The strings of the 12 Ensemble and the percussion and piano duo of George Barton and Siwan Rhys make natural collaborators, for both regularly explore corners of contemporary music that other groups tend to overlook. Last autumn at Covent Garden they joined forces to provide the pit band for Oliver Leith’s Kurt Cobain opera Last Days, and they have come together again for this touring programme, which was included in the Kings Place Sound Unwrapped series.
Its centrepiece was a new work for strings, piano and percussion by Laurence Osborn, commissioned for the tour, and by quite a margin the most absorbing and worthwhile piece in what was a rather uneven concert. Osborn describes his piece TOMB! as recognising “the necrophiliac side of heritage and our morbid obsession with dead things”. In this case the “dead things” are traditional musical forms like fugue, jig and passacaglia, which flit in and out of the 20-minute movement like apparitions, only occasionally assuming recognisable forms. The effect is intriguing, sometimes unnerving, but always engaging, and full of textures that are never quite as straightforward as they seem.
