Music
Oliver Coates, School of Art, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
three stars
Cellist Oliver Coates is a chap on a mission, taking his instrument, one of the most fondly regarded in the orchestra, into new areas of sonic experiment and visual presentation. He was one of the contributors to Cryptic productions' Pacific Quay event that closed Glasgow's Commonwealth Games cultural programme, Sound to Sea, and some of his music for that amphibious extravaganza featured here, alongside compositions by Larry Goves (derived from Chopin), Mica Levi (from the soundtrack to the film Under the Skin) and Olivier Messiaen (a composition originally for ondes martinots). However virtuosic a player he is, for much of this hour-long recital he used his instrument more as a tone generator, feeding its raw sound through electronics to creature layers of texture.
Partnering him in this reinvention of chamber music was video artist Laura Colmenares Guerra, whose pictures were as varied as his sound: an elegant underwater swimmer for the Goves, geometric shapes for the Levi, and synthetic landscapes for the Messiaen. There was a clarity to the images that was sometimes missing from the music, although the simplicity of Coates arrangement of Squarepusher's Tommib Help Buss as a pizzicato viol tune, and his two Gaelic melody-sourced songs for vocalist Chrysanthemum Bear had an elegance of their own. The difficulty was that it was all just a little bit dull, or perhaps rather more dull than that. Thankfully Bang on a Can composer Michael Gordon came to the rescue with the closing piece, Industry, introducing some overdue muscularity to the programme, and even faint of echoes of Red-era King Crimson in the crescendo of sound Coates produced, with the background visuals helpfully just that colour.
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