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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
March 31, 2019
It was in 1680 that the poet Thomas Brown (author of Dialogues of the Dead), then just seventeen years old, was expelled from Christ Church College, Oxford, for some unrecorded misdemeanour.
The Dean of the college (and later Bishop of Oxford), Dr. John
Fell, offered Brown a reprieve if he could extemporaneously
translate epigram XXXII from Book I of the Roman poet
Martial, which reads:
Brown's impromptu reply was the now well-known verse. (And, lest you think that Dr. Fell was always this forgiving, it is also recorded that he once punished another student, for the crime of "courting a wife while only a bachelor of arts", by making him translate into English the entirety of Johannes Schefferus's Lapponia — a comprehensive History of Lapland — also from the Latin.)
And what, if anything, you are no doubt wondering, has all of this to do with Sunday night's exceptional Aventa concert?
It is simply this: replace "Doctor Fell" with "John Adams" in Brown's verse and you have my personal feeling about the latter's music in a nutshell: despite admiring it for its undoubted skill of construction and invention, I have never warmed to Adams' music and doubt that I ever shall.
It was with an exceptionally vivid and precise performance of Adam's Son of Chamber Symphony (alas, I'm afraid I even find his title irritatingly "cute") that Bill Linwood and the Aventa Ensemble finished their final concert of the 2018-19 season.
Adams has said that the piece, scored for fifteen players, "gave me an opportunity to do the kind of challenging virtuoso writing that I would never attempt with a large orchestra" and here, at least, I would concur: the music seems extraordinarily difficult from a technical perspective (as was confirmed to me afterwards by members of the ensemble, who told me that if you once got even slightly lost "there is no way back").
The opening movement begins with a bang and is aggressively rhythmic (I nearly wrote "almost aggressively" but, really, there are no half-measures about this music at all) and remarkably busy throughout. There is no letup either for the players or the audience, although there did seem to be hints of Aaron Copland buried deep in the music.
I did enjoy the passing of the melody which introduces the slow movement between flute and clarinet, although this soon accelerated to something approaching what seems like Adams' preferred tempo, before the finale, which was once again loud and bouncy (yet, alas, for me, dull), brought the work to a rousing conclusion.
A superb performance all round, I just wish I could be more enthusiastic about the music.
Ah well, you can't hug every cat.
The urge for musicians to play or sing duets with themselves goes back at least three-quarters of a century, to 1941 when Sidney Bechet recorded The Sheik of Araby and Blues of Bechet playing the clarinet, soprano and tenor saxophone, piano, bass and drum parts himself. The record was released as being by "Sidney Bechet's One Man Band".
But it was not until the advent of tape recording and devices such as the Echoplex, which contained a short, continuous loop of tape, that a musician was able to perform such a duet in real time.
One of the most notable exponents of the tape delay was the minimalist Terry Riley, who would perform all-night concerts in which he improvised against the delayed sound of his own keyboards and gave the results titles like Persian Surgery Dervishes.
At around the same time (1970) the lead guitarist of the British underground rock band the Pink Fairies would play lengthy guitar solos duetting with himself using an Echoplex delay unit. My memory says that his solo (and such it truly was: the rest of the band simply ceased playing) at the legendary Phun City open air festival lasted for some twenty minutes. (Trivia fans will also be delighted to know that the guitarist, Paul Rudolph, was in fact a Canadian and now owns a cycle shop right here in Victoria).
These rambles down the back alleys of my musical memories (not, alas, that I ever got to see Riley perform in person, although I still have fond memories of John Tilbury playing A Rainbow in Curved Air in London's Purcell Room) were prompted by the unlisted item which opened the second part of Sunday's concert: Marcus Goddard's Solus, a title which, as Goddard himself said, is essentially a three-way pun ("Solace" and "Soulless") and is scored for solo trumpet (the composer himself) and live electronics; the technology now having advanced to the point that a player can duet with a modified delay of himself.
For me this commendably short (around ten minutes) piece was a definite highlight of the evening, as Goddard's trumpet echoed from side-to-side of the stage, interacting with variations of itself, before finally subsiding to the sound of the unmodified instrument, which, strangely, summoned up aural images of The Last Post being played at an almost inaudible distance.
Mesmerising.
Goddard's music also opened the evening, in the shape of Pool of Lost Grooves.
The piece begins slowly with piano and tuned percussion rippling under almost static chords, before rhythms begin to emerge, only to disappear again shortly after.
The music was for the most part very busy and great fun, displaying Goddard's keen ear for unique sonorities along the way, such as the flute and clarinet duet with piano and marimba accompaniment.
Once again there were moments when Aaron Copland would have felt at home with the harmonies, but my abiding memories are of a vital, rhythmically complex piece in which, no matter how complex those rhythms became, my foot hardly ever stopped tapping — which is pretty much standard for anything, no matter how fearsome, directed by Linwood and played by Aventa.
The evening was rounded out by Rodney Sharman's Chamber Symphony.
I especially enjoyed the slow moving chords of the first movement, textures which put me in mind somewhat of Ligeti (e.g. Atmospheres), yet without seeming derivative, and whose structures and the sonic imagination displayed were more than sufficient to hold the interest.
The second movement opens with massive, tutti chords and contains a wonderful flute solo with col legno string interjections.
Like much of Sharman's music which I have encountered previously, it deserves, nay demands a second hearing.
Like everything I have ever heard from Bill Linwood and Aventa it was immaculately and enthusiastically performed.
Aventa never disappoint.
The Ensemble: Müge Büyükçelen, Tyson Doknjas, violins; Mieka Michaux, viola; Alasdair Money, cello; Darren Buhr, doublebass; Heather Beaty, flute, piccolo; Russell Bajer, oboe, English horn; Shawn Earle, clarinet; AK Coope, bass clarinet; Katrina Russell, bassoon; Darnell Linwood, horn; Marcus Goddard, trumpet; Scott MacInnes, trombone; Corey Rae, Aaron Mattock, percussion; Roger Admiral, piano, keyboards.
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