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.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Kristofer Svensson
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Keyboards without Ego: Golub, Svensson, Tolimieri
Saturday 17 December 2022
“Who cares if you listen?” becomes something of a Zen koan when listening to these three collections of keyboard pieces: all at once they are personal in their conception and execution yet impersonal in their aims and affect on the listener. Phillip Golub’s Filters is a set of four piano pieces released on Greyfade, a label dedicated to process-based composition. Golub composes loops, simple repeating patterns which he then layers and alternates into subtly varying patterns. He has used these to create installations of indeterminate length, but for this LP he reduces his material to a couple of interlockling loops played on piano to create four modest but substantial pieces of roughly equal dimensions. Roughly equal characters, too: Golub has selected his materials (and his takes – the track titles indicate that one piece was discarded) to sound similar internally and externally. As each piece resembles the others, so does each moment of a piece resemble its others, allowing the listener either to ignore any difference or to listen closely in an attempt to distinguish each loop’s start and end. The overall pattern resembles a loosened knot, where each part may be examined but not pulled free from its structure. Golub’s language resembles Satie, in its recursiveness and use of familiar harmonies detourned through being stripped of direction and functional purpose. The pieces were recorded on “a beautifully maintained Steinway D” and its soft, buttery tone is well captured here.
A more spindly sound is offered for the two compositions by Kristofer Svensson on Mats Persson and Kristine Scholz’s stilla sväva. You may remember Svensson from Maya Bennardo playing his Duk med broderi och bordets kant for solo violin on a previous Kuyin release. You may remember Persson and Scholz from their various recordings of Cage and Feldman etc. (their double CD of Christian Wolff’s piano duets is an excellent introduction to that recondite composer). The keyboards heard here are older instruments: Persson plays a clavichord on the half-hour suite I Sommarluft before being joined by Scholz for a four-hands duet on a 19th century square piano in Kori Kamandungan. Both works require the instruments to be returned into a just-intonation system of Svensson’s devising. It all makes for a bracing combination, with the slowness characteristic of much just-intonation music at odds with the sharp attach and quick decay of the instruments. Composer and musicians work together here to make music of finely engraved lines and points in a slow, thin counterpoint. The material draws on themes from various cultures and periods of history, ranging from Sundanese tradition to Mamoru Fujieda’s study of floral electrostatics. Some notes on the square piano sound prepared, unless Svensson has really exploited the harmonic potential of the instrument’s stringing. Otherwise, the retuning does not draw attention to itself other than to give clarity to the fragile shapes and a faint resonance to highlight the delicate craftmanship deployed here. Both works are recorded in their first full hearing, with the mics hot enough to capture the room and extraneous sounds as well as all of the strings’ qualities.
The above pieces can be heard as being created out of a sense of compulsion and obligation to their art more than a goal of moving a listener in a given way; this goes double for Quentin Tolimieri’s three-hour set of piano solos Monochromes. A cycle of fifteen compositions, it begins gently enough with the slowly circling Monochrome 1, before really leaning into the title’s premise. Number 2 obsessively rags on arpeggiated clusters in the top register, then number 3 obsessively hammers a muted string until a emits a veil of harmonics. It’s a catalogue of forms shaped by techniques, in unison with material created as by-product of those techniques, overtones and beating frequencies, damped and muted strings. Some pieces are little more than gestural exercises, such as the exhausting 35-minute marathon of tremoloes that makes up the entirety of the central number 8. Number 12’s similarly taxing roll of alternating high clusters also suggests that both pianist and listener need to be prepared and in the right state of mind before launching into some of these pieces, so that the fruits of your respective labours can be best appreciated. The wacky thing is that the overall cycle’s structure is not nearly as rigorous as it intially appears, as a run of several highly reductive pieces is suddenly interrupted by a soft, beguiling work as number 13, one of several works where melody and changes are free to unfold. As a reflection of Tolimieri’s own musical practice as composer and performer, it makes you question how deeply you listen into any piece, regardless of its surface detail.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Kristofer Svensson, Phillip Golub, Quentin Tolimieri
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Maya Bennardo: four strings
Monday 19 September 2022
Violinist Maya Bennardo has just released an album of two pieces for solo instrument, titled four strings. This is all new to me, except that I have heard other works by Eva-Maria Houben. The first piece, Duk med broderi och bordets kant, is by Kristofer Svensson and centres on a bright but wistful theme which is teased apart by Bennardo in various ways. The complete melody can only be inferred as the pattern is repeatedly broken up with gaps, or pauses, or through time being prolonged or momentarily suspended. It’s a playful act of analytical scrutiny, taking something that hints at a whole and deconstructing it into redolent fragments, each of which may be taken as sufficient in itself.
Bennardo’s playing is alert to the possibilities contained within such brief moments, a point which becomes even more important in the titular work by Eva-Maria Houben. Houben’s music reflects a kind of obsessive care over each sound, even when the sound may be particularly unprepossessing. This can sometimes be offputting to the casual listener, or even not so casual, as you wonder what she may have heard in them in the first place. Bennardo presents Houben’s four strings in a generous interpretation, balancing its stringent emphasis on high pitches and its allowances for free sounds and improvisation. Within the score’s constraints, she presents each note in a unique way, taking the slenderest of material to build a substantial piece of light and shade, from silence and sound.
