Tag: Olivier Messiaen

Radius, Wigmore Hall: reviewed

My review of this concert last week is now up at Musical Pointers.

It has become a feature of Radius concerts to programme works of the experimental, mostly American, avant garde alongside their more obliging European counterparts. This practice reached a sort of zenith so far in the evening’s enticing performance of Cage’s Telephones and Birds, which, instead of taped birdsong, used Messiaen’s piano transcriptions, along with the requisite recordings of telephone calls (all made in this case to the Monterey Bay Area ‘Birdbox’ hotline).

As a broad strategy it has its pros and cons. In particular, I have reservations about how the coherence and ‘throughline’ of concert (rather than an assortment of recently rehearsed works) is affected. Another effect – more ambiguous and thus potentially more interesting – is the relative influence of one tradition upon another. In general – and in this performance of Telephones and Birds in particular – I’ve found that the glossier European masters tend to smooth out any experimentalist abrasions.

Read more here.

Radius – TONIGHT – Wigmore Hall

I’ve dropped the ball slightly on this one, so apologies for the late notice, but Radius play tonight at the Wigmore Hall. Their programme celebrates the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the first publication of “On The Origin Of
Species” by taking up the theme of “chance” in music. The group will play pieces by Messiaen, Boulez, Cage and new works by
Paul Newland and Tim Benjamin.

Full Programme
Boulez: Domaines
Cage: Telephones And Birds (Not Birds But Messiaen)
Paul Newland: Monotonous Forest
Messiaen: L’Alouette Lulu and L’Alouette Calandrelle from Catalogue D’Oiseaux
Cage: Radio Music
Tim Benjamin: A Dream Of England

More information: Wigmore Hall; Radius website.

Five fave concerts from 08

With other events dominating this year I didn’t see quite as much live music as last year. A smaller pool may statistically account for why I didn’t see quite as much that really blew me away either, or maybe I was more cynical than in 2007. Anyway, here are five I rated in 08, in chronological order:

Messiaen: Vingt régards sur l’enfant-Jésus. Pierre-Laurent Aimard, QEH, 13 January

The first of several ‘event’ concerts this year. I don’t appear to have any notes from this night, but it was fantastic. I don’t usually care much about performers, more about what they’re playing, but P-LA is an exception. Missing his Vingts régards in London a few years ago was a long-held regret of mine, finally put to rest here.

Nono: Promoteo, RFH, 9 and 10 May

Another major ‘event’. The hype may have threatened to obscure the music, but Nono’s Tragedy of Listening didn’t disappoint. Listening a second time around, in a supposedly less acoustically perfect part of the hall, was a revelation.

What I said then:

Prometeo, which begins strongly with intensely detailed waves of material but raises its game with each movement until the seventh, ‘Three Voices (a)’. This three-layered slab of solo voices, thunderous brass rumbles and a high violin drone that was slowly passed around the auditorium is a shattering experience: and on first encounter a jaw-dropping shock.

Having pushed through the spiritually cleansing rigours of the earlier movements, at this stage I was hearing Nono’s music with an acuity I have rarely experienced. It was as though layers of my received listening habits had been progressively peeled away to expose the raw, subjective core of my listening being. Nono’s musical reward for his listeners who have reached this far is this overwhelming and exhilarating 12-minute blast of sound.

EXAUDI, Shoreditch Church, Spitalfields Festival, 13 June

The smothered intricacy of Evan Johnson’s Colophons still haunts me, as does its startling central gesture. No one else sings Ferneyhough’s Missa brevis (or any Ferneyhough) like EXAUDI; and the juxtaposition of Tudor works by Sheppard and Taverner was absolutely convincing without pandering to lazy new-ageism. Looking back this was both the best programme and most revealing performance I heard all year.

What I said then:

This concert, combining Tudor motets with Anglo-American modernism, was profoundly satisfying not only because of smart and sincere programming, but also because of EXAUDI’s sensitivity to the musical lessons to be learnt from both eras. Their core repertoire of late modernism makes pretty uncompromising demands upon its performers, but the group’s great strength is in not letting standards drop for the apparently easier Renaissance repertory. Mater Christi, the first of two Marian Antiphons by John Taverner that opened the concert, was a beautiful illustration. The control, precision and balance of the 12 voices was remarkable in itself, but most breathtaking were the final bars. Many performances of Renaissance polyphony reveal a series of climaxes rolling into one another, a sort of permanent ecstatic state that cancels out any specific musical structure and leaves the listener in an anonymous state of bliss; EXAUDI, however, kept a tight lid on their dynamics until the very end when a sudden crescendo into the closing cadence made the heart leap into the throat. A thrilling and revelatory moment made possible by technique and interpretative skills honed on avant-garde repertoire.

Tony Conrad, Tate Modern, 14 June

Hugely enjoyable, profoundly troubling, got to do it once. My ears still ring just thinking about it.

What I said then:

Moving around the hall was physically oppressive, especially as you walked in and out of range of the various speakers. The first section, with TC’s shadow (with his hat) looming like a maniac with a drill, was terrifying.Rainforests, glaciers and Xenakis are awesome; Conrad is frightening, like climate change. On my way home I was physically discomfited – not just ringing ears, but ringing skin. I had to wash the sound off me before I could sleep.

Plus Minus, The Warehouse, BMIC Cutting Edge, 23 October

Videos from this concert (which mercifully don’t show the balding pate of yours truly) may be found here.

The last Cutting Edge series run by the BMIC before they are absorbed into the new Sound and Music organisation was high quality stuff (honourable mentions to both Libra Duo and Asamisimasa Duo), but + – just pip it for a) the most consistently interesting programme (including fine pieces by Laurence Crane, Matthew Shlomowitz and Markus Trunk) and b) introducing London to the very strange music of Peter Ablinger.

Last year’s list.

Grisey spoon

Grisey – Les Espaces acoustiques reviewed.

I’ve mixed feelings about how this came out. Could have done with another editorial sweep from me at the least. Oh well.

Xenakis, Benjamin, Ligeti and Messiaen reviewed.

This one’s less ambitious and probably better for it.

My feelings about the reviews reflect my feelings about the concerts.

Linkdump

A ton of stuff in the inbox – time for a spring clean:

Spiral Cage reviews some Lachenmann.

DJA on (ir)rational rhythm notations.

Composers in newspapers 1 – Anthony Pateras!

Composers in newspapers 2 – Heiner Goebbels!

Composers in newspapers 3 –  Jonathan Harvey!

Anthony Tommasini gets excited that Thomas “over-hyped and over there” Adès sells out Zankel Hall; overlooks the possibly more exciting Gerald Barry chamber opera from the previous night. Luckily, Feast of Music didn’t. Zankel only half full, apparently, so don’t sink all your money into new music shares just yet.

But really, ignore pocket operas – pocket Helicopter String Quartets are where it’s at.

FoM is also outraged that the NY Phil – the work’s commissioners – aren’t interested in playing Messiaen’s final masterpiece in his centenary year.

And countercritic has had it with Bernard Holland and the “entirely retarded” haters of atonal music.

New Music on a Shoestring: March

Usual rules apply – UK concerts only, got to be non-concession tickets available for a fiver or less. (Although I’m thinking of expanding this to £6 since that seems to be the price of a lot of things these days.) If you think your concert should be in this list, tell me about it!

1st March

Royal Academy of Music

Royal Academy Soloists, Clio Gould (dir.), Jonathan Deakin (cello), free entry, 6pm

Includes Tippett, Light Music, Paul Patterson’s Cello Concerto and a new work by Mi Hyun Woo, C-dega.

2nd March

Royal Academy of Music

Academy Manson Ensemble, Dominic Grier (cond.), free, 5.05pm

More Patterson – Intersections and Westerly Winds, Bruno Gabirro’s Entre murmúrios e silêncios and James Williamson, Music for Six.

Great Hall, Goldsmiths College

New electroacoustic works by composition students at Goldsmiths. Free, 7.30pm

4th March

Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge

Cambridge Gamelan Society, Anton Lukoszevieze (cello), free, 12pm

Music for cello and small gamelan ensemble.

5th March

Coombehurst Studio, Kingston University

Peter Hill (piano), Paul Archibold (electronics), free, 1.10pm

Messiaen, Le traquet stapezin, La chouette hulotte, L’alouette lulu, Archibold, Recoil

Recital Hall, UCE Birmingham Conservatoire

Stefan Östersjö (guitar), £5/£3, 7pm

Pieces by Natasha Barrett, Viking Eggeling, Michele Tadini, Henrik Frisk, Kent Olofsson, Richard Karpen and Paul Dolden.

7th March

Royal Academy of Music

Mainly New, Christopher Austin (cond.)

Diana Burrel, Gulls and Angels, Double Image, Piece Number 80, Schubert, Quartettsatz

9th March

Royal College of Music

Madestrange Opera: from the Soundhouse, free, 7pm

Kaija Saariaho, Lonh, Daniel Rugman, Two Shakespeare Sonnets, Michael Oliva/Deepak Kalha, The Girl Who Liked to be Thrown Around

15th March

Southbank Centre

Philharmonia Orchestra: Martin Musical Scholarship FundRecital, free, 6pm

Naoko Miyamoto (violin), Simon Lane (piano)

Works by Prokofiev, Bartók, Wieniawski and Aaron Holloway-Nahu, Breathless

Royal Academy of Music

Academy Brass Soloists, James Watson (dir.), free 6pm

Patterson, Deception Pass, Timothy Bowers, Sonata for Bass Trombone and Piano, Robert Szymanek, May it fill your soul, John Gardner, Quartet for Brass, Jeffrey Agrell, Jive Concerto

16 March

The Spitz

Gobsmack: Thinking Outside the Voicebox, £5, 7.30pm

JUICE, Curious Voice Duo, Jamie Woon, Jenni Roditi, Wan Dan

I’m definitely gonna be at this one, cos I’m reviewing it. Looks good – see you there!

17 March

Queen’s College, Cambridge

Vigani’s Cabinet, free, 2pm and 5pm (plus composer’s round table at 4)

New works by Sadie Harrison, Laurence Crane, Andrew Hamilton, Naomi Pinnock.

The Holst Singers, Temple Church, 28 January 2006

Last night at the surprisingly well-hidden Temple Church, secreted in the passageways of establishment off Fleet Street, the Holst Singers, conducted by Stephen Layton, gave ample evidence of their claim to be one of Britain’s foremost choirs. It has been a while since I last went to an all-choral concert, and a long time too since I last enjoyed a concert as consistently as this.

The principal focus of the programme, as I highlighted in my preview a week or so ago, was the 37 year-old Polish composer Paweł Łukaszewski, and although space was found for four appearances of his music it was only one of a number of themes covered in the evening.

The dominant work of the evening was Łukaszewski’s Mass, a UK première, here given in its version for chorus and organ. This was divided into two (Kyrie, Gloria and Offertorium, and Sanctus, Agnus Dei and Ite missa est), forming substantial centres for each half of the concert. The significance attached to this work was highlighted by the choir’s procession each time from the Round end of the church, where the other works were all sung, to the Altar; after each half of the Mass, they would process back to the Round. Each of these four transitions was accompanied by the organ, superbly played by William Whitehead. On one occasion this organ music formed part of Łukaszewski’s Mass; the other three were Messiaen. Any sense, however, that the concert might be leaning too heavily on the formality of Catholic liturgy was dispelled by the organ’s fourth intervention, ‘Joie et clarté des corps glorieux’ from Messiaen’s Les corps glorieux. The larger organ cycle may represent the abolition of physical boundaries, a highly symbolised meditation on the death of Death, but this movement with its extravagant solo lines is best described, frankly, as be-bop Messiaen. I wasn’t the only person in the church stifling a grin at this point.

As well as Messiaen’s organ music, the other mini-theme of the concert was twentieth-century British choral music, a staple of the Holst Singers’ repertoire, and represented by some fine examples of the genre. The second half opened with Peter Warlock’s The Full Heart, a prime example of that mid-century English choral style that, I think, is some of the most harmonically adventurous music ever written within an essentially conventional melodic, tonal framework. If you’ve read any of my pronouncements on Herbert Howells, you’ll know how highly I rate this kind of thing. The piece achieved a certain notoriety for its difficulties when it was published just after World War I – one conductor claimed his choir needed 36 rehearsals to perfect it. Needless to say, the Holst Singers handled it with aplomb.

Actually, speaking to members of the choir, the really tricky piece of the evening was James MacMillan’s Christus vincit, which closed the first half. Not least among its difficulties is a high, exposed soprano solo, sung beautifully by Nicola Wookey. MacMillan isn’t always the coolest of composers, but I’ve long taken secret pleasure in his music; one of the first contemporary works I learnt well was, naturally, Veni, veni, Emmanuel. His short violin and piano work After the Tryst is one of the most perfect miniatures I know, and there was something of its solid, languorous harmonies and almost independently spiralling melody in sections of Christus vincit.

The other two English works were both carols, by Jonathan Harvey and Jonathan Dove, taken from the lengthy series of new carols commissioned for the annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College Cambridge. The unveiling of these on a candlelit Christmas Eve afternoon is one of the musical highlights of Christmas, and as a result I’d heard both of these before. I think on a second listening, I prefer the Harvey – typically rich, resonant Harvey – and it easy to understand the appeal to a composer of his spiritual sensibilities of Bishop John V. Taylor’s text:

Should you hear them singing among stars
or whispering secrets of a wiser world,
do not imagine ardent, fledgling children;
they are intelligences old as sunrise….

Their melody strides not from bar to bar,
but, like a painting, hangs there entire,
one chord of limitless communication.

But of course the principal focus of the concert was Łukaszewski, and three of his works were presented: the Mass, Ave Maria, and O Radix Jesse, which opened the concert. This latter is taken from the composer’s Seven Magnificat Antiphons, to be performed in their entirety in the Singers’ 8 April concert. This was much the sort of work I was expecting from Łukaszewski, a thickly-scored, heady blend of harmony, melody, and echoing drones, characteristic of other contemporary Polish choral writing. It is a lovely work and as a result made an intriguing preview for April.

Like the Antiphons, Ave Maria is another early piece by the composer (if 37 year-olds have early works), and was another attractive example of the type, although O Radix Jesse is certainly the more substantial composition. The Mass, however, I found a little disappointing. Having seen Łukaszewski’s strength in writing the sort of choral harmonies that hang like vapour trails, the Mass‘s opening Kyrie presented a more assertive style that relied heavily on open octaves and fifths. These minimal resources were deliberately chosen but this decision did not really convince, and the composer’s most mature work of the evening too often sounded like the work of a less-experienced man. The programming may not have helped – it had to follow ‘Desseins eternelles’, from Messiaen’s La nativité du Seigneur, a rich Christmas pudding of a work. The second half of the Mass was greatly improved, and the Agnus Dei is certainly the finest of its six movements, a successful marriage of the dense harmonic language of O Radix Jesse with the celebratory tone of the Mass as a whole. There was certainly enough here to make me want to hear the whole piece again.

Evident from all three pieces was Łukaszewski’s skill in drawing depth and detail from apparently 2-dimensional material – one absolute stonker of a chord leapt out of nowhere towards the end of the Kyrie – and it is this quality of his music, as well as its frequent beauty, that makes me unreservedly recommend the Holst Singers’ rematch on 8 April.