Cutting the mustard

The Cutting Edge | The Warehouse London

The British Information Centre's first Cutting Edge season last year was sufficiently successful to suggest that these Thursday night concerts in the surprising time-warp of Waterloo Station's backstreets will become a valuable annual fixture on the London new music scene. This autumn's dozen programmes offer the predominantly British mixture of compositional styles and performers that characterised last year's concerts. New features include the touring of four programmes around Britain.

The British Information Centre's first Cutting Edge season last year was sufficiently successful to suggest that these Thursday night concerts in the surprising time-warp of Waterloo Station's backstreets will become a valuable annual fixture on the London new music scene. This autumn's dozen programmes offer the predominantly British mixture of compositional styles and performers that characterised last year's concerts. New features include the touring of four programmes around Britain.

A packed house greeted the Cutting Edge's opening concert, on 28 September, which was an all-female affair, centring on a "portrait" of the 33-year-old London-born, now Berlin-resident Rebecca Saunders. It's encouraging to see such challenging music evidently lapped up by a genuinely enthusiastic, if hardly vast, crowd. Saunders' obsession with timbrel exploration puts her firmly in the tradition of Europeans such as Helmut Lachenmann who have never been seriously embraced by British audiences.

Yet her music is in several respects more directly accessible than this suggests. Saunders may now have abandoned the clock- work musical boxes that feature prominently in four earlier works, to focus on exploring the innards of an instrument's sound possibilities in more integrated ways. But her 1998 Quartet (which was here receiving its British premiere) offsets its "scientific" placing, amidst frequent silences, of simple accordion sounds, grinding double-bass dissonances with a repeated piano melody marked "melancholic".

The five players of Topologies, with the pianist Ian Pace prominent among them, gave what appeared to be carefully moulded accounts of the four works we heard by Rebecca Saunders, plus some Kaija Saariaho and early and more recent pieces by that grim Russian renegade, Galina Ustvolskaya.

The following Thursday it was the turn of Apartment House, its vocalist, clarinettist, cellist and guitarist occupying various parts of a central performing area and the balcony.

Some of what they performed was distinctly peculiar - proceedings began in the cramped foyer when you found yourself hard up against a shrieking soprano sporting coiled imitation snakes on her breasts. But this programme was intelligently shaped, with applause only at the end of each half, to place its 15 items in a coherent context. Six of these were by the 51-year-old German composer Gerhard Stäbler, whose combination of the wacky and the wise I rather enjoy. Another of his Belfast Breakfast Songs, sung with skill and passion by Loré Lixenberg, had her dressed in protective clothing and delving into a dustbin for a banana.

By some distance the best of the four, more conventional, world premieres on offer was Andrew Toovey's Noh: often captivating, if ultimately over long, modal ruminations from a solo cello (the excellent Anton Lukoszevieze), with vocal additions from the cellist himself and a gong up on the balcony.