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.
