Poppe Zug (2007)
Bailie Night Scenes I & II (2023) [World Premiere]
May Multiplayer Instrument (2023) [World Premiere]
López Brass Quintet (2003-04)

Ensemble Apparat (Mathilde Conley and Rike Huy (trumpets), Samuel Stoll, Morris Kliphuis and Elena Kakaliagou (horns), Weston Olencki and Wojciech Jeliński (trombones), Eliot Duschmann (tuba)] / Max Murray

Radialsystem V, Berlin
Sunday 21 January 2024

by Richard Whitehouse

Heading into its second quarter-century, Berlin’s annual Ultraschall festival put together some typically wide-ranging programmes – not least this Sunday afternoon concert, which featured Ensemble Apparat in a sequence of diverse pieces for various ensembles of brass instruments.

Among the leading German composers of his generation, Enno Poppe (1969-) has now built a sizable catalogue – from which Zug, whether it refers primarily to a train or a procession (or the capital of a Swiss canton), continually diverts and intrigues with its interplay for brass septet. Unfolding as three intensifying waves of activity, the music elides between sometimes playful and at other times ominous moods. While the expressive outcome is left in the balance, there can be no doubting the formal cohesion of a work whose technical dexterity never draws undue attention to itself.

Its comparable number of players aside, there could scarcely have been greater contrast than with Night Scenes by Joanna Bailey (1973-). Much of her recent output features audio-visual or installation elements, the present diptych setting its instrumental component in the context of a soundtrack whose incrementally changing ambience likely reflects those places specified. Hence the luminous if distanced activity of Geneva and atmospheric if never claustrophobic confines of Schwarzwald, with these two complementing each other in an evocative totality.

From here to installation pure if not so simple. Visual artist Ragnhild May (1988-) has made a feature of human and mechanical amalgams, with Multiplayer Instrument her most ambitious such project yet by fusing the ensemble into a ‘meta-brass instrument’ whose sonic and even constructional qualities are in a constant state of change. While its overall impact inevitably depends on being seen as well as heard (see the photographs on the Ultraschall website), the stark and even hieratic nature of this undertaking is undeniable even to those ‘just’ listening.

The combining of sound-sources was heard at its most graphic in the Brass Quintet by Jorge E. López (1955-). Here the instrumental music is interpolated with concrète episodes such as evoke respectively the sonic overlap between an alpine crevice and industrial powerplant, the tortuous process of mountain rescue down a vertical cliff-face, then its effortful continuation over a field of scree. In each case, the contextual emergence and resolution of these episodes has been provided by the music for brass out of which they come then into which they return.

That brass writing has all the visceral immediacy associated with this composer, not least in its emphasis on those lower sonorities of Wagner tuba and contrabass tuba. The preludial first section vividly contrasts its contrasting musical-types, while the second is an incisive toccata and the third a plangent threnody, then the fourth section resembles an introduction and fugue in which a lively jig earlier insinuated by trumpet rapidly comes to the fore – dominating the closing stages as it draws all five instruments into a recessional of jocular yet wanton inanity.

Such was the impression made by this performance, superbly rendered by the musicians of Ensemble Apparat under the astute direction of Max Murray. It set the seal on a programme of engrossing music and music-making – these being characteristic of Ultraschall at its best.

You can watch this concert via the Ultraschall website Click on the names to read more about Ensemble Apparat and Max Murray – and for the composers Enno Poppe, Joanna Bailie, Ragnhild May and Jorge E López, whose 65th birthday tribute can be read on Arcana