In a one-night-only event, the Barbican showcased works from two of the UK’s most original contemporary voices alongside Pierre Boulez, a composer crucial in shaping 20th-century avant-garde music.

The concert opened with new works by Hannah Kendall and Cassie Kinoshi — two of the UK’s most original contemporary voices — performed by Ensemble intercontemporain, the group founded by Boulez nearly fifty years ago. These pieces are not just music in the traditional sense, but layered experiences of history, identity, and resistance.

Kendall’s shouting forever into the receiver (2023) is a tense, shape-shifting work that explores the legacies of plantation systems and the enduring scars of colonialism. Using excerpts from the Book of Revelation, and vocal textures that range from whispers to shrieks, she crafts a piece that feels both personal and political. The ensemble moves through it with precision, allowing space for every shift in tone and meaning to land.

Commissioned especially by the Barbican for this concert, Kinoshi’s [UNTITLED] (2025) followed, drawing on Caribbean rhythms, soundsystem culture, and the legacy of the late Trinidadian artist Boscoe Holder. The piece celebrates joy and resistance in equal measure, and at its heart is a sense of play; from the rhythmic use of a Roland drum pad, to tightly-structured improvisation. You can feel the influence of jazz and club music, but the work never settles into one space. It is about transformation, cultural memory, and reshaping how stories and identities are carried through sound.

What connects both works is their roots in lived experience. These aren’t abstract exercises in modernism, but pieces that reach out — politically and emotionally — and ask us to listen with more than our ears.

After the interval came Boulez’s Sur Incises (1996), a towering and meticulous work that reminds us of the ensemble’s origins. With its jagged momentum, crystalline textures and relentless complexity, it stands in contrast to the more narrative-driven first half. And yet, the juxtaposition makes sense. The evening became a conversation across generations: between Boulez and the artists he helped make space for; between structure and spontaneity, form and feeling.

More than a concert, this was a meeting of worlds: classical rigour with experimental energy, tradition with deep-rooted cultural memory. And in the hands of Ensemble intercontemporain, everything feels both precise and alive.

Reviewed on 27 May, 2025 at Barbican Hall.