Music

Tectonics, City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

Four stars

The festival that Mayday signalled the start of may be a lost part of Glasgow's history, but this weekend proved that in contemporary music at least, an appetite is undiminished. While Glasgow Royal Concert Hall offered one distinct flavour, the BBC SSO's event co-curated by Ilan Volkov and Alasdair Campbell defies easy categorisation.

Arguably there is little more "minimal" that the music of Frenchwoman Eliane Radigue, whose recent chamber music was a key element, but the first music to be played, a new work by DJ and turntablist Mariam Rezaei, set the tone for Tectonics as precisely as possible. With all the spaces at Candleriggs well-used, her atmospheric score teamed members of the SSO with musicians from Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra in half a dozen or so small groups of players spaced around the Old Fruitmarket above the audience. That mix of elements was key in the combination of scoring and improvisation that followed.

It was a weekend in which that space recovered the vibrancy it had in its earliest days as a makeshift home for Glasgow Jazz Festival, but which has been hard to recapture since the building's redevelopment. The trick was accomplished by restoring the playing area to the other end of the room, where a small, lower stage instantly created a more intimate atmosphere for improvised music. The Rezaei piece was followed, for example, by Adam Bohman and Karen Constance and a set of electronica that may have been technologically particular, but worked with brittle, sharp-edged sounds common to many of those working in that area over the past four decades or so.

There was also a familiar language to Saturday's set on the same stage by saxophonist Peter Brotzmann and pedal steel guitarist Heather Leigh, but the impact of the duo in full flow was a joy. Leigh's ear-stretching figures add a crucial rhythmic pulse to Brotzmann's muscular improvisation that operated at full tilt for much of the set, with just occasional dips into a teasing tone of balladry.

Goodiepal, the alter ego of Faroese musical storyteller Parl Kristian Bjorn Vester, is, on the other hand, quite unique. His durational performance in the recital room involved lame gags, an annotated book, interaction with his own recorded voice and a Steinway grand, among other features. Words are key, but inadequate to capture his practice, yet people persisted in trying to do just that to encourage others to pay him a visit.

Saturday night's orchestral concert of premieres seemed to share sonic elements, although composers Joanna Bailie, Paul Newland, Christopher Trapani, John Croft and Cassandra Miller all have distinct approaches. There was the sound of the sea in Bailie's revision of Debussy (followed by harmonic skating across the rhythms of Beethoven and some wonky fairground Strauss), in the evocation of the Hebridean landscape of outsider artist Angus McPhee in Newland, in Trapani's Rust and Stardust and in the gong rolls on Croft's dreamscape, with the latter two also sharing a taste for big band horns. Miller's cello concerto had the broadest dynamic arc and kept soloist Charles Curtis's limited to marking the bars for brass fanfares, until a cadenza of harmonics accompanied by the orchestra's front desk cellos brought the programme to a quietly theatrical close.