Jürg Frey: Clarinet Quintet [Another Timbre]. The live premiere of Jürg Frey’s new Clarinet Quintet took place in Bologna last night; it will receive a performance in London next week. The musicians, all members of Apartment House, have also recorded the work for Another Timbre so you can hear it right away – the work was commissioned by the label founder Simon Reynell. The quartet, with Heather Roche on clarinet and a string quartet consisting of violinists Mira Benjamin and Chihiro Ono, Bridget Carey on viola and Anton Lukoszevieze cello, perform the piece with their usual exemplary dedication, with all the confident, self-assured understatement of, say, the Melos Quartet playing Brahms. Kids these days won’t remember that Frey used to be considered a radical, with compositions that focused on silence and repeated, single sounds to the extent that it felt like a provocation. The thing here is that he has not mellowed with age, or rebelled against his earlier style. The Clarinet Quintet is a sublimation of his earlier instincts and interests, showing consummate mastery over materials and technique as he works his way through from the beginning of the piece to its end. It’s a complex work that feels simple and approachable, yet on its own terms. The music steadily rolls out at a comfortable pace, instruments never straining to extremes, with hints of subdued melody woven throughout. I’d tell people it has a kind of pastoral feel. Almost too subtle to consciously register, there are fleeting moments which disturb the peaceable atmosphere: a melodic loose end, a skip in the rhythm, a brief transition where the voices clash and you understand that Frey has determined to things the hard way. What could have passed as merely pleasant becomes a reflection on how such contentment is precarious, negotiated and hard won, thus making pleasure fulfilling – there’s no sermonising on this; the values are imbued in the music that has resulted. The Apartment House strings mesh together but not too sweetly, each voice having its own quirks and quiet flashes of tetchiness; Roche’s clarinet blends into the overall texture, then emerges as soloist, steps back for periods then resumes blending into the background, making a character out of her part. Beyond its overall initial impression of solidity and suppleness, several listenings so far indicate a profound depth to this music and I suspect the listener’s responses to it will alter a little each time it is heard.
Jürg Frey: Je laisse à la nuit son poids d’ombre [Another Timbre]. It’s interesting to compare the Quintet with a work from about five years earlier, Je laisse à la nuit son poids d’ombre, released by Another Timbre last year. Of similar length, nearly an hour, but very different in its means and methods. The French ensemble]h[iatus with sopranos Hélène Fauchère and Géraldine Keller recorded this in 2021: a setting of lines by Swiss poet Anne Perrier and old Japanese haikus that fills out at a deliberately slow pace, seemingly to emerge one pitch at a time. Sounds, like words, are felt out and tested, with each one gradually finding a place in the larger scheme. For an ensemble of eight instruments plus voices, the texture is kept very thin until late in the piece; we’re well into the work before the presence of two voices is unmistakeable. Opposed to texture, the timbre is often strange and exotic, with unexpected percussion sounds and the addition of an analog synthesiser which nudges the ensemble towards the uncanny. I can’t write about this piece in greater depth now, but just wanted to draw attention to how Frey has produced two works that are apparently diametrically opposed in approach while sharing the same care and interest in sound and its effects, an equal level of craft.
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