Tectonics

Tectonics

City Halls, Old Fruitmarket and St Andrews in the Square, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

For an event in its second year, Glasgow's Tectonics weekend - a collaboration between conductor Ilan Volkov and the BBC SSO and Alasdair Campbell's AC Projects - felt like a more mature entity. Not that it lacked glorious moments of musical childishness - Sarah Kenchington's Sounds from the Farmyard installation, for example, was an adventure playground of noise-making Heath Robinsonry for grown-ups - but it was able to embrace a remarkable range of contemporary composition, including a vast number of premieres, without worrying about category or genre.

Highlights of Friday's SAintS programme included the dancing of Solene Weinachter in Collective Endeavours' Fracking, Tom Varley's animation to accompany Anneke Kampman's compelling electronics and vocals, and Mark Vernon's and Barry Burns's investigation into the software of resuscitation training.

In the Grand Hall the orchestra was joined by vocal octet Exaudi - whose recital was a virtuosic display with featured composer Christian Wolff alongside pieces by UK-domiciled American Amber Priestley and Canadian Cassandra Miller - to perform a version of Michael Finnissy's Favourite Poets as the opening to Sunday night's concert of meticulously measured music by James Clapperton, Catherine Lamb and Klaus Lang, after Saturday's brasher programme of Wolff, John Oswald (a Beatles-referencing delight), David Behrman and Georg Friedrich Haas. And all that was before Richard Youngs showed what can be done with the Old Fruitmarket. A feast.

Many of the performances will feature on Radio 3's Late Junction and the Here and Now concert series.