Bishopsgate Institue / London
20 March 2007

Guy Johnston - Cello
Tom Poster - Piano

With contemporary murals bedecking the Bishopsgate Intitute, this was an appropriate venue for a Sounds Underground concert devoted to recent British music. Inevitable Britten proved the towering figure in the concert programme - his brilliantly textured Cello Sonata concisely drawn, yet depicting an impressive variety of moods and styles. Evidently empathetic towards Britten's mode of expression, Guy Johnston and Tom Poster gave a lucid performance that was coloured equally with passion and intensity.

The programme was neatly packaged, with Britten's formative teacher, Frank Bridge, the other mainstay of the first half. Yet two of Bridge's conservative salon pieces only serve to demonstrate the huge stylistic chasm between the two figures. Nevertheless Guy Johnston was in sparkling form in the virtuosic Scherzo.

Alicia Grant's carefully constructed Night Spell was both atmospheric and pithy - the false harmonics and mystic opening yielding to a greater momentum and a greyer musical language.

Dylan Pugh's Sonata (a Sounds Underground commission), however, was monumentally long, the first movement all but a complete work in its own right. Although it was somewhat rhapsodic in nature, there were many attractive sound worlds, particularly the frequent reference to church bells. Johnston and Poster gave an authoritative and heroic account of the work.

Joanne Talbot