Friday 17 February 2017

Review of Psappha concert at St Michael's Ancoats on 16th February 2017


Manchester’s leading contemporary music ensemble brought its 25th anniversary season to an end on Thursday with a concert featuring two world premieres and – strangely enough – the solo percussion work by Xenakis after which the group is named but which founder Tim Williams had never performed in public before.

Admittedly, he said beforehand, he’d been ‘obsessed’ by it since 1986. The reaction to his fulfilment of that long-held ambition can only be respect and awe. It’s overlapping, fiendishly complicated patterns of rhythm would (you would think) require at least four performers, and probably a conductor as well, to synchronize. It was a tour de force.

The striking thing, to me, about the two totally new works was the extent to which they are audience-friendly (unlike, for instance, Saariaho’s Light And Matter for piano trio, or Elliott Carter’s Intermittences for piano solo, which were also on the bill: they were brilliantly played and have their formal, in the case of Saariaho, and sonic, in the case of Carter, intellectual fascination, but that’s about as far as they go).

Emily Hall uses lyrics written by Agneiszka Dale and soundtracks made by Mira Calix to complement and interact with her music for violin, cello, clarinet and piano in Advert – Wedding Dress.

In five brief sections it expresses aspects of separation … fairly clearly of the end-of-an-affair sort. The first includes abrupt and sudden impacts which give the music the character of melodrama to an unseen sequence. The second is a tender lament accompanying a poem about getting rid of the unwanted wedding dress – it’s so full of grief and confession that the following Stonewalling, dominated by its ‘beat’ soundtrack, seems like an embarrassed reaction to the heartbreak that has just been revealed. Then there’s a kind of varied four-note round, as the lonely soul makes friends with mice in the wall (‘Hello Micky [sic], hello Minnie!’), and a grim tango to lines from a disappointed migrant about the ‘Shitty West’, ending with what seemed like a lavatorial sound-effect.

It may all seem very depressing, but there’s warmth in the musical writing that instantly appeals, and you could never say it didn’t make sense.

Tom Coult’s Two Games And A Nocturne (for violin, cello, flute, clarinet, piano and percussion) is in three parts (doing, as he said, ‘what it says on the tin’) and playfully uses a variety of sources – a touch of blues, novel high cello pizzicato effects, a gradually accelerating, jerky rhythm which feels quite like fun before it slows and then heads off into a skeltering, syncopated allegro. The Nocturne is a gentle soundscape, with what would be heard by many as birdcalls from piccolo and glockenspiel – very Brittenish.

Structurally both new works are crystal-clear, with titles to help, and so was Nightswimming, a piano trio by Joe Duddell, because it comes across, psychologically, as a set of variations, building speed and liveliness to a peak and then going down the other side. There’s fascinating counterpoint in the writing, and, as in every piece, Psappha’s musicians played with consummate skill.


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