Boring Like A Drill.

Rodney Sharman: Known and Unknown (Redshift). My exposure to Sharman’s music is small and spotty: when describing his works for voice and guitar performed by the Paramorph Collective I lumped them in with that album’s predominant vein of “gentle quirks”. Known and Unknown brings together a selection of his piano pieces, performed by Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa. It helps to expand general awareness of the composer’s wide-ranging output, if only to a certain extent. The scattering of miniatures and compact pieces suggests, not entirely accurately, a preference for the small-scale. The short works range from affectionate pastiches, each with their own personal insight or mischievous twist, to bracing abstractions. The three sets of Opera Transcriptions are revealing, as the ‘transcriptions’ range in attitude from dreamy to acerbic; the third set ends with the pianist narrating a disturbing reminiscence of Claude Vivier. Gay identity is a recurring theme in Sharman’s music: the Vivier episode is echoed later in the larger piece The Garden, an overt and explicit “pocket opera” for vocalising pianist. Beside the inventions upon opera and Sondheim, it’s fitting there’s also a brief celebration of Michael Finnissy’s 50th. Iwaasa’s own queerness informs her collaborations with Sharman, with her interpretations matching his wit and also, in the case of The Garden, compounding it by effectively playing it in drag. The other substantial work is the title piece, commissioned by Iwaasa as a memorial to her mother; built out of descending chords, the forthright harmonies in sombre arrangements leave Sharman as a still slightly enigmatic character.

Sasha Elina: Different Songs. Vol 1 (self-released). Elina sings songs at home in her room, with faint outside noises sometimes intruding. The songs are small, sung in a small way. Eva-Maria Houben’s My Sweet Love and Seamus Cater’s Early Riser are without accompaniment, Elina’s voice up close and high-pitched, without vibrato or steady control of pitch, in the manner used by indie pop singers to convey earnestness. I’m predisposed to dislike people singing as though they are smaller and weaker than they really are and at some points it feels too affected, recalling the songs used in TV advertising by phone companies in the 2000s to convince you they were harmless. The accompaniments for the other songs were recorded remotely, merged in the recording: Tim Parkinson plays piano on the two Tomás Cabado songs, each very brief and reduced to the most essential elements without becoming simplistic. These work because there’s no room for Elina’s singing to be misinterpreted as cute, making the sweetness both strong and strange. Cabado in turn provides spare electric guitar for Johan Lindvall’s Five songs for voice and guitar, with each note and word placed with consideration and caution to create a cycle in microcosm that’s affecting without ever resolving its mood. Moment by moment, these pieces can reward microscopic attention and I expect that’s the intention behind the album, but with nine songs in just over twenty minutes, it comes across as being so slight that it’s trying to disappear completely.

Alfredo Costa Monteiro: Suspension pour une perte (Dissipatio). I’ve previously heard Monteiro in duet with Ferran Fages, performing with “resonant objects” and electronics. His solo work Suspension pour une perte employs this technique with a vengeance, taking a recording of a “broken piano” and treating it with gobs of reverb enhanced with electric organ seasonings. It’s a stark, solemn work that starts with deep, sonorous blows on the piano frame and carries on in a single-minded essay of abrupt, dark blocks of sound. The struck sounds give way to ominous rumbling in the low strings, fading into clusters of organ drones. Silence also plays a critical role, both between sounds and in letting each stroke of black ink reveal its inner colours, making a composition that never retreats into goth ambience while supporting itself as a musical structure for nearly forty minutes.

Ben Zucker: ( )hole complex (per/formance/eration) (Sawyer Editions). This one really pissed me off at first, not just because of the title. A soprano sax/clarinet duo named Garden Unit (Cameron Roberts and Julia Ansolabahere respectively) play this Zucker composition that wibbles on for damn near an hour, with no particular goal and no particular rush to get there. The two smallish voices trade timbres and hesitantly noodle for short periods of time before getting distracted and trying something else. Nothing seems to stick; they stop, and try again. Sometimes they boldly launch into a cringey jazz riff then immediately check themselves, attempts at minimalist quiescence quickly run out of puff. Their attitude is unreadable, as to whether they’re freezing up in panic, noble in their stoic forbearance, or just plain oblivious. A month later I came back to it to explain exactly why it sucks, only to immediately become intrigued. The piece is a bravura study in entropy and decline, exhausting all momentum yet somehow sustaining itself without resources through perpetual stalling, an endless dwindling away that never seems to hit bottom. It fearlessly shits down the blithe charade that music comes naturally and makes everything about the artform seem all but impossible: it can’t go on, it goes on.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Ben Zucker, Eva-Maria Houben, Johan Lindvall, Rodney Sharman, Sasha Elina, Seamus Cater, Tomás Cabado
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This ain’t drone. It’s slow and monophonic, with no obvious change in pitch over the time it takes you to normally breathe in and out, but it plays out like an orchestrated melody. It’s claimed that the three pieces on Scott McLaughlin’s we are environments for each other (Huddersfield Contemporary Records) came about over the course of ten years’ worth of collaboration with violinist Mira Benjamin and pianist Zubin Kanga, and listening to it again I can believe this. Each piece required meticulous attention to detail to present it without noticeable blemish; here, the content is all contained within the music’s surface, with precision-engineered technique to make the finest distinctions between texture and colour. The album opens with the most recent and fully-developed piece, a sublime thirty-five minute stretch of music titled we are environments for each other [trio]. The trio in question here is Benjamin on electric violin, Kanga on piano with electromagnetic resonators; the resonators acting as an emergent third force. Without ever becoming dense, the musicians follow a thin line that keeps changing its substance, e-bowed piano strings and amplified violin strings each giving a tone that is slightly diffuse about the edges. The resonances of the strings set off a surrounding radiation of additional tones that don’t sound like the usual harmonic overtones, but instead create new types of sound that resemble electronically synthesised waveforms. Paradoxically, the musical shaping of each event stills sounds very natural, making something that should be familiar enough feel fresh and new without making the technology conspicuous. The two earlier pieces, each sub-twenty minutes, are relatively less refined but almost as striking. Benjamin’s acoustic violin playing on the endless mobility of listening is augmented by McLaughlin’s live electronic processing to elongate the effects of her bowing as much as add harmonic resonance. The aim of transforming timbre by exploiting the instrument’s acoustic properties is present in a less developed form, latching onto sine-tone upper harmonics or letting the grind of strings turn beating frequencies into a pulse. The fact that drones are not part of the equation becomes clearer here, where the performer’s gestures are more overt. At the start of in the unknown there is already a script for transcendence, Kanga plays haunting phrases on a prepared piano swimming in reverb, but the struck notes soon peter out into sourceless tones from the magnetic resonators, lapsing into long passages of sounds sublimated into almost pure electronics, only occasionally propelled by piano keys.

The Greyfade label is starting up a Folio edition: hardcover books with an accompanying music download (music also available separately). The first release is Three Cellos, an acoustic realisation of Kenneth Kirschner’s electronic composition July 8, 2017 for the aforesaid instruments. Joseph Branciforte arranged the piece for live cellos, multitracked by Christopher Gross. The book is a seemingly exhaustive account by Kirschner about the compositional process behind the original work, from its conceptual origins, tracing through the emerging implications and complications in producing a finalised work, followed by an equally thorough discussion by Branciforte of Kirschner’s work and how to render it as an acoustic performance. Gross also gets in a couple of pages about playing the thing. Kirschner is a prolific composer of electronic music, producing large and boldly conceived works that refuse to be complacent about their foundational premises. July 8, 2017 was made with the use of algorithmic processes; it’s a pitch-based work made out of transformations of a reduced set of six pitch-classes from the usual twelve-tone scale. The predominant theme is one of tension and release, opening with a minor ninth that resolves to the octave which becomes the recurring theme throughout the work, transposed to other near-octaves on various pitches, all played in counterpoint like an illusory canon between two or three cellos at a time. The forty-minute work is divided into multiple cells in a seemingly modular form: Gross accurately likens the work immediately to a kaleidoscope. Each section feels like passing through a room full of mirrors, only to find that each successive room is also equally mirrored. For this acoustic version, with the reliance on the most angsty of dissonances as the basis of the work, your own headspace at the time of listening will play a part in whether you find its prolonged, reiterative excesses exhilarating, wearying or ludicrous. Kirschner’s essay maintains some consciousness of these aspects of composition and how much of the substantive features of the work can be out of your hands even as you create it; regarding this arrangement, he subtitles his chapter “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Vibrato”. The use of cellos rebounding off each other adds to the overall sturm und drang impression, but then Gross’s demonstrative use of vibrato throughout makes another comment on the electronic original: Kirschner was using sampled cello and wondering about the tensions and limitations of working with sampled instruments versus the real. Gross’s vibrato is prominent but alive and variable, responsive to the moment, while sample patches of acoustic instruments are naggingly uniform, pushing timbre to become a mere vehicle for pitch. Branciforte’s arrangement, with its emphasis on elastic phrasing, and Gross’s generous interpretation interrogate Kirschner’s composition even as they may appear to elevate it.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Joseph Branciforte, Kenneth Kirschner, Scott McLaughlin
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Last Sunday an afternoon of concerts was held at the Round Chapel in Clapton to commemorate what would have been the 88th birthday of composer John White. White, who died in January, is one of those figures of the British avant-garde whose work was, for certain generations, often more inferred from others than heard directly. That was certainly my experience when growing up in Australia and I suspect it wasn’t too different elsewhere in the Anglosphere, where a few glimpses could be deduced from reading about some tracks on out-of-print LPs issued on the Obscure label, or possibly even hearing them. Living in the UK helped to expand on this narrow view from half a century ago but even so, when hearing a selection of his music at Music We’d Like To Hear in 2022 I noted that his short, often oblique compositions condemned him to “being regarded in much the same way as an outsider artist”. The Round Chapel audience skewed old, peppered with original longhairs and a handful of soft-spoken Maoists up from Surrey for the day.

Hearing this much of White’s music in a day helped to understand how weak my understanding is of his art. Selections from his hundred-odd Piano Sonatas appeared throughout the day, mostly played by Dave Smith. These ranged from the benignly self-undermining miniatures I’d associated with his overall style, to some more generous take-offs on various genres (these were played by Mary Dullea) and one stark, early Sonata of brusquely contrasting intervals played by Tim Parkinson. The creative impulse was pulled one way then another throughout the day, alternating between more conventionally emotive music for plays or cosier chamber works, and more abstract works like the Concert Duos from the early 1970s, originally written for the John White / Christopher Hobbs tuba and piano duo. Then again, even those supposedly colder pieces were built upon dance steps or concert-hall favourites, so that White was always tweaking his sentimental influences in some idiosyncratic way, with the distinguishing factor being the degree to which the work’s origins could be detected on the surface.

Then there’s the comedy. Parkinson and Catherine Kontz performed White’s 2014 piece Wine Connoisseur’s Shoot Out, a cheerfully inconsequential piece for percussive objects (including wine bottle), ditzy stylophone breaks and readings of descriptions from a wine catalogue. It was very British in the way its harmless eccentricity raised questions about satire, arte povera and Dada without the slightest interest in spelling anything out beyond the audience’s immediate enjoyment. It makes Satie – one of White’s chief influences – seem pointed. It also shows why White remained a marginal figure, as he never really mellowed into a sufficiently safe figure with an institutionally acceptable idea of fun (as the Poor Fart Harmony tape from 1988 demonstrated when played later in the day). Instead of composing soundtracks for lottery-funded movies, he was performing live sets with homebrew electronics in the backrooms of pubs. John Lely, frequent collaborator with White in electronic gigs, played a concentrated work with an off-kilter array of lo-fi objects as a tribute, as did Greta Kalteisen, Andrea Rocca and Richard Sanderson with a revival of White and Hobbs’ battery-operated electronic ensemble Live Batts!! Of course, there were also the Machines – Newspaper Reading Machine, Drinking and Hooting Machine, with Autumn Countdown Machine to end the event – which were highlights as usual, perhaps through their simple ingenuity, or perhaps because everyone’s appreciation of White is oriented upon those old LPs after all.

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Tags: John White
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[Part 1: daytime concerts]

In the evening at Wigmore Hall, Apartment House presented two more premières but opened the concert with a late work by Elisabeth Lutyens, Go, Said the Bird, scored for string quartet and electric guitar. It’s a haunting piece, with the guitar (played by Sam Cave) contributing a unique sound, owing nothing to the usual popular styles associated with the instrument. Despite this, Lutyens shows a deep appreciation for the guitar’s capacity for timbral variation, with Cave first playing mysterious ascending glissandi in the bass range as coloration beneath the acoustic strings, using the clear and natural tones as both lead and background while occasionally throwing in moments of nasal treble or passages using a strange, watery modulation effect.

Elaine Mitchener was the soloist for the first premiere, as the vocal lead for an ensemble of seven musicians in Rolf Hind’s Blue to the Throat. The eight movements play through without a break and Hind makes innovative use of the voice, first more as instrument before emerging into song. The piece makes great use of Mitchener’s talents as a singer and for holistic interpretations of the music presented to her, with extremes of register expertly handled, quick-changes in attitude and extraneous techniques extending to percussive effects (torn paper, whipped violin bow) and Mark E. Smith loudhailer employment. Despite this, I still have trouble getting my head around Hind’s compositions; the combination of expressionism with ayurvedic equanimity doesn’t sit well with me and never seems to settle into a style that’s comfortable with itself. It made me notice that the details get a bit messy and many of the effects, such as those mentioned above, get lost in the aural clutter.

Blue to the Throat was conducted by Jack Sheen, who returned as composer in the second half for the première of his piano quintet Press. It carries on from where his Solo for Cello from last year left off, with strings again suppressed by heavy, metallic mutes to produce sibilant, desiccated whispering. Even longer than the Solo, Press plays for about fifty minutes and is broken into three movements. The remoteness implied in last year’s recording was strongly felt here, as Apartment House played constant, scurrying passages that twined around each other, but so faintly that at times you had to strain to listen. The hall was simultaneously filled with sound, but empty; a self-contained microclimate where forces swelled and ebbed but never broke into full voice. As for the piano, it was largely absent, adding an occasional low tone. The second movement continued much the same as the first and for a while it seemed to have turned into an exercise in duration, before small but deliberate changes made you suddenly notice that something was up. The third movement brought more changes but never relieved the tension, serving only to create further apprehension until the piano burst forth into a stupendous, disturbing cadenza that resolved nothing. Press is the eerie, negative image of an epic.

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Tags: Elisabeth Lutyens, Jack Sheen, Rolf Hind
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Only Music Can Save Us Now was the title for the three concerts presented by Apartment House at Wigmore Hall last Saturday, led as ever by Anton Lukoszevieze, where morning afternoon and evening they love-bombed us with new and unfamiliar compositions. As usual, there was no evident compulsion to justify the audience’s attention by way of a curatorial (read moral) theme, only music that it was believed would reward our fresh attention. The morning concert began with Kerry Yong giving the UK premiere of Marek Piaček’s Canzonetta, a piano piece written some thirty years ago. It’s almost as light and lively as the title implies, but offset by a contemporary interest in aggressively repeated patterns and worked with snippets of movie themes and ad jingles (“sound smog” as Piaček calls it) which might be considered po-mo except for the typically East European quizzical attitude to pop culture that realises parody is a two-edged sword. A second work by Piaček was played later in the day, his 5 Studies for piano quintet completed in 2022, where a similarly breezy approach added glossy varnish over sour humour. Šarūnas Nakas’s Cenotaph for piano trio, from 1995, may have been the most conventional work heard on the day. Composed in memory of anti-Soviet resistance fighters in Lithuania, it managed to alternate between dark and light, the tender and the brutal, with each seemingly contradictory impulse contributing to a single statement of emotional complexity. The two world premières of the morning were Christopher Fox’s Heaven as a scroll and Adrián Demoč’s Zamat (Velvet). The Fox piece is a characteristically strange piece; his music floats in the grey zone between the conventional and the experimental, so that hearing his stuff can be an elusive experience. A string quartet is accompanied by a set of bells, which had been hanging at one end of the stage all shiny and alluring all morning. The strings play with tunings to match those of the bells, with the natural harmonics and resonances guiding the musical substance beyond its usual intonation. Zamat is a spare and elegant piece, with clarinet and bass clarinet, viola and cello playing short melodic cells in unison. The strings are pizzicato throughout, slightly out of step and adding percussive colour to the two clarinets, whose timbres combine to add subtle disturbances to the pitch.

I have now also heard a slightly less weird and more approachable piece by Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson. His Sitt hvoru megin við þilið uses his computer animated scores and friable material, but in this case the instrumentation is for string quartet instead of homemade instruments and the piece is contained within a single movement. The frayed scraps of sound fall into fleeting patterns that never sit still. It’s an intriguing experience as the ear can never settle on any moment; my failure to hear what’s in front of me becomes a problem when confronted by my expectation that I should tell each movement apart. The first concert ended as it began with Yong solo giving the first British performance of David Mahler’s Only Music Can Save Me Now from the late 1970s, a piece firmly located in the minimalist ethos of the time: an ostinato cycles throughout, forming the basis for a type of open-form chaconne as right hand harmonises upon the left, playing tropes that make small but significant changes to the rhythm and phrasing. It’s a reminder of the fecundity of minimalism in its later blossoming, before the style was subsumed into its present monoculture of soundtracking pageantry.

Besides the additional Piaček, the afternoon concert included a string quartet by Dubravko Detoni, a composer who presence amongst Western music geeks seemed to fade away with the dawn of the CD era. Forgotten Music presents 27 slips of music, each relating to a different style or genre but distorted almost beyond recognition by subjecting each to intense but brief scrutiny. Multiple contradictory meanings proliferate as each moment passes, both overzealous and dismissive in interrogating the music’s contents, with possibilities for misinterpretation rife. It takes on extra significance when you remember Detoni was a Yugoslavian writing the piece in 1981. In some ways, a more acute statement of the predicament described in the two Piaček works. My personal highlight was Michaël Lévinas’s string quintet (extra viola) Les lettres enlacées IV, an enthralling work of grainy micropolyphony and spiraling scales, made out of modal figures transposed upon each other and transformed by a method derived from computer modelling of Doppler shifts in spatialised sound. A sterling example of how access to all the toys at IRCAM can pay off handsomely when used with probing, analytical thought. The afternoon’s premiere was Kerry Yong’s arrangement of Jem Finer’s album Hrdy-Grdy for reed organ and string quartet. The art of transcription here is complicated by Finer’s original being made on hurdy-gurdy with electronic processing, layering the curious instrument with delay loops and other forms of self-accompaniment. Yong and Apartment House handled these masterfully, with sampled organ blended into a multicoloured acoustic chorale with the strings. This was a different musical language to that heard the rest of the day, with direct melodic playing as the base, even as it was compounded by technical elaboration. In a curious way, the method used in presenting Finer’s collection of pieces as a live ensemble work was analogous to that of Lévinas composing his quintet.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Adrián Demoč, Christopher Fox, Dubravko Detoni, Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson, Jem Finer, Marek Piaček, Michaël Lévinas, Šarūnas Nakas
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Gabriel Vicéns is a new name to me, despite not being the first record he has out. A quick look through his back catalogue explains why: originating from Puerto Rico, now based in New York, his reputation is that of guitarist and composer of Latin-influenced jazz. I may as well be deaf when it comes to jazz, but I didn’t detect any disturbing traces of it when listening to Mural, his new release of chamber compositions on the Italian Stradivarius label. I only made the discovery after playing Mural several times over, blissfully unaware of his dark secret. Even now, the idea of it is like being told that Jo Kondo used to play prog.

In the seven pieces heard here Vicéns takes an abstract approach, laying his materials out according to some superimposed logic whose effects can be heard while the motivation remains obscure. Those materials are rarefied but playful, falling into grids of loping, off-beat rhythms or suddenly breaking away to chase their own tails. (The Kondo analogy was not arbitrary.) Trad genres like piano trio, wind quintet and Pierrot ensemble get pressed into service of counterintuitive structures. The trio Sueños Ligados is all staccato phrasing, each instrument rudely cut off no sooner than they have begun, before shifting scene to a cycling chorale of undulating chords disturbed by dissonant interjections. Vicéns often holds off his instruments for as long as possible, as on the opening title work, where piano spends several minutes toying with a reiterated pedal tone before clarinet and violin add commentary and timbral colour to the slightly prickly harmonization. The sleeve notes mention 12-tone composition at work here, but Vicéns takes chromatic dissonances and will repeat them rather than resolve them, implying the stability of repetitive music without any of the comfort that it typically affords, while cloaking less palatable melodies with the sly insinuation of a deferred payoff. It’s a mischievous pleasure.

The crack team of NYC players assembled here give studious attention to the comedic implications of the pedantic tread underpinning many of the works, while never making heavy weather of it or smoothing off the sharp edges to make something quirky. They present Vicéns with a cool facade as he alternately charms or worries the listener. The Pierrot work El Matorral begins with an ominous piano ostinato that soon falters and then loses momentum entirely, leaving the ensemble to make awkward attempts at initiating dialogue to fill up the void. Silence plays a part in all the pieces here, most notably the violin/piano duet Carnal, where small snatches of sonata-like playing escape in fleeting bursts. Everything here is clearly the work of the same composer, though that distinctive quality is hard to succinctly define. The discontinuities hint at a highly refined cartoon-music technique at work, which may be where the jazz seeps in, but the most rewarding thing about this collection is the way Vicéns never stoops to trying something popular, even as he surrounds himself with tempting opportunities.

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Tags: Gabriel Vicéns
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I’ve occasionally mentioned the Octandre Ensemble – particularly their advocacy of Frank Denyer, like last month – but not the music composed by their co-director, Christian Mason. Time – Space – Sound – Light is a new disc/download from Winter & Winter dedicated to Mason’s works for chamber groups with members of Octandre. Recorded in a Bavarian villa last summer, the set of works presented here recreates a potted version of a concert given in the same venue several years earlier. The sequencing of works is ideal, unfolding and then contracting as an extended suite. The attributes listed in the album title informs the understanding of Mason’s music, with its clean presentation of direct and associative qualities working in a close relationship. The set begins curiously but vividly with A kingfisher dives into the sun…, a strongly evocative pastoral recording of birds and insects on a summer’s day without any perceptible artifice. The following piano piece … just as the sun is always… sustains the feeling of open space with long, resonant pauses between its chiming chords. You can pick out resemblances and possible influences, particularly of European composers with interests in Asian music and thought – Messiaen’s bell-like harmonies, Scelsi’s unhurried pacing, Vivier’s sense for ritual – while still finding Mason has his own perspective on these traits which makes his voice identifiably unique. The use of piccolo and percussion in the ensemble work I wandered for a while… is the closest he gets here to anything resembling high-brow exotica, offset by the return of the bird sounds and electronic processing to extend the acoustic space. Cello, flute, piano and bells are the predominant instruments throughout the album. Mason’s talent for making sparing use of sound to maximum effect is heard in wandered and the succeeding Remembered Radiance, where cello, bells, piano and harmonica (without electronics) slowly build intense heat with increasingly stark timbres. Cellist Corentin Chassard gives a forceful soliloquy in the solo work Incandescence, emerging from silence with increasingly esoteric harmonics enriching the tonality and coloration as he drives towards the conclusion. Two shorter works conclude the set: Heaven’s Chimes are Slow is a relatively compressed and agitated duet for flute and piano (on all works the flautist is Audrey Milhères, with Joseph Houston on piano), before Chassard returns with a retuned cello for Bird learning to fly, transforming the instrument with a ghostly accompaniment of buzzing and distempered multiphonics before coming to a sudden stop.

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Tags: Christian Mason
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The Ostrava Days Festival began the new year with a compilation of highlights from their 2023 season, available in a few permutations (the CD version captures only a quarter of the downloadable material and you miss a lot of the best stuff). The download collection focuses on orchestral and larger ensemble works, most of them premieres. It’s tragic but appropriate that the first album begins with the first performance of the late Phill Niblock’s High Noon, given last September by ONO – Ostrava New Orchestra under Petr Kotík’s direction. Hearing one of Niblock’s dense sonic monads executed by a mass of acoustic instruments instead of his usual electronic drones is a powerful experience, with ONO retaining the expected level of intensity to achieve the complex but single-minded nature of Niblock’s music. I hope to hear this live one day. Also present is Christian Wolff, with the premiere of his For 38 Players by Kotík leading Ostravská banda this time. Wolff exploits the instrumentation to produce a particularly lively and colourful work, with the playful inquisitiveness of his discontinuous aesthetic at the forefront. Kotík’s own Outline / Fragment II retains a discernible foundation of his radical steady-state compositions from the Seventies beneath a more elaborate, if not exactly ornate, surface which raises the question of whether he has matured into a more eloquent mode of expression or just mellowed out and regressed towards conventional concert-hall gestures. We’re closer to a Boulez situation here than Glass or Reich so it’s fair to say the former.

Besides Kotík and Wolff, a couple of other names from recent festivals. Bruno Ferrandis conducts Ostravská banda’s premiere of Petr Bakla’s Diptych, an austere work for twelve string players. Bakla reduces everything here as much as he can, sustaining a monotonal line with a slow pulse, the faintest harmonization and gradations in colouring and dynamics to produce the illusion of motion. There is again a Xenakis piece, which seem to take on the role of a yardstick here amongst all the premieres. This time it’s the tour de force for string orchestra Shaar from 1983, which is always welcome, especially as ONO (conducted by Pavel Šnajdr this time) maintains momentum through the steady rhythm passages without trundling. Amongst the newer voices found here, several others lean into the same “less is more” approach heard in the Bakla piece. Michal Wróblewski’s Rhythms no. 3, Glissando appears to feature neither, except in a very subtle way to produce a precarious weave of light, thin material as played by Ostravská banda. James Falzone’s Neither/Nor II inhabits similar territory, even as Ostravská banda require a conductor (Ferrandis) for this piece, with studious attention to each pitch while sounding scarcely any thicker in texture than the original version scored for a trio of violin, piano and vibes.

There’s not enough of Zygmunt Krauze’s music readily available, so fortunately both download and CD include the premiere of his Rivière souterraine 3, with the composer as soloist on piano and Ostravská banda augmented by electronic sounds. It’s a craftily constructed montage of tableaux in which texture and colour take precedence over small-scale shape, where the details are articulated by what I suspect are sublimated examples of Krauze’s predilection for quotation, or ersatz quotation. In my ignorance I’m imagining that the title is a reference to the scherzo from Berio’s Sinfonia, but I’m not looking it up and the album booklet doesn’t say. The provided booklet doesn’t tell us anything about the music really, except that we dodged a bullet when the theatre piece about American politics documented in several photos was omitted from the album. There’s enough theatrics in František Chaloupka’s Allegory of the Cave II., which sounds like it should also be a piano concerto and almost is, making grotesques out of movie soundtrack tropes while occasionally channeling the earlier works of John Adams; it’s a natural fit but as with all grotesques the proportions of wonderment and disgust in your reaction will be a personal matter. Less forgivable is Ian Davis’s Pale Blue World which has a wan presence in this company, with that apologetic air that wafts through too much modern composition these days. As a disclaimer, I’m not an expert on this subject: for example, I keep mixing up Anne Cleare with Anna Clyne. This conundrum has hopefully been resolved once and for all by Canticum Ostrava’s performance of Cleare’s Earth Waves, a nakedly and defiantly weird piece from 2018 that combines the vocal ensemble with trombone (played here by William Lang) and electronic processing. Cleare relocates the contemplation of natural phenomena away from the limited realm of human experience, where the vast majority of it takes place, affirming its strangeness in relation to us while using the human voice as a means for doing so. The trombone and electronics act as transformative elements, both in altering the voices and in guiding them into extended means of expression. That exploratory, expressionist bent recalls the avant-garde of fifty years ago but tackles the medium with more assurance, aware that the technical and technological crudeness of the time is no longer necessary.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Ann Cleare, Christian Wolff, František Chaloupka, Iannis Xenakis, James Falzone, Michal Wróblewski, Petr Bakla, Petr Kotík, Phill Niblock, Zygmunt Krauze
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