Uproar is Wales’s new ensemble dedicated to contemporary music, established by conductor Michael Rafferty, whose musicianship was crucial to the foundation and subsequent success of Music Theatre Wales. In commissioning new pieces from 10 composers – ranging from the well-established to younger up-and-coming musicians, Rafferty started as he means to go on. And, if the enthusiastic reception was an indication of the appetite for such music, then the ensemble – 12 strong at this inaugural concert – proved its potential.
The sequence of pieces, each about five minutes long, represented a strong statement. Programme notes revealed more of the underpinning structural techniques than the ear could absorb in a single hearing, but Andrew Lewis’s Étude des Objets simply felt organic and integrated, while in Guto Pryderi Puw’s Uwchsonig (Ultrasonic) his glittering instrumentation fixed in the memory more readily than his analogy with sonogram images. Air – An Aria by John Metcalf was, like its title, playfully palindromic, and Gareth Moorcraft’s Cycles treated core material differently in four miniatures, the bright flurry of Mr Flutterby Dances contrasting with his earlier measured care.
Projected material occasionally added a visual context. Carlijn Metselaar focused on an Edo-period Japanese scroll depicting demons: her Night Parade of Monsters found equivalent sounds sometimes more benign than grotesque, but a final tiny repeated clarinet figure scraping like a branch on a windowpane gave a nightmare shudder. Mind the Gap by Sarah Leanne Lewis played with pitch and imitations of mechanical sounds heard on tube journeys to conjure a piece that eventually transported the ear to a world of its own.
In Maja Palser’s poised Aus dem Leeren, the emptiness alluded to in the title had a liminal quality, while Semaphore by Steph Power toyed with movement and stasis. Michael Parkin’s Murmurations had been a work in gestation waiting for just such a commission, and its brilliant shape-shifting of starlings’ sounds and flight showed the ensemble at its virtuosic best. Finally, Up by Lynne Plowman ended the sequence on an exuberant note.
