Minimal Extreme

Going through to Glasgow for Einstein and dazzling Flux

For the past couple of years, Glasgow's Concert Halls have been hosting weekend-long festivals celebrating Minimalism in music, from visionary 1960s beginnings to current manifestations. Among the attractive features of these weekends are the inexpensive hour-long concerts in the afternoon. These are imaginatively programmed and feature top performing artists, and I decided to make the trip across for two of the latest. This time the festival came with a qualifier: Minimal Extreme. I had a preparatory pint.

David Lang: genial

The first concert was devoted to an interesting composer with whom I was unfamiliar, David Lang (in attendance and providing a short and genial introduction). It began with two pieces in differing moods. Ark Luggage, for soprano and string quartet, received its premiere. It lists ninety-two things Noah may have brought on the Ark, as proposed by Peter Greenaway. The Smith Quartet and Else Torp were crystalline in the gently oscillating piece, which came across as a curious but pleasing vignette. Then came Pierced, a pounding concerto for piano, cello (amplified here) and percussion, with the tremulous Smith Quartet alongside. It is an ominous and thrilling piece.

The main course was The Little Match Girl Passion, Lang's Pulitzer Prize-winning choral work based on a mixture of Hans Christian Andersen's story and Bach's St Matthew Passion. Performed beautifully by four singers from Theatre of Voices, with sparse percussion, it is static and haunting. I only felt restless when the concert overran by nearly half an hour, after a late start and a fair amount of stagehand fuss throughout. I sadly forwent my inter-concert gin.

On to the second concert, another predominantly vocal offering but a rather different affair. Titled “Glass/Flux”, we reached back into Minimalism's earliest years. The five Kneeplays from Philip Glass' seminal opera Einstein on the Beach were interspersed with pieces by the composers from the Fluxus group. In the 1960s, this varied collective of artists and musicians developed forms of conceptual art and 'event' performance, extending the work of John Cage.

The rarely heard selections here were dazzling, masterfully performed by Ars Nova under the direction of Paul Hillier. The pieces favour simplicity and blur distinctions between art forms. La Monte Young's Composition 1960 #7 was in progress as we entered the hall, the singers quietly humming a perfect fifth, marked in the score “to be held for a long time”. This established a mood of hushed continuum; we moved from piece to piece largely without applause.

The Fluxus offerings were playful, Dadaistic and often fiendishly difficult. In Dick Higgins' Hank and Mary, four singers recited “Hank shot Mary dead”, each repeating every word a different number of times. It created a scattered and hilarious cascade, a kind of exploded cantus firmus. Meanwhile, Paul Hillier's solo performance of Genesis by Emmett Williams played a clever trick with broken word sounds, intoned whilst he extinguished a dozen candles in turn. Both pieces could not help but break the audience's stillness: there was spontaneous applause at their close.

The Kneeplays are choral tours de force. Glass involves the singers in complex counting patterns with added violin and fragments of poetry. Ars Nova, Hillier and violinist Jonathan Morton were again impressive and a joy to watch. How I wish I could see the revived Einstein on the Beach on its current world tour. The inspired presentation here, mingled with Fluxus, was exciting and something I would love to have shared – another success for the Glasgow's Minimal series. Philip Glass will be at the next instalment in person, and my ticket is already booked.