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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
April 2, 2023
One of my favourite images of all time is by the great British cartoonist Bill Tidy. Outside the office of a shipping line a crowd of tearful people are walking away, leaving a single man with a polar bear on a leash, enquiring of the spokesman: "Yes, but is there any news of the iceberg?" (You can see it here)
It all, as they say, depends on your point of view.
Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic has undoubtedly become a modern classic; one of the two works which not only made his name (the other being Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet) but also established that it was entirely possible to write emotionally affecting music in the style coming to be known at the time (some fifty years ago) as minimalism.
Nor has its power diminished over the years: Sunday's concert closed with what I believe to have been the third performance of the work by Aventa in Victoria and, while the setting of the Philip T Young Recital Hall cannot compete atmospherically with the Fisgard Light, venue of their second performance almost exactly seventeen years ago, the power of the music is such that it really didn't matter.
Bryars, himself a double bassist, has a fondness for lower instruments and the ensemble on this occasion consisted of what I like to think of as a typical Bryars string quartet — two violas, cello and double bass — plus horn, bass clarinet and two percussionists.
The work is framed by the tolling of a bell and, as can often happen with truly inspired music, what has come between informs the final toll so that it has a completely different effect from the initial one. What was previously heard as a warning signal has become a funereal lament.
I confess that I was a little surprised at just how powerful was the effect of music which I know well: the initial statement of the hymn tune bringing to mind the early music of Charles Ives — a connexion I had never sensed before — while the final "amen" cadences brought, as always, a lump to the throat.
The evening's eponymous work was Missy Mazzoli's Still Life with Avalanche, scored (mainly) for violin, cello, piano, flute, clarinet and percussion.
The "mainly" in that previous sentence is because, in addition to their other responsibilities, several of the players also double on harmonica at various stages: the slow-moving opening chords, for example, are filled out by harmonicas played by the flautist and percussionist.
This was my first encounter with Mazzoli's music and I am sure it will not be my last, as her star appears currently to be in the ascendant. I especially enjoyed the lively waltz-like passage and the bouncing syncopation as the music became more complex, before the harmonicas returned and the music came to a very abrupt end.
I must admit, though, that I was left with the feeling that perhaps the music was rather too long.
Or rather too short.
I am still trying to decide which.
Taylor Brook's Lore was written for Aventa and was receiving its first performance. It is scored for violin, viola, oboe, flute, clarinet, piano and percussion and is in six brief movements, which the composer has dubbed "songs", but not in the MP3-generation sense of "any piece of music", rather "to help conjure a sense of imaginary musical tradition".
Whether or not he was successful in that particular goal I am uncertain, but there were certainly numerous inventive and attractive moments. For example the repeated cello notes, with their wavering pitch, which opened the first movement Credo, the glissandos (and Brook does seem to love a good glissando) in Deviances, the dancing violin and flute weaving arabesques around the oboe in Routines / Games, the oboe's slow intensity in Lament in which Brook came perilously close to an actual melody, the dizzying runs of the horn up and down its range in Whirl, Pivot, and Orbit (although Brook does lose a mark for the Oxford comma) and the quasi-passacaglia of the final Incantation.
"I hate all these pseudo-philosophical over-simplifications. I hate all ideologies...And I never think in philosophical terms, or never in extra-musical terms."
György Ligeti's Chamber Concerto is another modern classic dating from 1969-70, the same period as the Bryars work, yet the two could hardly be more different. The music ranges from the "micropolyphony" of the first movement to the "insanely virtuosic presto" of the finale.
During Aventa's typically (insanely?) virtuosic account I was especially struck by the warm discords of the opening movement, which could easily have been dropped into Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey — whose use of Ligeti's music made him almost a household name — without anyone noticing. Organist Dagmar Kilian found a wonderfully soupy tone for the second movement. The "mechanical", not to say pointilliste, third movement was delicate and violent by turns and the finale was dizzyingly frantic, with a wonderful piccolo and bass clarinet duet, and Darren Buhr's growling bass underlying everything.
Another exceptional evening from Aventa.
Aventa Ensemble: Müge Büyükçelen, violin, viola; Cory Balzer, violin; Mieka Michaux, Müge, viola; Alasdair Money, cello;Darren Buhr, double bass; Emily Nagelbach, flute, piccolo; Anna Bertuzzi, oboe, English horn; AK Coope, clarinet, bass clarinet; Keith MacLeod, clarinet; Darnell Linwood, horn; Scott MacInnes, trombone;Roger Admiral, piano, celesta; Dagmar Kilian, harpsichord, organ; Aaron Mattock, percussion.
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