Music reviews: Sound festival, various venues, Aberdeen

Politics and classical music make for controversial bedfellows – some say they should never be seen in each other’s company, while others insist they’re inseparable. It’s a relationship that Aberdeen’s Sound Festival of contemporary music placed centre-stage in its opening weekend, in a seemingly innocuous concert of two world premieres for cellists Matthew Sharp and Noémi Boutin (****). With one performer English and the other French, one male and the other female, and with similar contrasts of nationality and gender in the duo of composers commissioned to write for them, the potential for interrogating political differences was clearly too tempting to resist.