For the best part of the 21st century, Devonté Hynes has built bridges between alt-rock and R&B. After terrorising mid-00s indie with dance-punk trio Test Icicles, he pivoted from hip oddball to pop bellwether, writing hits with Sky Ferreira and Carly Rae Jepsen. Hynes, 37, is now best known as Blood Orange (previously Lightspeed Champion); his music melds guitar-grounded bedroom pop with forlorn R&B and interludes that interrogate Black heritage, in step with pop trailblazers like his sometime collaborator Solange Knowles.
His first of two nights at London’s Barbican heralds another reinvention: his formal debut as a classical composer (barring the occasional film score and some collaborations with Philip Glass). The 90-minute set comprises five UK premieres, including two half-hour symphonies performed by London Symphony Orchestra – a still-rare staging of a Black composer in one of the city’s major concert halls.
The first, Naked Blue, draws a tenuous through-line from Blood Orange. Its windswept violins and insurgent cellos suggest a utopia under threat, evoking Hynes’s trademark lyrics of fraught sanctuary. But the orchestra, and conductor Matthew Lynch, invest it with a gravitas absent from his pop music, where he tends to contrast big themes and rich harmonies with scrappy beats and injured vocals. His warring emotions here give rise to a suitably epic battle scene.
Orchestra dismissed, Hynes emerges after the interval in a black baseball cap and grey jumper, dreads clasped into a ponytail. Hunched over a Steinway opposite fellow pianist Adam Tendler, he glides into The Long Ride II – a cascading duet reminiscent of composer Nico Muhly – and the exhilarating Morning Piece, in which arpeggios flutter towards a climax of Stravinsky-style pangs.
Solo piano piece Untitled III sounds tentative and slight, but closing symphony Happenings, beguilingly performed by the LSO, dispels any hint of inhibition. Soloist Tendler repeatedly lunges under the lid of the piano to strike or strum the exposed strings. As a rousing resolution beckons, he elbows the keys in a sudden gesture of refusal. The coda comes to rest on a discord, leaving this ambitious chapter of the Hynes catalogue auspiciously unresolved.
