Project Instrumental is a crack team of young musicians performing challenging music with talent and style. Founder and Creative Director Harriet Allan has forged an original chamber music phenomenon. It is exciting to hear music on traditional stringed instruments which makes you wonder how they are actually making that sound!
The “astringent harmonies"1 of Shostakovich’s String Octet provided a perfect opportunity for this ensemble to showcase its skills. As the lights went up, the mournful Prelude began, its grief-stricken chromatic meanders interlaced with spells of anger and the tolling of a bell – long low notes on the cello. The nightmarish Scherzo was brilliantly horrid – in parts it sounds like nails on a blackboard. I relished the lugubrious cello solo and weird glissandos, and admired the controlled wildness as the players scrubbed and shrieked their way through the awful frenzy.
Both contemporary composers featured in this concert were in attendance. It must be an amazing experience to hear one’s own composition performed. Are Fokkens and Cutler still wandering around in a delirium, as Shostakovich is said to have done for days after first hearing his octet played?
Cutler’s Music for Sunflowers is curious and pleasing. I imagined close-up scenes in a field of flowers – ants herding aphids, ladybirds doggedly climbing up and falling off leaves, ponderous beetles dodging raindrops, drunken bees, and a butterfly’s eye view of a host of sunflowers swaying in the breeze. There were delicious chords and cello bits, and wonderful winding melodic moments with double bass and viola. If the tone of a well-played viola can be described as ‘buttery’, this was ultra-creamy and salted to perfection.
A South African living in Cardiff, Rob Fokken wrote The Mountain in the Sea, premiered here, for Project Instrumental. He explained that it is a musical interpretation of the experience of travelling towards Table Mountain in the Western Cape. At the end, I would have liked to hear the whole piece again, possibly in reverse order, to understand it better. It was like a sea voyage, not a safe one, with strange sights and sounds rearing out of the mist. This was not comfortable music. Afterwards, Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings felt like a warm bath after wild swimming2.
1Shostakovich: A Life by Laurel Fay
2OK, maybe it’s only me who waltzes in the bath!