London Contemporary Music Festival

Abstract

Does intimacy have anything to do with music? Music – especially acoustic chamber music – is regularly, even unthinkingly, labelled intimate. The implications of this common-enough usage were the major preoccupation of the most recent London Contemporary Music Festival. With multiple images and varieties of intimacy foregrounded – bodily, sexual, aural, psychological, somnolent – Igor Toronyi Lalic's curation was masterful. By turns provocative, baffling, emotional and ear-averting, not without some irony, the concerts were held in a vast underground concrete room.