Diana Burrell, Jenni Roditi / St John's, London

Stephen Johnson
Sunday 20 April 1997 18:02 EDT
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There are concerts that make you realise what you've been missing. Time after time I've sat through evenings of music by young university- or college-educated composers, admiring the craft, the imagination, and wondering why the final feeling was one of emptiness. The first half of Thursday's Lontano concert at St John's, Smith Square, provided the answer. In their very different ways, Sianed Jones's The Bait and Jenni Roditi's Spirit Child both had the energy, the urgency and the directness of expression that so much well-intentioned new music lacks.

Jones's The Bait is as much performance art as composition. Jones sings, croons, shouts and whispers a string of modern verbal cliches, not so much accompanying herself on the violin, more using the instrument as a schizoid alter ego. The violin mocks, snarls, shrieks in protest or droops into lachrymose parody, electronics adding an extra, eerie dimension. The basic idea may not be new, but the sour wit and the strength of Jones's performance are unique. It's difficult to imagine anyone else making it work half so well, but that's not the point. As one-woman music-theatre, it made a compelling 20 minutes - not a moment too long.

Jenni Roditi wrote Spirit Child in response to a documentary about the Chinese oppression of Tibet and the abduction of the boy Panchen Lama in 1995. "Moved to take action," she writes, "I began to think what I could do to help." It's terribly easy to mock such intentions. If you want to change the world, Stalin reputedly said, one well-aimed bullet is worth a thousand symphonies. But works of art can change things. Shostakovich's Leningrad symphony was a vital wartime morale-booster; 10 years after the publication of Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, the kind of school satirised as Dotheboys Hall had ceased to exist, such was the outcry the novel caused.

I don't know if Spirit Child will ever melt stony hearts in Beijing, but it certainly melted mine. The ardent lyricism that emerged fitfully in Roditi's opera Inanna was sustained here. Sianed Jones brought all her hard-edged passion and vocal skill to bear on the voice part, and Dirk Campbell matched her ululations on the duduk, an Armenian pipe-instrument that sounds somewhere between a kazoo and a soprano saxophone. Under their director Odaline de la Martinez, Lontano also sounded as though they believed in every note of the piece. They should take it up again, soon.

The one disappointment of the evening came in the three works by the much-publicised Jocelyn Pook - best known for her atmospheric Blow the Wind, which accompanies the Orange ads on TV. Pook here set Robert Racine's La Blanche Traversee as a simple chant-line with an accompaniment straight from the slow movement of Vivaldi's Spring - pretty enough, but soon monotonous. The same bland elegance marked her song-cycle Storm from Paradise. The first Milton setting begins with two of the most spine-chilling lines in English poetry: "The mind is its own place, and in itself / can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven." Pook's setting created no spark, threw no light on these words. She might as well have been setting the Shipping Forecast or the Telephone Directory.

Three nights earlier, Diana Burrell's string fanfare The Gate, introducing an excellent Guildhall String Ensemble concert at the Wigmore, crammed more musical substance into less than two minutes than Pook managed in well over 30. Yet Pook is acquiring a cult following; Burrell is not. Is anyone out there really listening?

Stephen Johnson

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