London Sinfonietta/Cornelius - Varèse, Boulez, Feldman, Berio, and Davies, 18 May 2022

Hall Two, Kings Place

Varèse: Density 21.5
Boulez: Dérive 1
Morton Feldman: The Viola in My Life 3
Berio: O King
Tansy Davies: grind show (unplugged)

Simone Ibbett-Brown (mezzo-soprano)

Michael Cox (flute)

Paul Silverthorne (viola)

London Sinfonietta

Gerry Cornelius (conductor)

The London Sinfonietta’s Couch to Concert programme is intended for ‘newcomers … an exercise programme for the ears that will help you work towards attending a concert of contemporary classical music, and arm yourself with the tools to listen to (and even enjoy!) this genre’. I confess that I have yet to listen to the podcasts, but what an excellent idea. There certainly seemed to be a reasonable turnout in Hall Two of Kings Place; let us hope that some at least of the audience was there for the first time as a result. 

Varèse’s Density 21.5, here performed by Michael Cox, has humanity’s oldest instrument become its newest. Cox offered detail without pedantry, a masterclass in notes becoming music. Variations in vibrato, attack, dynamics, as well as telling phrasing all contributed to overall shape and direction, in a vividly communicative performance that would surely have had many wonder why this music might ever have been considered ‘difficult’. Boulez’s Dérive 1 followed, that opening, generative figure pregnant with potential. Its febrile clarity, married to post-Debussyan languor created and constructed balance and direction before our ears. Endlessly transforming, both free and determined, this was a fine introduction to the Boulezian labyrinth. 

Morton Feldman offered an instructive contrast, with the third of his The Viola in My Life pieces, this for viola (Paul Silverthorne) and piano (Elizabeth Burley). Its introverted intensity put me in mind almost of a passive-aggressive Messiaen (!) More fundamentally, though, its undeniable minimalism emerged as a real aesthetic, not the populist tag of contemporary centrist dads who merely like the sound music makes. Like what had gone, as well as what was to come, it had one listen. 

Berio’s O King was the only piece to open the human voice: older still than the flute, of course. It is difficult, probably impossible, to imagine humanity without it. Mezzo Simone Ibbett-Brown proved utterly in control of her instrument, if we may call it that, dazzlingly so when dovetailing with other members of the ensemble. Differences were revealed too, as they were between other players, ultimately revealed as penumbra to her lament for Dr King. Last up was Tansy Davies’s grind show (unplugged), to my ears more clearly post-Stravinskian than anything else we had heard. Rhythmically insistent, even obstinate, its status as dance music was abundantly clear in this London Sinfonietta performance. Something for everyone, then, which I suspect was a good part of the point.

Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival (3) – RUNE, 18 August 2021

Round Chapel, Hackney

 

Image: Jarno Leppanen/KA WA KEY

Kes’Cha’Au – Patricia Auchterlonie
Khye-Rell – Simone Ibbett-Brown

The MA – Ben Smith (musical director)
The VA – Siwan Rhys
The VAL’NAK’SHA – Joseph Havlat

The Waters – Ryan Appiah-Sarpong, Max Gershon, Shakeel Kimotho, Thomas Page

Gemma A. Williams, Jarno Leppanen (directors)
Ka Wa Wey (fashion)
Sid the Salmon (sculpture)

My final visit to this year’s Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival was also the final night of the festival. Alastair White’s RUNE was unquestionably my highlight, a worthy successor to WEAR, which I saw in 2018. (There have been others in between too.) Looking down from the balcony of Hackney’s Round Chapel, we saw and heard a reflection and dramatisation, both enigmatic and increasingly direct, of the journey of a young girl who, in a world in which history was forbidden, dared discover and tell her story and thereby to uncover the rune of the universe’s origin. Of course, no one, least of all our holidaying Foreign Secretary, could have predicted this would coincide with the terrible victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan; but that in itself heightened the importance not only of the message, if message there were—that, quite rightly, was left for us to ponder—but also of the very deeds of artistic creation and performance, runes of our own origins, existence, and, we hope, flourishing.

Image: Hannah Lovell

A beguiling sound-world of two female voices, soprano Patricia Auchterlonie and mezzo Simone Ibbett-Brown, and three pianos (the MA, VA, and VAL’NAK’SHA) rendered both strange and familiar what we knew. Drama lay as much in their interaction, glittering, lyrical, highly logical, yet capricious, and so much else, as in the words and scenic directions of White’s compelling libretto. A Prologue set the scene in terms of musical processes—and pitches, four of them eventually ceding their place to a fifth, and so on, as diminution of note values had our thoughts and responses gather pace. Mesmerising movement from Waters personified, their dress seemingly as integral to the whole as musical and verbal processes, helped create and order a visual framework, yet also bent our aural perception and understanding. The ‘transdimensional canals’ through which Kes’Cha’Au’s journey took her—and us—suggested a melding of physical and metaphysical, of quantum mechanics and spatial manifestation, and so much else: something, or some things, we consider to be art, history, culture, everything we consider both to impart value to our lives and yet also to defy notions of mere value. Symbols, ciphers, directions, whether verbal, visual, or in the half-lights and half-lives of piano and vocal reverberations, ‘traces of our passage’, propelled us on our way, perhaps to understand but certainly to wonder.

My immediate desire, upon reaching the end—or should that be the beginning?—was to wish to start again, to listen and re-listen, to watch and re-watch, in the light of tentative progress I had made. It was as if those numerical relationships that formed the walls of the universe itself had become sound, movement, and much else, as if the sounds that did likewise had become words, numbers, movement, and so on. Asking what came first was less beside the point than a question that never arose. Such, I think, was testament to the quality both of work and performance.

 

Image: Hannah Lovell