Dillon/Ferneyhough – review

The eye-catching UK premieres from Huddersfield's final weekend both came from British composers who now live and

work in the US. Brian Ferneyhough and James Dillon share the same publisher, and find their music routinely

consigned to the stylistic drawer labelled "new complexity". But as these performances reiterated, they really don't

have that much in common, apart from some surface similarities and a fondness for opaque programme notes.

Dillon's Sixth String Quartet ended a superb recital by the Quatuor Diotima, one of the three groups who introduced

it at the Donaueschingen festival last year. It's dedicated to the Scottish trade union leader Jimmy Reid, who died

just as Dillon was completing the score, but the music is in no sense elegiac. The taut single movement lasts around

13 minutes and forms a five-part arc, dominated by the teeming central section and with the last two revisiting the

musical territory of the beginning; it's a lucid structure, filled with bold, striking gestures and not a note

wasted.

The Ferneyhough work, brought by the French group Ensemble Linea, has taken longer to reach the UK: Chronos-Aion was

completed five years ago. Scored for 17 instrumentalists and lasting more than half an hour, it comes with a

typically impenetrable manifesto from the composer. But, as so often in Ferneyhough's music, what is introduced as

impossibly intellectualised turns out to be vividly direct and compelling in performance. The dense thickets of the

opening, connected by delicately coloured threads of sound, give way to explosive instrumental solos and finally to

isolated sound events separated by menacing silences, as the music's energy seems to ebb away.