This is a review of At Lunch One, with Britten Sinfonia at West Road Concert Hall
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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21 November
This is a review of At Lunch One, with Britten Sinfonia at West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge, on Tuesday 21 November 2017 at 1.00 p.m.
Programme :
1. Sarah Kirkland Snider ~ Pale as Centuries
2. Mark Bowler ~ Deep Green
3. Nik Bärtsch ~ Module no. 5
4. Judd Greenstein ~ City Boy
5. Bärtsch ~ 9_3_7
1. Sarah Kirkland Snider (1973-) ~ Pale as Centuries (2011)
(1) Pale as Centuries begins with what sounds like a riff, on electric guitar (James Woodrow), which, after the other instruments have made their introductions, re-enters. Flute, clarinet, piano and double-bass are all heard with varying degrees of attack in the piece, and, in time, that difference in attack passed to Woodrow, too, and – via some use of effects-pedals – some very vigorous sounds. A circular work, but one that feels obliged to end explosively (although Mark Bowler, composer of the next work on the programme, made a different choice with his OPUS2017 composition).
2. Mark Bowler (1980-) ~ Deep Green (2017)
Written for clarinet, flute and double-bass, (2) Bowler’s Deep Green, when the woodwind players are at the height of their pitch in the opening section, draws out the similarities in their timbre (with Joy Farrall on clarinet, and Thomas Hancox on flute). When Roger Linley (double-bass) starts the next one, he is playing – unusually for this instrument - sul ponticello, and leading into a passage with open chords that seemed reminiscent of Debussy (or of early Stravinsky ?). After an episode of faster writing, a deliberately drawn-out rallentando to close (after a very low note on the bass) on solo flute.
Tim Watts (pictured upper), from the Faculty of Music at University of Cambridge, hosted the post-concert event with Mark Bowler (lower) (and Nik Bärtsch – pictured below)
Asked, in the post-concert event, about whether it is fair to hear those other composers' sound in Deep Green, when his programme-note had referenced a Ligeti Etude, Bowler did not seem to engage with the question, but to state where he had quoted the source-material to which he was alluding : co-curator Nick Bärtsch commented that he liked the exchange for showing the contrast between what the composer wants to point to as in and influencing the piece, and what the listener may otherwise hear in it...
#WigmoreWednesday - did you know we record each of our pre-concert talks @wigmore_hall and release them as podcasts? Listen to the latest featuring Nik Bartsch & @MBowlerComposer https://t.co/G7GcRolG2w
— Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) December 20, 2017
3. Nik Bärtsch ~ Modul 5
Nice to meet pianist / composer Nik Bärtsch at @BrittenSinfonia's At Lunch One at @WestRoadCH this afternoon ! pic.twitter.com/taXfSEdUOX— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 21, 2017
Nik Bärtsch seemed to be referring to (3) Modul 5 in the post-concert talk (with Mark Bowler and Tim Watts - pictured above), appearing to say that he had been playing the piece for ten to fifteen years before learning how to realize it in, and play it in, public : did this fit with his comments about the use of prepared piano, and with one's having wanted to ask – if there were such a thing ? – whether this had been ‘a typical performance’ ? It felt as if (as with the famous Cologne concert of Jarrett, and another case of the piano that one arrived to find at the venue and ended up having to play) it might have begun in improvisation…
Whatever quite this work is, it begins in fascinating analogue sound-manipulation, and – exploiting the semi-tone – with over-tones and bell-like fringe-effects. As, though, its sound-palette broadened, one’s attention luxuriated in the assurance of, as Bärtsch described afterwards, the piece being presented to us at its best*, and stopped concentrating on exactly what sound one was hearing (or the mechanics of its production - as one did when Maggie Cole performed Ligeti's Continuum (1923-2006)), and very glad that this work – which was not included in the printed one – had been part of the programme.
4. Judd Greenstein (1979) ~ City Boy (2010)
Scored for the quintet of Instruments, and - after Quiet City (1939), and despite an ostentatious ostinato on electric guitar - not implausibly referencing a near-mid-twentieth-century American tradition, (4) City Boy sounds quite Coplanesque : when one looks to form, and beyond the actual individual Instruments, bass and guitar stand, in a way, for the typical harmonic lines of a symphony orchestra.
Initially, in the second section, there is a ‘jazzed-up’ treatment, and, when those elements recur, they just subside : hence the composer’s programme-note to the effect that, with the work’s rapid movement from idea to idea, relatively – fans of Zappa, Brittelle, Babbitt, or Brian Wilson will be disappointed. When we hear the original material on Woodrow’s guitar, it is via the effects-pedal-mediated world of reverberation and distortion. At a signal, and after Copland-like rain-drop effects on flute (whilst the piano has the ostinato), the players all come off together.
5. Bärtsch ~ 9_3_7 (2017)
Maybe (5) 9_3_7 seemed like a punked-up (?) iteration of what preceded it, to which Bärtsch was explicitly responding. He employed some interesting writing for the bass versions of the standard orchestral clarinet and flute, which were also less aurally ‘defined’ than the bass or the guitar. To his own part, Bärtsch brought both jazzy intonations and intelligence in deploying the sound of the held piano notes. Ending, after a slow introduction, with a slow, fumry?? coda, he used the space to work over the four-note motif (with its longer, final note).
Introducing works from the stage, as well as talking afterwards, Nik Bärtsch had been at pains to say how the works had been programmed, including leading to the choice of Mark Bowler's piece as the OPUS2017 award-winner : Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) is, of course, renowned for its novel and thoughtful approach to programming, and here, in works that (in two cases) one could only have heard before by being at Wigmore Hall (@wigmore_hall) on the preceding Friday, was a set of pieces where they 'talked to each other' and had their place, and quite apart from the customary exemplary playing (the hard work that goes into which we should never take for granted) !
End-notes
* Bärtsch told us that he has heard the notated work played twice by two other pianists and not – he did not use this word – related to it, and thereby throws up the larger question – before there was an established performance-practice (unless that was through Ralph Kirkpatrick's monograph, or in the encores of Vladimir Horowitz ?) – how, say, we know what Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas do, or should, sound like, i.e. from where do we now derive what we think is how Scarlatti played (or heard his royal pupil play) these pieces ?
Relatedly, if Leon McCawley plays, for example, the whole of a set of Rachmaninov Preludes (Opus 32) in the chapel at King's College (@ConcertsatKings) – or Joanna MacGregor a set of four Chopin Nocturnes at The Fitzwilliam Museum (@FitzMuseum_UK) - we know [what] ‘the famous one(s)’ ['are meant to' sound like] (with which no pianist can thus take many liberties), but how do we relate to the surrounding compositions, which may - despite such family-groups - very much feel like strangers to us ?
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
