OCM are well practiced at putting on music in unexpected venues – previous installations at the Botanic Gardens and Dorchester Abbey spring to mind – and as venues go, the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in South Oxfordshire takes some beating.  It’s entire purpose is to generate light – very thin beams of very high power controlled light – for the purposes of scientific study.  Not an obvious choice for a music venue, and indeed if you don’t work in the sciences you could be forgiven for not knowing that such a massive and dramatic facility is nestled neatly within power-sucking distance of Didcot.  The snag of choosing unconventional venues is that things don’t always go as smoothly as they should, and many who booked early were disappointed to be turned away from the offered tour of the high-security facility because it wasn’t made clear that the tour and concert were booked separately.  Which is a shame, because I’m not sure how I can point out without rubbing it in that the tour was worth the price of admission alone. Massive concrete structures in an enormous donut-shaped dome covering enormous electromagnets accelerating and guiding a stream of electrons a few microns across to a power of 3GeV.  Which, for those who didn’t drop out of a physics degree, is a lot.

Dramatic though it is, it’s not a good space for hearing music, so back we went to the foyer of the administration building, all polished glass and metal, for the musical performances.  The style of music divided in two, with Thomas Tallis’s “Spem In Alium” – which closed the performance – clearly the template for the opening piece (Gabriel Jackson’s “Sanctum est verum lumen” from 2005), and Taverner’s (the Tudor one, not the currently active Russian Orthodox one) “Dum transisset” in the same devotional style.  Tallis and Jackson’s pieces are both arranged for forty  individual voices, split into eight sub-choirs of five, and the richness of the polyphony is absolutely breathtaking.  Jackson’s voices weave largely around one chord at a time, swelling effortlessly, and Tallis is absolutely masterful, passing the music between the sub-choirs seamlessly, stepping from fragile to almost overwhelmingly powerful with the utmost grace.  The dynamics are incredibly potent and never forced.  Sheppard’s “Libera nos” continues the theme of devotional Latin singing, drenched in harmony and absolutely beautiful.

At the other end of the stylistic spectrum (of unaccompanied choral music) was Ligeti’s 1966 piece “Lux Aeterna”, cut from the same cloth as “Atmosphères”, used most famously in Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” – the chromatic density is almost microtonal, and I’m reminded of a performer at the Japanorama concert at the Playhouse some years ago who played “a sampler with no samples” and encouraged the audience to make their own mix by moving their head, as the frequencies were such that the diffraction pattern would give every position in the auditorium a unique picture of sound.  It’s very much in keeping with the work of the synchrotron, with diffraction being the order of the day, and while it’s distracting to be able to see the conductor and realise that such an abstract piece does in fact follow a tempo, it’s still a stunning effect.  The 40-strong New London Chamber Choir are an incredibly impressive amateur ensemble who specialise in performing challenging contemporary choral music, and this is the kind of music that needs an incredibly good choir – the listener must have faith that the dissonance is intentional, and with such a chromatic score the quality of this choir really shows.

The new commission, Michael Zev Gordon’s “Allele”, falls between the two styles, somewhat deliberately.  The piece is arranged for forty voices in the style of Tallis, with new somewhat mystical words by Ruth Padel, but employs the dissonance and abstract tempo of the Ligeti, to partial success.  The whole feels cruder, harsher, and where the strongest moments of both the Ligeti and Jackson are full and bracing, Allele has a tendency to feel simply loud, and for the first time in the performance the details are lost in the otherwise excellent acoustics of the room.  There is a point where the conductor stops and leaves the tempo free, while the singers (indulging the concept of the piece) sing the transliterated genetic code of their own individual alleles, which is impressive, but on the whole it doesn’t feel as complete a work as the others performed.  I would try to explain what I mean by “sing the transliterated genetic code of their own individual alleles”, but from the experience of the night there’s nothing that kills the buzz of a great musical performance quicker than a forced and lengthy discussion of the concept of the work by the people who commissioned it.  All told, another success for OCM, another new venue discovered, and another appetite definitely whetted for the announcement of their Autumn schedule.