Figure: Side By Side review – spikily stylish baroque and contemporary music

The Guardian

17-02-2025

'Phil, do we have clearance?' A thumb shot out from the gallery above the stage. The musicians of period-performance outfit Figure giggled, then plunged into Vivaldi's Concerto for Strings in D minor ('Madrigalesco'), its opening gestures drawn out in fierce, even bowstrokes. Not a hint of vibrato to warm the tone. They tightened the screws on the concerto's already weird harmonies with some artfully dissonant pitching. In the fast movements, the ensemble clicked together like a mechanical device, Vivaldi's passagework suddenly animated by fizzing energy and punchy attack.
Then a scramble to swap bows – out with baroque curves, in with the modern – while Figure's co-artistic director, Frederick Waxman, introduced Caroline Shaw's Punctum, the first of the concert's four contemporary works. Punctum shadow-boxes with a passage from Bach's St Matthew Passion. Resonances pass in slow-motion ricochet across the string orchestra, gradually accelerating into something that approaches a Bach chorale heard at multiple times the usual speed. The performance was spikily stylish, segueing with ease from moments of razor-sharp crunchiness to quotations from Bach's own score.
Next came works by Freya Waley-Cohen and Edmund Finnis, and the world premiere of a new commission from Joanna Ward, alongside baroque concertos by Handel, Geminiani (after Corelli) and their largely forgotten Dutch contemporary Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer – a programme that made clear not only Figure's talents, but also its ambition. Violinists rotated through the position of leader, each one setting a subtly different tone, while characterful solos emerged from across the ensemble. Every player was spotlight-ready.
The programme's interleaving of the new and old was ideally suited to the haunted spaces of the neo-gothic Stone Nest, built as a church in the 1880s but more recently used as a nightclub, its gloomy dungeon-vibe still palpable. And musically, this group (established in 2021) is unequivocally impressive, its sound invigorating, its commitment absolute. But the concert involved multiple practical glitches and Waxman's spoken introductions fell far short of the level of the playing, repeatedly puncturing the spell cast by the music.
Figure's mission to create 'immersive musical experiences' is within its grasp – but that aim demands a more thoughtful approach to performance as a whole.
Figure perform Rhythm of the Seasons at Stone Nest, London, on 22 March