Manchester Collective, RNCM review - exploring new territory

Manchester Collective, now very much a part of the establishment world of new music, are still enlarging their territory. For this set, performed in Leeds and Manchester and repeated in Liverpool, Nottingham and the Southbank Centre, they are revisiting some ground but have a world premiere, commissioned by themselves, to offer too.

On one level, with co-artistic director Rakhi Singh as lead violin, it’s a programme exploring the range of the classical string quartet (with or without percussion and/or electronics, and in one item down to a trio), but on another it’s a journey into almost uncharted lands.

The premiere is What Psyche Felt, by Nabihah Iqbal – her first commission from a “classical” source. The phrase comes from Keats’ “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill” – an epitome of Romantic nature reverie if ever there was one – and the effect of the quartet-plus-electronica mix, and its episodic construction, is both haunting and stimulating. It makes no pretence at perpetual motion: when a section is over, it stops, then starts again. There are contrasts between sustained homophony and various polyphonic cells and occasional persistent figures emerging from the texture – even a ground bass effect with flurries of notes above it, and, after the rhythmic complexity of the piece increases, we briefly hear just the reverberations of what’s gone by. But it fades quickly: the vision gone.

As with many other Collective gigs, there’s amplification, with subdued lighting engineered for the occasion and a bit of haze as part of the experience. The overall title is “Serenity 2.0” … strangely so since the setlist is based on that for a previous tour by the Collective – one I missed, a few years back – called “Heavy Metal” (but that may have been ironic). At any rate, what unfolds is both serene and anything but. Perhaps you need the craziness to appreciate the serenity.

It began with Bruce Dessner’s Aheym, written for the Kronos Quartet in 2009. The title means “homeward” in Yiddish and the inspiration was Dessner’s grandparents’ immigrant journey to Brooklyn. There’s plenty of vigour in the essential rhythmic cell around which much of the piece is written, and complexity only increases, so not much serenity there … but it made a lively foil for the beginning of Nabihah Iqbal’s piece.

SERENITY 2.0 is the name of Ben Nobuto’s piece previously commissioned by Manchester Collective in 2021. It’s full of sampling – 80s Japanese pop, things off YouTube and baroque music among them – and all seems like a mad mix from the outset. But “relaxation” and “letting go” are spoken phrases that begin to dominate as it goes on (though madness resumes all too soon). After a percussion-led interlude, there’s a blast of noise, brief interruptions of what seems delirium complete with tremolandi, and near the end, as you hear the same voiced phrase, over and over, it manages to be near-hypnotic. Serenity, though? … No.

It was a purifying change to hear Dobrinka Tabakova’s Insight, for string trio alone – with its pitch-bending and slow glissandi around a unison to begin with, alternation of two seminal chords, lovely passages of lyrical tonal harmony, and folksy energy. It’s also a considerable challenge for three string players, in some ways the most impressive piece of musicianship in the whole programme.

Squint followed, by Sebastian Gainsborough, aka Vessel: he may be remembered as one of Rakhi Singh’s partners in Dark Days, Luminous Nights, an extraordinary film work created during the Covid lockdown, portraying layers of history in the physical structures of the River Irk valley in central Manchester, along with movement artist Blackhaine (who is to have a prominent role in this year’s Manchester International Festival). Squint, for string quartet, percussion and electronics, was first played by the Collective in 2021, and prominently uses vocal samples of a medieval French song. If not serenity, it arouses mystery … and, like Ben Nobuto’s piece, seems to hypnotize through repetition of spoken phrases (“You are becoming … we feel deeply … we are becoming …”). Perhaps for a little too long.

But Rakhi Singh and her colleagues (Julian Azkoul, violin; Alex Mitchell, viola; Alice Purton, cello; and Beibei Wang, percussion) had a bit of fun to finish with), in the form of another Nobuto piece: Opus – an arrangement of an anthemic track by Eric Prydz, the Swedish DJ and producer. It’s an exercise in acceleration and deceleration: but, rather like a main line steam engine in times gone by, it creates what you hear as different patterns of rhythm as its basic cell accelerates and decelerates, and it does its speeding up and slowing down at different rates. At first the rate of acceleration is regular … towards its peak that rate of change begins to slow and after it the slowing starts gradually, but eventually it’s braked very hard. “Lots of people go running to this track,” said Rakhi as she introduced it. I guess they often run out of breath.

• · Repeated on 15 March at Liverpool Tung Auditorium, 19 March at Nottingham Lakeside Arts, and 23 March at London Southbank Centre
• · More classical reviews on theartsdesk