Southbank Centre, LondonFeldman’s Triadic Memories are an interminable low, but much of the rest of this exploration of minimalism through an alternative largely female canon was cerebral and quietly compelling
The second instalment of this festival (the first of which took place in 2016) largely ignores the Glasses, Reichs and Rileys who pioneered minimalism in classical
music and instead explores an alternative, largely female canon. The only old-school figure represented is Morton Feldman, however, and a rare recital of his 1981 piano solo Triadic Memories is a low point of this weekend-long festival: a few minutes of harmonic and rhythmic leitmotifs are dragged out over a rambling and interminable 90 minutes.
Minimalism, with its restoration of tonality and emphasis on hypnotic repetition, often has much in common with early music. It is a tradition maintained here by Laura Cannell, whose chordal, multiphonic improvisations (sometimes playing two recorders at once, sometimes playing slack-bowed violin and sounding like a hurdy-gurdy) are a curious mix of medieval and modern. But other composers at the festival use minimalism to explore abstraction rather than order. A lengthy installation by the veteran French composer Éliane Radigue features only three pulsating notes, each lasting an hour, which constantly generate harmonics and secondary overtones – the sonic equivalent of a Rothko painting.