New Music Biennial review – an electronic symphony of sound

However deeply electronic composers and turntablists journey inside their own world of sound, the invitation to map their primary musical concerns on to a symphony orchestra usually proves impossible to resist. At the Southbank Centre’s New Music Biennial, some dealt with that crossover opportunity more resourcefully than others.

Dialogue by the British-Iranian turntable artist Shiva Feshareki failed to deliver on the promise of its premise: the material, which Feshareki composed for BBC Concert Orchestra and conductor André de Ridder, was pre-recorded, giving her the opportunity to transform it electronically before our ears. This throws up, she explained, the alluring prospect of hearing a transformation before the thing itself has been played orchestrally. In reality, though, the orchestral drones felt too broad and loosely argued to instigate a full-on dialogue between turntable and orchestra.

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On stage, electronic music composer and singer Elizabeth Bernholz – who performs as Gazelle Twin – presents as if she’s the love child of Kate Bush and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Her collaboration with composer/orchestrator Max de Wardener, The Power and the Glory, is largely a reimagining of material from her 2018 album Pastoral, and had a satisfying concentration of instrumental detail and dramatic urgency. Using densely nested string clusters to evoke the buzz of flies – which set the richly gothic mood – Gazelle Twin’s soaring, ecstatic melodic revelry was offset by unsettling, haunted orchestral backdrops.

Following this re-weirding of English idylls, The Centre of Everything, a 12-minute piece for strings by Edmund Finnis, was business as usual as stuffy counterpoint quickly defaulted to well-schooled, blue-passport pastoralism. Over in the foyer, the bold Charles Mingus-based volatility of a Langston Hughes-inspired piece called The Dream Without a Name, by the young jazz pianist Sarah Tandy and her group, went down well. But back in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the anaemic doodles of Where to Build in Stone – music with video by the Hull-based electronic duo Numb Mob – left me hoping that this didn’t, as the festival’s slogan proposed, “define new music”.