Cutting edge of modern music

Michael Dervan reports on the 26th Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, which included a Harrison Birtwistle showcase

The seven composers featured at this year's Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival were a diverse bunch. Brian Ferneyhough, now 60, is an English composer who has spent most of his life abroad, creating music so complex that most musicians baulk at the idea of trying to unravel its almost impossibly detailed notation. Judith Weir, who will turn 50 next year, writes music that's relishably crafted for performers and poses few barriers for listeners who rarely encounter new music. Helmut Oehring, born in East Berlin in 1961, was a hearing child of deaf parents. He learnt to sign as his first language, an experience that has profoundly influenced the often etiolated communicativeness of his music.

Yorkshire-born Gavin Bryars, another 60-year-old, has described himself as "a gently ironic English experimentalist", and it was his early experimentalism that, more than 30 years ago, produced his most famous pieces, Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet and The Sinking Of The Titanic, both of which have acquired cult status. Luciano Berio (1925-2003), one of the greatest masters of the age, a pioneer of electronic music and collage techniques, still retained a particularly Italianate theatricality and sensuality in his work. The Hungarian Péter Eötvös (born in 1944), best known as a conductor of new music, brings his performing experience to bear on a polyglot output. Harrison Birtwistle, who'll be 70 next year, is the gritty individualist whose Panic, a typically uncompromising Last Night of the Proms commission in 1995, stirred up a storm in conservative quarters.

The unusual presence in this line-up is Oehring, whose work has never been heard in Ireland - and whose portrait concert by the ensemble Apartment House consisted of pieces being heard in Britain for the first time. Oehring's credo is worth quoting: "Composing doesn't interest me so much. My music is blood, it is tears, violence, hate, death and love. But what does my music sound like? Dark, morbid, operatic, dramatic, hard, schizophrenic, sick, broken, yearning, androgynous, nightmarishly realistic. My wish is to compose a kind of melodramatic docudrama. After almost every piece I think: that was your last. But as long as the rope holds I won't go down, and the rest, anyway, is just waiting to write."

The pieces played in Huddersfield - Foxfire Zwei, Sexton A, Marie B (Seven Chambers), Locked-in and ER.eine She (aus: 5üNF/ Haare-Opfer) - presented a composer struggling with the darkest of demons. The gestures of the three deaf soloists in ER.eine She, and the fragmentary or confused-seeming musical lines in other works, suggest Oehring's approach embodies elements of turning musical communication on its head.

He replicates for the listener some of the challenges that face the hearing- impaired in a meaningfully sound-rich world. If you were to infer personal character from the effect of the music, you'd be tempted to conclude that Oehring was depressive. The works - strange, sometimes startling - are among the blackest I've heard. Foxfire Zwei, for instance, is one of a series of pieces inspired by the details of death by lethal injection in capital-punishment cases in the US, and the work's subtitle, Pancurominbromid, is the German name of one of the chemicals involved. You can say Oehring delivers what he promises.

The complexities of Ferneyhough seem relatively plain sailing by comparison. The Arditti String Quartet was present to do the honours in its inimitable style, but on this occasion it was the mesmerising playing of Mario Caroli in the often violently careering works for solo flute that made the strongest impact. Caroli's late-night programme - a full-length concert of solo flute pieces, which also included works by James Dillon and Michael Finnissy - was an occasion on which some of the most demanding of contemporary composers were matched by the sort of transcendent virtuosity that Liszt put so firmly on the map in the 19th century.

The Schubert Ensemble's portrait concert of Judith Weir was a disappointment, with a series of performances that refused to take wing. Weir, a composer who is crafty in all senses of the word, was altogether better represented by the Exaudi Vocal Ensemble in a performance of the Missa Del Cid, a setting of texts from the Poema De Mio Cid, which documents the achievements of the 11th-century Castilian leader. James Weeks, the conductor, and his singers delivered this sometimes wry, sometimes hilarious piece with impeccable poise and clarity.

Sadly, the same could not be said of Red Byrd's première of new madrigals by Gavin Bryars, settings of Petrarch sonnets in quirky prose translations by John Millington Synge. The performances suggested the singers had adequately digested neither the expressive nor the technical reach of the music. Bryars was also represented by some early works, rarely heard experiments such as The Squirrel And The Ricketty-Racketty Bridge (patterns worked out on electric guitars played on the flat) and Pre-Medieval Metrics, which works its way through the rhythmic patterns of Latin poetry with the sort of rigour that Tom Johnson brings to his mathematical obsessions. Huddersfield University New Music Ensemble under Barrie Webb performed Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, that hauntingly harmonised arrangement of a tape loop of a tramp's voice that, with its repetitive insistence leavened only by changing orchestration, has a lot in common with Ravel's Bolero, not least its way of transforming itself into a memory that refuses to stop repeating itself at random moments.

The Berio tribute was a slender one, a handful of the solo Sequenzas (the ones for flute, piano, voice), but its performers produced some of the festival's most memorable performances. The Neue Vokalsolisten Stuttgart gave a dazzling performance of Berio's impressively theatrical yet strangely unrewarding A-Ronne. The Ex Novo Ensemble, from Italy, included pieces by Donatoni, a composer who always brings to mind the single-mindedness of Gerald Barry, and the extraordinary De Vulgari Eloquentia by Claudio Ambrosini. Ambrosini employs a mixed quintet (piano, flute, clarinet, violin and cello) to produce some of the most glittering piano writing you could imagine, and he uses the other instruments to touch up, as it were, by tint or highlight, the character of the piano.

Not all of the planned Eötvös pieces were played, as the Keller String Quartet was forced through the indisposition of one of its members to withdraw from the festival. The replacement concert was a substitute so wonderful, however, that there can't have been any complaints. The quartet's leader, András Keller, and the soprano Maria Husmann performed the Kafka Fragments by György Kurtág, that master of the telling miniature. In this hour-long work, shards of text are combined with uniquely piercing shards of music. The Eötvös works made no deep impression save for the Wind Sequences played in the closing concert by the London Sinfonietta, where Eötvös seems to have found a stronger fibre of material, even if the working out - his aim was to find a Zen-like "stillness in movement, movement in stillness" - sometimes stretched out too long.

Birtwistle (like Eötvös, Bryars, Weir and Ferneyhough) was present at the festival. He is a most amiable and communicative speaker. He talked with a no- nonsense frankness that not only side-stepped any hollow inflation of the issues involved but also willingly reached out to fundamental issues that are often skirted over. "I just wrote it. I can't justify a single note in it," he said of his Refrains And Choruses of 1957, making clear that his experiences in Darmstadt helped him know as clearly the sort of music he didn't want to write as his negative response to English pastoralism. Birtwistle is quite happy to profess intuition as his guide, and he was at pains to draw attention to the distinction between the ideas that prompted him to compose (something easy to talk about) and the music itself (which decidedly is not).

That music is, to use a word once heard quite a lot in new-music circles, rebarbative. It's heavy stuff, not because of its complexity or its mass (and there's no question that it can be complex and massive) but because there's something unyielding about its matter. Yet that matter, however challenging it becomes, is engaging, and at Huddersfield it was nowhere more so than in the London Sinfonietta's performance of Theseus Game, which offered the spectacle of two conductors, Martyn Brabbins and Pierre-André Valade, conducting not two orchestras but shifting allegiances of players within a single orchestra, with a stream of soloists leaving their seats to stand in front and with periodic excursions to elevated positions at the side for brass players. It's one of those pieces that even as you listen is already inviting you back for further probing.

Other events that stood out were the performance by the Portuguese ensemble Remix of Emmanuel Nunes's Feldmanish Omens II, Peter Ablinger's Voices And Piano, shadowing the pitch patterns from recordings of famous voices (including Brecht, Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein and Mao Zedong) on the keyboard (shades of Roger Doyle's The Idea And Its Shadow here), a hair-raisingly virtuoso piano recital by Jonathan Powell, Mauricio Kagel's typically provocative, mid-1970s theatre piece Mare Nostrum, which envisages some of the possible consequences had Amazonians conquered the Mediterranean rather than the conquests happening in the opposite direction, Miguel Azguime's late-night performance of O Ar Do Texto Opera A Forma Do Som Interior (The Air In The Text Operates The Form Of The Inner Sound), a revelation that sound poetry is alive and well and thriving on the fruits of live electronic digital technology, and, at the other end of the scale, the Tapiola Choir from Finland, showing how amateur enterprise is still capable of matching the best professionals can offer in contemporary music.