S. Worthen | Weblog

Plague Songs was a performance at Barbican Hall last night of a collection of songs based primarily on the ten plagues of Egypt. The Biblically-inspired songs were commisioned by a project whose primary end result was a movie called (surprise!) Exodus, shot in Margate, and due to screen on November 19th on Channel 4 in the UK. The motley collection of songs spanned the genres from punk to folk, with a collection of heavyweight composers, talented musicians, exotic instruments, and moments as random as the NFL playing its first-ever official game outside of North America. (That's an analogy, for those of you who missed this snippet of news. The game in question happened at Wembley.)

( Songs written by Laurie Anderson, Imogen Heap, Rufus Wainwright, The Handsome Family, Tiger Lillies, Patrick Wolf, and other people that none of us had heard of before.... )

One of the best parts of this show, whose second half was downright incoherent after the mere randomness of the first, was the unexpected and wonderful use of unusual instruments. The saw has such delicate strength and elegance. I'd never heard of a cristal Baschet or an ondes Martenot, but Thomas Bloch played both - along with the glass harmonica - over the course of the concert. Cors anglais are, by comparision, relatively common, but I have no idea what another of the instruments played by the same musician was. It looked like a double reed stuck into a two foot long stick of bamboo which had been cut in half length-wise up most of its length, and then played by moving the bamboo flap up and down. Thoughts on what it might be?

My thanks to flickgc for enabling concert attendance.