Purcell Room
Charlotte
Bray: Invisible Cities
(2011); Beyond (2013)
Emilie
Meyer: Piano Quartet no.2
in G major
Bray:
Oneiroi (2013); On the Other Shore (2014); Zustände
(2016)
Philipp Bohnen (violin)
Barbara Buntrock (viola)
Isang Enders (cello)
Gerhard Vielhaber (piano)
Huw Watkins (piano)
In Aix this summer, I heard –
and enthused about – Charlotte Bray’s new work for solo viola, In Black Light. I was therefore very keen to hear a concert back here in London,
largely of her music; moreover, I was certainly not disappointed. Invisible Cities, the first piece on the
programme, is also for viola, albeit with piano. Barbara Buntrock and Huw
Watkins gave a performance full of nervous energy. Its first movement of four, marked
‘vivid, frenetic’, certainly proved vividly variegated, opening with memorable
contrast and synthesis – I think – of post-Schoenbergian harmonies with
jazzy-Gallic syncopation. ‘Unnerved,
intimate’ is the marking for the second movement and so again it proved, with
an intangible yet unquestionable sense of development from its predecessor.
Buntrock truly dug into the strings, preparing the way for what I hope it is
not too Romantic to describe as organically developing third and four
movements, the latter climactic in both anticipated and unanticipated ways.
Piano repeated notes offered counterpoint according to various understandings,
viola harmonics seemingly generative of new yet related material, music and
performance (piano and pizzicato viola) eventually fading into nothing.
Beyond, for solo violin, was sensitively and
indeed commandingly performed by Phillip Bohnen. It offered a nicely elegiac
pendant to the preceding, longer work, considerable use of the violin’s lower
register offering both continuity with and difference from the viola. Further
continuity was to be found in an equally keen sense of longer line, silence
included: again in a fashion reminiscent of, yet never to be assimilated to,
much Austro-German Romanticism.
Emilie Meyer’s 1857 Piano
Quartet in G major proved the only disappointment. Such was not a matter of
performance, the Maniari Piano Quartet doing everything one could reasonably
have asked for. Although we could enjoy a lovely chamber music sound, there was
little to the work 'itself'. In the traditional four movements, it fared best when
songful: pleasant enough, if hardly individual of voice. A few scattered
passages aside, for instance the opening of the scherzo, the composer struggled
to impart much in the way of formal dynamism or even coherence. What might have
passed muster as background music overstayed its concert hall welcome.
Following the interval,
however, there was to be more Bray – and most welcome it proved. First up,
Watkins returned to perform Oneiroi
for solo piano with what seemed to me an ideal match of passion and humanity.
According to the composer, ‘its muse was principally other music, that of Hans
Werner Henze and Oliver Knussen particularly’. Ghosts of Henze’s piano music I
certainly heard: perhaps again that post-Schoenberg inheritance, or maybe that
is just me? There seemed to be at work a fruitful, generative dialectic both in
work and performance between (surface?) freedom and tight, underlying
organisation.
On
the Other Shore, for solo
cello, received a fine performance from Isang Yenders. In Bray’s words, it ‘represents
an idea … of observing something from afar whilst not able to get close to it’.
That comes very close to what I imagined I heard: a sense of intimacy at
distance, of coming into and falling out of focus. As with the earlier piece
for solo violin, both the long line and its possible constructive allusions and
illusions came strongly to the fore.
Finally, we heard Zustände for violin, viola, cello, and
piano, performed by the Mariani players. Its three movements take inspiration
from various ‘states’ – as in the title – of ice, the first ‘Brittle, frozen,
slowly disintegrating’, the second ‘Freely, fiercely independent’ as a ‘majestic,
lone iceberg’, the third ‘Bright, alert,’ located, we are told, ‘within the
highly energised, at times threatening, environment of an ice field’. There was
certainly icy tension to be heard at the opening, imbued with a paradoxical,
productive sense of desire, albeit thwarted, to suspend time. It moved, and
rightly so. The piano was silent for most of the second movement, which seems
to rise, aptly enough, from the cello line up. It is glacial, perhaps, in a way
not dissimilar to some of Bartók’s music. Bray describes the final movement as ‘varied
and unpredictable’. Once more, so it sounded in performance before I had so
much as looked at the programme note. Control of material and the expressive
means to which such control is put were never remotely in doubt. Zustände and other solo and chamber
works (Beyond, Invisible Cities, and On the
Other Shore included) may be
heard on a new RTF Classical CD: on this basis, highly recommended!
