LONDON, Fretwork, Contemporary Music Network, Union Chapel, IslingtonThe podium is no place to leave your zip undone12 November 2001If ballet music without dancing is hard to stomach, how much harder is it to watch dancing applied to music that would be better off without it? At Fretwork's performance at the Union Chapel – a trendy affair with moody lighting and lots of choreography – I found the answer: exogenous dancing is far worse. There are several things I should say before getting to the performance itself. Firstly, that I love this group; I love their timbre, I love the way the individual styles of the viol players tussle against and inform each other, I love the tension of their approach and the sound they create. Secondly, that I know nothing whatsoever about dance. Thirdly, that – given the previous statement – it's only natural that I still know what I like and it isn't the kind of over-literal interpretation that results in dancers lining up a series of ownerless shoes during a work about the holocaust, or squiggling their fingers up to the sky and then tapping their chests to the words "Heaven is mine". Enough of that, let's look at the music. Constructed loosely around the theme of grief, Fretwork's contemporary/renaissance programme had the visceral attack that Tilson Thomas's Egmont so badly lacked. If the harmonic invention – or lack of it – wore thin in Tavener's The Hidden Face and Orlando Gough's Birds on Fire, this was compensated for by the weird coolness of Tan Dun's A Sinking Love and Andrew Keeling's Schulhoff-indebted Afterwords. Guest artists Nicholas Daniel (oboe) and Michael Chance (counter-tenor) gave charismatic performances that were beautifully attuned to the timbre of the viols. But little of the new music had the tailormade fittingness to these specific instruments of the Gibbons Pavan. Wonderful playing, distracting presentation, uneven material. Anna Picard http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=104522
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