I’ve been catching up on some recent releases by Catherine Lamb, who continues to beguile and mystify in turn. Curva Triangulus [Another Timbre] is the sole work on the latest album, a thirty-five minute octet played most gracefully by Ensemble Proton. This is an outstanding work from Lamb, imbued with a warmth and respiration that her music typically doesn’t like to display on the surface despite its construction being worked out with equal thoroughness. It is, as always, composed for a form of just intonation, combining harmonics and overtones of varying complexity to create a spectral sound; but in this instance any semblance of an unfolding process is obscured by recurring cadences, wandering melodic lines and alternation of contrasting instrumental groups, textures and registers. Without drawing attention to itself, it charms with its odd eclecticism, mixing discrete tuning principles into its modal phrases, the modest ensemble harboring exotic instruments both old (triple harp, clarinet d’amore, a reconstructed microtonal arciorgano) and new (contraforte, lupophone). Whether despite this or because of it, the music nonetheless gives an overall impression resembling 18th Century hymn tunes, steady and serene with a little warping at the seams that only reminds you of the sureness of its purpose.
Three works for voices are heard on parallaxis forma [Another Timbre]. Exaudi and the Explore Ensemble give a luminous rendition of color residua, as I heard them play it live last year. The remaining two pieces feature bravura performances by Lotte Betts-Dean: pulse/shade was written for four like voices but here Betts-Dean overdubs herself to form a strangely precise chorus, even as the vocalise is softened by the lack of consonants. The hocketing effect starts to feel a little forced after a while, even as you’re impressed by the halo of resonant tones that suffuse each stuttering phrase, and it seems a smaller work than its length suggests. Perhaps even more impressive and uncanny is Betts-Dean heard solo in parallaxis forma, for voice and ensemble. Explore Ensemble are the musicians again, producing an aura that surrounds and backgrounds Betts-Dean as her voice ascends, sometimes climbing, at others gliding, at times soaring into something beyond normal. Later, the voice has to drop below the singer’s normal range, hinting at the physical demands this music can make while we’re considering the depth of its abstractions. The sound is beautifully captured, the resonance of St Nicholas’ Church at Thames Ditton providing an almost unnatural sheen as it complements the players.
andPlay is a violin and viola duo, the two musicians being Maya Bennardo and Hannah Levinson. They play natural sounds in a natural way, which can be harder than it seems; it can get a little easier when it’s just the two of you listening to each other and the tuning of your strings, getting into the naturally occurring order of harmonics without any external push back towards the conformity of equal temperament. The two works on Translucent Harmonies [Another Timbre] both date from a concert given by the duo in 2018. Lamb’s Prisma Interius VIII makes another appearance here, having been recorded at least once before in an expanded version for recorder and strings with electronic spectral resonance. As a string duet, minus electronics, this “melodic” version reduces harmonic saturation to a bare minimum, with Bennardo and Levinson plotting out a path through just intonation pitches that bleed into each other by association as much as through superimposition. It returns strongly to some elements of Lamb’s music brought out by Johnny Chang’s solo violin plus synthesiser interpretation of Prisma Interius VII, the folkish traces and simplicity of line (not minimal, there’s a difference) stripped of ethereality and artifice, grounded in guttural strings. Kristofer Svensson’s Vid stenmuren blir tanken blomma was composed for andPlay as a companion piece to their concert presentation of Prisma Interius VIII: it’s a longer work that recalls Duk med broderi och bordets kant his solo violin piece also recorded by Bennardo. Also in just intonation, the piece meanders with a roughness and casualness that makes the Lamb piece appear stuffy. Here, the two instruments shadow each other warily, with melody or counterpoint to be more inferred than directly heard from the brief fragments held together by speculative silences. It differs from the solo piece in forsaking the wistfulness and playful approach for a more contemplative traversal of the trail, it’s also about twice as long, so that over the forty minutes Bennardo and Levinson begin to piece together a kind of intuitive continuity that’s more felt than heard.
