Showing posts with label Steve Reich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steve Reich. Show all posts

Wednesday 2 September 2020

Live-Tweeting from The 2020 Proms : London Sinfonietta in 'A programme of pulses'

Live-Tweeting from The 2020 Proms : London Sinfonietta in 'A programme of pulses'

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


1 September

Live-Tweeting from The 2020 Proms : London Sinfonietta in 'A programme of pulses'














Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Wednesday 18 May 2016

Phrenology with Phronesis (work in progress) : Watch yourself when the (cross-)rhythms kick in !

This is a review of a gig given by Phronesis at The Stables, Wavendon, MK

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


18 May


This is a review of a gig given by Phronesis at The Stables, Wavendon, Milton Keynes, on Wednesday 18 May 2016 at 8.00 p.m.



Personnel (in surname order) :

* Anton Eger (drums)

* Jasper Høiby (db)

* Ivo Neame (pf)



This posting has been prepared from review-notes, made consistently with having to take them within blank spaces on Saffron Screen’s (@Saffronscreen’s) beautifully printed May / June programme, since a night off / out turned into a busman’s holiday… (One’s own fault, for going to The Stables (@stablesmk) and not realizing that wanting to write a review was inevitable - and, also, that its proportions would balloon beyond 'a mere sketch' of a review, which was intended 'to give the flavour' !)





First set¹ :

1. Song For The Lost Nomads

2. 67,000 mph

3. A Silver Moon

4. OK Chorale

5. Stillness




By anyone’s standards, (1) ‘Song For The Lost Nomads’ was a pretty good opener : one might have been forgiven, at the very outset, for thinking that Jasper Høiby was just quietly touching the strings of his bass, as if to check, as string-players quietly do, that it was in tune (his is a standard double-bass with a pick-up²) :

Except that he was looking across to Anton Eger (on drums), with whom he had less need to tune than with Ivo Neame (piano)… [One is reminded of Ravi Shankar famously having said, at The Concert for Bangladesh, If you like our tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more.]


Rather than with apparent tuning of any kind, (2) ‘67,000 mph’ had, if not a militaristic drum solo to start, then, at least, one that one sounded to be militarily informed. As one was to realize, from hearing the three members of Phronesis, both of the other instruments have their percussive aspect, and they rejoice in using it (please see below). Not that, just as Høiby later tapped out some rhythms on his bass’ case, one cannot, say, use the opening and closing of the valves on a tenor sax as an effect, but bass-strings, even when bowed (one can bounce the bow), can more easily lend themselves to relatively pitch-neutral sounding (and one need only look to Igor Stravinsky, or Steve Reich, for piano-tones that are embedded within ensembles).


For, Phronesis clearly does, at times, have a principle in working out an approach to compositions that uses blocks, whether of sections within the number, or bars over which it will increase or abate intensity and or tempi, and thus using the capacity of all players for ‘patterning’ the material in this way is an important aspect of the whole.

In (3) A Silver Moon, however, they perhaps felt a little more self conscious, at first, when introducing more elements of free jazz ? Before one felt that they had ‘got into’ the item, the impression was given of being a little more at a remove, and which was heightened by the seeming classical allusions as the theme became exposed. Of course, in jazz that deserves the name, it is by being improvisatory, and needing to be open to running risks, that it is alive (one does not stoop to referring explicitly to a jazz-gig where members of an ensemble around the size of a quintet exclusively played off the page), and, appreciating as much, it was fine that this central part of the set had made a little less impact.


No matter, as pianist Ivo Neame opened (4) ‘OK Chorale’, and we were into another of Phronesis’ elongated treatments, originating with his patterned (or repetitive) figurations [if there is a magic in styling it ‘Ok’, apologies to Jasper H. for having put the title into house-style] : unlike with a jazz-standard (or if one already knew the band’s discography or its members’ pedigrees), one is not – as is sometimes the case (Brad Mehldau maybe, or, more obviously, Keith Jarrett with his long-standing Standards partners) – waiting for the melody to emerge from where it has been submerged (though there is some element of that to Phronesis, too), but, as one might with formal sonata-form writing, recognizing / knowing the material that we heard earlier when it recurs.

That is as may be, but there had been a touch of holding back, from the strength in and of the first two items, in the third, and now we knew that the trio was really into it. Not, of course, just because we had a rocking, head-banging drummer before us in Anton Eger, but rather that, as we listened, and as he interleaved mini drum-solos into the texture, seeing him, and his face and expression, confirmed to us that he was on a feed-back loop with us – however that works for performers, be it seeing nods, hearing gasps or sighs, or perhaps even a sway in the front row... (It is not, one knows, only at the end, when the length and amount of applause is longer for this item than for its predecessor, that both we, amongst our fellows, and the performers come to grasp whatever might be what Russell Hoban (@russellhobanorg) liked to call the limited-consensus reality [apologies, Russ, if you likewise did not hyphenate...].)


The set closed with (5), in which Phronesis felt most free of all, and we heard Jasper H. bow his bass, even sawing with it at times, and then some low picked notes, which sounded very deep, as well as next going extremely high.

As we proceeded, perhaps another classical allusion from Ivo N., some strummed bass, and then what looked like – from the front – Anton E., playing his drum-kit with a pair of dinner-knives : metallic, anyway, and bringing that kind of timbre to cymbals and stretched surfaces alike, but just as part of that bewildering ‘build of sound’ that is Phronesis at its best, with symphonic proportions summoned by three instrumentalists.


They were lucky that we let them off the stage to take a break, though they had clearly taken much pleasure in playing (and so any need for rest came after a refreshing kind of work-out) !






Second set¹ :

6. Urban Control

7. Phraternal

8. Behind Bars

9. Kite For Seamus

10. Rabat

11. Just 4 Now



[...]



More to come soon...

Encore :



[...]



End-notes

¹ Set-lists by kind courtesy of Jasper Høiby of Phronesis (@phronesismusic). However, when the second set gets written up, there was clearly a segue that was wrongly interpreted (for reviewing purposes) as a change of mood / tempo of the sections within a number…

² But no ‘sock’, attached to the side, in which to stow the bow, which instead rested handily on the small stand by his right. One gathered that bowing the bass has come relatively recently - and also that its player does not play in a symphony orchestra (almost necessarily, the latter fact came before the former.)

(As agreed afterwards, such devices to carry the bow not only look like a holster (and how quickly does one need to whip out a bow ?), but they must also affect the sound and performance of the instrument.)




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Monday 22 February 2016

The last Prelude and Fugue, and onwards : Reich, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Bach celebrate (with) Louis #Andriessen

A review of Britten Sinfonia at Milton Court for / with Louis #Andriessen (Part I)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


18 February

This is the first part of a review of a concert given by Britten Sinfonia under Andrew Gourlay (and with soprano Allison Bell), as part of a BBC Louis Andriessen festival at The Barbican Centre, presented by Tom Service at Milton Court on Saturday 13 February at 3.00 p.m.


Soprano Allison Bell sang in #Andriessen's Dances (1991), the only work in Part II of the concert (which is reviewed here)



Programme (Part I) :

1. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) (arr. Louis Andriessen (1936-)) ~ Prelude No. 24

2. Bach (arr. Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), compl. Andriessen) ~ Prelude and Fugue No. 24

3. Stravinksy ~ Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914)

4. Steve Reich (1936-) ~ Duet (1993)

5. Andriessen (arr. strings, Marijn van Prooijen) ~ Miserere (2007, arr. 2015)



It has to be said that, even with the benefit (and delight) of having heard Peter Donohoe (@PeterHDonohoe) play Book I of Das wohltemperierte Klavier entire (at The Stables at Wavendon, Milton Keynes (@StablesMK)), there are still pairs of Preludes and Fugues that one feels that one is less confident of knowing well¹ :

So it is that, although recordings of Book I abound (and are listened to, e.g. by Glenn Gould, András Schiff, Richard Egarr, Keith Jarrett, etc.), those Preludes and Fugues from around No. 19 onwards never quite get as much attention / exposure as they might, or should – from that personal perspective, therefore, hearing the original work first might have helped one listen out better for what first Andriessen, then Stravinsky, had done to Bach's structures and textures…



Bach (arr. string quartet, Andriessen) ~ Prelude No. 24 in B Minor, BWV 869, Das wohltemperierte Klavier (1722, arr. 2006)

1st violin, Jacqueline Shave ~ 2nd violin, Miranda Dale ~ Viola, Clare Finnimore ~ Cello, Caroline Dearnley

(1) In the part for cello, we apprehended serene, stately movement beneath that of the other strings, and, as we resumed da capo, there were moments of tenderness. When, later, the writing for cello could be perceived to have a step-wise character, the other string-parts had a fluidity to them, and there was an excitement to the music’s build and fall.



Bach (arr. strings, Stravinsky, compl. Andriessen) ~ Prelude and Fugue No. 24 (1722, arr. 1969)

(2) A little as when Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) played Mahler’s arrangement, for chamber string orchestra, of Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor (‘Death and The Maiden’), D. 810, there was not an impression of a much fuller sound, though it appeared capable of being more sweeping in its effect, and gave a ‘larger’ crescendo.

In this version, the sadness came out in the theme that Bach takes for a fugal subject : its intensity was not lessened by a group of instruments playing the long opening trill (the Prelude also contains trills). Its motifs, and the use of falling intervals against contrary motion in the other parts, are suggestive of mourning, and, as the culmination of Bach’s educational enterprise (we know that, in class, he used playing it through as one), it is almost necessarily far removed from the Prelude and Fugue in C Major, BWV 846, with which Book I begins.


As to the impression given, especially of the Fugue, by making the arrangement, one factor has been mentioned above (i.e. the relative unfamiliarity of items towards the end of Book I), but, even compared with Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080 (which is still sometimes thought recondite), does this material seems harder to shape ?



Stravinksy ~ Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914²)

The quartet was made up exactly as for the first piece in the concert :
Jacqueline Shave and Miranda Dale, Clare Finnimore, and Caroline Dearnley

The work had no titles for the movements until 1928, when, alongside his Étude pour pianola, Stravinsky arranged them for orchestra (under the title Quatre études), and they became called, respectively, Danse, Eccentrique, and Cantique : the stridency of the first of these was characterized by vigorous pizzicato notes on cello (Dearnley), and an emphatic part for first violin (Shave), with occasional prominent strokes from second violin (Dale).

Stravinsky opened the second Piece by employing a heavily accented and slurred sound (as of his notion of an eccentric³ ?), but then there was an abrupt change of tone and mood, more extreme, in its rhythmic freedom and energy, than even much of BartĂłk’s writing for string quartet. When the initial material resumed, there was less jollity about it, and less slurring.

The last Piece was very different again – and one wonders what, in arranging it for large orchestra, Stravinsky might have changed. It began with a few gestures, which conjured to mind, perhaps, a waste space, before developing into what resembled a hymn (or someone praying).

Yet we were to keep reverting to those more stark gestures, as if to a distillation of his Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) from the previous year – and a work of whose influence on him Louis Andriessen was later to tell. Towards the end, the part for lead violin had a fugue-like subject, and, amidst these unlikely fragments, to the credit of the Sinfonia’s string-players (as well as of the composer), there was warmth.

Appreciative of a sensitive performance (and it could be that this felt like the first substantive piece ?), the audience at Milton Court called the players back for applause.



Reich ~ Duet (1993)

When they were leaving the concert-hall after the first part of the concert, one heard a couple of men talking in a way that showed that they did not realize that they had already heard Reich’s Duet.

Even for those who did not have the programme, as maybe they also did not, it was clear enough, not just because Tom Service (@tomservice), for the BBC (@BBCRadio3), had announced, and talked about the pieces in, the running-order of the Louis #Andriessen Immersion Day concert (through to the composer’s own Miserere) : for one thing, it was not as if it did not, in aural terms, resemble Steve Reich's style, but, for another, one imagines that (as with Music for 18 Musicians) he would have specified where on the stage, and so in visual terms, the duo should be – the familiar Sinfonia violinists Jacqueline Shave (leader) and Miranda Dale (principal second violin) had been facing each other across the performance-space.


This was a completely other sound-world from that of Stravinsky (as heard from 1914), with its use of echo / delay, i.e. in the person and playing of the performers, and sustained notes. Reich then added in patterning, in the form of rhythms from the double-bass (Roger Linley) and, for this piece, a third cellist (Rowena Calvert), deploying a flat bow to tap the strings.

For those who had been listening to Ligeti recently (because of Britten Sinfonia’s At Lunch 2), utterly different from the effect that he sought – open sounds, but with dissonance introduced, and the interaction of the parts of Reich’s duetting pair of violins, conspiring to throw the equilibrium off balance. With a light, open texture, the Sinfonia brought the work to a close.



Andriessen (arr. Marijn van Prooijen) ~ Miserere (2007, arr. 2015)

Interviewed by Tom Service, Louis Andriessen told us (wanting, as he said, to avoid giving us a lecture’s worth on it, as he had formally done elsewhere recently) that he had written Miserere for Amsterdam Sinfonietta as a requiem - as at, and for the fact of, their final concert : he had done so at a time when funding for the arts had been in the hands of people whom he described as ‘gangsters’, and this ensemble (and four others ?) had lost its grant.

However, another and happier aspect to its genesis, at the outset, had been a simple figure, written as a birthday present for his sister, and which #Andriessen said that even he could play on piano. The work had originally been written for string quartet, and Andriessen approved of the present arrangement (for string orchestra), which had been made by the Sinfonietta’s bassist, Marijn van Prooijen.


Alas, it had been intended that the review-notes, on which the comments that follow are based, would be amplified, with the piece (fresh) in one’s memory : nothing wrong with the intention as such, as an effort (as with Andriessen’s Dances, in the second half) to detach oneself from the activity of formulating immediate and specific responses, and, rather, making a comment on the overall impression⁴...

At first, the work fell into sections, with contrasts occurring between the sections. Then, as Andriessen had said to Service by way of an introduction to his composition, it becomes more ‘disquieting’, and less ‘conventional’, which we heard as the texture felt itself to be twisted (or tortured ?). When that feeling did subside, there was a quality of expansiveness to the writing, which was a little reminiscent of such moods in Copland (or Sibelius ?) – till, at the end, it had richness, as of Britten.


Part II of the concert is reviewed here



End-notes

¹ As, say, with a concert that includes complete Rachmaninov’s Preludes, Op. 23, nothing can alter the fact that some are celebrated (e.g. No. 5 in G Minor, marked Alla marcia), and so one less easily relates to their neighbours, heard in between.

² Although it was completed in 1914, it appears that it was not published until 1922 (and Stravinsky had revised it in 1918).

³ Assuming that Stravinsky did not conceive of that description after the fact, although Book II of Claude Debussy’s PrĂ©ludes had first been performed in London in 1913, of which No. 6 (L. 123 / 6) is marked Dans le style et le mouvement d'un Cakewalk, and sub-titled (at the end of the piece) GĂ©nĂ©ral Lavine – eccentric.

If, of course, it had happened - whereas, it had then seemed natural, just after hearing Allison Bell (@bellAsoprano) sing, to write up notes for the second half.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Tuesday 23 June 2015

He’s the daddy ! : Colin Currie DJs at Saffron Hall (Part I)

This reviews Colin Currie Group’s all-Steve-Reich concert at Saffron Hall (Part I)

More views of or before Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


23 June


This is Part I of a review of The Colin Currie Group’s all-Steve-Reich programme, with Synergy Vocals (in Part II), at Saffron Hall on Sunday 26 April at 7.30 p.m.

The review is in two Parts : Music for 18 Musicians (19741976) is here



Music for Pieces of Wood (1973)

The Colin Currie Group (@ColinCurrieGrp), led by Colin Currie (@colincurrieperc), opened the gig with a piece that echoed (though not literally) Saffron Hall’s (@SaffronHallSW’s) interior furnishing or appointment, Music for Pieces of Wood (1973).


By analogy, as each player joined in with a tock-tock sound, one felt that one could be listening to, and through, the line- and clause-breaks of John Milton’s verse in Paradise Lost, with its accentuated language of intonation : it was all there in these pitched instruments, and their cross-rhythms and overtones. (Colin Currie came in third, and there was a thudding, almost dully brutal quality to the timbre and pitch of his instrument, compared to those struck by his peers, and of whom we became less and less aware that they were beating different patterns.)

As we got used to the shape of the piece, we could hear the clear acclimatization of the fourth voice, and ourselves became acclimatized, as it began falling into rhythm (or step) with its neighbours, and speeding up its pace (this video may just confuse, but purports to let one visualize what happens with the various patterns). With all five players introduced and bedded in, and after a small crescendo (at 3 : 04 in the video), the iteration wound down, with beats dropping out, until we were back to the unceasing first two players.

Maybe we were just waiting, maybe expecting for Currie to join in again, but we could be more free this time around (if it was, exactly, another time around**), and just absorb the experience at times, feeling as though we were trotting with the percussionists, or as though it was the cream of the fringe-effects of Ligeti’s Clocks and Clouds (composed the year before, in 1972).

At any rate, the effect was persuasive and impelling, one that must have been intense within the sound on stage. Its cessation, when the final iteration was through**, was met with a roar of approval.



Quartet (2009)

As the programme-notes told us, Quartet (2009) had been commissioned by the CC Group, but only first performed in 2014. They go on to quote Reich as calling it one of the more complex of his compositions.

It was the major work, in terms of length (but still as a balance to a bigger second half), but, as one might imagine, not a quartet in the sense of strings*** (although two instruments rely on them) :

Two concert grands, facing each other, and, likewise, two vibraphones, in a work marked Fast / Slow / Fast a form that, as Reich comments, is not only played without pause, but is also one familiar throughout history (from publishers Boosey & Hawkes web-page for the work).


Fast turned out not to be all that fast, in a movement that was joyous, but restrained, and where the players laid easily on the beat. It was distinguished by the gorgeous tone of the instruments, and the use of accents and rubato. At one point, very near the end, we were brought down in scale to a softness of some subtlety, and then up to a dynamic high, before a pause brought in a four-beat close.


The slow movement that succeeded it had the feeling of being at night, but not in any way like that of BĂ©la BartĂłk’s famous movements with an ‘inner’ shadow, and rather by of Reich moving on from what went before, using open chords (as well as discords, later) to give the sense of introductory material. From there, it moved with delicacy, and with the sense of sounds precisely being placed in the air (fully as much by the score as by the playing).

The central part employed the resonant qualities of these forces, making use of a jazzy riff, spread-chords (which had a querulous, questioning tone to them), and what were nearly chimes (but without overplaying any notion of Night). On, though, we went, with further discord that led to full-throttle reverberation, but it proved to be words such as ‘rubato’ and ‘restraint’ that characterized the moment on which we ended.


There, strangely, more words, by the same amount again, for Slow than for Fast… And here, maybe reflecting that the second Fast built upon and ‘wrapped up’ up what it followed, some short comments :

The movement had a quality that seemed to be of assured urbanity, maybe evoking a city like New York. It, too, left chords in the air, again not quite chimes (because they were unresolved in the bass-notes of the piano), and, as it approached the intensity of its conclusion, one was keenly aware of all the methods of, and need for, clear and close communications between Colin Currie and the three others.



Part II of the review (Music for 18 Musicians (19741976)) is here



End-notes

* Which, if one studies recorded performances, can be seen to be signalled by a nod (as is the moment of dissipation down to two musicians), as here (at 9 : 36). (Or one can see performers, unlike these or those of the Colin Currie Group, using non-cylindrical, actual and rough pieces of wood.)

** The programme-notes tell us that the time-signature tightens, each time, from 6 / 4, to 4 / 4, to 3 / 4, but maybe even the trained ear prefers to get lost in the changing impressions : as mentioned above, this video purports to let one visualize what happens with the various patterns...

*** Publishers Boosey & Hawkes' web-page for the work, giving Reich’s Composer’s Notes, has him observe : Quartet, when mentioned in the context of concert music, is generally assumed to mean string quartet.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Saturday 20 June 2015

He’s the daddy ! : Colin Currie DJs at Saffron Hall (Part II)

This reviews Colin Currie Group’s all-Steve-Reich concert at Saffron Hall (Part II)

More views of or before Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


27 April


This is Part II of a review of The Colin Currie Group’s all-Steve-Reich programme, with Synergy Vocals, at Saffron Hall on Sunday 26 April at 7.30 p.m.

The review is in two Parts : Part I is reviewed here



Music for 18 Musicians (19741976)

Impressionistically, let us start where (after a beautiful first half) we ended the night at Saffron Hall (@SaffronHallSW), with the huge feat that is Music for 18 Musicians, and which only commenced after a sacred silence :




This was music heard as it really should be, live, not as we might know it, say, from YouTube (@YouTube), Spotify®, our own collection of physical recordings, or from the Live In Concert programme, on week days on Radio 3 (@BBCRadio3)…

Though orchestral concerts may still be their own type of monumental enterprise, which usually guarantee that we will hear, for example, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 more or less as we know it, those things will not bear comparison with what is outside the everyday the stuff of what is, say, uniquely best at Aldeburgh Festival (@aldeburghmusic) [e.g. Gerard McBurney's A Pierre Dream at The Maltings, Snape], in Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (@HCMFUK), or in a jazz-gig that is devastatingly in the moment**.

What had Colin Currie (@colincurrieperc), with Colin Currie Group (@ColinCurrieGp) and Synergy Vocals (@vocalsynergy) wanted to bring us in Music for 18 Musicians ? One cannot usefully summarize this work, but best feel for its over-arching structure, behind the sensation of pulses within pulses, patterns within patterns :

Probably, Reich predominantly does not wish us to be in wonder per se – as might seem to be what Michael Nyman’s** music expects of us or, as with that of Philip Glass**, to be mesmerized ? No, something else, here part of which is to do with, in purely visual terms, how the percussionists, as well as some of the singers and pianists, moved around the Saffron stage, and gave us sounds that cohered, coalesced, metamorphosed, and fragmented***.



As one example, how the playing of the large, bright-golden shakers (which were also shaped as if to resemble ice-cream cornets) was passed, baton style, to pianist Huw Watkins (@WatkinsHuw) : Watkins started shaking a second set in tandem with, but more quietly than, the percussionist whom he was relieving, and then the latter, between shakes, deftly dropped out, to be free to play another part, and which gave Watkins variety from the piano riff that he seemed to have been repeating.

Or likewise, on marimbas, the fact that someone else in the ensemble, who, on another of the concert grands, had been doubling up (with bass-textures), slipped into the pattern of first the right-hand pair of beaters of the person from whom she was taking over, and then both, so that he could walk around her and away, to his next role. Even more so, say, than when (in a move that, too, mimics dance in a larger-scale orchestral setting) an entry can be seen to have been given to the second desk of violins, but just so that the first desk can come in with the key entry, or counter-response, this appearance of instrumentalists in sympathy / synergy with each other was almost balletic : Seeing is hearing.

For words such as sympathetic (for co-resonating strings, etc.), concord, consonance and harmony are all, not without reason, integrated into the language of music and musicality : as was joyously noted, during this performance, When I lose faith in what humanity is, or exists for, moments of this kind tell me.




With any concert, of course, even if only through a video (where one cannot choose what to see), one can enhance one’s understanding of the sound that is being made (when, where, and how, and by what means), and can learn to view one’s way into what is being heard, e.g. which instrument / player is contributing a tone or effect. Just as, here, one could identify, from the movement of her lips, the high soprano (credited as Joanna Forbes L’Estrange) from the four seated and loosely microphoned singers all of whom, at times, came to resemble wordless angel-voices… (Or, from the distribution of the parts in other repertoire, isolate the singers with exquisite vocal-colour in Stile Antico, maybe, or The Sixteen.)


All was in keeping with the poetic formality of the lay-out of the stage (no doubt specified in the score (as since confirmed by buying the recording pictured)), with two ranks of sopranos looking at each other across a paired violinist and cellist, who faced twin clarinettists (on B flat and bass instruments). Far back, two twinned grand pianos, and forward of which, in the intervening space, several pairs of likewise twinned marimbas, a golden vibraphone centrally, and, behind it, two facing xylophones. All with feedback monitors, and with a sound engineer at the back of the auditorium, who later confirmed that, when he detects interference fringes, or the xylophone is played with attack near the end of the work, he can bring up the sound a little to give those things emphasis.



Adding or taking away layers, we saw the care with which Colin Currie curated the performance, clearly signalling each change of section (as, on a smaller scale and amongst nods and other gestures, we saw the principal clarinettist doing, by raising the bell of his instrument, seeming to mark the number of iterations) : it felt as though Currie oversaw it, and maybe had licence (from Reich or his score), to vary the emphasis of each section, given by its duration.

Afterwards, no wonder that those eighteen people linked hands : to us, they were linked in our hearts and souls already, and this was their triumph, that they had communicated something so special, and in all its fullness we were full of magic, and of admiration for Reich’s, and their, conception of this work.




Part I of the review (Music for Pieces of Wood (1973) and Quartet (2009)) is here



End-notes

* Let alone one such as Jan Garbarek’s one-set Barbican Hall concert at the time of the Dresden album (2010 ?)…

** One has to suggest that there is little more than a superficial relationship between any of these actually quite different and differentiated composers, or, indeed, between most of those who are thought of as together as writing minimalist compositions.

*** Fragmentation fragmented, only by us, so that, in the repetitions (or near-repetitions), we could focus on what the cello contributed, or some other instrumental, or human, voice.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Tuesday 22 April 2014

Minimalists - or Rhythmicists ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


22 April

The composers on the bill at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange (@CambridgeCornEx) on Sunday 27 April are usually (nay, invariably) referred to as members of the school of Minimalism.

Dennis Russell Davies, interviewed on Tuesday afternoon’s edition of Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3’s) ‘In Tune’ (@BBCInTune) (available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04153wl for seven days from transmission), pointed out that the composers in the series of three approaching concerts at London’s Cadogan Hall, from which the programme in Cambridge has been derived, all know each other – with Arvo Pärt having looked to Michael Nyman as an example before the disssolution of the Soviet Union led to The Baltic States becoming free (Pärt is Estonian).

Nevertheless, although Nyman took the term from art history*, and, it seems, first used the words ‘minimal music’ in a review in The Spectator in 1968**, it seems to have lost its connection both with other movements in the arts, and with evidently fitting the music to which it refers : does a work by Frank Stella, for example, bear any significant resemblance to the way in which a composition by John Adams works ?

If there is any common element in the work of composers that is described as minimalist, it is never as distinct as John Cage’s unavoidable 4’33” or unconventional in the way that his ‘prepared piano’ is. Instead, it tends to treat a theme as an ostinato or a ground bass might be used, for its rhythmic possibility, and the same is as true for Steve Reich, with the fringe effects caused by two or more players (who gradually become more and more out of synch and cause interference), as when a repeated motif in a work by Philip Glass modulates in relation to the parts of the other instrumentalists.

More here (the long version - easy-read one to follow soonish) as a review of Sunday’s concert…


End-notes

* Whereas it had initially been applied to Black Square (1915), a famous painting (of the infamous kind) by Kazimir Malevich.

** In relation to various compositions that had been performed at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA – @ICALondon).



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Thursday 31 October 2013

Authentic calculation

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


31 October

Whatever anyone else was drooling over in teenage years, for me it was the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) catalogue, marvelling at these discs (they were LPs) of Anne-Sophie Mutter and Maurizio Pollini, and seeing recordings of Luciano Berio or Steve Reich, with their stylish covers (or boxes).

And there was the distinctive look of the Archiv series - made, I now realize, to resemble icons - and the notion of, say, baroque technique and practice, along with the names of the recording artists and the repertoire.

Even with a score, though, one can only notate so much (but, by studying performance, one can spot where what is usually played differs from scores, or the composer's MS), so to recreate, when bowing, what happened 150 years or more ago from reading written accounts is bound to involve an element of interpretation.

The risk of it all : ending up with authentic-performance groups that, because of using (reconstructions of) older instruments, with their differing construction, bows and mouthpieces, may sound much like each other, but not, maybe - for having abandoned modern instruments and technique - very much more like what the original audience heard.

We probably do not know in some cases, but we can gauge the riskiness of some wind-playing from how - compared with, for example, a modern trumpet or horn - the note sounds. Curious that, in a way, music played in this way should have turned its back on valves, whereas technology is always building on previous invention, and only discarding what no longer works.

Can I imagine someone not only being told that, by saying a wyfe was buxom, Chaucer did not mean comely, but obedient, but also trying to speak Middle English (as some will Latin) ? Can I imagine the exercise of someone carrying out recreated operations, limited to the surgical instruments and procedures of Lister's day ? Do I imagine that I would have a greater feel for how mathematics and engineering of the 1950s were perceived and practised, if I had to use a slide-rule... ?




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)