Audience Review - A very accomplished pair

New Dots continue their quiet but confident mission to establish themselves as a vital part of London's music scene. It is surely a no-brainer that events such as their concerts are to be cherished and supported – they have dedicated and knowledgeable people at the helm, the choice of venue serves their purposes well and the content of the concerts gets their diverse and enthusiastic audience into lively conversation.

No exceptions at The Forge this week. Using just two performers – percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys – presented the young composers with an interesting array of resources, and a very accomplished pair of musicians, with which to create new sounds. Perhaps, in truth, the only real 'innovation' was in Barton's performance of Frederic Rzewski's To the Earth (1985), for four flowerpots played with non-specific sticks. An assured performance in the middle of the concert, To the Earth provides a great insight into the potential for anything to be considered percussion, and what great opportunities this presents to composers.

To the featured composers: William Hunt was the only male composer to present a piece and it was his In The Moor Light that opened proceedings. Hunt's inspiration for his work was the ever-changing way the light hits the Yorkshire Moors, a view he grew up with. He was keen to stress in his programme note that, actually, In The Moor Light was more an ”abstract study of time, change and eventual transformation”. That seemed like a denial of what was endearing about the work, which used the relationship between the sound of marimba and vibraphone (and, to a greater extent, the ensemble of piano and percussion) to good effect to bring to mind the very pastoral idyll which served to inspire the composer in the first place.

Ji Sun Yang's Recollection used a bit more percussion than Hunt's work yet aimed to capture the power of silence and how “the space of reverberation is represented by the concrete object of sound”. Not sure whether I was listening for silence or reverb, I ended up being endeared by the latter – indeed, in my notes I find “tour de force”, and the piece does reach a satisfying conclusion. The “confusion” about who is playing, supposedly obtained by the treatment of reverb, is open to argument and I was not wholly convinced, but it was enjoyable music nevertheless. The use of an 'Ebow', designed for guitar, on the piano was novel and effective and I was keen on a 'callback' gesture late in the work, using bowed vibes, that mimicked that Ebow sound.

After the Rzewski interlude, Siwan Rhys had the stage to herself for Kate Whitley's 5 Tiny Piano Pieces. This was the first perfectly descriptive title of the evening. They were indeed five miniatures for piano, described respectively as “declamatory, spacious, playful, sad and triumphant”. These were well constructed miniatures, fitting plenty of interest into their short frames (none was longer than 90 seconds) and it must be hoped that Kate uses them as foundations of fuller works at a later stage.

Francesca Le Lohé's Saida Portraits carried tangible influence, inspired by the photographs of Hashem el Madani (viewable on the Tate's website). George Barton contributed playful percussion in Father and Son (presumably in the role of the father) and there was an affectionate mockery to Reesh, depicting a man holding in his stomach and flexing his biceps. Baqari's Wife marks a photo of a woman in relaxed pose, holding a jug on her shoulder but whose face has been apparently scratched out by a disapproving husband. Le Lohé used the tone and resonance of the bass drum to devastating effect, hounding and eventually overpowering the coquettish piano. The Veil, in which a maid-of-honour character appears less than enthused by her photographer, is probably the least successful of the five movements, but the work is brought to a zingy, schmaltzy (and maybe even edgy) end by The Kiss, a fun photograph of two men sharing an affectionate moment. The singular disappointment was that the photographs were not displayed on the projector screen during the performance. Music must of course be allowed to speak for itself but the use of the imagery, only cursorily displayed in the brief pre-amble, would surely have been justified here.

Nathan Hamer was at Sounds of the New at The Forge, Camden on 10th June 2014