What was your last concert?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Thank goodness that, with the old system, music never fall off the stand, nor do two pages ever get turned at once.

Indeed. This never happens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMrXgKbKssw

[Maclintick]

Snarky Puppy at a rammed RAH yesterday evening. Now uncategorisable as they've strayed (progressed ?) from their funk-fusion roots, but they possess an eclectically prodigious line-up of talents -- worth the price of admission just for the duelling drummers. Possibly one in the eye from the Albert Hall to the London Jazz Festival on opening night ?

[gurnemanz]

Trio Apaches at Wilts Music Centre on Friday. Nice programme with familiar and totally new persuasively put across:

RAVEL Piano Trio in A minor
BABAJANIAN Piano Trio in F sharp minor
BEETHOVEN Piano Trio in D major, Op 70 No 1 “Ghost”

[LMcD]

Just back from St John's Church where we greatly enjoyed the latest 'Music in Felixstowe' concert:
Haydn String Quartet Op. 33 No. 1
Mozart Piano Concerto K414 ('quartetto' version)
Elgar Piano Quintet
The Ward Piano Quartet and Paul Turner.
Some stunning displays of poppies in the church - the Elgar was premiered in 1919.
The 'in memoriam' book in the church mentions a Muriel Elgar who died 18/11/1991.

[bluestateprommer]

From my pre-Thanksgiving jaunt to NYC this week:
(a) This LA Phil / Yuja Wang / Dudamel concert at David Geffen Hall, where I experienced my first-ever orchestral concert with 5 (!!) encores by the guest soloist, namely (thanks to this Instagram post from Lincoln Center):
1. Arturo Márquez: Danzón No. 2
2. "Tea for Two" (the Art Tatum version, AFAICT)
3. Stravinsky: 'Danse Russe' from Three Movements from Petrushka (actually a good segue into the 2nd half, had she stopped at that)
4. Rimsky-Korsakov: "Flight of the Bumble Bee"
5. Schubert: "Gretchen am Spinnrade" (presumably arranged by Liszt, at a guess)
At the end, we got the same post-Rite of Spring encore that the LA Phil and El Dude delivered in London, Sousa's "Liberty Bell" March (truly "And now for something completely different"). The opener, Ginastera's Variacionces concertantes, was marred by the same cell phone going off twice, where Dudamel directed a modest glare in the direction of the offender. In fairness, the offending ring tone was perhaps the most mellifluous ring tone that I've ever haerd, and almost blended in with the music.

Pre-encores, YW did a very fine job with the new John Adams de facto piano concerto "Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?". I didn't care for the work itself, but all involved did it well, and it was nice that John Adams was there to take a bow. (What he thought about the five encores, I've no idea.) This was a very good concert, and if nothing else, was certainly value for money.

(b) Magdalena Kozena, with Mr. Kozena on piano and 6 fellow musicians (including Andrew Marriner), gave this recital the next night at Alice Tully Hall, a really enterprising mix of songs and chamber ensembles. Perhaps unsurprisingly, MK was at her very finest in the closing selections by Janacek and Dvorak, where the other musicians joined in as mini-chorus in the Janacek in 2 numbers. In the 2nd half, the first Brahms song with viola and piano elicited spontaneous, premature applause just before the end, which one audience member reacted to by raising his hand, with surprising effectiveness. The audience then warmly applauded after that first song concluded, which was very heartfelt and completely warranted.

In his review, Tommasini caught the 1st encore, Richard Strauss' "Morgen", but evidently missed the 2nd encore, Dvorak's song "Good Night" (don't know the original Czech title). Unlike YW, MK knew to stop at 2 encores (not that I minded 5, nor did the LA Phil, since they were potentially going to get overtime pay out of it). This concert had 2 cell phone offenses as well, one just after one selection (2 seats over from me), and the second between 2 other songs. MK waited for the 2nd offender to silence their phone before resuming.

[Dave2002]

Indeed. This never happens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMrXgKbKssw

Love it! Many musicians can cope, but now I’ve noticed some musicians, not just pianists, doing whole concerts from memory. Emma Johnson does this, and one of her recent concerts with John Lenehan was very impressive That also presents its own problems though - the classic one being where there are two pieces (probably by the same composer) which contain a very similar passage, and then one of the performers forgets which piece it is while playing the common passage. Other issues concern repeats ....but these problems can happen even with the music, and even if it doesn’t fall off the stand.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

HCMF 2019: Pinnock & Cleare, Fri 15/11/19

For me, a disappointing opening day of this year's Huddersfeild Contemporary Music Festival. The very first concert was given by the Sonar S4tet, beginning with Lunik 1, a quite humdrum piece of group improvisation. This was followed by I am, I am by "featured composer" Naomi Pinnock(b1979). Quite why she was so described puzzled me - this 20-minute piece was the only work of hers performed at the Festival, and other composers not so designated had more and/or longer pieces performed. Nonetheless, Pinnock was given a full-page introduction to her work and aesthetic in the Festival Programme Booklet, where we were told

Unlike composers who only focus on the essence of sound, the thing on its own terms, Pinnock thinks of sound as something that maps out experience, that finds its way into the lives of listeners: "it's not that sounds in and of themselves don't interest me, but that I'm more interested in the effect of them within a gesture - which is why I will always remember more about how something made me feel rather than any interesting technical aspects." It's not what sound is, but what it does.

The Programme Booklet was full of gems like this, written by Robin Smith, and, to be fair to Pinnock, she spent much of her pre-concert talk with Robert Worby clarifying, qualifying, and correcting what had been written. Nonetheless, the piece itself "did" very little - the Quartet played a pair of chords repeatedly, after a certain time, one of the notes in a chord was changed, and the resulting pair were then repeated, etc etc etc, until the process was completed. To alleviate the texture, a vocal line sung by the wonderful Juliet Fraser floated above the Quartet material. Fraser's voice is so special that anything she sings is worth hearing, but the piece was really a five-minute piece, stretched out for twenty. It "made me feel" as if everybody had rather wasted their time*.

The Concert was redeemed by a performance of Heinz Holliger(b1939)'s Increschantum, also for Soprano & S4tet, written in 2014, but sounding like something written by a pupil of Berg or Schoenberg. Rich, involving, quixotic, it was by far the work that most impressed me.


The evening was given to a portrait concert of four works by another "featured composer", Ann Cleare(b1983) performed by the Riot Ensemble. There was some much more impressive Music here - particularly in the concluding eyam iv [Pluto's farthest moons], which was full of beguiling sounds, bound together with a masterly handling of structure, giving impetus between the individual sections of the half-hour piece. Similarly involving sounds featured prominently in the other works, but, for me, without that feeling of "drive" binding the sections together, so that they each seemed longer than eyam iv, whilst being shorter in combined duration. The concert left me keen to hear what Cleare will be doing in, say, twenty years time, whilst not especially keen to seek out any of her other current work.

* - another gem from the Programme Book, specifically describing this work:

It makes use of [Pinnock's] mood-boarding approach to composition, containing an ephemeral weave of sound and silences, describing what we can perceive - and what we can't. As ever, Pinnock draws together tangible experiences and dream-like phenomena, scattering notes as if to suggest the world of invisibles that we punctuate with words and actions.

... so there!

[Richard Barrett]

mood-boarding

?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

?

Quite!

[Bryn]

Quite!

Sure, but water Hell is it?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The Festival Programme Book was embedded with such gems; how about this:

Cleare doesn't so much make scores as she does blueprints: speakers & instruments are set up in certain shapes, forming particular relationships with the room they find themselves in. Ensembles become a matter of choreography; fixed in particular spaces, musicians are as much POSITIONS as they are performers. ... For this concert, the malleable setting of Huddersfield Town Hall will transform into an open-plan forum; audience members will experience the specific ways in which Cleare has decided to carry her music through it.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

HCMF 2019: Monday Freebies, 18/11/19.

Every year, the Festival puts on free concerts throughout the Monday held at various venues around the University Campus. There are usually around 16 fixed events, each lasting about half-an-hour or so, plus three or four "fixed" features, some of them inter-active, which continue non-stop throughout the day. It is a brilliant way for people either to sample a few of the activities associated with what's today's composers and performers of New Music are doing - or to stay for the whole twelve + hours.

Far too much going on to report on all of it here, but the highlights for me were the Concert given by The Hermes Experiment - an ensemble of Harp, Clarinet, Double Bass, and Soprano, performing works by Meredith Monk(b1942), Oliver Leith(b1990), Joel Rust(b1989), and a group improvisation in which all four performers produced Music from different areas of the Double Bass. All the Music was attractive, and enthusiastically performed by the young Musicians, with very special praise for the Soprano Heloise Werner, a superb singer with a pleasantly penetrating voice, somewhere between Victoria de los Angeles and Mama Cass in timbre. I hope to hear a lot more from her in the future.

I also enjoyed being screamed at by members of the Edges Ensemble, assembling a performance from Yoko Ono's Grapefruit texts. The screaming was beautifully in tune (the exact opposite of many an opera singer's attempts at singing sounding more like screaming) - and the surreal mixture of instruments and the sound of tearing paper was peculiarly moving. (The piece ending with the performers presenting the audience with flowers or enigmatic greeting cards.)

Pianist Philip Thomas performed a quartet of Feldman's early works for film and dance, three of which also featured dancer Hilary Elliott, whose spare gestures and movements were carefully blended with the sounds Feldman created.

HISS, the 48 channel, 66 speaker Huddersfield Immersive Sound System (good job this wasn't set up in Plymouth), was offered to five composers on the Professional Development Programme for Female Composers of Electronic Music. In the event, two of the composers were ill and unable to attend the Festival to supervise their work, so we heard only three of the completed works, one of which was very disappointing in that I felt the composer had rather over-done the subtlety, and neglected the full potential of the unique opportunities that HISS offers - it seemed as if the work could have been created with any less "extravagant" sound system. The other pieces performed (Petroglyph by Heloise Tunstall-Behrens[b1985), and Nicole Raymond[b1990]'s Crackles of Rain) gave a much more immediate sensation of the special qualities offered by the system, in very different ways from each other.

And a Saxophone improvisation by John Butcher; solo Violin & Electronics (and flapping leather gloves & shoes shuffling in a sand pit) from composer-violinist Lisa Robertson(b1993); Nicholos Moroz(b1991) powerful Intralatent for Piano, Percussion, & Electronics, performed by the composer with the GBSR Duo (percussionist George Barton & pianist Siwan Rhys); turntables, CD players, film, guitar & bass, and much, much more. The freebies day is always a highlight of the Festival, attracting more people into exploring and discovering ways of creating and responding to Music than many of them may have experienced before (and, no doubt, rejecting some of it) - as one of the schoolkids was overheard to say "Oh, that's done my *flippin'* head in - it's brilliant!"

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

https://soundcloud.com/the-hermes-experiment/monk-double-fiesta-excerpt-live-performance

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

HCMF 2019: Frank Denyer, "The Fish that became the Sun (Songs of the Dispossessed)";

Just for those Forumistas who were unable to get tickets for this Sold-Out event - this was a terrible performance, you're really lucky not to have been able to attend.

Okay? Very good - nothing else for you to see here: move onto another Post.

Right, now they've gone - this was one of the most uplifting, moving, and optimism-boosting concerts I've ever attended. After my often rather lacklustre reactions to events in the first half of the Festival, it was a tremendous relief to be privileged to experience this performance. Completed 23 years ago, after five years in the making, this was the first public performance of Denyer's 57-minute work (the recent recording by the same performers, available on another timbre label was put together from four different sessions) - and, despite the severe "limitations" arising from the non-"standard" instrumentation (including several created/adapted by the composer himself) and from the various different tuning systems involved, the overwhelmingly positive response from the packed audience in Huddersfield Town Hall (extra seats had to be put out on the day to accommodate the demand) should - if there's any justice at all in this world - ensure that word-of-mouth reports lead to the many future performances the work deserves. To put it bluntly, it was, I felt, a major contribution to our cultural life.

Scored for around 40 performers arranged in various groupings around the hall, The Fish is a continuous sequence of Musical events/sections ranging widely in mood and scope. Music of great delicacy is answered/interrupted by moments of fury; humour by despair; terror by optimism - all cohering in a total, single Work, throughout characterised by that fusion of lyricism and ... I don't know how to describe it ... "timbral violence" (???!!! - they'll be getting me to write the Programme Booklet next year if I carry on like this!) ... that is familiar to everyone who knows any of Denyer's other work.

To pick just one of the "highlights" - about 10/15 minutes from the end, the Music is interrupted by a pair of children, singing a nursery song. They are interrupted by growling brass chords, threatening and ominous. The kids continue regardless, and gradually the aggressive material is "soothed" - but that material has "corrupted" the kids, and by the time the brass has settled down, the kids' singing had become taunting, sinister, threatening. The Turn of the Screw in 5 minutes - and making the James work seem like something by Enid Blyton!

Wow! Phew! Astonishing - and, I believe, recorded for future broadcast on R3 ('tho' not as part of the current run of New Music Show features from the Festival).

Interviewed by Robert Worby before the concert, Denyer came across as a lovely, funny, humane, insightful, and honest individual - 'though of NO use whatsoever in explaining the title of his great work! Nonetheless, for me nothing less than a milestone in my life.