Tonight at King’s Place sees the second of two concerts of new Irish music for violin and piano. (For my review of the first concert, see here.) In Solos and Duos for Violin and Piano: 2, Ioana Petcu-Colan (violin) and Michael McHale (piano) explore the lyrical side of contemporary Irish music, taking as a starting point the individual sounds worlds of the violin and piano.
Programme
Ian Wilsondrive and spilliaert’s beach (both available on this recommended CD) Philip Hammondmidnight shadows and elegiac variation Ronan Guilfoyle the 2nd – mouth music – and 4th movements from his
sonata for solo violin Philip Martinhomer blues and two elegies
13 November 2009 at 5:40 pm
· Filed under Music ·Tagged James Dillon
Incidentally, it’s obviously N*w C*mpl*x*ty week in the British press – here’s a very fine piece on James Dillon (whose music is also being performed in Huddersfield) in today’s Times.
The complexity came about as a way of creating music that approximates to the complexity of being alive today, he says. Which is why he was never tempted by minimalism. “I’m not keen on hypnotics,” he explains. “It’s why I gave up acid. They render you mindless; you stop thinking. There’s something politically and ideologically dangerous about it.”
But isn’t there a middle way? Composers who are producing more accessible music, such as Judith Weir and Julian Anderson, are the ones winning friends, aren’t they? “These are people who are — how does one put it? — embraced by the establishment. But are they winning audiences in France, Germany, Italy and Spain?” he asks. “The world is not England for me.”
My first Guardian article came out today. I now feel a combination of great satisfaction, disappointment at the inaccurate headline, and terror that someone’s going to find tremendous fault with it.
It’s a fairly puffy thing previewing Richard Barrett’s Opening of the Mouth at Huddersfield next weekend, but it got a few things in there that I’m quite pleased about. Some juicier stuff got cut for space; I may rework that up somewhere else yet.
A disused railway foundry on the edge of the desert outside Perth, Western Australia, March 1997. Inside it is dark and airless, and stiflingly hot. The confined space is filled with the stench of rotting fish. In the decaying heart of the building, amid rusting machinery, dozens of bottles of putrid milk and other surreal detritus, sit an audience and a small ensemble, playing music of an uncompromising but eerie beauty. One reviewer is nearly sick.
Elliott Carter: Hiyoku Chris Dench: sum over histories Richard Barrett: Hypnerotomachia (wp) Aaron Cassidy: I, purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips Michael Finnissy: Marrngu
Evan Johnson: Apostrophe 1 (all communicate is a form of complaint) (ukp)
Members of ELISION:
Richard Haynes, clarinets
Carl Rosman, voice, clarinets
King’s Place, 2 November 2009
As it turned out, Carter’s Hiyoku wasn’t an entirely representative prologue to this concert. True, there isn’t much contemporary repertoire for two clarinets, and suitable preludes must be even harder to find. Although it was beautifully played, with the rolling suspensions in the second half of the piece flowing seamlessly out of one another, it was a deceptively soft-edged way to begin an ELISION recital. Chris Dench’s sum over histories, for bass and contrabass clarinet, set a more familiar tone. I’ve said before that I don’t really get on with Dench’s music, and still don’t get on with the first half of this piece. As its gestural language gradually thins out over the course of the piece I find it easier to get into, but that only leaves me more puzzled about the earlier bits. It’s not clear at what level I should be listening: to microscopic detail, or macro-level form. The work’s intricacy at its opening strongly suggests the former, but this never really hooks me, and I find myself drifting around the piece not sure of what it wants from me.
Richard Barrett’s Hypnerotomachia, for two clarinets in A, was brand new and quite a surprise. I’ve never heard Barrett’s music sound with such a slow harmonic rhythm, or sound in such smoothly curved phrases. I don’t want to give the impression that any of the edge of his explorations of instrumental technique has been softened: instead of the jagged forms of another clarinet piece like knospend-gespaltener, for example, I heard the activity and effort compressed through tiny nuances of glissandi, microtones, tremolandi and multiphonic chords. The work is conceived in broadly heterophonic terms – the two clarinets are thoroughly intertwined, exploring similar paths through the material. Amplification further blends them into one instrument, as the two sound sources on stage are combined in the mixing desk and retransmitted through the speakers. Sitting to one side of the stage it was often impossible to separate the two instrumentalists.
Every moment of the 16 minutes of Evan Johnson’s Apostrophe 1, for two bass clarinets, sounds impossible: there shouldn’t be room for such detail in such a narrow margin at the edge of the audible. The material that might be found in such seams shouldn’t be capable of sustaining a large-scale symphonic argument. Johnson creates genuine magic in his music, and this is a beautiful piece. The performers sit with their backs to us, an instruction that is emphatically made on acoustic not theatrical grounds, but the combination of visual and acoustic impressions produces interesting interference patterns in one’s reception of the piece. The sound is inevitably muffled, but so are any visual cues as to who might be playing what. The sense of screening off, on several levels at once, was powerful, and added a whole new dimension of mystery to the piece. I’m not sticking my neck out when I say that if he keeps up this standard, Johnson’s music will be with us for a very long time.
Haynes and Rosman took one solo piece each: Haynes’s rendition of Finnissy’s Marrngu for E-flat clarinet was as physically committed as you would expect: the concluding ascent into the fortissimo stratosphere of the instrument was almost too piercing. Rosman set aside his clarinet for Cassidy’s I, purples, for voice and computer. The score indicates (in Cassidy’s typically hyper-complex manner) everything but pitch: this is determined live by the computer, which plays a continually changing glissando audible only to the performer, from which the pitch to be sung at any moment is selected. I realise I’m going to sound like those critics who carped at Boulez and Stockhausen in the 1950s when I say this, but I wonder how many of Cassidy’s original intentions actually survive the processes of notation, performance and reception. Not, I stress, in terms of whether the piece is strictly playable – Rosman demonstrates emphatically that it is – but whether the succeeding concretisations of the idea at each stage don’t blunt the transmission of detail and nuance to the next stage. Barrett and Finnissy, for example, keep in sight certain solidities – such as an easily graspable structural framework, a sonic directness, a particularly clear gestural vocabulary (the deafening conclusion to Marrngu, for example) – that I don’t find so easily in Cassidy’s music. I worry that it is all weight and cladding without the necessary steel skeleton. That in itself is not an unattractive idea, though, now that I write it down. It’s the sort of conceit that is better explored in music than architecture, certainly. Jury’s still out here, but you can form your own impressions thanks to YouTube: this video was recorded during rehearsals at King’s Place.
An alternative review of this concert, by Stephen Graham, may be read at Musical Criticism.
Several of the pieces in this miscellany of special commissions and ‘must do’ rarities came across as surprisingly honest to certain choral traditions. No doubt that perception is a product of my upbringing, but that tradition and the resulting pieces sound interestingly and pleasingly English to me, right down to the strings of finger pops in Molitor’s Lorem ipsum, which recalled peals of change-ringing bells. But then EXAUDI and most of the composers they performed are products of similar upbringings to mine, so perhaps it’s silly to fret over context vs content and acknowledge things for how they appeared.
The Cold War and Music Study Group of the AMS has a new blog. At the moment it just includes notices about the study group’s forthcoming meeting at AMS 2009 (next weekend), but hopefully it will blossom into something more than this.
An open discussion about some of the topics raised at the meeting would be great, since the papers that are to be presented look pretty tasty:
Marcus Zagorski: ‘Historical Narrative and Aesthetic Judgment: Serial and Post-serial Music in West Germany’
Elaine Kelly: ‘Conceptions of Canons in a Post-Cold War Climate: Interpreting Narratives of the Past in the GDR’
Heather Wiebe: ‘Britain’s Cold War’
Lee Bidgood: ‘Czech Bluegrass Music, Ethnography, and the Liminal Presence of the Past’
Hon-Lung Yang: ‘Researching Music in the People’s Republic of China’
This is the sort of thing that would really have floated my boat a couple of years ago, and I’m still sort of gutted that I can’t be there. The papers by Kelly (which will ‘explore the limitations of assessing East German music according to aesthetic criteria shaped by the hegemonic “western” canon. In the process, she will suggest alternative means of interpreting narratives of the past in Cold War and post-Cold War contexts’) and Wiebe (which will ‘examine how some of the Cold War’s most pressing issues were addressed in a specifically British context. Focusing on Britten’s treatment of themes of communication and freedom, as posed against the forces of both capitalism and totalitarianism, she suggests that the particularity of British cultural responses to postwar modernity complicates familiar dichotomies of populist and avant-garde, East and West’) sound like they explore some of the issues (alternative histories, de-Westernising Europe, questioning traditional dichotomies, etc) that I touched on in my own thesis, but didn’t have the resources, energy or imagination to explore further. Hopefully some of the results will be available soon.
The video of musikFabrik’s 2008 production of Michael’s Journey Around the World has been posted to YouTube, and it’s well worth watching. WDR did an admirable job of capturing the overpacked visuals, but the DVD still represents only a fraction of what the audience was seeing.
My review of last month’s Radius concert at the Purcell Room has just been accepted for publication in Musical Opinion. It won’t be out until the January issue, but I wanted to pick up some overspill here.
Firstly, John Reid’s playing of Berg’s opus 1 Piano Sonata was stunning. I ran out of space in my short review to really expand on why I thought it was so good, but the main thing I got was a sense of Berg’s full spectrum tonal palette, and his skill in slipping from one of its regions to another. Reid gave the music quite a lot of space, so it was possible to follow the intricate voice-leading and thus follow the logic of Berg’s tonal-atonal transitions. The final pages were breathtaking.
More generally, I thought this was the best-programmed Radius gig I’ve seen. I love the Boulez, Cage, Vivier and Xenakis rarities that have been a feature of their Wigmore Hall concerts, but I’m always a little anxious that the concert doesn’t always hang together as a whole. In this instance, however, Tim Benjamin’s Mrs Lazarus was well complemented by the Berg and Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony.
Should programming matter that much? I’m beginning to notice it when it does. Or perhaps it’s not programming so much as setting. What does bother me is when the memory of one work, still being processed and pieced together, is wiped over by beginning of the next piece. When the second piece perfectly complements the first, this is less of a problem, but that’s a difficult match to pull off. Better, perhaps, is to set each piece in enough space so that those memories can be processed before one’s attention is back in demand. It’s not just a question of silence either side of a piece, although that helps a lot. It’s also something to do with the environment in which the music is being heard, the priorities of the audience (listening to, or being seen), the building, and so on. The Wigmore Hall, more than some venues, conditions a certain kind of listening: the seats are quite low in relation to the stage, and aren’t raked,; the acoustic is sound-studio flawless; the architecture and decor all point towards a certain style, set of values and historical moment. It’s a bit like being inside a Muse’s womb: there’s no real life in there, and what is in there has been genetically pre-programmed.
On the other hand, I invariably enjoy concerts in churches more. They’re cold, the seats are hard and creaky, you can hear the street outside and the lighting is uneven. Not womb-like, they’re more like a translucent box in which art and real life (two sides of the same coin after all) can interpenetrate. And church architecture – particularly of the Hawksmoor/neo-classical variety that you get all over central London – is more of a blank slate. Yes, it expresses a number of things like power, majesty, and a certain moral code. But those things are generalised enough to applicable in new historical contexts. The architecture of the Wigmore (and I’m sorry for picking on it like this) speaks more specifically and is more historically reified.
Funny, hip advocates for classical music complain that concert halls are too much like churches, and here I am saying that they don’t go far enough.
EXAUDI makes a rare appearance in London this week with an eight-voice programme of the newest contemporary music – much of it to be premiered at this performance. EXAUDI are a staggeringly good choir and not to be missed: if you need some persuasion, here’s what I said about their performance last year at the Spitalfields Festival.
The concert is part of Sound and Music’s The Cutting Edge series and takes place at the Warehouse, next Thursday, at 7.30pm.
Chung Shih Hoh: mantra:imagine (2007, UK premiere)
Stephen Chase: from Jandl Songs (2007-)
Gwyn Pritchard: Luchnos (2007, UK premiere)
Ignacio Agrimbau: The Humanist (2009, world premiere)
Amber Priestley: Unloose to the Murmur (2009)
James Weeks: from Mala Punica (2008-9)
Linda Catlin Smith: Her Harbour (2004, UK premiere)
Claudia Molitor: Lorem ipsum (2007)
ELISION’s next visit to King’s Place is drawing closer: Sum Over Histories features music for two clarinets by the British composers Richard Barrett (a new piece), Chris Dench and Michael Finnissy, the young Americans Aaron Cassidy and Evan Johnson, and the old American Elliott Carter, all performed by Richard Haynes and Carl Rosman.
Haynes and Rosman are two of the best new music clarinettists on the planet, and you can bet that the pieces in this concert will push their skills to the limit. A couple of the pieces were broadcast by ABC in Australia last year and you’re in for a treat: I’m particularly looking forward to hearing Johnson’s Apostrophe 1 (All communication is a form of complaint) – a fragile, fluttering thing – in the flesh. Don’t be dissuaded by this being almost entirely a clarinet duo recital – the range of sounds and colours will be huge.
Here’s a full programme (not currently available at the King’s Place site):
Elliott Carter – Hiyoku (1984) for two clarinets
Chris Dench – sum over histories (2006) for bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet
Richard Barrett – Hypnerotomachia (2009) for two clarinets
Aaron Cassidy – ‘I, purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips’ (2003 – 2006) for voice with live computer-generated pitch material
Michael Finnissy – ‘Marrngu’ (1982) for solo E-flat clarinet
Evan Johnson – Apostrophe 1 (all communication is a form of complaint) (2008) for two bass clarinets
Date: Monday 2 November
Time: 20:00
Venue: Hall Two
Price: From £9.50 (the earlier you book, the cheaper the ticket)
Online booking here.
