Showing posts with label Britten Sinfonia Voices. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Britten Sinfonia Voices. Show all posts

Saturday, 15 April 2017

Tweets from Easter at King's 2017

Tweets from Easter at King's 2017 (and a night at Cambridge Modern Jazz)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

Tweets from Easter at King's 2017 (and a night at Cambridge Modern Jazz)





Tuesday 11 April :








Wednesday 12 April :










Maundy Thursday [at Cambridge Modern Jazz, with Arnie Somogy's 'Jump Monk' Quintet] ~ 13 April :



Not in any formally aleatoric way, but just because that was how pieces had fallen from, and been restored to, his music-stand, leader Arnie Somogyi (double-bass) deviated from the set-list, and so there was an uneven spread between what Thelonius Sphere Monk and Charles Mingus had written :

This went well, because we knew that we were in for an evening of Monk and Mingus staples – the latter had even written ‘Jump Monk’ for the former (even if most of Monk’s puns or wordplay remained just as obscure). When frontmen, Tony Kofi (alto) and Jeremy Price (trombone) stepped aside, we reduced to the cohesive form of the classic trio, with Mark Edwards (piano) and Clark Tracey (drums) playing tightly with Somogyi, and not even averse to a solo, all of which rarely did not have us nodding along to what these exponents of their art were devising.

Price and Kofi are very different players, so they did not try to compete with each other’s style, and Price’s playing complemented the improvisation that we had heard from Kofi : they each listened with care to the other, and, whereas Kofi’s is a more right-ahead sound, Price played with an inward-out manner that focused on a rounded tone-quality. As the audience did, who were really getting into these developmental lines, Somogyi must have liked long-form solos, and he would only sparingly call in any of the players, when he wanted to shape where the number was going. All in all, a very full and good night’s jazz !



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Good Friday ~ 14 April :







Holy Saturday ~ 15 April :













Easter Monday ~ 17 April :










 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 14 December 2015

A supple rendition of Messiah from a modern orchestra and its chorus

This reviews Messiah, performed by Britten Sinfonia and Britten Sinfonia Voices

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 December (link to additonal review added, 22 December)

This is a review of Messiah, performed in Cambridge by Britten Sinfonia and Britten Sinfonia Voices at West Road Concert Hall, conducted by Eamonn Dougan and led by Thomas Gould, on Tuesday 14 December at 7.30 p.m.





Part I

Adeptly keeping the movements ‘ticking over’ was one of the many strengths of this performance by Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) and Britten Sinfonia Voices, under the leadership of Thomas Gould (@ThomasGouldVLN) and the baton of Eamonn Dougan (@ejdougan).
With, for example, the recitative for accompanied bass ‘For behold, darkness shall cover the earth’, which runs into an air for bass voice (Robert Davies), the transition was smooth, and both from one movement to the next, and within them, the orchestra evoked a feeling of chiaroscuro that matched a text that told of the people that walked in darkness having seen a great light. Many believe that Charles Jennens, the librettist of Messiah (HWV 56), was also that of Israel in Egypt (HWV 54), which was premiered three years earlier, to the month (almost to the day), and one cannot easily forget the like moment when Israel is still in captivity*, and Pharaoh and the Egyptian people being visited by plagues…


In the following Chorus, ‘For unto us a Child is born’, one both experienced something like that halo effect, from a core group of instrumentalists, that one associates with Bach’s St Matthew Passion (BWV 244), and noticed how neatly the bowing and the turns, according to Thomas Gould’s example, were executed : in his writing, Handel has musically prepared us for the change of focus and for the pastoral mood that ushers in the nativity. Here, then, he gives us nothing more elaborate than a cadence, and no word-painting, at the end of the accompanied soprano recitative, when the shepherds were sore afraid.

 Nicely pacing the further sections of recitative, with these familiar Christmas passages from Luke’s gospel, Carolyn Sampson made us ready to be greeted by trumpets – and, nice though it can be to hear the expertise of playing a natural horn, we had the warm assurance that we were not going to get split-notes or wavering pitch from Paul Archibald and Jo Harris :




When, following this moment, Carolyn Sampson finally came to an air, ‘Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Sion’, the string ensemble that we heard with her was nimble, and her voice was honeyed, with only a little vibrato in the higher register. Straight after, alto Iestyn Davies had a recitative, and then an air, and there seemed to be a tranquillity not just to such words as He shall feed His flock like a shepherd ; and He shall gather the lambs with His Arm, but to his voice itself. In another air, Sampson employed a little coloratura, and then there was a Chorus that closed Part I.



Part II

In the alto air ‘He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows’, following a short initial Chorus, Iestyn Davies was superbly judged as to pacing, and depth of tone – in a movement that is best with a careful and controlled overview, it was a delight to hear an approach gained from an experience of operatic roles put to good use.

As noted below (in the second paragraph, below, concerning Part III), and with Gould’s skilled leading, Dougan had chosen to emphasize the concerto feel in Handel’s score, probably in conjunction with how portamento was employed in the alto part. Thus, there were longer bow-strokes, but also Spring-like flourishes, and, with the string-colour, they made an excellent match with the celebrated purity of Davies’ timbre.


Particularly in the Chorus ‘Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows’, Emma Feilding and Jessica Mogridge beautifully interpreted the writing for oboe, which one was excellently placed to hear**. The size of the orchestra (and of the venue) means that one can appreciate it as a pervasive aspect (rather than Handel’s occasionally using brass), which makes for a very significant part of the sound of the work. (It has not been noticed before, but, in the Kyrie of the Requiem Mass in D Minor (K. 626), is Mozart making a reference to Messiah here, with his choice of fugal-subject ?)


In an important sequence linked by tenor voice, two passages of accompanied recitative (the first was heard with vibrant, angular strings) led up to a very modern-sounding air. Before it, in the second section of recitative, Allan Clayton movingly gave us the hollow feeling of the Messiah in the situation described by the text, and in the deepening of the hurt, with the repeated words in the second half of the sentence :

 Thy rebuke hath broken His heart ; He is full of heaviness
The second air, after even more desolate words from Isaiah (He was cut off out of the land of the living ; for the transgressions of Thy people was He stricken), reapplies them prophetically, and the gospel perspective accordingly changes the viewpoint completely to the divine one (with But Thou didst not leave His soul in hell, nor didst Thou suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption).

Although there is brief refreshment in the lovely soprano air ‘How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace’, in which we felt solace through Sampson’s voice, Part II continues, and concludes, in a less personal vein of theology in global terms : the refusal of God’s authority, rebellion against his rule, and the vanquishment of the rebels (when the libretto has ‘the Lord shall have them in derision’, Dougan had that laughter in the strings). Victory and a celebratory frame of mind are part of the pattern here.

 From the perspective of the Hanoverians, the way in which, just four years later, The Jacobite Rebellion was to be bloodily put down would be seen just in these terms, beginning by how it ended disastrously for the Jacobite cause at The Battle of Culloden (on 16 April 1746, again almost to the day).

In this performance of Part II, the Chorus 'Hallelujah, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth', with which it concludes, was attended with great dignity, but avoiding the not unusual sense of pomp (or, as far as one was aware, people standing in some sort of patriotic erectness), which can draw too much notice to the form, rather than the intention, of the libretto. A modest pause then preceded Part III.



Part III

 Maybe it was no more than having stayed three times near Fishamble Street in Dublin, and been taken, during a literary guided walk, to the site of the Great Music Hall there where Messiah had first been performed (on 13 April 1742), but there seemed to be an Irishness, in the lilt of the voice, and tone of the instrumentalists, to the famous soprano air that starts Part III, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’. Sampson was radiant, as she had been throughout the evening, and clearly relished embodying conviction in this number.

 In the opening alto air from Part II, one had been struck by the impression of early concerto-writing, with Dougan and Gould bringing out variations in attack and feeling between adjoining passages (please see the second paragraph, above, concerning Part II) : here, the delivery was much more legato, and with delicate flourishes. Continuing with the Chorus ‘Since by man came death’, we had contrasts in mood from soft to declamatory, as between ‘death’ and ‘resurrection’ – within each half of the two scriptural sentences, and between them.


When it came, soon after, to the equally famous ‘The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible’, trumpeter Paul Archibald perfectly accommodated the bass voice of Robert Davies, and in an ensemble whose sound had been integrated and equitably balanced all evening. A peculiarity of the setting (which was one aspect that the pre-concert discussion had addressed, though not this specific point) is the dual rendering of the word ‘raised’ here (and of other words earlier***), a question to which one was made alert from having read Claire Tomalin’s biography of one-time Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Jonathan Swift.

When we first hear ‘raised’ in this bass air, it is as a one-syllable word : Tomalin tells us that, in Swift and Handel’s time, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a literary battle had raged, whether to make it the convention that such a word as ‘raised’, when the –ed ending is not separately sounded, should always be written ‘rais’d’. (With ‘sounded’ itself of course, used in the last sentence, there can be no doubt, because it inevitably has two syllables : in this sentence, then, if those arguing for the convention had not failed, we would now write ‘us’d’****.)

 To recap, when we first (and also in the repeat) hear the words ‘the dead shall be raised’, the word is one syllable, but, when Handel jumps straight back to focus on a shorter part of the phrase, he makes it two syllables. (Indeed, and as we may be used to in choral singing, look through the libretto of Messiah, and, in most words with an –ed ending, it is sounded.) No doubt musicologists have theorized why that is so in the case of this pairing, but the effect appears to be this : that we notice the word less the first time, but, when it immediately reappears in this two-syllable form, it allows Handel to dwell on it with the voice, and draw attention to it as an action.


The soprano air ‘If God be for us, who can be against us’ is the last item with a soloist in Messiah, and this was a very special moment. Not uniquely, the Sinfonia reduced here to a small group of instruments (which was probably Caroline Dearnley on cello, Benjamin Russell (bass), Stephen Farr (organ), with leader Thomas Gould), since one can hear other examples of this sort of treatment (or even, for example, see soprano Lynne Dawson here, with an ensemble [the clip has no acknowledgements] where, in much younger days, Stephen Cleobury is the conductor (but here just brings the players in)).

However, in playing obbligato for this air, Gould brought so much more expressiveness than in that example, and such sensitivity to playing to accord with Carolyn Sampson and her voice, that the experience was a thing of beauty : with one’s unquestioned mainstay for the piece in the group of Sinfonia players, the sense of adventurousness, even riskiness, in his playing, and how it fitted to her artistry, was compelling. As one says, the moment was very special, and (as, in contrast to those, say, in the St Matthew) it then almost made Handel’s task harder in achieving the effect of the concluding Choruses :

Given post-mediaeval precedents such as Palestrina, Handel is not the first person to set the single word Amen as a movement, but he is scarcely writing in that musical tradition (unless we remember that we are in Dublin ?). Yet does he do so here at such length that it might feel like pastiche (if not, maybe, an extended musical-joke ?) – certainly to begin with, and partly in relation to what preceded, one did wonder.





Possibly one is always wise to wonder, a little, at Handel and his exact motives, but in time the Chorus did build beyond feeling as though it were an exercise, and made an impressive and agreeable end to this evening with Carolyn Sampson, Iestyn Davies, Allan Clayton, Robert Davies, Eamonn Dougan, Thomas Gould, and the whole of Britten Sinfonia and Britten Sinfonia Voices.








End-notes

 * Moses is, of course, looked to as a precursor to the figure of Christ, and likewise the deliverance from bondage and across The Red Sea.

** It is always nice to listen out for Sarah Burnett’s contribution, as the Sinfonia’s principal bassoonist, but doing so is made easier when there is a visual link, and podium and other players intervened this time.

*** For example, in the first Chorus in Part I (just after the air for tenor ‘Every valley shall be exalted’), when we first hear the words And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, that final word ‘revealed’ is two syllables, but it is then sounded as just one.

**** On account of how the dispute became resolved for ordinary writing (if not for scores), we now write raiséd, when we wish to indicate that it is two sounds, but our norm is not to put ‘rais’d’ for one (although one will find that form appearing in texts that have not been modernized when edited).

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 14 February 2014

Britten Sinfonia Voices : life, song and wine

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 February

A concert given by Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) at West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge, on Tuesday 11 February


This concert comprised three compositions by baritone Roderick Williams (two of which had received their World premiere at the Sinfonia’s concert in Norwich the previous week), four-part songs by Schubert and Schumann, and a Lied by the latter.

It started with Williams’ Red Herring Blues for clarinet and piano (from 1994), which opened with a jaunty solo from the former, played by Joy Farrall. Tom Poster then joined in, but with similar material that yet sounded different on a different instrument. As it developed, there were some violent gestures from the piano, reminiscent of moments in Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus when some powerful chords are struck, and even of that composer’s birdsong. A short, meditative piece, it ended with what seemed like a quotation from the first bars of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Next, the four members of Britten Sinfonia Voices (Susan Gilmour Bailey, Alexandra Gibson, Nicholas Mulroy, and Eamonn Dougan) gave two multipart Lieder of Schubert, Der Tanz (D. 826) from 1825, and then the earlier (1816) An die Sonne (D. 439), the second much longer than the first, which gave a taste of the operatic quality of these voices, which happily reached right to the back of the auditorium, and with very clear German diction. An die Sonne allowed us to hear what good voices they are individually, before blending them again so well.

Whereas the other Lied contrasted the despondency and infirmity of age with the energy and dancing of youth, this writer, Johann Peter, turns to weightier things : the poet’s persona enjoying creation in the immediate moment, even praising it, but suddenly realizes the truth of his mortality along with it. The line-ending of the final stanza, Staub (dust, in the phrase ‘Return to dust !’) is followed by a somewhat creepy tone from Mulroy’s tenor, but, as the stanza is reprised, resolving into a happier conception (via the word Laub, meaning ‘foliage’).

The first of Williams’ two commissions by the Sinfonia and Wigmore Hall was The last house on the river, for all forces, and had an eerie quality to its opening, and hints of Boulez’ writing for piano, before we heard from the clarinet in its chalumeau register. The work went round in cycles of Williams responded to by the singers in close-harmony style, and with regular instrumental intermissons.

Karen Hayes’ highly poetic text (she is the librettist for both works) is deftly set by Williams, and the very English sound of the group of four anchored this very specific evocation of time and place, with the intensity of the what is perceived picked out by the almost improvisatory feel of the clarinet writing. An enthusiastic round of applause met this new work, and the sensation in West Road Concert Hall was that there was appreciation for a well-conceived and performed programme of music by and sung by Williams and his colleagues.

A solo Schumann Lied followed, Auf einer Burg (from Liederkreis, Op. 39, setting Joseph von Eichendorff), where Williams’ mastery of his vocal resources, and of telling a story with his intonation and phrasing, were to the fore. As with the earlier Lieder, where there was a movement from a joyous state to – or to contemplating – a state of decline, this Lied leads us up, through all the surrounding circumstance, to a wedding, but the final image is that the beautiful bride (die schöne Braut) is crying.

Staying with Schumann, Britten Sinfonia Voices brought us Mondnacht, from 1840, which had a feeling of floating, of calm, with a change of mood as it ended just with piano. Then Schubert again, Schicksalsenker (D. 763) from eighteen years earlier, which began with tenor voice, and gave the feeling of being taken back in time, partly in the restraint with which the quartet sang, and partly in the repetition of the word from the title (Fate’s Anchor). The link is that there is a feeling of transcendence, of the soul stretching wide its wings (Und meine Seele spannte / Weit ihre Flügel aus), and of a world where every pain has escaped far away (Fern entfoh’n ist jeder Schmerz).

The feeling of Gemütlichkeit in the Trinklied (D. 183) from 1815 set the mood for this final group of works, with even a table and drinks of some sort as the Stammtisch of the Voices, as they gave us this drinking song, praising friendship and wine, and with variants of the sentiment of Ohne Freunde, ohne Wein, / ich nicht im Leben sein (‘Without friends, without wine, I should not like to be alive’) as the closing couplet to each verse.

Next, the second Williams’ commission In His Cups (again setting Karen Hayes), so one could see why it was keeping company with this Schubert genre. For this piece, Joy Farrall played off stage in a piece that evoked a Britten-like sort of Englishness, of a village pub, and of secular and church life in small communities in an earlier decade, and with outbursts from the piano. The diction and syntax of Hayes’ poetry takes one beyond John Clare and ‘The Deserted Village’ even to Shakespeare : But in his cups he’d thought her beautiful could evoke the topers in Twelfth Night, and Williams had carefully matched his setting to a pastoral of yesteryear, such as might parallel an inland Peter Grimes.

The final two short songs, both by Schubert (Lebenslust(D. 609) from 1818, and another Trinklied (D. 75) from 1813), ended the recital, and both stir up the notions of friendship. In the first, we have allein sein ist öde, wer kann sich da freu’n (‘To be alone is bleak, who could enjoy being there ?’), and the delivery was both crisp and emotional. The second had a clarinet line added to the scoring for tenor, chorus and piano, so it was a rousing close to the proceedings, with even a Schiller-like invocation of the spirit of brotherhood in Laßt uns all Brüder sein ! (‘Let us all be brothers !’) – perhaps the correct context of the ‘Ode to Joy’ is the pub ?!

A recital that delivered many flavours and juxtapositions, all of which seemed to enrich each other.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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