review 14 may 2008

Colchester New Music Day May 14^th 2008

Sarah Leonard and Gemini Ensemble

Ian Mitchell, Clarinet; Rose Redgrave, Viola; Joby Burgess, Percussion; Huw Watkins,Piano

Though this was certainly not the object of the exercise, if Gemini's performance of the Harrison Birtwistle Ring a Dumb Carillon in the evening concert is taken to be a kind of model of what ‘New Music' is about,of all the pieces on this so exciting day (lunchtime, afternoon and evening),  in terms of musical originality and invention, Julia Usher's two pieces came the closest to modelling on it.

Il Pozzo di San Patrizio is a musical depiction of vertiginous rising & falling in the 62 metres deep well at Orvieto. Terrifying ‘vertigo & disorientation'. From Julia's programme note it seems that the piece is intended to describe the journey down and up again but any attempt to identify a one for one relationship between the music and a physical placing on the journey would be a severe distraction from the musical experience-to take the whole experience in one fusion of sensation is far more rewarding: the descent and ascent, the ‘sinking in the knees', lightness and clarity and release-all seem to me to be conveyed at once.

Incalmo, with libretto devised by Julia and Ruth Smith, is, as befits a glass-blowing workshop, for health & safety reasons, a tightly organised kind of music drama. Sarah Leonard, in the character of Glassblower, gave a spirited declamation with much inventive percussion effects and parallel declamations on clarinet & piano. At one level the drama is about the processes of glass-blowing; at another level, glass-blowing is taken to be a metaphor for life which evolves out of shapelessness, a metaphor for human relationships-the chemistry of the glass and the chemistry between people, tensions, success and breakage. Bubbles of life, as we are...

In the evening concert, Alan Parsons' riveting Mantissa came next in terms of style. A kind of discussion piece between piano & marimba, limpid exchanges between viola & cello and exquisite emergent long ‘tunes' when viola, cello and marimba got together.

At the other end of the musical spectrum, and none the worse for that, came Tim Torry's In the Thousand Million Worlds, a setting of a Buddhist text has elements of Vaughan Williams & Holst in meditative mode. Ecstatic chants, ‘richly perfumed' harmonies, tranquillity... with a bit of jazziness thrown in.  Ultimately, there is a sense of profound arrival at some peaceful place which one seems to have known all one's life but lost the map for. The mood of the music lingers.

Tim's piece concluded a scintillating evening which started in similar mode with Mark Bellis' The Genealogy of Christ and included very exciting Colchester Institute student pieces which were given a workshop going-over in the afternoon.  The Genealogy of Christ is a hugely successful piece. A trance-like, simple, sparing song-line, setting a text from St Luke: Jesus... which was the son of...  which was the son of...  all the way down the 77 generations to Adam and God. Ineffable chords with incredibly taut climaxes and finally God on a long high Bflat.

Stuart Russell's energetic Carillon for Julia Usher, just post-minimalist thrust itself impulsively onwards threaded on clarinet & viola..

The lunchtime concert began with Paul Buckley's nicely complex exciting Tiger Tiger. There's an incisive viola part with sardonic woodblock commentary. The clarinet constantly seems to be on the point of making a breakthrough with its own tentative melodies & arias...

Alan Bullard's initially wordlessly sung Lament requires you to read the words of the folk-song ‘All things are quite silent' to know that the young wife's husband has been press-ganged to fight in the Napoleonic wars. You compress them into a gestalt so you intuit lamentation, green fields, valleys ringing with thrushes, absence... The gestalt springs into life when the words are sung at the end and the piano has simple descending phrases against more ominous chords so that we know there's no certainty here. A very effective variation process preceding the theme itself.

Roy Teed's Aubade starts with a viola solo of a distinctly pastoral kind, beautifully reminiscent of RVW. There are lively wake-up calls on viola & piano with certain wistful pauses that return to the opening viola gesture. The ending is energetic and expansive.

Paul Buckley described my own Five Variants as ‘abstract pastoralism' which pleased me greatly. Every piece of music I write has my long dead father's very musical initials CGFBflat in it; they occur in each of the five variants.

What a day this was!

 Colin Blundell