London Sinfonietta Landmarks Revisited !

Fifty years of the London Sinfonietta marked by a programme closely connected to the Sinfnietta's glory days - Xenakis, Birtwistle, Colin Matthews and Wolfgang Rihm.  I was at the live concert last November at St John’s Smith Square,  broadcast at last on BBC Radio 3 (available online, on demand for a month) . Here is what I wrote then. It's  still valid !

"A great London Sinfonietta experience with Martyn Brabbins conducting
Xenakis, Birtwistle, Wolfgang Rihm and Colin Matthews at St John's,
Smith Square.  As the London Sinfonietta nears its 50th anniversary,
it’s good to hear them presenting landmarks from their core repertoire. 
Good music is always "Unfinished Business", revealing  more with each
experience. Governments want to divest themselves of responsibility for
education, forcing orchestras to change their focus. But excellence "is"
education, and education doesn't just mean people who wouldn't normally
listen to music.  Hopefully the London Sinfonietta will return to its
pioneering roots and be proud of what they do.

Harrison Birtwistle's Silbury Air ( 1977/2003) is a case in point.  It's one of the great classics of the repertoire, inspired by Silbury Hill, a neolithic mound rising steeply above the flat plains of Wiltshire. In foggy conditions, it looms above the mist as if it were a strange alien entity.  It connects to other prehistoric land forms in the area, such as Avebury, Long Barrow and Stonehenge.  Building these  monuments may have taken millennia, constructed as they were without modern tools. Yet no-one knows who built them, or why.  "Unfinished Business", mysteries we may never solve.  Silbury Air is an evocation in musical form of many ideas Birtwistle has been developing over many years: layers of sound like geological strata, cells growing organically into denser blocks,  always moving.  Tiny percussive fragments (including harp and piano - Rolf Hind)  grew into a long seamless drone, with oboe, B flat clarinet and trombone.  Flurries of notes, building up patterns.  Temple blocks and metallic brass : lines swaying in characteristic Birtwistle waywardness.  Could we hear neolithic workmen hammering away ? And echoes of The Rite of Spring ? Textures thinned out : high strings and winds, surprisingly subdued, mysterious brass chords, percussion in various forms beating time.  Ticking sounds, too  - the passage of time - an elusive flute theme rising above.  Single harp chords. Hard to tell when sound merged into silence, but that, I think, is the point.

Organic growth, too, in Iannis Xenakis Thalleïn (1984)  The title means "sprouting"  Thus the sudden but sustained chord, exploding like a siren, high-pitched sounds rising upwards, rhythmic cells bubbling along. An exotic glissando that decelerated before rising up again - a tendril, unfurling and swaying. Further loops of sound (winds and brass), sparkling flurries and single notes plucked on piano and percussion.  The music moves through several distinct phases, ideas carried through and developed anew.  Dense textures alternated with stark staccato, evolving into florid glissando multitudes.  Percussion chords anchored wildly rhythmic figures.  Single chords along the
keyboard danced with drums and strings.   Long wailing brass and  single chord percussion. The "siren" opening returned, in new form, with a strong brass line. Xenakis creates shapes with sound, shapes so inventive that they could be depicted in visual form.

As I listened to Xenakis, I thought of Boulez's many Notations,  reconfiguring and growing like a Mandelbrot, the very essence of life.  So it was good to hear Colin Matthews’ Contraflow (1992)  after Xenakis Thalleïn. Again, the idea of shapes spiralling and unfolding, with joyous
proliferation.  It's "contraflow" in the sense of two forces meeting and merging. Colin Matthews is a major figure in British new music and very much a part of the London Sinfonietta heritage.

Since this concert was a sampler programme, we didn't get to hear the whole of Wolfgang Rihm's Chiffre-Zyklus (1982-6), which evolved from Chiffre I through a series of different instrumental groupings to form a traverse, though each section can be played individually.  Here, though, we heard Chiffres II (of X) subtitled "Silence to be Beaten" (1983). From near silence, a strident chord which breaks into zig zags, movement further propelled by rushing rhythms, capricious figures for winds and brass, alternating by piano beating time like a metronome.  Energetic blocks of sound which suddenly disappear into near-silence.  High-pitched sound, interrupted by thwacks of timpani. Further near silence, rumbling percussion, tense single keys crackling across the keyboard. The climax builds up in waves of varied detail.  A marching pace, led by brass calls. Gradually, the textures open out again: sighing winds, single notes on the piano, and silence returns. What a ride!     

London Sinfonietta Landmarks - Birtwistle Xenakis Matthews Rihm

Silbury Hill collage, from London Sinfonietta

 A great London Sinfonietta experience with Martyn Brabbins conducting Xenakis, Birtwistle, Wolfgang Rihm and Colin Matthews at St John's, Smith Square.  As the London Sinfonietta nears its 50th anniversary, it’s good to hear them presenting landmarks from their core repertoire.  Good music is always "Unfinished Business", revealing  more with each experience. Governments want to divest themselves of responsibility for education, forcing orchestras to change their focus. But excellence "is" education, and education doesn't just mean people who wouldn't normally listen to music.  Hopefully the London Sinfonietta will return to its pioneering roots and be proud of what they do.
Harrison Birtwistle's Silbury Air ( 1977/2003) is a case in point.  It's one of the great classics of the repertoire, inspired by Silbury Hill, a neolithic mound rising steeply above the flat plains of Wiltshire. In foggy conditions, it looms above the mist as if it were a strange alien entity.  It connects to other prehistoric land forms in the area, such as Avebury, Long Barrow and Stonehenge.  Building these  monuments may have taken millennia, constructed as they were without modern tools. Yet no-one knows who built them, or why.  "Unfinished Business", mysteries we may never solve.  Silbury Air is an evocation in musical form of many ideas Birtwistle has been developing over many years: layers of sound like geological strata, cells growing organically into denser blocks,  always moving.  Tiny percussive fragments (including harp and piano - Rolf Hind)  grew into a long seamless drone, with oboe, B flat clarinet and trombone.  Flurries of notes, building up patterns.  Temple blocks and metallic brass : lines swaying in characteristic Birtwistle waywardness.  Could we hear neolithic workmen hammering away ? And echoes of The Rite of Spring ? Textures thinned out : high strings and winds, surprisingly subdued, mysterious brass chords, percussion in various forms beating time.  Ticking sounds, too  - the passage of time - an elusive flute theme rising above.  Single harp chords. Hard to tell when sound merged into silence, but that, I think, is the point.

Organic growth, too, in Iannis Xenakis Thalleïn (1984)  The title means "sprouting"  Thus the sudden but sustained chord, exploding like a siren, high-pitched sounds rising upwards, rhythmic cells bubbling along. An exotic glissando that decelerated before rising up again - a tendril, unfurling and swaying. Further loops of sound (winds and brass), sparkling flurries and single notes plucked on piano and percussion.  The music moves through several distinct phases, ideas carried through and developed anew.  Dense textures alternated with stark staccato, evolving into florid glissando multitudes.  Percussion chords anchored wildly rhythmic figures.  Single chords along the keyboard danced with drums and strings.   Long wailing brass and  single chord percussion. The "siren" opening returned, in new form, with a strong brass line. Xenakis creates shapes with sound, shapes so inventive that they could be depicted in visual form.

As I listened to Xenakis, I thought of Boulez's many Notations,  reconfiguring and growing like a Mandelbrot, the very essence of life.  So it was good to hear Colin Matthews’ Contraflow (1992)  after Xenakis Thalleïn. Again, the idea of shapes spiralling and unfolding, with joyous proliferation.  It's "contraflow" in the sense of two forces meeting and merging. Colin Matthews is a major figure in British new music and very much a part of the London Sinfonietta heritage.

Since this concert was a sampler programme, we didn't get to hear the whole of Wolfgang Rihm's Chiffre-Zyklus (1982-6), which evolved from Chiffre I through a series of different instrumental groupings to form a traverse, though each section can be played individually.  Here, though, we heard Chiffres II (of X) subtitled "Silence to be Beaten" (1983). From near silence, a strident chord which breaks into zig zags, movement further propelled by rushing rhythms, capricious figures for winds and brass, alternating by piano beating time like a metronome.  Energetic blocks of sound which suddenly disappear into near-silence.  High-pitched sound, interrupted by thwacks of timpani. Further near silence, rumbling percussion, tense single keys crackling across the keyboard. The climax builds up in waves of varied detail.  A marching pace, led by brass calls. Gradually, the textures open out again: sighing winds, single notes on the piano, and silence returns.  What a ride!      

Giacinto Scelsi, the Hölderlin of New Music?

If Hölderlin had written music might he have written like Giacinto Scelsi (1905-88)?   Scelsi's music  and Hölderlin's poetry have a similar moonstruck quality. Both were artists for whom the term "from another planet" could have been devised. Scelsi's music is fragmentary and eclectic, but fascinates me because it opens out strange vistas one might not otherwise access, just as Alice in Wonderland follows a rabbit into a hole in a tree and discovers bizarre, alternative reality.

Scelsi, the great grandfather of microtonality, was born  into the Italian aristocracy. A cosmopolitan sophisticate, he hung out with Cocteau in Paris, and was received as an honoured guest at Buckingham Palace. Yet when he died died only 25 years ago, he was something of a mystery, a recluse who had spent most of his life in secure institutions. His music is as strange as his life was: bizarre, obsessive, and elusive. Assuming, of course that it was his music, since there are claims that it wasn't. Perhaps Scelsi is as kin to Ferdinand Pessoa as he is to Hölderlin?  Pessoa used many identities that corresponded with each other –  a precursor of the modern internet troll, though he was genuinely creative rather than destructive as trolls are.

At last a new book, in English, Music as Dream: Essays on Giacinto Scelsi. edited by Franco Sciannameo & Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini. Please read the review here in Soundproof Room, one of the finest blogs on new music, for a detailed summary. Please also read this article the late Peter Graham Woolfe wrote in 1986, when Scelsi was still alive - very perceptive. More on Scelsi, Xenakis, Murail etc on this site, too, please explore.,

Arditti Quartet Xenakis Edinburgh International Festival

By Juliet Williams

Tuesday, like Monday, saw the performance in Edinburgh of work created by a polymath, this time the Greek architect and composer Yannis Xenakis, whose mathematically derived boundary-pushing work  started to be created under the tuition of Messiaen. One of the interesting aspect's of the very enjoyable Messiaen anniversary year was the chance to see the very considerable diversity of subsequent-generation composers who benefited from his tutelage in developing their divergent styles.

The work of Xenakis is extraordinary, challenging to listen to but from which I emerged strangely energized. For me it was the highlight of the  performance. Two of his works were presented. Ikhoor, named after the life-giving fluid flowing through the Greek Gods used in place of blood (blood cells and their behaviour being a subject which had fascinated the composer), is a string trio with an urgent insistent drive, full of buzzing sounds which create the impression of a swarm of bees. The cleverly contrasting ending involves the previously intense sound fading to a whisper, then creating the effect of echo. Tetras ('Four') was inspired by the composer's experience of working with this ensemble. As Messiaen describes it, 'The sound is a delicately poetic or violently brutal agitation.'

Like the previous day's performance, the Arditti Quartet recital at the Queens Hall  featured both high-quality performance of established repertoire (here Janáček's pleasing “Kreutzer Sonata”  string quartet number one) and innovative contemporary works. Perhaps more than any other ensemble, the Ardittis emphasis working with and alongside composers as they develop the works they commission.

This performance featured the fruits of not one but two such collaborations; not only the work with Xenakis, but also two string quartets from  the American Conlon Nancarrow, best know for composing a large number of works for player piano. Two of these were arranged here for live musicians, and these were presented  after the performance of two string quartets from him, the second of which was created for the Ardittis after hearing their own performance of the first. These two quartets were separated in the composer's output by another, never finished but referred to as his 'second' string quartet, so that the two performed here are known as the first and third.

The Third Nancarrow Quartet, which formed the second item in the second half of the Edinburgh concert, was a real revelation, being much of the time very delicate and almost melodic in its sound world, referencing at times the melancholic longing of the opening Janacek. Its first movement closed with an extended cello solo, excellently performed here by Lucas Fels – who was consistently good. The baton is then passed to the first violin, which has another extended, this time largely pizzicato, solo, with occasional accompaniment from the second violin, which occupies most of the second movement. The technically demanding and rhythmically unusual closing movement uses all four voices to come to a surprising ending.

The Ardittis performed excellently in a very varied and challenging mixture of repertoire. Broadcast live on BBC Radio Three, the performance remain listenable via the BBC website for another six days.

Games with Time : London Sinfonietta Prom 44

Delightful Londoin Sinfonietta experience at BBC Prom 44. Ligeti, Xenakis, Berio, Jonarthan Harvey, Louis Andriessen and John Cage. Mentally challenging but also intensely good fun. "Fun?" sneered someone not so long ago "That's not an acceptable term in music" But anyone who can't appreciate fun can't really appreciate creativity.To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, "when a man is tired of fun, he's tired of life".

This Prom was also a challenge to creative thinking. No orchestra for Ligeti's Poème Symphonique, . Instead 100 metronomes furiously ticking away until their mechanisms run out of steam. Metronomes count time and tempo is a basic building block of music. Like Poème Electronique, it's an installation piece that breaks down rigid assumptions about how we process sound into music.

I've loved Luciano Berio's Sequenza V for years without knowing its background as it works fine as pure music. It's a study of breath control. The trombone emits tentative blips, then creates long, low lines that seem to probe into space. Trombones call to communicate. Byron Fulcher shows how his trombone can peak, sometimes like a moan, sometimes a long exhalation, probing space and reaching outwards. He's dressed as a clown, mocking the Victorian propriety of the Royal Albert Hall. But it's also a reference to a famous clown who lived near Luciano Berio when Berio was a boy. Berio liked humour because it was anti-authoritarian and broke down barriers.

Xenakis Phlegra  refers to the clash between the Gods of Greece and their predecessors, the Titans. Obviously it's not "pictorial" but a confrontation between jagged,  angular pulses and more complex emanations. Woodwinds, brass and percussion weave zigzags  around each other.. Gutsy, "wooden" sounds from the strings. A huge, elliptical emanation from the brass, then a strange blast that suddenly deflates. There's even a snatch of melody, a brief reprise before the piece speeds up maniacally, and ends with pulsating short signals, like transmissions from distant planets.

In Jonathan Harvey's  Mortuos plango, vivos voco, technology is the instrument. A boy's voice sings agains ta recording of  tolling cathedral bells. But the boy himself is now an adult. while his voice rermains that of a child, recorded when the piece was first created. Harvey is playing with time, for what we hear is both something frozen in the past and reconstituted  anew in performance.

Many of the themes in Prom 44 pulled together in Louis Andriessen's  De Snelheid (Velocity) (1984). Two identical groups (saxophone, brass, piano at the sides, flutes, harps, keyboards in the front and centre back what Andriessen calls "Buddha", woodblock percussion that operates as a giant metronome. Regular, unvarying pulse, but one which speeds up quicker and quicker until you can't count the beats. Any faster and the player might disintegrate. It's gloriously punchy and exuberant, but must be hell to play and keep together. The London Sinfonietta have Andriessen's idiom under their skins, so to speak, and have been playing him for years. André Ridder conducted, stylishly.

And then silence. Or not.  After 60 years, John Cage's notorious 4'33 still draws howls of rage from fundamentalists who don't think about what they listen to.  Cage makes us think about the art of listening, why and how we process what we hear around us. 4'33 is like a Cage Musicircus, where we're presented with layers of multiple stimuli. Every "performance" is unique, created by chance and happenstance. Unfortunately at the Proms everyone keeps reverently silent which defeats the purpose. But 4'33 is "music you can perform at home" at any time.  Indeed, in our 24/7 world of mass instant communication, ruled by technology, we need to heed Cage more than ever.

This Prom ended as performance art, volunteers texting randomly, like in an installation space. A cheeky concept!  But fun.

photo : Peter Forster

Xenakis Rachmaninov sculptors in sound Prom 63 2009

Rachmaninov and Xenakis on the same Prom? The "arch-modernist" and the arch-Romantic? Strange pairing, but whoever made the connection really understands how music works other than on an obvious superficial level.

Everyone knows that Xenakis worked with Le Corbusier, though as an architect he didn't design ordinary buildings, but conceptual structures like the Philips Pavilion. See HERE. (There is a lot on this site about Xenakis, architecture and Le Corbusier, so use the links at right or the search widget). It's important to remember this as Xenakis didn't design with bricks and mortar but with ideas. So there isn't any real transition in Xenakis from creating structures in space and creating structures in sound.

Nomo Gamma takes performance space as starting point, and fills it with sound. Xenakis creates spans of sound which cross over each other from different points in the vast void, forming an intricate network of effects that hold together even though they don't have physical form. Think how bridges are built, spanning emptiness til they create a strong structure. Like the Philips Pavilion, Nomo gamma is a free floating series of small cells which coalesce to form content out of void.

It's an ideal piece for the Royal Albert Hall, for it maximises the vast open spaces. Ninety-eight musicians positioned all over the building, even in the upper galleries. Musicians move, in and among the audience, further breaking down the idea of fixed positions. It's amazingly dramatic, because the audience is drawn into the experience. So much nonsense has been written this year about the Hall's acoustic. In fact there's no such thing as a single acoustic: everything depends on what's being played, and in what position it's being heard. It's a flexible concept. Too often it's used as an excuse for lazy listening. Last year Stockhausen's Gruppen and Cosmic Pulses were heard to magnificent effect: what a tragedy that the composer didn't live to experience them at that Prom!

Xenakis wasn't the first or last composer to experiment with sound as structure but his background makes it easier for people to grasp the concept. It was an astute move to use Nomo gamma as a wedge, opening the door towards greater understanding of ideas in new music. So much nonsense is currently being written about new music as "intellectual" – repeated so often it becomes shibboleth. Judging by the huge applause at this Prom, even extremely cereberal, conceptual theory like this can work if only people actually listen and open themselves to experience.

So the audience lapped up Aïs which followed, where Xenakis deconstructs the idea of singing, giving Leigh Melrose a part that ranged from extremes of the register, disintegrates into clucks made at the back of the throat, then suddenly swooping off into screams that break off as if strangled in mid-flight. It's impressive in performance even though it wrecks a singer's voice. Berio, Nono and others deconstructed voice more effectively than this, but Xenakis is good to hear at the Proms because he was such a fascinating personality, who can make new music approachable even by audiences who might otherwise be scared off theoretical music.

Aïs is also accessible because it connects to concrete images, like the paintings on Greek vases which depict the exaggerated expression of ancient actors - eyes round, mouths frozen in horror and and so on. Indeed, though there's only one soloist, the vocal part is created so it functions like a chorus. Poor Melrose switches from one type of sound to another so quickly that it seems as if there were several roles trapped within one body. Quite a tour de force, but this isn't repertoire designed for human habitation. Rather like some of le Corbusier's architecture (or rather that of his followers). Rebuild the Barbican for human access!

The real surprise of this Prom was for me Rachmaninov's From the Isle of the Dead. David Robertson, an "arch-modernist" to use that infantile term of abuse, turns the old dreamer into a cutting edge master. It's hard to believe that this piece was written in 1909, before the Rite of Spring, before Sibelius 7th. Above is one of Arnold Bocklin's paintings of a dream he had about an Island where death reigns. It springs like a volcano out of a smooth sea, impossibly steep cliffs surrounding a dense grove of trees. It's completely unnatural. There's only one way onto the island, through a narrow crack. A narrow boat approaches, with an upright figure. Any Freudian will note : images of death, sex and birth together. Perhaps why the image is so powerful, it's an archetype.

So Rachmaninov, who was spellbound by the picture, paints music which describes a place which cannot possibly exist in reality. Often this piece is played like a misty impressionist landscape, which it arguably is. But Robertson and the BBC Symphony Orchestra get so much more out of it Suddenly, the craggy cliffs become savage blocks of upright sound, contrasting with the flowing passages whih represent movement, perhaps through light or water. The concept of structures, density and texture, of movement and fixed masses. It's music as architecture, long before Xenakis, even before Sibelius's powerful sculptures of Nature. So now the clichés that parcel composers into niches like tonal/atonal are shown up for the myths they are. Thank goodness for original thinkers like David Robertson who don't stereotype. Not long ago I heard the Berliner Philharmoniker play the same piece. When one of the best orchestras in the world plays on auto pilot, you realize just how important a good conductor is and why the best deserve the money.

An excellent Shostakovich 9, but the shock of Rachmaninov was still too great for me to overcome.

Tonight's Prom feature Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Dialogues for two pianos. The Berliner Philharmoniker have been doing a seaon of Zimmermann all year, so go to their site whee you can still watch and listen. Zimmermann's big masterpiece is Requiem for a Young Poet, which the B Phil has a wonderful download of. Read about it HERE

New Music at the Proms 2009

The Proms aren't fossilized. They've always supported new music, introducing things that have turned out to be standard mainstream fare. The idea that anything new must automatically be suspect is a fairly recent concept. It wasn't always so. Conductors mix new with old so people can listen in an intelligent way. Nowadays unfortunately there are audiences who pride themselves on refusing to pay attention, to prove they "know" the "trick". It's not a trick, just sensible programming. Henry Wood would not have been amused by such "clever" folk. Fortunately, the Proms still respect his ideals of learning and listening.

Obviously, not all new music is particularly new conceptually or musically. That's fair enough. What we know now as basic repertoire is only the tiniest fraction of what was produced at any time. Naturally there's more dross than gold, but if we don't get a chance to hear, how are we ever going to know? There's a basic problem in that most of the best music around now is chamber music, quietist work that doesn't sound good in a cavern like the Royal Albert Hall, which favours big blasts of booming noise. One of the most horrible pieces I've ever heard was something of a hit a few years ago because it was big. It was described, by the composer, as similar to Beethoven 7th. Unfortunately it was followed by Beethoven 7th. Someone behind the programming had a brain!

In among the baroque, 19th century giants and solid early 20th century British composers this year are some intriguing prospects. Jonathan Harvey and James Macmillan fit in nicely with the wallpaper of semi-religious and choral music. Macmillan's pitted with Haydn no less.

For me one of the must gos is Prom 10 on 24 July, a concert of Takemitsu, Debussy, Hosokawa and Ravel. Akiko Suwanai, who so impressed last year in RVW, will be playing. Hosokawa's new piece incorporates Japanese instruments like the sho. It should be good, he's no pastichiste.
Another must go is Prom 18 on 29 July, Widmann's Con Brio. There was a Widmann series at the Wigmore Hall this year, which was well received. Jonathan Nott conducts the Bamberg Symphony, sensitive performers of new though not necessarily shocking new music.

August 4th will be another good day. The evening concert features a Heinz Hollinger premiere, and the late Prom Harrison Birtwistle classics like Silbury Air. David Atherton, makes a welcome return, conducting the London Sinfonietta, which he helped found decades ago. Birtwistle is Atherton territory. This Prom jumps out from the crowd so anyone interested in new music will have noticed. Those who only know Birtwistle from opera will have a blast on 14th August with the Second Act of The Mask of Orpheus.

Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies were the Brave New World of British music. It's good that the Proms celebrate Max's birthday on 8th September so nicely. The first concert sets the mood with Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture. The late concert features the BBC Singers. Both Westerlings and Solstice of Light are to texts by the Scottish poet George Mackay Brown. These are both spectacular pieces and would have worked extremely well in the earlier concert, particularly as the massive organ will be used. When will the Proms get over the idea that late night "ghetto" slots are somehow less important ?

Also unmissable for me will be Detlev Glanert's Shoreless River, Prom 46 on 19th August. Glanert has been heard several times atv the Proms, his Theatrum Bestiarum being written specially for the RAH organ and acoustic. This new piece is part of a forthcoming opera, jointly commissioned by the BBC, WDR SO, NSO Washington and the Royal Concertegebouw Amsterdam. Glanert was one of Henze's few students, he's very good indeed. In March I heard his opera Caligula in Frankfurt (see link at labels list on right)

Another major highlight will be Louis Andriessen's De Staat. This is one of the major works of our time, still as relevant and powerful as it was when new. Again, it's late night on 28th August but it will be performed by the Netherlands Wind Ensemble, who are very good indeed. They're also playing Steve Martland and Cornelis de Bondt, whom I don't know yet, but if an ensemble like this likes him he must be worth hearing.

George Crumb fans will find a way to get to Prom 66 on 4th September even if it's only on the radio. One of the pieces is Vox Balaenae where the flautist sings into his instrument, evoking the song of a whale. There'll also features on Michael Nyman, Philip Glass, Unsuk Chin, John Woolrich, Judith Weir. And of course Claude Vivier, Canada's greatest composer conducted by Charles Dutoit. This will be Orion, "an exploration of the echoing vastnesses of outer spoace" in 13 minutes!

Anyone dependent on public transport is disenfranchised from late night Proms which can end before the last train. It's a marketing thing – mass music, mass audience, though the Hall doesn't suddenly change size at night. But perhaps the Proms are gradually cottoning on that new music can fill houses if it's packaged right. Two high profile Proms this year feature composers who might not fit the image of mass appeal. On 2nd September, David Robertson includes two Xenakis pieces in the "main" evening concert. Audiences who come for Shostakovich shouldn't have any problem with Xenakis. His Nommos gamma is hugely dramatic - 98 players spread around the auditorium. A concert that has to be experienced live, well suited to Robertson's dynamic style.

The next evening, Jurowski is conducting the LPO in B A Zimmermann's Dialogues. Zimmermann is a significant composer : At the Philharmonie in Berlin they're doing a lot of his music including the seminal Requiem for a Young Poet. Catch the video broadcasts on the Berlin Philharmoniker website. If Zimmerman can sell in Berlin, London should take note.

Xenakis Total Immersion

Of the three Total Immersion Days at the Barbican this year, this was the most demanding as it connected with the on-going Le Corbusier exhibitions at the Barbican and RIBA. Yet for that very reason, Xenakis Day was the most satisfying because it meant “thinking outside the box”, architecture people connecting to music, music people connecting to architecture.

Xenakis didn’t give up architecture for music. Both architecture and music were, for him, different aspects of creative expression. Just as architecture is a way of enclosing space, music is a way of ordering sound.

The day (12 hours!) began with Mark Kidel’s film Something Rich and Strange. It was made in 1991, and Xenakis himself features. As in all good film, some of the most revealing moments are impromptu. Xenakis and his wife visit his old school. She’s thrilled. Until that time, Xenakis had been a political exile : Greece was a part of his life she’d not known. He’s more sanguine. “It’s all in the past”, he says. He was pragmatic, a man who sought solutions.

Hence Anastenaria, from 1953, when Xenakis was still working full time with Le Corbusier. The first part, Procession aux eaux claires refers to ancient Thracian mysteries. The male voices represent the Anasthenarides, priests, who lead the populace to sacred waters. The music evokes chant but made abstract, angular layers of sound building up to density. The second part, Sacrifice, employs slow glissandi which will become one of the composer’s trademark.

But it’s the third section, Metastaseis, where the interface with architecture is most apparent. Diagrams for the score resemble diagrams for the building. It was used to “introduce” audiences to Varèse’s Poème Électronique as they entered the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958. The Pavilion went even beyond Le Corbusier’s ideas about free form buildings. It was conceived as a unit of three surfaces, curved, rather than flat, which enclosed the space within in a womb-like embrace. Xenakis was less poetic, describing the concept as “cow’s stomachs”. The surfaces weren’t even solid but composed of small panels individually pieced together. What shocking sci-fi it must have seemed to people used to buildings as rectangular boxes !

Metastaseis grows from simple sustained pitch, from straight line to curve, long arcing glissando stretching and bending, like the planes of the Philips Pavilion..It’s a relatively straightforward miniature, though, so Tracées, from 1987, opened the evening concert where Martyn Brabbins conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Tracées employs ninety-five musicians, yet is tightly constructed. Brabbins understands why, conducting with discipline. Here, the woodwinds imitate glissandi, although they aren’t designed for such things. Without good performers of this calibre, these sections would collapse into mush. Congratulations are due to the musicians involved – this took expertise and Brabbins let them do it without fuss.

In the Marc Kindel film, Xenakis stands in his old school and recites from memory, apparently spontaneously, Ariel’s song from The Tempest, “Full fathom five, thy father lies….”. Perhaps he had been meditating on the poem, for he set it in 1994 for the BBC Singers as Sea-Nymphs. They’ve performed this often, and with Stephen Betteridge conducting, it was nicely polished. Less polish, though, would have been preferable in Nuits, which Xenakis dedicated to political prisoners from antiquity to the present. It’s a horrific protest, written from personal experience. The words are tortured like the prisoners are, yet when they can, fragments leap out like vocal glissandi, before subsiding into the complex polyphony, intensified by non verbal sounds like whistles and low hums. Exaudi, which has performed Nuits several times in the past few years, has a more acute feel for the tense anguish of the piece.

It was good to separate Sea Nymphs from Nuits with Mists for solo piano, for it made a bracing interlude, throwing the different techniques into high relief. In the programme notes, Ivan Hewett describes the mathematical theories behind the work. I can’t explain them nearly so well, but simply enjoyed the clean, uncluttered lines and clusters of notes which Rolf Hind played with rapid-fire tempi.

In Troorkh, Xenakis explores “extreme glissando”. Hewett’s notes describe it so well that they’re worth quoting. Xenakis, he says “treats the trombone as a kind of superhuman Homeric bard, recounting some tempestuous tale in wordless song”. The technical and physical demands are such that even Christian Lindberg, for whose skills the piece was written, collapses visibly from exertion after each of the two most demanding passages. It is an elegaic piece, as expressive as Greek tragedy. The trombone is supported by a group of brass, written with character. The trombone in the orchestra cannot possibly hope to match the virtuosity of the solo part, but responds in simpler mode. The tuba part is expressive : it can’t match the trombone’s stretching slides, but its tone is darker and profound.

Antikhthon again demands a huge orchestra. One of its characteristics is a long, shrill chord, like an air raid siren, or perhaps the drone of an aircraft taking off. It doesn’t matter, the effect is eerie, menacing, out of this world. If the chord is mega-glissando, it’s balanced with clouds of densely layered pointillist sound. There’s so much disparate activity it’s hard to make individuals out clearly, like finding a single insect in a swarm of locusts. Pithoprakta springs to mind, though this is later and more sophisticated. . Like the multiple panels on the planes of the Philips Pavilion, the different units function together. Sometimes the cloud clears, to reveal details, like the first violin (Andrew Haveron) tapping staccato on wood, before the orchestra wells up again. Brabbins’s strategy of keeping textures clean and clear paid off well. Like good architecture, an elegant structure doesn’t need fussy curlicues.

This was a magnificent concert, and would be quite an event at the Proms. Like the South Bank Xenakis series some years ago, audience numbers were healthy. Total Immersion Days aren’t just about blockbusters, though. Not all Xenakis is mind bendingly difficult.

Earlier in the day there was a special concert of Xenakis’s works for percussion ensemble. Sanforta, a specialist percussion ensemble played Okho for three djembas. In Africa, these drums really can “speak” as they’re played with much improvisation. Notated music is never going to be quite so fluid. Catherine Ring, still in her final year at the Guildhall, impressed as soloist in Rebonds, cheered along by the Guildhall Percussion Ensemble who performed Persephona. It was good to hear these musicians and these pieces because they reveal how Xenakis’s more elaborate works grew from “simple”, direct roots.

Please look at this link for more detail, and more photos

READ my piece on Xenakis's designs for Varese Poeme electronique

http://www.musicalpointers.co.uk/reviews/liveevents09/XenakisDay.html

Holland Festval 2009

The Holland Festival is lively - a great excuse to visit Amsterdam in early summer. This year the Festival celebrates Louis Andriessen's 70th birthday. The Andriessen family have long been significant figures in the Dutch music scene. In the 60's and 70's Louis symbolised the progressive spirit of the times, creating the Orkest de Vollharding and seminally important works like De Staat.

On June 6, there'll be an all day series featuring Andriessen's Haags Hakkuh (2008) and Vermeer Pictures (2005) plus works by Henrik Andriessen (father), Stravinsky (hero) and Diderik Wagenaar, another important Dutch composer. There'll also be another programme with vocal/theatre work, La Passione (2002) and the Folksongs of Luciano Berio, Andriessen's mentor.

Th big opera this year is Adam in Ballingschap by Rob Zuidam. Claron McFadden sings, which should be interesting. If I were going this year (alas not), I'd be heading for Pascal Dusapin's Passion, based on Monteverdi's Orfeo. This is also on in Paris in April. Dusapin writes exquisite chamber music and his operas are restrained but to the point. His Faustus, the Last Night is excellent. It's out on DVD. For a detailed description of Passion in Aix last year follow the link on the labels list at right. Dusapin was Iannis Xenakis's only student. More on Xenakis coming up soon, bookmark this blog.

Since writing this I've looked at the printed book programme and there's lots more - quite a bit of Dusapin chamber music and also the opera The Anatomy of Melancholie on 19th June. There is also a concert of Goeyvarts and his opera Aquarius on 21st June. There are several Varese events, a symposium, some concerts and installations. Holland Festival always delivers interesting things !

The Holland Festival is also good on world music, and this year's special is a performance of Buranku theatre. Bunraku puppets are stylised, as divorced from modern western concepts of theatre as can be, more austere than kabuki. Yet that's precisely why they're interesting. I'd go to this if I could.

Architecture as music Kowloon Walled City

In 1965, my friend went to a talk by Xenakis. Yesterday we went together to the big Le Corbusier exhibition at the Barbican. First weekend - queues for tickets, packed with earnest looking students and a few familiar faces, not that architects are as high profile as rock stars.

The Poème Électronique room is particularly good because you can see the whole film in its original black and white starkness - clips of Godzilla, ancient art, Belsen, Madonnas. Profound and found objects, thrown together. Sit where you can see both the film and the colour overlay on the other side of the room. At the Philips Pavilion both were shown together : at the Barbican, use your imagination to put them together and in the context of the undulating, walls not made of solid concrete but shards attached to a metal frame, hanging in the air, defying gravity rather than solidly ignoring it.

So, a few random and non-technical thoughts. Mandelbrot patterns are supposed to show how all creation evolves in a systematic sequence even though it may look infinitely chaotic. One striking thing about the patterns in Le Corbusier's work is the way simple grids multiply themselves, becoming ever more complex. It's really not so different from so much new music. Which is why for me new music is as organic as nature, cells dividing and expanding in sequence. And why I don't buy rigid tonality versus atonality doctrines which inflict labels on what is beyond classification. Time to reverse dogma and simply listen.

Architecture is a way of "enclosing space" even when they integrate light, air and landscape. Xenakis described the three planes of the Philips Pavilion as a "cow's stomach", an inner space where ideas are digested. Music too is a way of enclosing sound in structure, creating sculptures with sound. More on this soon after Xenakis Immersion Day on March 7.



Architecture isn't just buildings. The exhibition featured a lot on Le Corbusier's thing for urban space. Cities don't usually grow by planning. except when there's a disaster like the Lisbon Earthquake, or the upheavals in Paris in the 19th century. In the third world there are/were lots of urban environments which defy any principle of urban order - people just build where and how they can. The "traditional" Third World city is a maze-like warren of random structures. Electricity is "borrowed", sewers connect to water supply. There used to be a place in Hong Kong called the Kowloon Walled City which was a vertical burrow of conjoined structures where you never had to reach street level, if you knew how to navigate corridors, illegal bridges etc.

Note in the photo above, extensive gardens were created by the government - not the city inhabitants - to counteract the claustrophobia of the Walled City. (the photo enlarges if you click on it). The gardens acted as a kind of cordon sanitaire around the conurbation. Previously, it had been surrounded by multi storey building, only separated by a narrow city street. Had fires broken out or plague or cholera, it would have easily spread to the rest of the area. Moreover, since the Hong Kong government had no legal jurisdiction, triads ruled : the Walled City was a crime hotspot. Surrounding it with public gardens meant that police surveillance was possible. When the Triads ventured out, they could be stopped. In theory, anyway. The gardens weren't about aesthetic design, but served a grim, practical purpose. Town planners with their drawing boards sometimes don't understand.

Eventually the Chinese and Hong Kong governments made a deal to end the historic anomaly that allowed the Walled City to exist, and the whole place was razed.

So back to my beef with the Barbican. Originally the idea was that the mini-Metropolis should reflect the warren that was medieval London. The ancestors of my friend who heard Xenakis in 1965 lived under what is now the Barbican Hall. The difference is that, in a medieval village people knew their way around because they didn't travel far, and adapted to the higgeldy-piggledy maze by habit, not optimum convenience. People don't build warrens for fun, they just come about piecemeal. Ordinary people don't have big budgets they just improvise. "Traditional" cities aren't a "model" for anything.

The Barbican's systems are utterly counter intuitive to logic and rational movement. Even the lifts (elevators) when they condescend to appear, don't all go to the same floors. And when you get in them they decide for themselves where they are going to go, complete with sado-mechanist voice machinery. The Barbican was not designed for the disabled, elderly, children, or anyone who wants to get from point A to B without going round the block ten times. here's no natural flow of movement. And the feng shui is hopelessly stagnant. The Barbican complex is a structure that actively hates people.

Le Corbusier, Xenakis and Varèse Philips Pavilion

Think back to the Brave New World of 1958, after grim years of war and austerity. Philips, the then technology giant, wanted to dazzle the postwar world with the ultimate in artistic modernity. Thus Poème Électronique was conceived. It was an amazingly ambitious, visionary venture : it’s hard to imagine what an impact it made on audiences then who weren’t used to techno anything, far less an extravaganza of electronic music and visual effects in a building that looked like something from a sci-fi movie

Le Corbusier wanted to create a Gesammstkunstwerk. As an architect he understood how people experience space and fill it with sight and sound : Poème Électronique is a concept that juumps straight off the theoretical draftboard into reality. That's why he threatened to quit altogether if Philips wanted to drop Edgard Varèse. The whole point, for Le Corbusier, was that Varèse, neglected and frustrated, represented the new frontier, mixing technology with art.

Looking back on 20th century modernism , that's a trend that keeps recurring from the Italian Futurists to Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique. But the Philips Pavilion was a multi-dimensional experience on a huge scale, where vistors and space were part of what was happening. Thousands filed through the Pavilion, herded almost like animals, through corridors in which they were bombarded with bizarre sounds, flickers of images blasted so quickly they hardly had time to absorb them. In 1958, before most people even had TV, this was amazing. No way would a multinational today even dare consider something so adventurous.

There's plenty to read, even diagram by diagram plans of how the pavilion was built. Here is a clip of what folks in 1958 saw :

What a succession of images! And how strange they must have seemed to people who still watched movies in black and white. And how shockingly prescient - multiple Hiroshimas, right in the middle of the Cold War.

A lot of fuss is made over who did what and when in the development of the Philips Pavilion project. But such nitpicking misses the point. Architects, unlike composers, can't work on in isolation. Moreover, Poème Électronique was a fusion, not merely a series of events. As Xenakis himself said, there was an alternative son et lumiére installation Philips wanted to use, but it just didn't work in quite the same way.

Although Varèse didn't see the pavilion before he wrote the music, he understood the concept of sound being created as part of an environment. This idea – which dates from the Middle Ages – is very much live today. Think Stockhausen's sculptures in sound like Cosmic Pulses (Proms 2008) or "architectural" music built for specific spaces. Think Simon Bainbridge, Magnus Lindberg, Luigi Nono, where performance space is part of the experience. The images were projected onto the fluid lines of the building, the sounds adapting to the acoustic.

Furthermore, although Xenakis only wrote a short prelude before Poème Électronique, he designed the structure of the pavilion on principles that relate mathematics, architecture and music. In 1955, he'd written Metastasis, distinctive for its glissandi that shoot upwards and outwards like arches. He said "If glissandi are long and sufficiently interlaced, we obtain sonic spaces of continuous evolution. It is possible to produce ruled surfaces by drawing the glissandi as straight lines. ... my inspiration (for the Philips Pavilion) was pinpointed by the experiment with Metastasis". He goes on to show, via diagrams, the causal chain of ideas which led him to formulate the architecture from his earlier piece of music. The music grew from architecture and vice versa. It's way of thinking in pliable shapes.

This is why Poème Électronique is still significant after 50 years. Varèse never had the facilities which IRCAM, computers and modern electronics gave those who came after. But like a wild and woolly John the Baptist, he showed the way (See a wonderful 1920's arty shot of him by clicking on his name in the labels list on right). Conceptually, Le Corbusier, Xenakis and Varèse are still in the vanguard, their achievement still not fully understood. Follow the labels list on tight - lots on the architecture and music interface, Xenakis etc.

Big Le Corbusier retrospective London

A major Le Corbusier retrospective starts Friday 19th Feb in London at the Barbican. It's an important exhibition which covers Le Corbusier's whole career- architecture, design, philosophy - and his influence on others. There's a tie in with the Xenakis Total Immersion Day on 7th March.

The exhibition, which runs to 24th May includes, according to the Barbican blurb, the "monumental mural painting, Femme et coquillage IV (1948) from his own office at Rues de Sèvres, Paris; a reconstruction of his Plan Voisin for Paris (1925); a complete original kitchen by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand from his famous Unité d’habitation, Marseille (1947-50); original models of Ronchamp (1950-55), Unité d’habitation (1945-52), Parliament Building Chandigarh (1951-64) amongst others; and the film version of Le Corbusier and Edgard Varèse’s Poème Electronique (1958)." This later is a must for anyone interested in 20th century music, as it led to IRCAM and so much more. Lots of Picassos, Legers etc too.

Later I'll write about Le C, Xenakis, Varèse , the Philips Pavilion and Poème Electronique so watch this space - this blog can be bookmarked and subscribed to. In the meantime, here's a link to the article in the Times about the retrospective. There aren't any Le Corbusier buildings in England, so holding the show at the Barbican is as close as it gets. Pity that even after 25 years, I loathe the Barbican's demented anti-human, anti-intuitive architecture, with its appalling feng shui, as much as I love the clean tangents of Le Corbusier's work seen from photos. The photo above, Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp is by Guigui Yoshito.

Times article :

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/architecture_and_design/article5725116.ece

Tristan Murail Total Immersion

This is why I pay taxes. Each year the BBC sponsors a series at the Barbican in London for “total immersion” in a particular composer. It’s intense: whole days of music, talks, extra activities. In fact so intense that this year they’ve divided it into three separate days. Stockhausen Day was described earlier (follow the subject link on the right). Next month it’s Xenakis, and on Feb 7^th it was my favourite, Tristan Murail. Anyone who still thinks that Messiaen had no influence (and there are some) is totally deluded.

Messiaen taught people to find themselves, said Murail to Julian Anderson. In the evening, Pascal Rophé conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in two early Murail works.

Gondwana was the land mass formed when the continents we know were once joined together. Very loosely, this describes Murail’s Gondwana (1980) when densely textured blocks of sound gradually evolve. The concept is Messianique, recalling Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, even The Quartet for the End of Time. Murail also references Sibelius’s Leminkäinnen in Tuonela, from the Kalevala saga, grounding the piece in tradition even though the harmonies were derived from frequency modulation (FM).

Time and Again (1985) was commissioned by Simon Rattle, with whom Murail played ondes Martenot on the famous CBSO recording of Turangalíla. Themes from Turangalíla pop up joyously, but the real tribute is in the way Murail unites Messiaen’s wayward exuberance with electronic techniques made possible by Murail’s use of FM and synthesized sound. If Turangalíla bothers some with its “cinematic” wildness, Murail makes it a virtue. Time and Again moves back and forth, as Murail says “replete with flashback, premonitions, loops…as if the listener were inside some sort of time machine”.

Murail’s more recent work is even more inventive. So much so, that I’ll write about ...amaris et dulcibus aquis….(1994/5 rev 2004) and Terre d’ombre (2003/4) in much greater depth later. Come back to this blog for more.

Murail’s “greatest hits”, Winter Fragments (2000) and Treize couleurs du soleil couchant (1978), were played by students of the Guildhall School of Music in the afternoon, joined by Rolf Hind in Territoires de l’oubli (1977), a thundering turbulence for piano. Plus the Hugues Dufourt Hommage á Charles Négre which is described below. But there’s only so much I can write at one go. So “watch this space”, as they say.

Renzo Piano's Shard of Glass

Renzo Piano's new building is named "Shard of Glass" because it's a clear glass spike due to shoot out of the Southwark skyline at London Bridge in 2012. In fact, two of them big momma and baby. Architects and modern art fans, drool. But also fans of Luigi Nono. Prometeo was premiered as a performance installation in a structure designed by Renzo.

Prometeo is all about clawing onto the shards of civilization in a collapsing world. Things can shatter at any time, everything's fragmenting, dissolving. So Piano designs a boat like structure, hanging suspended from the roof of a derelict baroque church. The musicians were seated on planks, little more than boards across space. Scary ! The performance must have captured that edge of danger which the sedate concert at RFH this year missed. So, concept and music combined.

Read about Prometeo by following the links on the list of subjects on the right of this page. It's an experience, its message even more prescient now than in Nono's time. Read about Piano's Shard of Glass in the Times, or by googling Renzo Piano Top of His Game. Photo by Keturn. There is a lot about architecture on this blog considering it's a music blog. Please look on the labels list at right, lots on architecture and its interface with music, incl Xenakis and Le Corbusier, and composers whon think music as architecture, so PLEASE keep coming back. Also pieces on non western architecture, and visual art.

George Benjamin - Ligeti Messiaen Xenakis South Bank

“Unlike painting, music unfolds in time”. So say the programme notes to George Benjamin’s concert at the South Bank on 21/10. The pieces chosen show composers can adapt concepts of time in music – not simply tempo changes,. The notes for this concert are unusually good but the attributions are tucked away in small print. But they are superb. So if I quote more than I would normally, it’s for a reason. These guys are the best.

This concert was one of the highlights of the massive Messiaen retrospective at the South Bank, conducted by his student, George Benjamin. It centred around Messiaen’s Chronochromie, where “Kronos”(time) and “Khrôma” (colour)interact. Time is expressed through “32 different durations, subject to a system of permutations”. The rhythms are like cells of time, beaten into pace mainly by percussion. Like clockwork, the sound ticks along mechanically, but onto this Messiaen adds two layers of colour. First, the permutations are expanded by “dense harmonies in seven or eight parts”, gongs with first violins, bells with second violins Then Messiaen adds the vibrant “colours” of nature, birdsong and even the sound of a mountain waterfall he heard in the mountains, which he notated in eight parts. At the 1962 première audiences went bananas, what cacophony! But as Messiaen explained: “My permutations of durations are rigorous, my birdsongs are free. Rigour is implacable, but so too is freedom”. In this performance the rhythm whirred nicely but the overlay of detail was perhaps more dominant. Boulez takes a more vigorous approach, getting the contrasting structure and tensions more intensely, but Benjamin is interesting as “closeup”.

My friend first heard Xenakis in 1965 – speaking about architecture. Xenakis was an architect, trained to think spatially, who worked with Le Corbusier. Think blocks, curved concrete and angles – not so different from music. Pithoprakta begins with a horde of tapping, short bursts of sound. Sitting up in a box for a change, I could see how each sound was made differently – sometimes bows tapped against wood, sometimes fingers, strings sometimes plucked, sometimes tapped. It was like an immense chorus of insects, each small sound morphing into a mass. Only later did I read the programme where the writer describes it as “an insect-like crowd of unpitched tapping, punctuated by a single stroke on the woodblock”. Just like insects, the sounds suddenly die down and change direction. Then, as Mr Mystery says, “criss cross glissandi ensue, within a basically static cloud”. …”the final silence is broken into by a mass of swooping glissandi that gradually settle in dense clusters like a swarm of bees”. I must be psychic.

Ligeti’s Atmosphères is almost too well known to describe. Our friend expresses it thus “Now there is virtually no figurative foreground, only background. But what a background! Brilliantly coloured and of blinding intensity this too suggests clouds and gases amassing and dispersing, a strange and exotic void before matter is created”. He refers to Beethoven and Bruckner, most of us think 2001 Space Odyessy. So high and clear are the pitches they seem to exist like elementals, “beyond” structured sound or time frames.

These three masterpieces proved tough competition for George Benjamin’s own Sudden Time from 1989/93. The Messiaen influences are extremely present –sometimes you can hear what must be deliberate references. The title comes from a poem by Wallace Stevens which says “It was like sudden time in a world without time”. So the swirling textures and minute divisons of time “ebb and flow with seamless liquidity and only rarely solidifies into vigorous rhythmic pulsation” – “sudden time” leaping out of stretching time.

The mystery writers ? Peter Hill on Messiaen, Richard Steinitz on the others.

DANGER ! Xenakis at Aldeburgh

“Dulce periculum est” (danger is sweet), ends the ode from Horace set by Wolfgang Rihm, Quo me rapis. The poet is going where “nothing is slight, mundane or mortal”, yet relishes the unknown. It’s a metaphor for art.

Xenakis, a political radical, dedicated Nuits to “unknown political prisoners……the thousands of forgotten whose very names are lost”. Hence the fragmentation of sound. He uses broken syllables from Sumerian and ancient Persian texts. Phonemes express the idea of half-heard “voices”, and of ruthless suppression. Polyphony creates tumult more powerfully than straightforward word setting. In its own way, Nuits is as concisely aphoristic as a Kurtàg miniature, for the voices here symbolise vast forces, thousand of people silenced over many centuries. Exaudi employs a range of techniques like growls, whistles, the chattering of teeth to expand in sound the idea of fragmented words, each fragments building up a powerful wall of sound. Some of the wailing vowel sounds are held so long it’s as if Exaudi members were practising circular breathing. This makes the sudden, last syllable sound even more distressing, as it cuts off, strangled, in mid air.

.... Xenakis’ Kottos, for solo cello. Rohan de Saram is probably its finest exponent ever. I’ve heard him play this several times, but this was truly stunning. In his quiet, unassuming way he said a few words before starting to explain that Kottos was the son of Gaia, the primordial earth goddess. The full story is gruesome, pitting father against son in titanic struggle. As de Saram says “it’s like Quranos is pushing Kottos back into the womb”. De Saram does amazing things : long, protracted growls of sound scraping at the lowest possible range of the instrument, manically fast microtonal flourishes executed with great precision. Towards the end, de Saram plays conflicting rhythms with such energy that the music seems to levitate on its own dynamism. Look again at the photograph above, where five images of de Saram are superimposed on one another. Kottos is polyphony for a single instrument

http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2008/Jan-Jun08/aldeburgh20062.htm