New videos from ELISION

Freshly uploaded to YouTube and added to my YouTube mega-post.

All these pieces were performed by ELISION at Kings Place in February (and the videos are live recordings from that concert). When I reviewed that concert, I was absolutely taken with Liza Lim’s cello solo, Invisibility, and I’ve not changed that view.

Invisibility draws inspiration from Aboriginal art, particularly the the use of ‘shimmer’ effects to reveal the simultaneity of past, present and future spiritual reality.The piece demands two bows, one standard, the other a ‘guiro’ bow of Lim’s devising, in which the bow hairs are twisted round the wood of the bow, like a damper spring. This gives the sound across the string an irregular, serrated effect, rather like the cross-hatchings of Aboriginal art. The bow stunted the cello’s dynamic range, but as well as obscuring it also revealed new drifts of sound beneath the notes. Unlike many of the other composers represented, Lim deals not in the sparks and abrasions of conflicting musical forces, but in a stretching and dissolution of those forces to find new realms beyond: discovery, not destruction. The result was breathtakingly beautiful. Séverine Ballon’s superb performance may be a hard one to follow, but this is a piece that deserves a long life in the repertoire.

Liza Lim – Invisibility

Timothy McCormack‘s Disfix is already familiar to regular readers; this video complements the live recording made in Huddersfield last autumn:

Timothy McCormack – Disfix

When I first heard it in February, I found Richard Barrett’s brass duo, Aurora, tricky to get my head around. Listening again, I’m still thrown by that opening section of disintegrating harmonics, but the piece’s overall shape benefits from a couple more listens:

Richard Barrett – Aurora