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Contignations

London
Queen Elizabeth Hall
02/14/2004 -  

Dai Fukikura: Fifth Station (world premiere)
Brian Ferneyhough: Incipits
Brian Herrington: Symphonia (world premiere)

Martyn Brabbins (conductor), Louise Hopkins (cello), Paul Silverthorne (viola)

Morgan Hayes: Dark Room (London premiere)
Brian Ferneyhough: Seven Tableaux Vivants Representing the Angel of History as Melancholia (UK premiere)
Richard Barrett: stirrings (London premiere)
Tazul Tajuddin: Kehalusan Ukiran (world premiere)
Brian Ferneyhough: Carceri d'Invenzione I

Martyn Brabbins (conductor), Mark van de Wiel (clarinet), Roderick Williams (narrator)

London Sinfonietta

Brian Ferneyhough is writing an opera, but it is unlikely to be on soon at the Coliseum. Ferneyhough is the most conceptual and least theatrical of composers, and his music works with ideas the way that of most other composers works with emotions, rhythms or the colours and textures of sound. In a set of interviews on film that introduced the performances of his works in this set of concerts, Ferneyhough talked about the disruption of time and the structure of emblems as if they were as straightforward as, perhaps, the choice of form or the biographical impulse behind composition. He sounded either delusional or extremely pretentious, and indeed there were snickers in the audience, although bar the odd dutiful journalist they must have known what to expect. While his music could never be said to "sound nice", though, it arguably creates a space for rich reflection in the same way as baroque emblems or symbolic compositions in all media do. For the audience, there is certainly something worthwhile in the combination of the performance and the conceptual background (provided they already grasp it). One wonders whether it is all that rewarding for the performers, though.

The South Bank day consisted of works by Ferneyhough and his students and associates, and it was clear that if he has had a pervasive influence it is in triggering radical individual ideas. The other works were comparatively low concept, but fascinating: Dai Fukikura's Fifth Station, apparently inspired by science fantasy movies, used the simple but effective method of stationing instrumentalists around the hall so that the balance of their various interactions was unique for every listener; Morgan Hayes' Dark rooms, formally a short clarinet concerto, was a luscious wash of decaying and emerging patterns, inspired by the crumbling mansions of Tangier and the hardening images of developing photographs (both retro ideas these days). Brian Herrington's Symphonia was a rough-edged polyphonic exploration of the forms of religious music, perhaps a latter-day rural Texan equivalent of Charles Ives' New England hymnodies, though with a sceptical distance. Richard Barrett's stirrings, six intense musical gestures, was brief but, well, stirring.

Ferneyhough has an obvious affinity with Piranesi in the way his anti-visual imagination finds its expression in two heavily loaded dimensions (of the score in the one case and the etchings of fantastical architecture in the other). Piranesi's Carceri linked several of the day's works. Ferneyhough's own Carceri d'Invenzione I was nearly incomprehensible to this listener, while the quasi-textile patterns of Tazul Tajuddin's Kehalusan Ukiran were comparatively easy going. Students from the Purcell School also presented chamber works based on ideas from Piranesi's Carceri during the day.

More striking was Ferneyhough's 1996 Incipits, a set of seven formal musical beginnings that quite literally goes nowhere. It is possible that Ferneyhough was inspired by Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller, a set of narrative openings that somehow form a novel, although his knowledge of literature might well take in Apuleius' Florida, a set of rhetorical openings that perhaps somehow form an entertainment. The Sinfonietta's virtuoso violist Paul Silverthorne and amazing, tireless percussionist Alex Neal were particularly heroic in their sections.

As for the opera, we saw the penultimate act, Seven Tableaux Vivants Representing the Angel of History as Melancholia. Based on the work of Walter Benjamin, the complete work begins with his suicide after he was turned away at the Spanish border while fleeing Nazi-occupied France. After that, it seems to be concerned purely with his ideas. The Seven Tableaux Vivants each consist of an orchestral sections with a spoken narration of a poem by Charles Bernstein, each based on another work. Several are imitations or homophonies in English of poems by Heine, beginning with "Laurel's eyes". There was certainly a sense that the music is never far from the rocks, but the result was strangely engaging, with considerable help from Roderick Williams' mellifluous Sprechgesang.



HE Elsom

 

 

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