Unsuk Chin, Total Immersion (Barbican, 9th April)

I was lucky enough to get hold of the Unsuk Chin Total Immersion day before it disappeared from BBC iPlayer this weekend.  Four of her pieces from the event were broadcast: her breakthrough work Acrostic-Wordplay (1991), for soprano and ensemble; Double Concerto (2002), for piano, percussion and ensemble; Gougalon (2009), for ensemble and Rocaná (2008), for orchestra.

The first piece was written after a three-year compositional silence following a traumatic year of study with Ligeti. It was enormously fascinating to hear of Ligeti’s scathing criticism of himself and others and his brusque dismissal of Chin’s already well-received early works. Despite the difficulties of her time with the Hungarian master it was clear that she retains some warmth towards him, a feeling that was clearly reflected in the music, though, as Jonathan Cross pointed out in his illuminating conversations with Sara Mohr-Pietsch, we shouldn’t, perhaps, take these observations too far.

Despite this I couldn’t help falling into this temptation as I listened. The seven-movement Acrostic Wordplay takes texts from Michael Ende’s Endless Story and, a favourite of Ligeti too, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The piece uses the texts very freely and with great humour, evoking not necessarily the sound world, but the playfulness of Ligeti’s Aventures. Ligeti was also fond, even in works of apparently enormous surface complexity, of underpinning his music with easily comprehensible pitch structures. This too was everywhere evident throughout the programme. In each movement of Acrostic Wordplay, for example, there is a very obvious controlling pitch. But Chin’s writing is so dazzling, so colourful, so perfectly judged, that the listener is hardly aware of it, except in the positive sense that it binds the whole together. In a similar vein the Double Concerto felt like an enormous elaboration of a tonic that never entirely disappears and instead provides a welcome foundation for the virtuosic writing throughout the ensemble. Gougalon (Scenes from a Street Theatre) is a reflection of Chin’s Korean roots in that it evokes the street entertainers she remembers when growing up in Seoul. Playfulness is everywhere in evidence in this music too. Take the second movement, Lament of a Bald Singer, for example. Again constructed over one controlling pitch, this is not mushy romantic lamentation; in its crazy downward glissandi, circling woodwind and brass ‘wah-wahs’ this is a wittily sardonic parody of self-pity. The effect is hilarious and wonderful.

The last work, Rocaná (Room of Light) was inspired by ‘beams of light – their distortion, refraction, reflections, and undulations’. A magnificent twenty-minute orchestral tour-de-force, the point of inspiration becomes dazzling rays of sound that distort, reflect and refract around the orchestra. To me, its sudden shifts of state, from ethereal, hypnotic and other-worldly to brash, violent and terrifying, also evoked another acknowledged influence on Chin’s music: the world dreams. To a greater or lesser extent this was also in evidence in the other works I’ve described; as Chin herself says: "My music is a reflection of my dreams. I try to render into music the visions of immense light and of an incredible magnificence of colours that I see in all my dreams, a play of light and colours floating through the room and at the same time forming a fluid sound sculpture.’

The next Total Immersion day will feature the music of Hungarian composer and conductor Peter Eötvös at the Barbican on Saturday 14 May.

Cheltenham Festival Preview

If you want two weeks of great music with some extremely thoughtful programming, the Cheltenham Music Festival (29th June-10th July) could be just the ticket. Aficionados of new music will find plenty to attract them.

Top billing, given that it comes hot-on-the-heels of the critical and popular success of Anna Nicole, goes to a welcome revival of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s first opera Greek. The piece, a translation of the Oedipus myth into Thatcherite East London, will be given by Music Theatre Wales as part of their wider tour of the work. There are also premières aplenty.

Some of these fit nicely into the festival’s ‘Music and Maths’ theme. The world première of Charlotte Bray’s Replay (June 30th), for example, was inspired by spherical geometry and will be played alongside an established work by Robert Saxton, A Yardstick to the Stars. The two composers will also give one of a number of talks during the festival exploring the ‘Maths and Music’ theme.  The mathematics of metre permeates much of the surface of another well-represented composer at the festival: Steve Reich. Cheltenham provides the opportunity to hear his seminal work Drumming (3rd July) as well as UK premières of new arrangements of Electric Counterpoint, Six Marimbas Counterpoint and Vermont Counterpoint (also 3rd July). Celebrated percussionist Evelyn Glennie performs in a concert that contains two, as yet unnamed, world premières from Joseph Phibbs and Hannah Kendall (1st July) whilst Arlene Sierra’s new work inspired by scientific studies of insect behaviour, Insects in Amber, will receive its European première by the Carducci Quartet (8th July).

Other premières fall less obviously into the festival’s overall themes, but are no less to be recommended. These include Ian Venables’ Remember This, based upon Andrew Motion’s elegy on the death of the Queen Mother (29th June); Edward Rushton’s Pandora, Organic Machine (10th July); Michael Berkeley’s Ode–In Memoriam (1st July) and, in a special event that will take place on September 11th, Richard Blackford’s substantial new work Not in our Time will mark 10 years since the 9/11 attacks in New York.

My source inside the festival tells me that tickets for the new music events are going quickly. Get yours soon…

For more details about these and other festival concerts visit: http://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/music.

UK Arts Council cuts.


More evidence that the UK is living in artistically straitened times emerged yesterday from the Arts Council of England. A £100m budget cut in October has led to a reduction in the number of groups receiving funding from 849 to 695. Many of those that have been successful have also experienced large budget reductions, though the picture is not consistent since, instead of ‘uniform cuts to all’, the Arts Council has adopted a policy of ‘strategic cuts’. This means that some organisations, such as the Young Vic, have experienced large budget increases, whilst others are new to the list. So what about the purely musical picture, and what might it mean for composers?

Within the organisations that the Arts Council will continue to fund, 86 are classed as purely musical. Of these, 14 appear to be new to the list. Of the rest, 48 have experienced budget cuts, 24 budget increases. Within these figures are causes of concern and a few crumbs of comfort. Aldeburgh Music and Birmingham Contemporary Music group, for example, have received cuts of 9.3% and 11% respectively (all figures adjusted for inflation). Most worryingly, Sound and Music, the organisation that is a mainstay of support to living composers, has received a whopping cut of 48%. Crumbs include budget increases for the Psappha ensemble (up 40.8%) and Oxford Contemporary Music (up 16.5%). It is less clear from navigating the Arts Council website just which organisations have lost their funding completely. Perhaps members will have more information about this?

In another related piece of news the government has pledged an extra £80m of lottery funding for the Arts Council from 2013. Is it uncharitable to wonder whether this might have something to do with the ending of the London Olympics?

 

 

Leonid Desyatnikov – composer and artistic director of the Bolshoi Theatre

­I had a conversation about opera with Leonid Desyatnikov.  Desyatnikov is one of Russia’s most prominent composers and since 2009 the artistic director of the Bolshoi Theatre.  His opera Rosental's Children, based on the libretto by the highly controversial fiction writer Vladimir Sorokin commissioned and staged at the Bolshoi Theatre made an enormous and scandalous success.  One of the opera reviewers described: ’’Here, Mozart is a clone brought to life at Doctor Rosenthal's laboratory. With the government subsidies for cloning and stem cell exploration, as well as for other areas of basic research, cut off during Boris Yeltsin's presidency in the early 1990s, clones of Mozart and other great composers-such as Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky – find themselves loose on Moscow's streets, exposed to the murky post-Soviet reality, memories whereof are still fresh for many Muscovites.’’  The Russian State Duma accused the opera of being ‘pornographic’ and promted an investigation after its premier.  Nevertheless, the opera received a Golden Mask Award.

Elena Langer:  Can we please talk about opera?

Leonid Desyatnikov: Why opera?

EL: Because of your Rosental's Children, because you are the artistic director of an Opera House and because I have ulterior motives as I have just finished writing my own full-length opera and am very keen to discuss various aspects of the genre.  Do you think you could describe what opera is in one sentence?

LD:  This is too difficult!  I can only offer a banal answer – a pinnacle in the history of European culture.

EL: Is opera a story told through music, singing and movement?

LD: No, it doesn’t necessarily need a story.  There are many wonderful operas in which nothing really happens. Take Saint Francis of Assisi by Messiaen, or any baroque opera…  If a composer uses mythology then the story lacks suspense.  The development of the plot becomes unimportant as everybody knows what is going to happen.

EL: At least we now have established what is NOT important and that is the plot!

 

LD:  Of course – look at Tristan and Isolde or Szymanowski’s King Roger….  In any fiction film many more events take place than in an opera.

 

EL: What is important then?

 

LD: Well, what is important is that it creates some fit of passion, some metaphysical, otherworldly psychological human state expressed through music.  Opera shows us characters in such emotional states that are otherwise impossible to express but through music.

 

EL: It is the only genre where we can hear the thoughts of several characters simultaneously…

 

LD: Yes, true, but we can’t hear the text in 95% of cases!  Instead, we see a special moment, where a few characters are shocked. At least I personally always remember those kinds of bewitched moments.  ‘I’m frightened’ (‘Mne strashno’), for instance, from the first tableau of The Queen of Spades or the finale of The Marriage of Figaro.  So after all, it doesn’t matter what they are saying, it matters what they all are feeling during those moments.  Music is able to tell us more than the text in this situation.  The characters are still, like in a child’s play ‘statue’.  The depth of their feeling is interesting – the ensembles are not about what you see, but what you don’t see, about the inner side of life.

 


Excerpt from Desyatnikov's opera 'Rosental's Children'

EL: Could you name your 5 favourite operas?

 

LD: Five favourite operas for a professional composer would not be enough. Your favourite opera is the one, where you revel with each note, which you know by heart from beginning to end.  There are music-lovers, who could sing each character’s lines from their favourite operas.

 

EL: True! My grandma could sing huge bits from Traviata and Eugene Onegin although she wasn’t a musician.

 

LD: Probably, you could only be so faithful to opera if you are a music lover, not a professional composer.  Opera for me and should be for you, a kind of back garden, which you can’t regard with reverence. We have to cultivate this back garden because we are its owners.

 

EL: But I still regard Wozzeck or Lady Macbeth of Mtsens with reverence…

 

LD: As a matter of fact, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk doesn’t touch me much.  Actually, the same could be said about Wozzeck. Although, the culmination moment in the d-minor invention couldn’t leave anybody untouched.  The problem is that I know this opera from inside out – for a few months I was living with it.  (Wozzeck was recently staged at the Bolshoi Theatre – EL).  So it is really hard to be emotionally shocked by something that you know so well.  My perception of it is not fresh enough.

 

EL:  I’m always amazed by the German counterpoint, the intensity and richness of it.  I don’t think you could find that level of counterpoint in Russian music.

 

LD:

Interview with Carla Rees of rarescale

 

Low-flute specialist Carla Rees has been running rarescale since 2003, championing new chamber music for alto and bass flutes. With their Premiere Series 2010 starting on Saturday 18 September at Shoreditch Church in London, I asked her to tell us more about what rarescale do, and how composers can get involved with their work.

 

RF: rarescale has been around for a number of years, energetically championing new music by a very broad range of composers. For those readers who haven't come into contact with you, who are rarescale, and what is your mission?

CR: We are a chamber music ensemble with flexible instrumentation, which specialises in music using alto and bass flute. I began working to develop repertoire for low flutes and received pieces for a wide range of chamber music combinations, so I wanted a group with flexible instrumentation which could build programmes around the works  rather than developing a narrow repertoire with limited instrumentation. I am passionate about the alto and bass flute and they have a lot of potential within a solo and chamber music context, so my aim is to work with composers to develop as wide a repertoire as possible. rarescale is a registered charity, and one of our aims is to educate composers in terms of how to write successfully for these instruments, as well as doing what we can to promote their works.

 

RF: Can you tell us more about the quarter-tone flutes you play? Who makes them, and how common are they? What draws you to them?

CR: My instruments are made by Eva Kingma in the Netherlands. They have full quarter tone system key work and are capable of achieving a full range of quarter tones without compromising tone colour. They are still relatively rare instruments – the alto was made in 2000 and is the first of its kind, although there are a few others around now, and the bass was made in 2007 and is the first with an upright design, which means the weight of the instrument is taken up by the floor rather than my arms! C flutes are now being made with the quarter tone system by two different makers and are becoming a little more common. It’s a fantastic design, because the extra keys don’t get in the way of standard playing – I’d use my quarter tone instruments for Bach or Mozart, just as much as I would for contemporary music. They offer a  wide range of possibilities for alternative fingerings, timbral trills and contemporary techniques (especially multiphonics) and are incredibly versatile with microtonal tunings too. On top of that, they are very well made and have a beautiful tone and response.

 

RF: In the past, you had a remarkable open call for new works, through which you undertook to try to premiere any works with suitable scoring which were sent to you. Is the call still open, and are there any restrictions or guidelines about sending in scores?

CR: The call for scores is still open. I’ve received around 600 pieces since rarescale was founded in 2003, and on average I receive one new piece a week. As a result of that, I have to be selective about what we can perform, but I learn every piece I am sent, and it goes into the database so that it can be considered for a particular performance opportunity. I tend to build programmes around instrumentation, so it can sometimes take a while before we have enough pieces to justify including a certain instrument in one of the concerts, but I programme as many of the pieces that are up to standard as I can. Generally speaking, we rarely use more than 4 (or at a push) 5 players in a concert, for financial reasons, more than anything, and it is always easiest to programme works for alto or bass flute solo or with electronics or guitar. Other core instruments are soprano, bass clarinet, cor anglais and piano, but I am willing to accept music for any combination. I prefer to receive scores as PDFs or Sibelius files by email, and I am more than happy to receive a very wide range of compositional styles – I am trying to build a repertoire for the instruments, so variety is essential. This means the works need not include the full capabilities of the quarter tone system instruments, and I will also consider works which are suitable for educational use; I run masterclass courses for alto and bass flute players so I am also always on the look out for works my students can play.

 

RF: Saturday 18 September sees the first concert in rarescale's Premiere Series 2010. Can you tell us more about the series, and in particular Saturday's concert? What other performances and projects do you have coming up?

CR: We hold the Premiere Series every year, in Shoreditch Church. We usually do two or three concerts every autumn (this year there are two) which we use as a platform for some of the new works received during the year. The first concert (on 18th) is for alto/bass flute, soprano, bass clarinet and electronics, and we’re playing a range of new pieces and second performances, including by Michael Oliva, Rob Fokkens, Scott Wilson, Thomas Simaku, Jay Batzner and Kaja Bjorntvedt. We also usually include something by a well-known composer, and this concert, Rosie Coad will be performing La Fabbrica Illuminata by Nono, which is a fantastic piece for soprano and electronics. The second concert, on 6th November, is for alto flute, guitar and electronics, and includes pieces by Claes Biehl, Elizabeth Winters and David Bennett Thomas. In place of a third concert in this year’s series, we’ll be performing the premiere of Michael Oliva’s Requiem at St Albans Abbey on 20th November, with the fantastic chamber choir, Mosaic, under Nicholas Robinson. The piece is scored for choir, organ, alto flute and electronics. Also coming up is our 2011 masterclass course on the Isle of Skye, which has both an electroacoustic composition masterclass course, led by Michael Oliva, and a composers retreat, to enable composers to come and work in an inspirational environment and to meet other composers and some of the rarescale players.

 

Weblinks: