Nico Muhly Premiere, Barbican, review I'd heard a rumour there was a new genre out there called "alt-classical," and last Friday I had my first knowing encounter with it. Three leading composers of New York's alt-classical scene were performed at the Barbican by a hefty-sized Britten Sinfonia conducted by André de Ridder, violinist Pekka Kuusisto, cellist Oliver Coates, folk (or possibly alt-folk) singers Sam Amidon and Thomas Bartlett, and violist Nadia Sirota. It was quite a crowd. The first thing I discovered about alt-classical is that it's achingly hip. Every piece was greeted with ecstatic whoops from the young audience. In every other respect it was curiously indefinite, like a watercolour landscape smeared while still wet. We heard an awful lot of plangent, modal sustained strings, often with a pastoral oboe peeping through. The harmonies shifted in layers, in a way that was tinged with mysticism and hope. Imagine the moment in the Hollywood movie when Tom Hanks clicks his expensive valise shut, gazes fondly at his still-sleeping family, tiptoes downstairs and drives through a misty New England sunrise to his rendezvous with destiny, and you'll have some idea of its tone. The three composers featured in the first half shared this tone, but with interesting differences. Missy Mazzoli's Violent, Violent Sea had an ecstatic swirling quality, with undulating figures not so far from Debussy's La Mer. Owen Pallett's Violin Concerto was full of old-fashioned virtuosity such as Vivaldian string-crossing, thrown off with fierce concentration by Kuusisto. They were embedded in a curiously sideslipping harmonic texture that was reminiscent of Thomas Adès, though without the latter's knowing sophistication. Nico Muhly's new Cello Concerto, played by its dedicatee, Oliver Coates, was much more instinctively "musical" in its sharply heard orchestral palette, and its way of energising string cantilenas with off-beat Stravinskian accents. But as with all the pieces, the promising opening soon lost its way, and attempts to restore direction through sudden harmonic shifts couldn't dispel a debilitating sense of drift. In the concert's second half the orchestra retired and the singers, together with Muhly, Coates et al, took over, on a stage bathed in blue light. Here there was no danger of drift, as the repeating verses of the old songs carried us along irresistibly. The problem was that their simple pathos was spoilt by Muhly's over-elaborate arrangements and annoyingly hyperactive flitting between different instruments. Whatever alt-classical is, it certainly isn't telling simplicity.