Jürg Frey: Voices [Neu]. For over twenty years now, the Exaudi vocal ensemble has combined exemplary technique with esoteric repertoire and adventurous interperative chops. Director and co-founder James Weeks leads the ensemble through a collection of Jürg Frey’s choral works, an aspect of Frey’s music that has had scant representation on record so far, probably because most of them were composed for Exaudi. All the pieces here are for unaccompanied voices. It’s tempting to call Frey’s approach to grouped voices as descontructive, ignoring the negative connotations that word can evoke, but that sense of taking music apart in different ways to examine how it works its effects on us pervades from one piece to the next. The opening work Out of Chorales begins with repeated chords on single words, isolated by short silences. In successive short movements the number of voices drops away from eight to four, then three, before returning to eight for the final movement, alternating between staggered vocal lines and rhythmic unison. Polyphonie der Wörter is the earlier work here, from 1998, allowing each singer free choice of text from a list of words, set to sequences of unresolved cadences. Any semantic sense from the words are obscured by multiplicity. Frey’s earlier style comes through, with suspended passages of wordless drones sung by the female voices, and one extended silence. Despite this dry formal structure and content, Exaudi transform the piece into something haunting and mysterious. (The singing was all recorded inside Temple Church in London, adding to the ambience.) Shadow and Echo and Jade could well be Frey’s most demonstrative work yet, with two groups of four voices each starting out by trading tones in near monotony, breaking into isolated fragments and then finally unfolding into glorious, radiant chords. The two final works are both settings of Emily Dickinson: Blue Bird’s Tune is a shorter, seemingly more conventional work which displays Frey’s hitherto undiscovered knack for choral writing, creating a mood from nuanced but sober harmonies. A related skill can be heard in the polyphony of Landscape of Echoes, which again applies formal structures to produce an elusive form. The setting of Because I could not stop for Death may be the most ambitious work here, not least because Frey counterposes Dickinson’s text with another by Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi on the constant renewal of nature amidst loss. Bai’s poem acts as a ground against the Dickinson setting, first as bass against solo soprano, leading into a slow, dreamlike polyphony that keeps a firm control on the verbal and harmonic material. The voices of Exaudi excel at these works which depend upon self-discipline and Frey builds a work of emotive and spiritual power by restraining subjectivity, finding enduring depths in the impersonal, in the manner of other art from outside the romantic tradition.
Nicolas Gombert & James Weeks: Gombert [Another Timbre]. Weeks is also a driving force behind this peculiar Gombert album, which apparently really is titled G O M B E R T and is not just a matter of typography. Despite presenting a selection of Gombert’s motets (and a chanson), there are no voices here. Instead, Weeks has arranged these pieces for chamber ensemble: flutes, clarinets, violin, violas and cello – strictly no muſyckinge. Later on, a trumpet appears. The ensemble is Apartment House, who play it as they would with their other contemporary commissions, clean and non-vibrato. What is Weeks trying to achieve with this? It’s not a “re-imagining” (ugh) of Gombert but a way of finding a means to hear Gombert for ourselves, by presenting his musical thinking to us plain. Shorn of verbal significance, historical baggage and churchy resonance, we get a new perspective of this complex but fluid polyphonic artistry. For added perspective, Weeks has composed his own interludes to create space between the arrangements. They are successful in that they don’t attempt to complement or contrast with Gombert, but to provide a pause. Deliberately reduced to little more than two alternating pivots, they announce themselves through the use of piano and the faint drone of a sine tone, with sparse instrumentation. Weeks refuses commentary and instead offers breathing space for reverie, before the polyphony resumes. The album was devised between Weeks and Another Timbre founder Simon Reynell, reflecting his taste for the lucid and unadorned: all detailing here is in its construction. As with Frey, the impersonal gains profundity when it engages with the listeners to reflect upon themselves, rather than be impressed by the artist’s personal sensitivity.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: James Weeks, Jürg Frey, Nicolas Gombert
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Three Fusis
Monday 25 August 2025
Andrew Greenwald: A Bridge Between Spaces [Kairos]. You wait ages for a solo viola d’amore album and then three come along at once. All three are by Marco Fusi and released on different labels so I checked for you and thankfully he hasn’t died. It’s not really true that these are strictly solo viola d’amore, not least because all the pieces on the Greenwald disc are for plain ol’ violin. At times you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise: Fusi digs deep into Greenwald’s A Thing Made Whole (heard previously as the opening of a larger cycle of works) to produce deep, rasping breaths and striated tones more associated with mediaeval instruments than the modern concert hall. In my earlier review, referring to Austin Wulliman’s interpretation of the piece, I blithely stated “I can’t imagine how their interpretations could be technically improved, given the consistency in their calm approach to the finicky scores.” Questions of technique aside, Fusi makes the piece an entirely different experience, dispelling any suggestion of spectralism by filling the tones with noisy urgency. The pacing is also urgent, with Fusi whipping through the piece in roughly two-thirds the time given by Wulliman, miked up close to catch every tiny extraneous sound.
Heard in this context, A Thing Made Whole becomes part of a new and different cycle, an intimate but confronting, even claustrophobic soliloquy of throaty harmonics and half-sounded pitch. A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not (VIII) exemplifies the handsy approach Greenwald and Fusi take towards the violin, each bowed sound surrounded by clusters of taps and smudges against the instrument’s neck and body. It resembles the way Fusi and his composer collaborators treat the viola d’amore, as a resonant object more than a simple producer of notes. The opening piece on the album, the title work, is the most violinistic and, at least in the use of pitch, most conventional; it’s permeated with a nervy loquaciousness whose ticks and stutters which become the focus of close scrutiny in the subsequent, although earlier composed, works. (The contrasting Bourrée is a pregnant pause, seeming about a million miles away from the Back movement it echoes.) The solo works are set apart by Frames, the result of inspired improvisation between Fusi on violin and Greenwald on drumkit, the latter releasing the restrained voice of the former while sharing a percussive language, providing both grounding and ventilation to the more rarefied monologues.
Wired Resonances [Huddersfield Contemporary Records]. Fusi’s collaborations with seven composers to produce works for solo viola d’amore are heard here, mostly recent plus one dating back to 2014. That older piece, Zeno Baldi’s Spikes, suffers from the extensive use of electronics which makes it all sound over-processed and less an extension of the instrument than attempt to dress up an unprepossessing subject. Five of the works use electronics, with Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh’s Breathless having the same fault as the Spikes by using the viola d’amore as a means to an end without aparent regard for its particular characteristics. The electroacoustic works by Pierre Alexandre Tremblay and Barbara Nerness take place on a more equal footing, with Fusi performing in duet with the composer. Tremblay adds his own electric bass to his digital augmentations of Fusi’s playing, while Nerness spotlights and backdrops the viola d’amore with electronic treatments and field recordings. The most successful electronically-enhanced piece is Bára Gísladóttir’s ORF (en líka axir og önnur pyntingatæki), a characteristically audacious and pungent work with frailties and vulgarities set against discomfiting sound affects from suburbia. It’s not the only Gísladóttir piece which seems funny at first but gets more disturbing with further reflection – or the other way round, depending on your temperament. I’ll decide when I find out if they in fact have a suburbia in Iceland. Of the straight-up acoustic works, Giovanni Verrando’s Fourth Born Unicorn, rounded version is a brief Lachenmann-like study in the marginal sounds produced by a prepared viola d’amore, but Mary Bellamy’s Shivering Mountain is a substantial and comprehensive work that exploits the resilience of the instrument, with Fusi demonstrating how even the frailest sounds can persist, and revealing a surprising capability for richly coloured multiple stops.
Evan Johnson: dust book [Another Timbre]. Speaking of exploiting the viola d’amore’s acoustic properties, Evan Johnson has Fusi pursue these qualities to their fullest, but in a very different direction. dust book is one long work in six sections, beginning and ending with interludes, each of which are longer than the sections they frame which should tip you off that we’ve strayed far from the conventional. On the first listen you’ll struggle to distinguish one section from another, because you’ll struggle to distinguish any sound at all from the background ambience of your home. Johnson’s predilection for redolent silences and small sounds are pushed to an extreme of sorts, spurred on by the viola d’amore’s dual nature of astringent timbre and surprising resonance. Fusi is given the task of microdosing the sonorous, concentrating everything into small flecks of sound. Some of Johnson’s compositions can enervate, but the tensions at play here arise from the level at detail set amongst the featureless expanse, mixing abundance with formal parsimony. It is ultimately about sound rather than about ideas about sound, contra the Sphinx-like pseudo-profundity found in, say Manfred Werder. Be reassured there’s no earrape with sudden outbursts, so you can safely listen to it cranked up and not miss anything. One section is labelled as “several canons”, as a challenge for the advanced listener.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Andrew Greenwald, Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, Bára Gísladóttir, Barbara Nerness, Evan Johnson, Giovanni Verrando, Mary Bellamy, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, Zeno Baldi
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The Deceptive: Phillip Golub, Leo Chadburn
Sunday 10 August 2025
Phillip Golub: Loop 7 [greyfade]. You may remember Phillip Golub’s earlier album Filters, in which four pieces titled Loop presented interlocking piano melodies with a recursive nature that resembled musical knots, loosened enough to allow each twist and turn to be observed but never ultimately traced to a resolution. Loop 7 stands alone here as a half-hour piece, suggesting something similar yet more elaborate. Befitting the subtle deviousness of Golub’s compositional thinking, it both is and isn’t. The long piano loops wind around each other in a lazy fashion, casually leading you back to where you’re sure you’ve already been, over and over. This time, the single Steinway is replaced by two Disklaviers retuned to a 22-note scale, adding to that woozy feeling of something being out of kilter despite sounding irrefutably correct. There’s also some subtle electronic processing, which you eventually start to notice, and two live musicians (Aaron Edgcomb on vibraphone and Ty Citerman on electric guitar) who you may not notice at all. Their almost imperceptible playing adds to the reverberant aura that shimmers around the pianos, making the music’s progress increasingly inexplicable. Seasoned punters will start getting flashbacks to “1/1” off Music For Airports and with good reason, each presenting the same imperturbable surface, only Golub’s is more playful than oblique.
Leo Chadburn: The Primordial Pieces [Library Of Nothing]. In their manner of presentation, Chadburn’s compositions purport to be simple, but their apparent directness is deceptive. This suite of five pieces are reworkings of “sketches” Chadburn made some twenty years back, but the simplicity of their materials belie the insidious effects they produce on the listener. The outer pieces present pianist Ben Smith, playing ascending, scale-like figures over a background wash of synthesiser tones. A Secret, heard at the Music We’d Like To Hear fest last month, is presented here with electronics acting as a background wash -the importance of that role should not be de-emphasised. Its opening counterpart, The Reflecting Pool, is more florid, with grand chromatic flourishes underpinned by ominous drones that occasionally slip out of gear. The strings appear in the inner movements, each for four violins (Angharad Davies, Mira Benjamin, Chihiro Ono, Amalia Young), appearing first as feathered chord sustained and motivated by incidental tremoloes, then on their return as pure quivering, relieved only by a short spell of descending harmonics. The central piece is Smith alone on piano, a troubled labyrinth of unresolved arpeggiations of an unresolved chord, that varies only in intensity, flagging and then redoubling in its efforts until suddenly stopping dead. It’s the unstill centre for a nested cycle of pieces that could otherwise be carelessly mistaken as calming.
