Tag Archives: Hannah Kendall

In concert – Ensemble intercontemporain – Boulez 100 @ The Barbican

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Ensemble intercontemporain / Nicolò Umberto Foron, NikNak (turntables), tyroneisaacstuart (choreographer & dancer), Julien Creuzet (visuals), Nathan England-Jones (electronics technical support)

Hannah Kendall shouting forever into the receiver
Cassie Kinoshi [untitled]
Pierre Boulez Sur Incises

Barbican Hall, London, 27 May 2025

by John Earls. Photo credits (c) John Earls

Billed as part of the Boulez 100 series* to celebrate what would have been Pierre Boulez’s 100th birthday year, it was exciting to see a concert by Ensemble intercontemporain, the group the great iconoclast founded in France in 1976 (I can’t help but also tell you that this was with the support of the then French Secretary of State for Culture).

Recognising Boulez’s championing of new voices, the programme combined a classic Boulez piece with new works by two younger generation British composers. First up was Hannah Kendall’s shouting forever into the receiver. The title comes from Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and refers to the description of a tiny plastic toy soldier yelling into its handheld radio transceiver. In this piece, spoken extracts, initially from the Book of Revelation and then verses from Ezekiel, are passed back and forth between two performers using walkie-talkie radios and sat on opposite sides of the stage. This is combined with arresting musical accompaniment including pre-programmed music boxes playing familiar works such as Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, dampened piano and a contemplative harmonica chorale. It was a fascinating opening 15 minutes.

Second on the programme was the world premiere of composer, arranger and saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi’s [UNTITLED]. Inspired by Boscoe Holder, the Trinidadian artist, dancer, choreographer and musician it “pays tribute not only to historic Caribbean artforms…but also to the continued evolution of these forms in modern diasporic contexts”. This is reflected in this multi-disciplinary piece combining music, choreography, improvisation, technology and visual art “embracing the kind of fluid creativity that Boscoe Holder explored throughout his lifetime”.

At the very start choreographer and dancer tyroneisaacstuart circles the stage before literally passing on the baton to conductor Nicolò Umberto Foron (currently Assistant Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra). Throughout the evening Foron’s angular gestures complemented the music perfectly. Something of a dance in itself.

tyroneisaacstuart’s own dancing involved spins, weaving through sections of the orchestra, running on the spot and at one point appearing to hit a forcefield during a dramatic build-up of repetitive beats. Rhythm featured strongly throughout the piece including beats from NikNak on turntables (Nathan England-Jones provided electronics technical support) and we were frequently never far from an albeit eclectic dancefloor.

The dancer was all dressed in white contrasting with the fiery red visuals (by Julien Creuzet) on a large screen featuring the slower movements of blurred figures. Kinoshi’s intention is that the “on-stage presence invites the audience to not only hear but to see rhythm”. I don’t know whether when the orchestra, dancer and visuals are on stage together it makes it difficult to focus properly, but at times it felt a bit too busy. That said it is a stimulating and brave piece.

[left to right: Cassie Kinoshi, Nathan England-Jones, NikNak, Nicolò Umberto Foron, tyroneisaacstuart]

After the interval, nine members of the Ensemble performed Pierre Boulez’s Sur Incises (1996-1998) for three pianos, three harps and three percussion parts (including vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, steel drums, and tubular bells).

The stage setting alone with the instrumentalists set some distance apart (a bit like Covid times) with the harps centre stage was striking. It’s quite a sonic experience too. Heavy percussion and lustrous harmonies combine in an ebb and flow of crashes and trills that both comfort and have a sense of foreboding. Boulez’s music has a reputation for being difficult, but when played like this it is utterly captivating.

John Earls is Director of Research at Unite the Union. He posts on Bluesky and tweets / updates his ‘X’ content at @john_earls

*It was a bit strange, not to say disappointing, that the concert programme labelled this as part of the Boulez 100 series but contained nothing on Boulez himself or the piece of his being performed. The notes on the other two pieces, written by the composers themselves, were, not least for this reviewer, very useful.

For more on the ensemble, visit the Ensemble Intercontemporain website

Published post no.2,547 – Wednesday 28 May 2025

In concert – Mimi Doulton, Thando Mjandana, BCMG: Songs at Day, Songs at Night

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Mimi Doulton (soprano), Thando Mjandana (tenor), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group / Vimbayi Kaziboni

Kidane Primitive Blaze (2022)
Birtwistle Today Too (2004)
Birtwistle …when falling asleep (2018)
Kendall Tuxedo: Between Carnival and Lent (2022)
Kidane Cradle Song (2023) [BCMG Sound Investment commission: World premiere]
Anderson Mitternachtslied (2020) [UK premiere]
Anderson THUS (2023) [World premiere of final extended version]

Elgar Concert Hall, University of Birmingham
Wednesday 18 October 2023

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

A varied programme greeted attendees at tonight’s concert from Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (to be repeated in Bristol on October 29th), consisting largely of vocal pieces and directed with precise assurance by the highly regarded (justifiably so) Vimbayi Kaziboni.

Equally well regarded at present, Daniel Kidane (recently signed to Schott) was represented by two works – of which Primitive Blaze made for an effective curtain-raiser with its array of interlocking rhythmic patterns whose elaboration brought greater emphasis on a linear continuity in its wake. Both the electric guitar and tenor saxophone were prominent within this ensemble – the latter instrument emerging at the forefront in the final stages, when its plangent tones signified a closure as decisive formally as it sounded decidedly equivocal.

Next came settings by Harrison Birtwistle. To a text by the 18th-century Japanese poet Tanko (translated by Joel Hoffman), Today Too found tenor, flute and guitar evoking a twilit scene whose ominous elements are subsumed into an aura of shimmering, even sensuous stillness.

Rehearsal considerations necessitated exclusion of the David Harsent setting From Vanitas (hopefully not in Bristol) but not of …when falling asleep – Birtwistle’s last completed work, which intersperses lines by Rilke (translated by Jochen Voigt) with those by Swinburne in a sequence the more affecting for its understatement. Mimi Doulton brought a keen eloquence to the sung component, though Thando Mjandana seemed a little tentative with those spoken in parallel, and quite why the final lines of his contribution had been excluded was unclear.

Doulton returned for Between Carnival and Lent – one of Hannah Kendall’s ongoing Tuxedo series drawing on the art-print of that name by Jean-Michel Basquiat; abrupt juxtaposition of keening melisma with spoken polemic rather tending to cancel out each other as it proceeded.

Mjandana duly came into his own with the premiere of Cradle Song, Kidane’s setting of verse from the poem by Blake, though an evident desire to avoid the winsomeness associated with ‘innocence’ led to a highly rhetorical vocal line surely at odds with the semantics of this text.

The evening closed with two settings by Julian Anderson, both from his song-cycle In statu nascendi and drawing on a linguistic variety of verse in the context of an ensemble similar in line-up while not in usage to that of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Nietzsche (in the original German) was the basis for Mitternachtslied, familiar lines here exuding an anguished elation wholly different from that encountered in Mahler or Delius. Longfellow at his most visionary was the starting-point for THUS, building gradually from speculative beginnings towards a climactic section whose visceral impact felt less a setting than an intuitive riposte to its text. This premiere of the ‘final extended version’ drew a forceful though slightly self-conscious response from Doulton, in what seems the likely culmination of the song-cycle in question.

It certainly brought to a striking close a programme whose relative short measure was more than outweighed by its variety or its intrinsic interest. Hopefully those who hear it in Bristol will be equally responsive to its enticements as those who were present at Elgar Concert Hall.

For ticket information on the forthcoming Bristol concert on Sunday 29 October, click here, and click here for more information on the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Click on the artist names for more information on Vimbayi Kaziboni, Mimi Doulton and Thando Mjandana, and on the composer names for more on Julian Anderson, Harrison Birtwistle, Hannah Kendall and Daniel Kidane

Published post no.1,986 – Sunday 22 October 2023