What was your last concert?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Hcmf 2016

2): Sunday, 20/11/16 - Beat FURRER; FAMA
Isabelle MENKE (actress), Eva FURRER (Contrabass Flute), EXAUDI vocal ensemble, London Sinfonietta - conducted by the composer.

First performed in 2005, and given several performances across Europe in the eleven years since, this late-night concert was the second time it has been performed in the UK (the first was in London a week previously). It is an outstanding work of Musical Theatre, and given an outstanding performance in Huddersfield Town Hall - I haven't heard the Sinfonietta play as well as this in over a decade; the work and its composer's direction encouraging the players to give their best work to the piece. (If only they were permitted to perform this sort of repertoire at the Proms, their concerts might not be so deadly tedious: it used to be the finest New Music ensemble certainly in Britain, arguably in the world - give them work that challenges them and it is still a formidably impressive ensemble.)

The Music veers between incisive, energetic activity and static, uneasily tranquil repose containing sounds of sheer sensuous beauty - the ensemble voices spaced out around and above the audience, passing single notes between themselves, "and every voice reaches listening ears" (Fama is the personification of Rumour in Ovid's Metamorphoses, from which much of the text originates). Menke's "narration" (it isn't really that - the spoken text is given to the actress in the same way it would be given to a singer - distorted by repetitions and fragmentations; delivered often in rapid - and notated - rhythmic patterns) cut through the instrumental and sung material, twice accompanied only by melismatic and liquidly sensuous "gurglings" from the solo Contrabass Flute - played by the superb Eva Furrer, the composer's sister (and co-founder with him of Klangforum Wien, who gave the first performances).

Unlike the Clarinet Quintet heard earlier in the evening, I felt that the composer was working directly with - and responding directly to - sound (rather than, to express it clumsily, with systems that then were realized in sound); and sound that was often hypnotically, seductively beautiful. An unqualified success - it is incomprehensible why it has taken so long to receive performances in the UK. With any luck, we might get Begehren before too long.




Greatly appreciated by the audience, too - which included (a couple of rows in front of me) Rebecca Saunders, Juliet Fraser, and Sara Mohr-Pietsche. (SM-P and Robert Worby were both - as usual - very much in attendance throughout the Festival, not just at concerts that they were presenting for broadcast. And performers/composers also gave support to events other than those in which they were directly involved: HCMF has maintained its "social" aspect even in these financially straitened years - people are interested in what others are doing, curious to hear what's going on. It's a very special atmosphere.)

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Incidentally, this is what a Bass Flute looks like (the instrument on the right, played by Ms Furrer:



... on the left is one of the two Bass Clarinets which frequently keened to each other during the piece.)

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Further information on the piece in response to the London performance on 12/11:

Beat Furrer's FAMA came to London at last, with the London Sinfonietta. The piece was hailed as "a miracle" at its premiere at Donaueschingen in 2005 by Die Zeit: State of the Art New Music, recognized by mainstream media, which proves that the market for contemporary music lies with lively audiences. FAMA is music as theatre in the widest sense, operating on multiple levels. In the last ten years, it's been performed many times, and there's a recording on Kairos. Experiencing it live, however, is essential since it was created as an experience to be enacted live, for maximum impact. It's a multi-sensory immersion: participation is not passive.

Ostensibly, Furrer's text comes from Arthur Schnitzler's novel Fräulein Else, about a girl who likes a fancy life and makes money from entertaining men, but it would be a mistake if this were taken too literally. The narrative isn't straightforward. The opera begins in Latin. then flows into a stream of consciousness, where ideas constantly mutate. What "is" Else's story? We aren't told in straightforward narrative. We learn through induction, empathizing with the clues in the seemingly disjointed text, and in the oblique imagery in the music. As we learn in real life. Significantly, FAMA begins with a discourse from Ovid, Metamorphoses Book XII, in which Fama the goddess of Rumour intuits meaning by processing what she hears around herself. What we knows, or think we know, grows through interpreting impressions from a non-stop flow of data.

Sparkling bell-like sounds, voices intoning fragments, beautifully pitched but elusive, long elliptical phrases in the orchestra shooting forth, patterns that move and draw back. The first two scenes in FAMA suggest teeming, vibrant happenings, just beyond our grasp. "Ich höre das Feuer.....ich höre den Regen..... ich höre in meiner Erinnerung.....ich höre das Schweigen." Then Else emerges, or rather Isabelle Menke intoning Else's words rapid-fire. The syntax isn't conversation, it doesn't communicate. It's an internal monologue, free associating, random thoughts from which we might, or might not, deduce who Else is. Perhaps Else herself is still figuring things out, asking questions, deducing, unsure. The ensemble reveals little: barely audible clicks and brushing sounds, as if the players themselves were listening and watching. As Else's voice rises, tensely, the orchestra bursts into manic life: cacophony, cut through by long, clear metallic lines, replicated by the voice. It's as if the voice and ensemble were reaching out, feeling out to invisible walls, gauging distance by sound waves. High, clear notes, flutes and clarinets feeling the way, hesitating, interrupted by sudden flashes of percussion. Sounds come from all directions, often out of sight, often distorted. Else's voice sometimes seems to materialize in the air. Piano sounds, accordion sounds, are heard as if from great distances across time. Ticking sounds, sometimes percussion, sometimes bows sawn against strings in bizarrely mechanical fashion. Every noise matters, no matter how subtle.

"Wie hübsch!" said Menke, with a demented smile. "How cute it is to walk around naked" Figuratively, she's watching herself in a mirror wondering what others think, and what she should be thinking of herself. The strings bow violent, mechanical angles, the brass blow mocking raspberries. The text describes how Else puts on a coat and walks naked through a hotel lobby. No-one knows. Then, at first quietly, the sound of a contrabass flute takes over where Else's words end. Contrabass flute: an instrument which looks so bizarre that just looking at it is an act of theatre. It's huge, silvery and metallic but, full blast, it's like a siren, blaring menace and mystery. This contrabass flute interlude is a magnificent coup de théâtre. The whole orchestra screams in response, then falls quiet as the contrabass flute, played by Eva Furrer, continued unchallenged, like a strange dancer, moving and singing with grave but bizarre beauty.

The words "Else, Else, Else" are projected onto the walls. A point is being made, visually, though the words are barely heard, the voices of Exaudi singing pure sound, materializing as if in dream. The effect was both magical and sinister. We don't know what happens to Else, but we could hear the swirling tumult in the orchestra. Walls of sound crashed around us, giving way to uncanny chords resonating in near silence. The contrabass flute led a section that seemed almost fugue-like in its grave but quirky dignity. Else returned briefly. Her last words were "Adresse bleibt Fiala". Whatever that's supposed to mean, I do not know, but the effect was powerful, and lingers tantalisingly in the mind. FAMA is more focused than Furrer's earlier Hörtheater Begrehen, first released on DVD in 2008, which also deals with multi-level concepts of time, space and sound. Thus FAMA lends itself well to semi-concert performance, as we enjoyed at St John's, Smith Square. Although we didn't see the cool, blue walls of the original, the plot. such as there is, predicates on a kind of mental imprisonment. The gold and burgundy of St John's, with its elegant chandelier, suggested the outward luxury of Else's profession, which could take place anywhere, not just in the Dolomites. The drama, and the genius, of Furrer's FAMA is that, through art, we may have come closer to understanding what goes on in Else's soul.

Thank goodness for the London Sinfonietta, returning to their roots in cutting-edge repertoire. For a while, they seemed caught up in sponsor-pleasing "education", but good work is, in itself, educational. Any orchestra can do education, but what the London Sinfonietta does is new music better than anyone else. This FAMA will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at an undisclosed date

... very pleased to see the last bit of news there.

[Ferretfancy]

Thomas Sondergard replaced Gergiev with the LSO at the Barbican last night, the maestro is recovering from a knee operation. In the first half we had a well played but slighly too polite performance of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, and Barry Douglas gave us the B flat minor Piano Concerto. This was a very emphatic performance, certainly exciting when it needed to be but almost always too loud. The quieter passages lacked finess, I thought, although to be fair one or two friends of mine thought otherwise.

After the interval came Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony. What an amazing work! This went very well indeed, it's tragic character and irony perfectly in balance. Great playing from the LSO.

[Daniel]

Thanks for those excellently written reports, ferney (#1455/56), you make both Rebecca Saunders' Skin and Beat Furrer's FAMA sound mouth-watering! I seem to have a relationship in waiting with Saunders music at times, and am always interested in finding open doors. I'll try to track down both works, though it sounds as if FAMA particularly benefits from the live experience.

Interested to read all other reports too.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Thanks, Daniel. It's wonderful how we react differently to how Music affects us - as soon as I heard my first piece by Rebecca Saunders (over twenty years ago now) the sound world instantly "clicked" with me, and my admiration for her work has grown with each subsequent encounter. (I remember posting in response to Stasis in the 2011 Festival that that would be how I'd hope what dying would be like: surrounded by strange and beautiful new sounds before fading into oblivion. Which was meant to be a lot more complimentary than it looked when I saw it on the page! )

[Beef Oven!]

Great reviews from Huddersfield, ferney. Thanks very much

Agree with Daniel, you’re certainly convincing about Rebecca Saunders - I wonder when Skin will make it to a CD!?

[MrGongGong]

Incidentally, this is what a Bass Flute looks like (the instrument on the right, played by Ms Furrer:



... on the left is one of the two Bass Clarinets which frequently keened to each other during the piece.)

I think (pedants corner) that is a contrabass flute

This was rather good I hear

http://57north.org/events/live-music/diverse-tremblings-pete-stollery-and-richard-craig

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

HCMF - Monday Freebies; 21/11/16

Every event on the Monday of each Festival is free to all comers - so, between noon and midnight, a dozen or so concerts takes place around the Town. This year kicked off with a pair of works by Michael Finnissy: the recent Third Political Agenda (a response to Brexit) for piano, played by Philip Thomas who then led a performance of one of Finnissy's "mobile" works: Post-Christian Survival Kit, a Cagean "Musicircus" from 2003/4 performed admirably by students on the University Music course - great fun, setting a positive mood for the day, which was already cold and drizzly, and with worse weather forecast for later in the day.

A swift walk across the campus to St Paul's Hall for a recital of works for piano & electronics given by pianist Zubin Kanga with electronics produced by Ruaidhri Mannion. The three pieces didn't leave very much of an impression on my memory (the writing for piano seemed much more comfident and competently-written than what the electronics were called on to provide; a lot of echoing and imitation, with a teeny bit of distortion here & there). More memorable were the frantic nods from the pianist to the "technician" whose furious scowl of bafflement at his equipment left the audience with a sense that something might have not gone exactly to plan. Oh - and Mr Kanga needs to remember to remove his acoustic gloves (wires attached from his wrists to the piano) before leaving the stage - if the wires hadn't tugged him undignifiedly back, he couls easily have tugged the expensive-looking laptop from the Music desk of the piano to the floor.

To the Town Hall for a performance of Grisey's Talea (1986 - I think the oldest piece of Music heard at this year's festival) by the Explore Ensemble (who all looked about fourteen years old - so were probably ten years or more older: I've reached the age where everyone looks either fourteen, or "my age" - which is actually how I think I looked bout twenty years ago - or "old" - which is how I look in the mirror). They were terrific! Totally dedicated to the work and giving it their all to the audience - a pleasure to watch them work together, and by far the best performance of this work that I have ever heard. (This is the third time I've heard it at Huddersfield.)

I'll find it difficult to comment on Ailis Ni Riain's Skloniste - a live performance to an hour-long documentary film on the Sarajevo siege of 1992-6. I cannot imagine what Music could possibly begin to be an adequate "accompaniment" to the sights and stories told in the film. Neither could Mr Riain.

After a concert of Music for Saxophone, electronics and Nyckelharpa



(about which I cannot remember much, except that I much prefered the first piece, Telian by Robert Bentall, to the second, Manc'umbia by Mario Duarte) we had to traipse nearly a mile across the Town to get to St Thomas' Church in what had now become heavy rain. Worth the cold and wet, however, to hear yet another completely dedicated and enthusiastic performance by two young performers, the Piccoloist (? "Piccoloautist"?) Susanne Peters and Violinist Sarah Saviet. The keen eye-contact and attention both to each other and the scores in front of them made the joy of the Music even more of a delight. 5:4 has, I believe, commented unfavourably on the acoustic of the building for the works on the programme (Tim McCormack's Glass Stratum, Maderna's Dialodia - a 3minute piece from 1971, but receiving its first performance in the version for this combination - and Evan Johnson's L'Art de toucher le clevecin ( a marvellous work - like threads of silk, looking delicately colourful and fragile, but tougher than steel in reality). Certainly, the performers had to battle with the crescendo of wind and rain pelting the church roof - and, of course it would have been better placed in Phipps' Hall - but I seem to have heard more detail than 5:4 and with more ease. Great stuff (as I mentioned to Ms Peters the next day when I saw her in the Student coffee bar - she apologised profusely for the weather; I made it clear it was worth catching a cold to have been able to hear it).

But, by the time we had to walk back to the Town Centre, the rain was torrential, and it was now rush hour, so traffic moving through puddles were ensuring that not an inch of me was left dry (imagine the Morecambe & Wise Singing in the Rain sketch) and I just couldn't walk around the town for a further six hours, so I returned home, missing in particular Eliane Radigue's OCCAM HEXA IV - a site-specific installation piece for Bates Mill Photographic Studio, and Raphael Roginski's guitar recital of his adaptations of/reponses to Music by John Coltrane and poetry by Langston Hughes. Very annoying - the only downer of this year's Festival.

[gurnemanz]

Joanna MacGregor in Schubert and Liszt at Wilts Music Centre.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I think (pedants corner) that is a contrabass flute

Stragg my vitals with a plinthflanger - you are, of course, absolutely correct: as was made perfectly clear in the programme notes, and the cover and the notes of the CD!

This was rather good I hear
http://57north.org/events/live-music...-richard-craig

I bet it was! Terrific fluteneer and an impressive selection of composers.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Elision, hcmf, 22/11/16

Marking the twentieth anniversary of the Elision Ensemble's first appearances in the UK - "coincidentally", also at the Festival on 27th November 1996 - and the thirtieth of its existence, the ensemble's clarinettist Carl Rosman conducted a stunning concert of two works. As at the event twenty years ago, there was a work by Liza Lim, who introduced her work, How Forests Think in a pre-concert discussion with Sara Mohr-Pietsche. A four-"movement" work featuring a prominent part for Sheng, an ancient wind instrument with a formidable history in Chinese Classical Music:



... played by the outstanding Wu Wei. A beguiling and convincing course of Musical events, it was the most immediately convincing of the larger-scale works by Lim that I have heard (or, of course, I'm just more accustomed to her ways of working than I have been in the past, where it has seemed on first hearing as if the works were "just" streams of fascinating aural events with little obvious connection to each other). An open and generous artist, committed to her responsibilities to her work and to the Musicians with whom she works, Lim amply repays the attention her work demands, creating new and completely satisfying timbral challenges and rewards. Due for broadcast on Hear & Now on 7th January next year.

As is the other work on the programme: Aaron Cassidy's the wreck of former boundaries. I don't want to say too much about this "not-quite-a-concerto-for-two-trumpets" as the essential surprise of the work will be spoilt for those who will listen to the broadcast (I'll save it until after) - but, to sum up; WOW!!! (To elaborate - "No; really - I mean, WOW!!!") The work sharply divided the audience into two factions - those who thought it "the very worst piece I've ever had the misfortune to have heard", and those (like me) who were bowled over by its cheek, humour, passion, and the sheer visceral thrill of the ride. Definitely one for BeefO! Not really anything like anything I've heard by this composer (whose work has fascinated me for nearly a decade - I have all his album) but just as brilliant. (And it says a great deal for the Lim piece, which appeared afterwards in the programme, that it answered the obvious "How do you follow that?!" challenge with an eloquence and quiet power all its own.)

Nostalgically, a sense of deja-vu: that Elision UK debut concert twenty years ago had also included a work by Lim, and a work by a composer whose reputation I'd known, but whose work I'd not heard Live before: the Negatives series by Richard Barrett - no looking back from that point!


And what a lovely chap Carl Rosman is - after the concert, I saw him looking a little lost in the Creative Arts building. I had to tell him how brilliant I thought the concert had been; he broke into a big smile and shook my hand as if I'd done him the favour!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Salamander Tandem: "White Cane"; HCMF, Weds 23/11/16

Wednesday was initially advertised as rather a thin day of events at this year's Festival: just one concert in the evening. Fortunately, three performances of this rather special event were added to the programme by the time the full programme was published. The performances took place on Platform 1 of Huddersfield Railway Station, so I left the car at home and went with a fellow Forumista on the train.

Essentially a collaboration between the dance artist Mickel Smithen, viola player and dance artist Takashi Kikuchi (both of whom are also visually impaired - and their movements were "accompanied" by the amplified sounds picked up from the contact mics on their white canes as they swept gently across the surroundings), the Musicians Isabel Jones and Duncan Chapman, and support from Indra Slavena and Sam White (on Platform 3, also using white canes to pick up the sounds of the aurroundings), and Derek Grant and Geoffrey Fielding. Oh - and the audience and members of the public waiting for/getting off trains. We were given headphones which enabled the sounds being picked up, and the sung, improvised narration of Isabel Jones to be heard clearly in addition to the ambient sounds without disturbing the day-to-day business of the Station.

I hope I don't trivialise the event by saying how lovely it all was: on a freezing day outdoors, the beauty of the landscape was brought into focus by Jones' haunting, gentle and persuasive voice drawing attention to what people were doing (our fellow Forumista became something of a leitmotif, referred to three times throughout the performance - all I managed was "a man with a red scarf"; and that could have been any of three in the audience/participants) - the contrast between the sunshine on the distant Pennines in one direction and the bustle of the traffic coursing through the Town centre. The unsentimental poignancy of Dennis - one of the Huddersfield "regulars", himself severely visually impaired - joining the movements of the professional dancers with his own white cane; the delighted reactions from ordinary commuters, wondering what was going on - Jones didn't notice/comment upon the number of passengers leaving platform 3 who waved back at Kikuchi as he waved them farewell.

And the Music - an improvised cocoon of shifting and sustained beautiful sounds, lasting 35minutes (that's as long as The Rite of Spring or Beethoven's Fifth) that managed both to be prominent without upsetting the collaborative contributions of the others - and was much more Musically satisfying than some of the "stand-alone" concert pieces using electronics presented during the Events on Monday morning. I had expected to find the event satisfying, but I was surprised by how moving and uplifting the event was; the sense of "connection" and simple joy - and chats afterwards with others who'd been there showed that it wasn't just me who felt this way. We had intended following the performance with lunch and returning for the second performance - but the mood of delight made it feel as if that wasn't appropriate - like having two consecutive banquets - so, instead, we had lunch in the Head of Steam, and decided to catch the next train back - which happened to coincide with the second performance. We were now on the opposite Platform with other passengers, who saw what was going on and started asking themselves what was going on - we told them, and everybody on the carriage started paying attention to the performers (who couldn't be heard) and talking to each other - yes, a group of English complete strangers actually chatting to each other! Amused and curious; it had touched their lives for a second and brought an instant of the unusual to the routine of the train journey.

Only in Huddersfield? Possibly not - the performances have taken place in other venues - but certainly always in Huddersfield.

[MrGongGong]

Great review

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Great event