‘Brace yourself,” the concert programme warned. “This is music that refuses to behave.” After more than 10 years and some 350 world and UK premieres, we’d expect nothing less from Riot Ensemble. This is a group whose promo images once saw them brandishing drumsticks as clubs, music stands as Kalashnikovs, that treats new music as a bloodsport: they like to be in at the kill.
Fresh on the slab were four works from across the spectrum of scope and mood – “music of maximal difference” as conductor Aaron Holloway-Nahum put it – a playlist designed to bring a polite midweek audience up to frenzied, club levels of intensity before cooling us down and sending us out dazed and disoriented.
