REVIEW: Tangram: Divine Intimacies
Review Date: 19th May @LSO St Luke's
REVIEWS
Kassy Fang
5/23/20262 min read
©️Photo by Tangram Divine & Mike Skelton
Produced by Tangram and the London Symphony Orchestra, Divine Intimacies transformed LSO St Luke's church into a space where time seemed to loosen and blur. Curated by Alex Ho and Sun Keting, the programme moved across centuries and cultures, bringing together music including works by Kaija Saariaho, John Cage and Yang Yong alongside medieval chant by Hildegard von Bingen, ancient Chinese ritual music and newly reworked historical repertoire.
Rather than presenting these works as contrasts, the performance allowed them to flow into one another through recurring textures and resonances. Throughout the evening, hexagrams generated from the ancient Chinese I Ching guided a series of structured improvisations between the musicians. Each configuration of Yin and Yang subtly redirected the atmosphere and pacing, opening new pathways through sound and ritual. Themes resurfaced, dissolved and reappeared in altered forms, creating continuities across geography and history. The effect was less like moving through a conventional concert programme than drifting through overlapping temporal worlds.
The four musicians gave each passage a vivid physical presence. Daniel Shao’s flute lines often arrived like sudden flashes of energy, piercing through the space with a ceremonial force. Peng Cheng drew out long, winding phrases from the erhu, full of elasticity and ache. Most striking was the interplay between flute, erhu and Garwyn Linnell’s cello. Linnell revealed just how expansive the cello’s sonic range can be: grainy, resonant, vocal, percussive. As the three instruments responded to one another, the performance kept expanding and contracting in scale.
The percussion from Wang Beibei carried extraordinary narrative force. Fine, delicate textures evoked flowing water; elsewhere came the deep reverberation of temple bells echoing across a Japanese garden at dusk. These sounds accumulated gradually before erupting in the ferocious intensity of traditional Chinese Wind and Thunder Drumming, then receded again into near-disappearance.
The visual design deepened this sense of immersion. An LED installation by Ke Peng, with visuals by Chang Meng, surrounded the musicians in shifting trigrams and hexagram formations. Light pulsed, flickered and changed colour in response to the music, turning the stage into a living diagram of movement and transformation. The west-facing windows of St Luke’s caught the late-summer sunset just as the performance unfolded. Strands of light fell across the historic spiral staircase like reflections moving on water. The natural world inside the music merged with the evening outside the building. Sound, light, architecture and time are briefly aligned into a complete sensory experience.
Bringing ancient and contemporary music into conversation is difficult, especially across such a vast historical span and with such a diverse instrumental palette. Divine Intimacies achieved it with extraordinary confidence. The result was a sound world both immense and deeply intimate - spiralling, returning and opening wider until, for moments, it became possible to lose track of where you were entirely.
★★★★★
For more information, please visit: https://www.lso.co.uk/whats-on/tangram-divine-intimacies/
Credits
Flute: Daniel Shao
Erhu: Peng Cheng
Cello: Garwyn Linnell
Percussion: Beibei Wang
Installation: Ke Peng
Visuals: Meng Chang
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