The music too had a sense of extravagant largesse. By the end of the day I'd heard so much bells-and-vibraphone glitter and so many giant piled-up chords flecked with twittering melodic arabesques I was starting to feel giddy. Fortunately not every composer chose the route of aural saturation. Nachtmusik 1 (Night Music 1) by the senior Portuguese modernist Emmanuel Nunes took the path of austerity, colouring and recolouring a handful of dusky harmonies.
Restriction can produce magical results, but despite the best efforts of the Portuguese group Remix this piece seemed dry as cardboard. At the other end of the scale were the two pieces for large instrumental group and electronics, played by the London Sinfonietta to the not-unpleasing accompaniment of torrential rain on the roof. The first was Bhakti, a set of musical meditations on ancient Hindu texts composed in 1982 by the festival's composer-in-residence Jonathan Harvey. It pits a dazzlingly bright ensemble against its own electronically-generated "double", and though it was fabulously inventive the form felt uncertain. The piece seemed to end several times before the real ending arrived. By contrast Richard Barrett's Mesopotamia, a sequence of ten musical movements overlapped in "archeological" layers like the remains of ancient Mesopotamian cities, was intriguing but tentative. I wanted it to go on.
