4 posts tagged with "review"

Took the time to go to a concert of contemporary music tonight, a rare pleasure for me these days. Psappha, at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, playing a concert of largely new work. Sean Friar's Scale 9 which opened the programme was likeable and energetic, a sort of andante and allegro, or rather andante and blues, in a post- (very-post-) Gershwin vein. Nice to see an ensemble conducting themselves.

I like my flavours strong and simple, and Francesca Le Lohé's Blind Men and an Elephant was a little too detailed and finely wrought for my taste. It had the merit of turning out to be shorter than I thought it would be, which sounds snarky, but is actually an honest and well-intentioned comment: a compressed, rich piece.

Shows how out of touch I've become that I didn't even know Gordon McPherson had a big three movement prem tonight, Stunt Doubles. The gag here was having a synthesised ensemble play along with the real players. This worked very well: even just a few years ago this would have been a very different piece, but today's huge sample libraries make a much better job of it than the old 128 midi sounds. The first movement was… maximal, a million notes, but still very clear and structured. In the second movement Gordon dipped into a jazz bag which he normally keeps very well hidden, up in the loft somewhere behind an old sofa: we all liked this.

The third movement gave me some pause, with a slightly, er, naff, pastiche, of a filmic whistly-march type tune. The end of this piece oddly made more sense to me, where we heard this tune again, this time on the synthesised ensemble. Overall I thought this was a good piece, a bit tiring in places.

Dimitrios Skyllas New Miniatures for the Universe rather exceeded my C21st 140-character attention span. Seemed to be rather large miniature. And, the Steve Reich Double Sextet: boring.

But, very well played by Psappha, as were all the pieces in this well balanced and engaging concert.

I saw a great new opera recently, The Sloans Project. Composed by Gareth Williams with a libretto by David Brook, it was set and performed in the historic Sloans Bar and Restaurant. Yes, that'll be opera performed in a pub! The opening scene was a coup de theatre. As the audience milled about in the bar downstairs, the show just started right there, with a couple at the bar bursting into song, soon to be answered by another drunken-looking guy at the bar. After that the audience were invited to process to some of the upstairs rooms, where there were a series of three vignettes, followed by a culminating scene in the ballroom.

Gareth of course is a friend and colleage of mine of old, with his PhD at the RSAMD – sorry, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland – running more or less in parallel to mine. Recently he's been plowing the operatic furrow consistently and with great success. His musical language is very spare and secure, with a great command of vocal writing. In this piece I was drawn in by the unique staging as much as anything else, but I seemed to detect some new thinking in his approach, particularly in scene two Chopin's Ghosts, which collided separate and uncoordinated music in different keys on the harp and piano in a very creative and effective way.

The performance of The Whirlies the other night was a bit of a stunning success. Good audience, including the arts editor of the Herald, Keith Bruce, who seemed to really get the piece;

'The new music came from J Simon van der Walt, whose The Whirlies pitted his own prepared multiphonic scrabbling with table-top banjo ukulele and electronic gizmos against lush concert-orchestra strings - a collision only enhanced by the shattering of a glass behind the bar.

There was some theatre, too, in his intensity and the swaying of the cellists, in as perfect a musical encapsulation of the East Kilbride road system as I ever expect to hear.'

The East Kilbride Mail also wrote up the piece enthusiastically, and even did one of those celebrity twenty question interviews;

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Well, Gareth and I got a really excellent review for our concert last night from Michael Tumelty in the Glasgow Herald;

'Let's not mess about. Never mind technical shortcomings, rough edges, the fractured tenor who was clearly in discomfort. Last night's offering by RSAMD students in the academy's festival of new music, Plug, gets five stars for the originality of creative thought that flowed from student composers Simon van der Walt and Gareth Williams into two new works for theatrical performance.

In another era, van der Walt's Schaduwee would have been called a song cycle. This creation, for soprano, four bassoons, piano, electronics, kazoo, projected images and some horseplay (I've never seen the pianist hilariously heave out the innards of a prepared piano as part of a piece) was something else, though there were enough Malherian devices to give a hook into the familiar. The piece, a musical, literary and theatrical questioning of language, was abundant with ideas, arcane and mundane, but was dazzlingly performed by stratospheric soprano Alexa Mason and her team of intrumentalists.

Gareth Williams' one-act boxing opera, Love in the Blue Corner, is like nothing else I've seen in a theatre. It turns its subject inside out. There is only one boxer. He's a loser and he dies, beaten to a pulp. He stands, silent and still in the read-lit centre of the ring, while a make-up artist daubs him with the sweat, bruises, cuts, fractures and wounds that leave him wrecked. The action of the match is in Williams's postminimalist, postmodern music, belted out by the ensemble, and given voice by the trainer, who exhorts his stubborn failure of a protege to move, jab, dance, persist.

It was a heartbreaking tragedy in a mind expanding night from the students.'