Concert Review: 175 East, Michael Lett Gallery

175 East. Photo / Greg Bowker

Austerity ruled at 175 East's first concert of the season, with the unadorned acoustics of the venue's white walls complementing the ad-hoc seating on plastic deck chairs.

The programme offered various ensembles and solos featuring guitarist Dylan Lardelli, cellist Katherine Hebley and clarinetist Andrew Uren.

The evening set off with a re-scored version of Richard Glover's Violin with Clarinet and Piano, an exercise in sonic thrift, sustaining five minutes' running time from a sequence of eight basic notes.

With all sounds clustering within a miniscule pitch range, it was a short and effective re-tuning of our ears, priming us for the world premiere of Christopher Fox's as air, as light.

The English composer's 20 minutes of quaver-by-quaver wallpaper music proved an onerous listen. In the second of Fox's three movements, lingering harmonic effects and zesty Bach-style register skips sparked more interest, but Dylan Lardelli's delivery was distinctly lacklustre. The guitarist doggedly worked through Fox's 11 pages with too many notes slipping by the wayside and with none of the persuasive charisma that such a work demands.

Lardelli's own composition, De Jant, was more successful. This presented a cohesive, forceful interaction between Uren and Hebley in a score that was afraid of neither pungent dissonance nor of fleeting intimations of more consonant climes.

The highlight was the oldest composition - the 1971 Charisma by the late Iannis Xenakis. Uren and Hebley took to its violent, confrontational writing with a positive zeal, perfectly catching the words from The Iliad that preface the score - "a soul like smoke moved into the earth, grinding".

After a laid-back solo turn in Benedict Schlepper-Conolly's Cyan, infiltrating honeyed strands of electric guitar into ambient electronica, Lardelli returned with his colleagues to present one of his more recent compositions, Lethe. Here Lardelli's extraordinary catalogue of clicks, twangs, pings and strums kept Uren and Hebley very much in the sonic shadows, although, alas, they were no match for a particularly clangorous outburst from the streets outside.