Manchester Camerata has made its UpClose
series into a brand in its own right these days, and in the Gallery space at
HOME, Manchester’s theatre-cinema-gallery-arts centre and its new artistic
partner, it had a venue for ‘Pocket Symphonies’ that no doubt brought an
enquiring set of new ‘experience seekers’, too.
What they found was a sequence of music
tracks realized by their composer, German creative wizard Sven Helbig, the
piano quartet parts played live under his direction by Camerata’s Adi Brett, Ann
Beilby, Hannah Roberts and Simon Parkin, alongside film created and curated
by HOME’s own Chris Paul Daniels.
That sounds pretty prosaic, but it was an
experience that held attention for most of its about one-hour duration, and the
magic was in the marriage of the music and the visuals – many of them archive
footage with a nostalgic twist, or (in one case) time-lapse shots of familiar
scenes in our own busy-bee city, woven into fascinating tapestries of
superimposition.
Biggest hit on the night was one dominated
by images of speed along a railway track, matching the pounding moto perpetuo of the score, which they
decided to make into an encore, too.
Helbig described his work – which is on an
existing album, played by full orchestra and piano quartet – as a ‘song cycle’,
and I guess that’s what it is, if you think songs-without-words. (Symphonic
they are not, though in one or two I wondered whether ‘Pocket Passacaglias’
might have fitted, with their chaconne-style variation of an underlying
four-bar unit, or sets of units).
But hey, the man comes with imprimatur of
the Pet Shops Boys and Snoop Dog, among others, as well as classical outfits,
so you know he’s not an idiot. He can certainly write effectively for piano
quartet, and his music can be plaintive, or hyper-energetic, or loads of other
things, and is very appealing (tonal all the way) within its album-track
dimensions.
Is this the way to woo listeners into the
classical world who find traditional symphonies too long? Well, at one point
(just before the railroad track) I thought perhaps an hour of one
similar-length piece after another was going to be too long. But music with
something to look at is another genre, anyway – maybe even a kind of
Gesamtkunstwerk – and if Wagner could do the maxi version, Sven can do the
mini.
