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Apartment House

Anna Picard

“(…) Rzewski’s Coming Together (1971) opened the concert, ignited by the flame of Elaine Mitchener’s voice as she hissed and crooned and preached the words of Sam Melville, who died in the 1971 Attica prison riot. Ferociously expressive in voice and body, alert to the irony and beauty and misery of the text, Mitchener drove a thrilling performance by Apartment House, the pounding piano ostinato unflagging.”

★★★★☆

There is a terrible disconnect between the life of the African-American composer Julius Eastman and the euphoria of Femenine, his 1974 work for chamber ensemble. A little over an hour, pinned to a glowing vibraphone motif that is half doorbell, half fanfare, a brisk rattle of E flats and a syncopated nudge of Fs, Femenine loops around a single suspended chord in radiant riffs for piano, synthesizer, flute, violin and cello.

A sampled sleigh bell chinks steadily throughout. Modulation is threatened furiously by the piano but never achieved. It’s a work that invites projection, and as Apartment House relaxed into the pulse set by the percussionist Simon Limbrick, I wondered whether I was meant to hear pixels of Beethoven, Debussy and Vince Guaraldi’s Linus and Lucy, or whether I should just submit to an exercise in joy that sags and dwindles, then recovers.

On the first night of the London Contemporary Music Festival you could trace Eastman’s life in a small display of photographs, cuttings and concert programmes. Marginalised by his colour and his sexuality, the former boy soprano wrote in 1981: “I have sung, played and written music for a very long time, and the end is not in sight.” Nibe years later, homeless and addicted, he was dead, his legacy held in old cassette tapes.

John Cage was one influence, Frederic Rzewski another, and Rzewski’s Coming Together (1971) opened the concert, ignited by the flame of Elaine Mitchener’s voice as she hissed and crooned and preached the words of Sam Melville, who died in the 1971 Attica prison riot. Ferociously expressive in voice and body, alert to the irony and beauty and misery of the text, Mitchener drove a thrilling performance by Apartment House, the pounding piano ostinato unflagging.