traffic or construction works. For the choreography, the dancers rolled up, folded and tumbled over a black square of material representative of the concrete we share that makes up our city, making for a memorable performance that was enjoyable to watch.

In both composition and choreography, Phoenix Rousiamanis’s ‘Unfamiliar Flesh’ was the highlight of the evening. The penultimate piece employs passacaglia form to explore the “human body as a source of pleasure and horror simultaneously”, and creates a sense of unease by contrasting a gentle melody with ominous undertones, with shrill strings and broken chords accentuating the discord.

Lights held in hands, on a piano stool and attached to a carrying pole showed some skilful manoeuvring from dancers Irene Fiordilino and Sarah Santos, and by performing on a darkened stage, the dancers complemented the themes of the piece by visualising the contrast between light and darkness, making for a mesmerising watch.

In the final composition of the night ‘Zip, Zap, Boooooogie!!!’, Jasper Dommett tells the story of a first romantic encounter in a queer club setting, taking the listener through a range of emotions, from anticipation and joy, to hesitancy and doubt. At each shift in the score, you could tell the exact emotion Dommett wanted to convey, creating a sharp transition between states that refrained from sounding jarring. However, the choreography, in shifting away from the narrative to convey a more universal experience, felt disjointed, and unfortunately didn’t quite capture the emotional intensity evoked by the score.

Overall, Debut Sounds: Sound in Motion was thoroughly enjoyable, and a success for these fledgling composers. While the choreography at points didn’t quite meet expectations, there was certainly a lot of talent on the stage, and I’d hope to see more collaborations between music and movement take place in the future.

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Photo Credit: London Philharmonic Orchestra