AAJ Review: 2013 Ultima Contemporary Music Festival

**jkelman** · 09-28-2013

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My review of the 2013 Ultima Contemporary Music Festival, in Oslo, Norway, today at All About Jazz.

Last year's first visit to Oslo, Norway's Ultima Contemporary Music Festival revealed a rich program that blurred the lines between composition and improvisation in ways few (if any) festivals of its kind do. While the primary reason to attend the festival—Norway's Jaga Jazzist collaboration with Britain's Britten Sinfonia, the finale to the first Conexions season curated by host of BBC Radio 3's Late Junction, Fiona Talkington—was reason enough, the breadth of the festival absolutely made it a desired return destination. Still, who knew that Ultima 2013 would launch two productions so rarely performed that it never seemed possible that one—let alone both—would ever be seen on a public stage?

British composer Gavin Bryars has achieved much acclaim for his work, ranging from contemporary sacred music to string quartets, cello concertos and pieces written for percussion groups, but one of his earliest works, Jesus' Blood Has Never Failed Me Yet remains a high watermark. A painfully beautiful piece first recorded in shorter form on his classical debut for Brian Eno's Obscure imprint in 1976, it was later revisited in longer form on the much-lauded 1993 Point Records version, which also features guest Tom Waits, alongside the foundational loop of an old man singing a simple, heart-wrenching song, "Jesus blood never failed me yet, this one thing I know, for he loves me so," around which Bryars composed some of his most starkly beautiful music—cutting room floor footage from an unreleased documentary. A haunting piece that may revolve around simple constructs, but requires such precise dynamic control and astute conducting that it's rarely performed live, it was both a bold and fitting choice for Ultima to make it the closing performance of the 2013 festival season, at the stunning and most appropriate Oslo Domkirke (church), featuring the Norwegian Radio Orchestra and Oslo Cathedral Choir.

Another totally unexpected production was the revival of Harry Partch's magnum opus, The Delusion of the Fury. Partch was a maverick American composer who felt constrained by the conventional 12-tone western scale, and so devised his own 43-tone scale using principals of just intonation—but, of course, to perform his music, he then required an entire orchestra of instruments to be built to suit. While the original instruments—much of them tuned glass, metal and wood, but also including modified organs and stringed instruments designed to play microtonal scales—remain in a museum in New York, Germany's Ensemble Musikfabrik , under the direction of composer/conductor (and, in his own way, also a musical maverick) Heiner Goebbels, literally rebuilt the instruments from scratch and, while this production will be going on the road to select cities....

....Read complete review here.