Review from THE TIMES 15/12/04 London Sinfonietta BY RICHARD MORRISON Venue: Royal Festival Hall , London

SOME London Sinfonietta concerts are worthy but austere occasions: dutiful parades of cerebral contemporary music performed to a smattering of cognoscenti. This stimulating evening, part of the Ether festival “where worlds collide”, was very different. The Festival Hall was packed; the audience young and hip (or at least, younger and hipper than me); the music sometimes complex, often awesomely loud, but never inaccessible. The difference? For the second consecutive year the Sinfonietta, Britain’s top “classical” contemporary-music ensemble, was collaborating with Warp Records, a pop-music label that promotes mavericks operating at the cutting edge of electronic music.

What emerged was a fascinating survey of avant-garde music from the 1920s to the present day. The Sinfonietta, directed by Jurgen Hempel, presented such seminal historic scores as Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation, George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique and John Cage’s First Construction in Metal, as well as several Steve Reich pieces. Warp Records supplied sets by Tom “Squarepusher” Jenkinson (elegantly decked out in top hat) and Jamie Lidell, as well as tracks by Aphex Twin cleverly arranged for the Sinfonietta. There were films to go with the music, too. Ballet Mécanique comes with its own classic short film by Fernand Léger and Man Ray: a sinister portrayal of human activity at its most mechanistic, perfectly matched Antheil’s brutal, clangorous score. But for other pieces, old and new, new videos were specially commissioned from the likes of Flat-e and Bluespoon. In a couple of pieces the musicians created their own visual theatre. It was as thrilling to watch the percussionists making their entries into Reich’s Six Marimbas, for instance, as it was to hear the whirling metrical patterns diverging. The concert concluded with a gloriously dramatic gesture: towards the end of Aphex Twin’s Polygon Window, half a dozen side-drummers fanned out across the auditorium, kicking up a ferocious din while maintaining a perfect rapport. Could one detect influences across the decades? Certainly Lidell’s rich vocal fantasies — counterpointing delayed loops of his own voice — seem to owe much to Reich’s phasing techniques. Similarly, it was possible to detect in the multi-layered textures and frenetic drumming of Squarepusher’s electronic sound world a small echo of the glinting, diamond-hard surfaces of Varèse’s music, 60 years earlier. But why make connections at all? You could just switch off your brain and dance in the aisles, which is what some did. A refreshing sight — why don’t people do it in symphony concerts?