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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
February 8, 2015
When did composers feel they had to start explaining how they constructed their music? Certainly there exists no document by Schubert, for example, saying "in this movement I use subject groups rather than individual subjects", or by Liszt explaining that "my B minor sonata is a cyclical work in which the single movement subsumes the conventional four-movement structure". Later composers often provided programmes for their "abstract" compositions but then withdrew them (see under Mahler, G).
Perhaps it was only in the second half of the twentieth century, as the avant-garde drew further and further away from the tastes of the average music-lover, that composers began to feel that if only the audience understood how a composition were constructed they would appreciate it more.
History has shown this to be a chimerical notion and yet composers still do it, even when the music itself proves highly attractive and therefore needs no explanation.
These musings were prompted by the opening work in Aventa's latest offering, Gordon Fitzell's evanescence. In his programme note, Fitzell tells us that he was "interested in exploring the concept of aesthetic violence...How do issues of syntax, perspective, temporality, ideology and technology help foster such a conflict?"
I will admit right here and now that I have an inbuilt resistance to such writing (too long spent in academia perhaps); either the music works as sound or it doesn't and no amount of verbiage is going to rescue a piece that falls into the former category, no matter how ingenious (or multisyllabic) the explanation.
So it is quite possible that when the piece began - with a sort of electronic ripping sound, as if the fabric of the hall were being rent asunder - I was already prejudiced against it. Certainly I failed to enjoy the opening couple of minutes, which seemed to fall into the "heard it all before" category: slow chords, rubbed wineglasses, a bowed vibraphone.
But somehow, over the course of the piece, the purely sonic aspects of the, mainly slow and quiet, music won me over to the extent that, when it actually finished I was rather hoping it would carry on for a while longer.
Memo to self: next time, read the programme notes after listening to the music.
Zosha Di Castri's La forma della spazio did not utilise electronics, but it did banish clarinetist AK Coope and flutist Mark McGregor if not to the outer limits, at least to the back of the balcony, while soloist Müge Büyükçelen, pianist Roger Admiral and cellist Alasdair Money remained on stage.
La forma was a fairly short piece which would certainly repay a second hearing. I particularly enjoyed Admiral's turn as a sort of apprentice Morris Dancer, with bells on his ankle, the florid wind passages and the way that a particular four-note descending phrase was tossed between the players, both onstage and off.
Towards the close Büyükçelen - her usual excellent self - unleashed a series of very precise, mesmerising glissandi over slow chords and decorations from the piano. A most effecting passage.
Continuo(ns) was the first of two works by French composer Phillipe Leroux and, composed in 1993-4, the oldest music on the programme. Shrewdly, I omitted to read the programme note.
Scored for violin, cello, flute, clarinet and piano, my abiding memory is of notes repeated at different speeds by the players, sometimes overlapping, all leading to a reasonably violent conclusion. It certainly held my attention throughout.
The main event was the evening's eponymous work: Leroux's VOI (rex) (the man does like his parentheses).
Based on poems from Lin Delpierre Le tastement des fruits, VOI (rex) was composed in 2002. It is a work of "hi tech", in which the soprano soloist - the extraordinary Helen Pridmore - triggers (via a hand-held control, reminiscent of the slide-changing "clickers" prevalent before laptops and PowerPoint) changes in the way the live electronics reacts to her voice and the instrumentalists, with the resulting sounds sent through four speakers positioned around the audience. (This sounds almost trivial, but consider: a single misplaced or missed "click" would alter the nature of every that came after.)
There are five short movements, each sharply differentiated from the others. At times, as in the fourth movement, Devant tout autour, the electronics put Pridmore's voice into contrapuntal combination with itself; at others the instruments and their electronic echoes moved around so fast as almost to engender motion sickness. I also particularly enjoyed the opening of the last movement, L'inachevé à son faîte, in which the vocalist's "scat" singing was imitated first by the clarinet then the flute.
Leroux clearly has an exceptional auditory imagination; he also seemed very happy with the performance.
Bill Linwood steered his superb musicians through the various swamps and pitfalls of the evening's music with his customary firm hand.
Aventa Ensemble: Müge Büyükçelen: violin; Alasdair Money: cello; Mark McGregor: flutes; AK Coope: clarinets; Roger Admiral: piano; Corey Rae: percussion; Kirk McNally, audio.
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