Eclectic was the word for this remarkable new project from Manchester Collective’s Rakhi Singh and Alan Keary. Singh’s Bach and Keary’s Reich were each fantastic in their own ways, but it was a chilling closing piece that had audience members either enthralled or clamouring for the exit.
Alan Keary is a man who knows his way around a loop pedal. Watching him construct a dense soundscape with only his voice at the start of haunting original composition Shattered Creek felt a bit like watching a passionate painter get lost in their work, each vocal loop a delicately judged brushstroke that contributed to an emerging whole. He told us in advance the song had been written in response to the news story of a man finding himself stranded in a deep Peruvian cave system for three days, and Keary was adept at recreating that lonely, echoey environment with eerie rumbles of bass and floods of reverb. Then, a new sound: two alternating tones, harsh and loud in the mix, apparently cued by Keary with one of the dozens of electronic buttons and knobs at his fingertips. For a moment, it seems like an odd addition to the mix, perhaps a misguided attempt to take things in an unexpected direction. Then Keary looks up to the back of the room, smiles and takes his hands off his electronics. It is, of course, just the Star and Shadow’s pesky fire alarm; the plumes of stage smoke had been atmospheric but evidently a bit over the top. Refreshingly humble despite the seriousness of his composition, Keary simply abandons Shattered Creek and starts harmonising with the alarm. Rakhi Singh promptly joins in with him on violin in a moment of improvisation that hints at the immense musical nous these two possess. When the alarm persists Keary even throws in some lyrics (“Fire alarm / You’re my best friend”) and the place erupts in laughter.
That was only one of the incidents in a rocky start to this memorable concert; Keary had to stop the previous song twice and apologise when he miscued his loop pedal during a particularly fiendish rhythmic passage. But, if any performers are up to the challenge of overcoming song-ruining technical difficulties and mistakes, its these two. Both Keary and violinist Rakhi Singh, two members of the sprawling Manchester Collective (of which Singh is Musical Director and Fergus McCreadie one of this season’s pianists) are immense professionals, more than self-assured enough to not let a few slip-ups disrupt their mojo. Their willingness to laugh rather than sulk or attempt to hide the errors is typical of a group in which the stuffy old world of classical music increasingly struggles to contain them. Their releases never fail to surprise, offering daring, fascinating and often challenging sounds that sit right on the modern extremes of what classical can be. Forget the well-documented styles of 20th century classical music – Manchester Collective explore the unchartered territory of 21st century classical. It is groups like these that will define how our era of the genre is remembers in the decades and centuries to come.
That’s not to say Manchester Collective shun music of centuries gone by in favour of more fashionable sounds. This gig started with the distinctly unfashionable music of Hildegard von Bingen, an 11th century philosopher and mystic as well as composer of deeply religious medieval music (remarkable not least because she was an exceedingly rare female academic) whose potent, deeply spiritual compositions were centuries ahead of their time. An opening rendition of O virtus Sapiente is given life by a Shruti box, a simple wooden box containing bellows that emit a constant, hypnotic drone, tonight powered by Singh gently stepping on an attached foot pedal. The one note instrument is traditionally used in music from the Indian subcontinent, but in Newcastle it made von Bingen’s ancient melodies sound strikingly alive, the hinge of the box softly opening and closing as if breathing, the drone fading gradually into nothing in the seconds after Singh stopped pumping the instrument.
That enchanting opener was only the beginning of this duo’s eclecticism. Von Bingen was followed by two Bulgarian folk songs in unusual time signatures, Keary offering nimble bass lines under Singh’s sprightly violin playing. The challenge was to make these strange rhythms feel natural and danceable rather than needlessly intellectual and complicated, a task which Singh and Keary’s vivacious playing mostly succeeded in (at least when Keary wasn’t missing his cues on the loop pedal). A pre-recorded percussion track was a good idea to elevate the particularly bouncy tune of Buchimish, even though the drumming came across as a little underpowered in comparison to the two outstanding players giving it their all in front of us.
The real meat of the programme came with solo turns from each performer in the middle of the concert. First, there was Singh performing J.S. Bach’s Chaconne, a notorious piece due to its demand for both the melody and bass line to be played simultaneously on a single violin. Singh made a point of prefacing her performance with the bass line played in isolation, explaining how Bach simply repeats it, only with a multitude of creative variations. Her care towards bringing out that bass line was clear throughout the subsequent rendition, the piece crucially never losing its musical guiding star. Chaconne is a fierce piece of music and Singh was its equal, striking her bow across the strings in those famously ferocious opening notes as if wielding a sword. It was an unremitting intensity that occasionally came at the expense of a handful of subtler moments in the piece, but when Bach’s melodies rose to their most stormy Singh’s playing was a tour de force. Such was Singh’s immense passion for the piece it was easy to miss the vast technical ability and extraordinary feat of memorisation on show – Chaconne may be 16 minutes long, but Singh is not the sort to seek comfort from sheet music.
Similarly engrossing was Keary’s moment in the spotlight, a movement from Electric Counterpoint by 20th century composer and defining figure of minimalist music Steve Reich. Unshaken by his earlier slip-ups, this was a masterclass in loop pedal skills. One by one, Keary stacked dozens of intricately plucked guitar melodies on top of one another, creating a musical house of cards that could have easily tumbled down had one addition been played ever so slightly too fast or two slow. Instead, he was metronomic, impressively able to apply exactly the same tone to every melody, resulting in a fascinatingly balanced tapestry of interlocking twangs. It may have been less emotionally compelling than Singh’s Chaconne, but Reich’s music doesn’t call for individualism but rather rigid discipline in pursuit of a mathematical sort of beauty. Keary was less a musician, more a machine-like music generator, and the brilliance of Electric Counterpoint shone as a result.
However, in the end Chaconne and Electric Counterpoint were really just preludes to the extraordinary work that closed this set. LAD, written by American composer Julia Wolfe in 2007, was originally written for nine bagpipes and, although there sadly wasn’t a band of pipers waiting behind the scenes at the Star and Shadow, Singh and Keary had plenty of tech to recreate an unassailable wall of sound with just two violins in Singh’s own arrangement of the piece. And what a sound; the blaring tones of LAD more closely resembled a spiritual out-of-body experience than a piece of music by any of the usual definitions. Singh herself prefers to talk of it as “an ancient cleansing ritual”. It was here that Singh’s fearlessness as a violinist really came into its own. Her opening notes – a lurching upwards slide, heavily thickened by effects and distortion – was followed by gaping silence, Singh pointedly glaring into the whites of the audience’s eyes, making a few seconds feel like minutes. Stood in the front row, I found myself averting her unflinching gaze, pulse quickening. She returned to those sliding notes, sounding somehow even more sickening than the first time, before staring in silence once more. Never before have I been so utterly floored by the opening to a piece of music. Soon a drone emerged and Keary joined in with the mounting cacophony, the excruciating tension rising impossibly via a particularly gut-churning use of the Shepard tone. Eventually, haunting folk tunes arose from the din like zombies from a grave, sounds of a past era back to haunt us. The noise became so horrific, so viscerally intense that not everyone in the room could handle it: two old ladies sat near me rather huffily gathered their things and left midway through, triggering a chuckle from Singh. Another couple near the front also vacated just as the piece was reaching its apex. A few minutes of chaos marked the finale, Singh and Keary playing a non-sensical tangle of notes that was so avant-garde it almost made this powerful work of art feel silly. Nonetheless, by the time they had finished (remarkably ending this rhythm-less piece perfectly in sync) it felt as something in the air had changed. The applause from those of us that remained was loud, long and deserved – I’ve never experienced anything quite like Manchester Collective’s LAD. This leg of their autumn tour may have had a shaky start, but it could hardly have ended more strongly: modern classical music at its enthralling, inspiring best.