London’s Apartment House Celebrates 30 Years with Daring Program of New and Rediscovered Works
the Apartment House ensemble marked its 30th anniversary with a concert showcasing a bold commitment to contemporary music, featuring four world premieres and three UK first performances. The program, delivered with ”unimpeachable” playing, demonstrated the ensemble’s continued vitality and adventurous spirit.
The evening began with a UK premiere by canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith, Flowers of Emptiness, a melancholy hymn for string trio. Smith’s second piece of the night,Waterlily,her fifth string quartet,closed the program with “quiet beauty.” A remarkable discovery was a 1927 quartet by Dutch composer Daniël Belinfante, tragically killed in Auschwitz; its shifting moods ranged from angular dissonance to echoes of Janáček.
World premieres included Paul Paccione’s After Ventadorn, a reworking of a 12th-century troubadour song, described as an “intricate tapestry of haunting grace.” Eden Lonsdale’s A Thousand Autumns contrasted piano ripples with sustained strings in a “hypnotic kaleidoscope of patterns.” Adrian Knight’s Charm for the Protection of a Child, a six-part ritual, blended familiar melodic contours with unexpected harmonic touches, incorporating piano, vibraphone, and singing bowls.
However,the concert’s most striking moment came with Lithuanian composer Ramūnas Motiekaitis’s My Fragile Moments. The quartet employed tiny sticks to strike their strings, creating a sound “somewhere between the imagined sound of nerves stretched to breaking point and a troupe of increasingly emboldened mice tiptoeing across an attic floor at midnight.”
