Queen Elizabeth Hall
Zeynep
Gedizlioğlu: Kesik (2010, UK premiere)
Anahita
Abbasi: Situation II/Dialoge (2016, UK premiere)
Martin
Grütter: Die Häutung des Himmels (2016, UK premiere)
Ashley
Fure: Feed Forward
(2016, UK premiere)
Vito
Žuraj: Runaround
(2014, UK premiere)
Rebecca
Saunders: Fury II (2009, UK premiere)
Saunders:
a
visible trace (2006)
Saunders:
SKIN (2015-16)
Paul Cannon (double bass)
Juliet Fraser (soprano)
Ensemble Modern
Vimbayi Kaziboni (conductor)
Musical performance comes in many varieties, many of which I love. I should be lying if I claimed not greatly to look forward to
evenings with the likes of Maurizio Pollini or Daniel Barenboim, or my annual
visit to Salzburg. There is nothing, however, quite like being confronted with
new music: either brand new, in which case only the performers and perhaps the
odd rehearsal observer will have heard it, or verging upon it, as for instance
in the first of these two concerts in the Southbank Centre’s new SoundState
Festival, which, as its publicity puts it, ‘bringing together an unrivalled
concentration of global creativity, … celebrates the artists,’ or at least some
of them, ‘who are defining what it means to make new music in the 21st
century’. It is good for the ears and the mind: I have nothing on which to go
other than what I hear there and then. It is crucial for the future of music.
And it is far more exciting than any run-of-the-mill subscription concert, with
an equally run-of-the-mill audience. A severe spot or two of bronchial activism
is likely to prove the most surprising thing in the latter case. Here, who
knows what might happen?
The two concerts I heard were
both given by the Ensemble Modern and conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni. Performances,
insofar as I could tell, were just as excellent as one would have expected from
such players. The first concert offered five works by young composers, chosen
by the ensemble as musicians they admired, the second three works by Rebecca
Saunders, one of my most admired living composers, who just two days previously
had been awarded the 2019 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the first woman composer to have
received the prize and only the second woman at all (the first having been
Anne-Sophie Mutter). That, of course, tells its own tale, so it was heartening
to hear one concert in which three of the five composers featured were women
and another in which the sole composer was Saunders. Such is again another
advantage of much, if not yet quite enough, that happens in the world of new
music.
Zeynep Gedizlioğlu’s Kesik, or ‘Cut’, opened the first
concert. Its opening wind éclat promised much, repeated yet never quite:
different outcomes, different potentialities. ‘Lacerating’ was another word
that came to mind – not only, I think, on account of the work’s title. Part way
through, the oboe cut in, with a microtonal melody line more or less unbroken,
that spoke perhaps of the ‘oriental’ or ‘orientalism’, or was that my
orientalist projection? There was little or nothing in the way of repose until
that oboe line ceased, followed by a thwack of the bass drum.
Two United Kingdom premieres of
Anahita Abbasi works within a couple of days of each other: first it had been
her Intertwined Distances for harpsichord and electronics, courtesy of Mahan Esfahani;
now we heard her ensemble piece, Situation
II/Dialoge. A sense of landscape was strong, at least to my ears and
imagination: wind, or something like it, something like its effects, rustling
through bunches of leaves shaken by two of the players; sounds from inside the
piano; cello and double bass working together in crude (from the standpoint of
a Mozart orchestra) sounds heard in more or less contrary motion. Sounds that
were (relatively) more expected emerged out of that eery calm before a storm,
without the storm ever truly materialising. Unisons were achieved rather than a
given, quickly lost, prior to a return to the aural world of the opening,
chimes fading away a niente.
Martin Grütter’s Die Häutung des Himmels (‘The Skinning
of the Heavens’), scored for seven instruments (flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet/bass
clarinet, horn, trombone, double bass, and distant percussion), came next. The
distance of the percussion, behind and above evoked the celestial or at least
skyward dimension – like many languages, French does not distinguish between ‘sky’
and ‘heaven’ as English does – of a distant world whose goings on (aural in
this case) shaped, even determined those back down on earth, or onstage. A
sense of musical drama was strong: almost a scena
without words. Teeming wind lines, jazzy (yes, I know, but the cliché seems to
work here) bass pizzicato-led riffs: quickly changing moods, like products of the
weather or warring gods – are they perhaps the same? – processed before our
ears. It felt – and I am doubtless romanticising here, as is my wont – as if a
new Alpine Symphony were less being
presented then already reimagined, reinterpreted, redramatised.
Ashley Fure’s Feed Forward was the only one work I
found over-extended, but that may well have been my misunderstanding: I should
happily re-listen in order better to find my feet, should the chance arise.
There was, at any rate, some initial overlap or affinity with sounds in Grütter’s
piece: happenstance, maybe, or good programming? Structure was quite different,
as was the overall sound world, accordion sounding surprisingly unearthly in
context. A sense (deliberate, I think!) of tiring, of gesture wearing thin,
seemed integral to the work and its course.
The first concert came to an
end with Vito Žuraj’s Runaround, for
brass quartet (two trumpets, trombone, and horn) and ensemble. This was, I
think, the second time I had encountered Žuraj’s music, the first having been at
the Salzburg Festival in 2013. (Salzburg and new music, you see, are
anything but antithetical, whatever false dichotomy I drew at the opening.)
Žuraj, it seems, is a tennis enthusiast, many of his pieces (French Open, Changeover, etc.) finding inspiration in some aspect of the game.
In this case, it was table tennis: a game in a hotel room with brass players
from the Ensemble Modern. There was certainly a sense of everything to play
for, aleatoric elements apparently being present. Another thing that struck me
was the fineness of ear: even when using extended techniques, there was always
a sense of working with rather than against the instruments and their possibilities.
Spirits of jazz bands past hovered in fond parody, prior to a whirling,
intermittently waltzing vortex that for me faintly echoed – not necessarily a
matter of ‘influence’ – Ravel’s La Valse.
Comparison with Saunders would
be futile: an established, if woefully underrated (especially in this country)
composer spoke for herself, or rather her works spoke for themselves. First to
be heard was Fury II, for double bass
and ensemble, here with Paul Cannon as soloist. He seemed to me very much first
among equals, though, for at heart this is as much an ensemble piece (piano,
accordion, bass clarinet, cello, double bass, two percussionists) as anything
else. The dark, low rumbling from various instruments played on their affinity:
any might have emerged as the ‘soloist’ – or none. Indeed, other instruments
seemed often almost to speak as if they were double basses. Saunders’s finely
honed, post-Webern writing once again revealed the importance of every note,
timbre, combination, and so forth. There was drama – drum thwacks and all – but
with the tightest of focus, no ‘mere’ effect. Highly wrought, pent up in the
best sense, this was a work of undeniable mastery both as written and in performance.
a visible trace again offered much affinity and elision
between instrumental lines that yet remained clear: for instance, opening
transformation of viola into trombone. Intensity of string playing (and
writing) was striking indeed, an agent ultimately of distillation that was not
quite spare. This is not parsimonious writing, any more than Webern’s is. There
is fragility, even lack, yet neither is accidental. As in Italo Calvino’s
inspiring words, ‘The word,’ or perhaps the note, ‘connects the visible trace
with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or
feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.’ Slow, yet ever-changing
(not to preclude frenzy within), this is a piece whose timbral and other
relationships never cease to fascinate in their unfolding, in their paths, in
the traces they leave and mark out. As one instrument falls silent, another has
(almost) imperceptibly already begun.
Juliet Fraser’s soprano performance
proved the crowning joy of the evening and of SKIN, a work catalysed by lines from Beckett: ‘… this is the room’s
essence/not being/now look closer/mere dust/dust is the skin of a room/history
is a skin’. Interrelationships again came to the fore, perceived as if through
a skin-like membrane. What was the sound of, say, a string instrument and what
suggested it? Breath and its possibilities seemed to permeate the membrane of
perception, of consciousness. The eloquence of every differentiation in stages
from speaking to not-speaking, from speech to song, created and deconstructed
words and music before our ears. Words could speak, but so could instruments;
likewise with song. How meaningful was the distinction at all? Was it not the
all-embracing drama of something not so very distant from what we should once
have called a cantata the thing, the non-staged play, the drama of notes and
their performance? It is a large-scale work, yet every note counted: just as
much as in its two predecessors. A cry of ‘Sk – in’ at the close reminded us of
the work’s origin, course, and destination. End: or, as Beckett might have put
it, ‘fin’.
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