Taking time out from his full-time role as frontman for Toronto band Broken Social Scene, Kevin Drew makes his first album as K.D.A.P. (Kevin Drew A Picture). It is a chance for him to revisit his early 20s, when he listened intently to the early output of the Warp label as well as a good deal of electronic and cinematic music.
While it is a bit of a throwback, Influences is ultimately a creative response to the Coronavirus pandemic, when Drew found himself in the south of England in lockdown. Embracing the chance to get out into the natural world, his walked through the woods of Slinford and along the canals in North London. The excursions yielded plenty of musical ideas, which he expressed in fully formed ideas on the Endlesss app.
These ideas were sculpted into eight instrumental works with engineer Nyles Spencer, and some of the music was re-recorded with the help of drummer Evan Tighe and Broken Social Scene bass player Charles Spearin.
What’s the music like?
Influences positively bubbles with life and promise, like the English countryside in the springtime. An abundance of melodic ideas course through each track, carefully layered into an appealing patchwork of patterns.
The Slinfold Loop, Drew’s first track. blossoms nicely and shows how the album will work, without becoming an obvious blueprint. There is busy activity in the background and attractive melodic loops up front, all with the potential to germinate.
Shadow Rescues pulses with a positive nervous energy, while single lines are intertwined like shoots, leaves and branches on You And Me And Them, each with their own distinct colours. Wilner’s Parade is underpinned by a lean piano line, while Hopefully Something has a guitar prompt that could easily be taken from an outtake by The Cure.
Does it all work?
It does. Drew’s work is full of incident, and is ambient in the sense that it radiates positive energy and melodic charm. If anything some of these compositions could be allowed to run for longer, as there are so many ideas they would stand up to more development.
Is it recommended?
Enthusiastically. Influences is a highly listenable piece of work that reveals more with each listen. Influences is ideally structured and lovingly constructed. It is in a sense a love letter from Kevin Drew to his youth, but it could lead to so much more in the future, for he is clearly at home in an environment like this, and relishes the opportunities it has to offer.
“I feel a frost in the summertime”, sings Fake Laugh at the start of Ice, the second song into his collaboration with old college friend, producer Tarquin. How did he know that the album would be released in one of Britain’s worst summers in ages? The song, a single release from the pair’s debut album in partnership, is an accurate guide to what lies in store for listeners.
Their friendship was light to start with, a fleeting acquaintance while studying in Sussex, but here they hook up with far greater intent, releasing a few singles and picking up endorsements from the likes of DJ Annie Mac in the process.
What’s the music like?
Engaging and a bit quirky – but essentially some very listenable electro pop. There is a sound musical chemistry between the two, together with songwriting that comes alive in the lyrical department. Original Sin is a fine example of this, its opening lyrics set to chugging clarinets.
In contrast, We Ride holds its poise over a crunchy backing, while Gloom On The Dancefloor is an affecting, stately torch song. The vocals from Fake Laugh are a standout feature too, floating elegantly on Slow while beautifully layered on So Good.
Does it all work?
Yes, providing the listener doesn’t take their electro pop too seriously. There is no padding to the songs, the album over relatively quickly – but there is more than enough substance for it to survive a second and a third play without running out of steam.
Is it recommended?
Yes. This album offers an original approach, with songs that are a bit different to the over polished fodder heard on mainstream radio at the moment. Fake Laugh & Tarquin are on to something here, and it is to be hoped their collaboration doesn’t stop at one album.
‘Nature is the ultimate composer’. This is the standout quote from Berlin-based Gareth Williams, aka Llyr, as he introduces his first full-length album Biome. Natural sounds are the first things we hear, the birds and monkeys of the Borneo rainforest making themselves known and setting the scene for Williams’ thoughtful piece of work.
For Biome is an environmental album as well as a musical one, split into two distinct sections called Pre-Anthropocene and Anthropocene. The first four tracks constitute an ambient celebration of nature and its many qualities, while the second group of four are disrupted by human involvement.
What’s the music like?
Llyr allows the field recordings to flow beautifully from the start, with minimal involvement from his own electronics, but he prompts the slight changes of mood with a natural instinct for structure. The sounds are lovely on headphones, the listener allowed to revel in the unhurried natural processes of the jungle. Particularly striking is the fourth track, Courtship Signal, where the mating calls of frogs in Kubah National Park are replicated and developed.
When the humans get involved the electronics come to the fore, and so do the dance beats. Llyr manages the crossover really well, and unleashes a form of primal energy through the kinetic Intrusion #509, the bubbling of The Hawthorne Effect and a rush of percussion on Interject, featuring Private Agenda, that sweeps all before it. Llyr uses this to show the chaos of the human imprint, having a good time but sweeping away the ambience that went before. Finally Encroachment powers to the finish, and we realise all the while that we have been held under the dense canopy of the forest. The white noise of the percussion enhances this effect.
Does it all work?
Yes. Biome is an imaginative look at the so-called developing world today, and its structure works really well. Essentially it is a sequence of natural ambience, followed by 25 minutes of busy dancefloor action, like moving between two stages in a forest festival.
Is it recommended?
It is. Electronics and field recordings can work together really well in the right circumstances, and this is definitely a case in point. Llyr makes a number of powerful observations about the state of the world today without ramming them down the listener’s throat, communicating them in a very musical way. This means Biome works on several levels, a journey in the truest sense of the word.
Violin from Beethoven’s possession, one of four instruments Beethoven received as a gift from Prince Karl von Lichnowsky around 1800 (image from the Beethoven-Haus Bonn)
Romance no.1 in G major Op.40 for violin and orchestra (1800-02, Beethoven aged 31)
Dedication unknown Duration 7′
Listen
Background and Critical Reception
Beethoven’s first published Romance for violin and orchestra was written after the second, which we have already appraised. It is seen by commentators as part of his preparation for a full-scale violin concerto, having attempted such a work ten years previously.
Once again there is a surprising lack of prose written about this piece, which is odd given its popularity on classical music radio. It is written for a ‘classically sized’ orchestra, the violin teamed with strings, flute, oboes, bassoons and horns.
Thoughts
Beethoven starts his Romance with the solo instrument alone, a striking move. It would have been relatively conventional for a piano to start such a piece on its own, but not the violin – which starts here with soft, plaintive chords, like a drone. The mood is slightly folksy.
Gradually the orchestra join the soloist, and as they do the mood becomes more warm-hearted, the theme heard several times and finished off with a decisive cadence. The violin goes on to lead quite an assertive section in the minor key, before returning to sing the main theme in a higher register.
Recordings used and Spotify links
Anne-Sophie Mutter (violin), New York Philharmonic Orchestra / Kurt Masur (Deutsche Grammophon) Thomas Zehetmair (violin), Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century / Frans Brüggen Itzhak Perlman (violin), Berliner Philharmoniker / Daniel Barenboim Arthur Grumiaux (violin), Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra / Sir Colin Davis
Thomas Zehetmair gives an attractive introduction with the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century under Frans Brüggen, with a fast tempo choice that results in a swift performance time of five and a half minutes. Perhaps not surprisingly Anne-Sophie Mutter lingers longer, hers a luxurious but tender account with Kurt Masur. Arthur Grumiaux has the ideal singing tone for this piece, while Itzhak Perlman also finds great sensitivity.
You can chart the Arcana Beethoven playlist as it grows, with one recommended version of each piece we listen to. Catch up here!
This year in the Summer at Snape series, Britten Pears Arts has been presenting premieres of new arrangements of works by Benjamin Britten. The last in the series will be composer Joseph Phibbs’ arrangement of Britten’s landmark orchestral song cycle Our Hunting Fathers for the chamber forces of the Hebrides Ensemble and soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn. Described by Britten as ‘my real Op.1’, the piece represents the full flowering of his creative relationship with W.H. Auden, who supplied the texts for the three middle poems, writing his own new verse for the Prologue and Epilogue. It is also the first of Britten’s works to explore the theme of humans’ inhumanity, which ran as a thread throughout his life and music. Arcana was able to talk with Joseph about his arrangement, and about the meaningful relationship he has with the music of its composer.
BH: I understand you have a long-standing relationship with Britten’s music. Can you remember the first time you heard anything by him?
JP: I was around 13, and borrowed some cassettes of the String Quartets from my local library. The opening of No.1 immediately captivated me, the violins and viola sustaining a soft cluster of notes at the very top of their registers, with gentle cello pizzicato gestures beneath. The sound world had a disorientating effect, one that was totally alien as well as extraordinarily beautiful. My impressions were of wide landscapes bathed in a glowing, evening light, and it may indeed have been influenced by the impressions Britten had of America around the time he composed it.
A few months later, I heard the Dirge from the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, which was riveting, and shortly after became obsessed with Peter Grimes, listening to it non-stop, before making a pilgrimage to The Red House when I was about 16.
I was incensed by a documentary that had just been made called J’accuse, which dismissed most of what Britten composed after 1945, and spoke at length to the curator about it, who kindly allowed me look around the Britten-Pears Library (perhaps to calm me down!). I remember picking up a stone from the drive way, in the hope that Britten’s shoe may have graced it 20 years earlier..
It all sounds crazy to me now (it probably was crazy), but my reverence for Britten has never really left me. He strikes me as an extraordinary and mysterious figure, a workaholic who was in some ways compelled to compose because his own irrepressible genius.
When I first heard Our Hunting Fathers it made an incredibly strong impression on me, and I found it emotionally very powerful. How did you respond on first hearing?
Of Britten’s mature works, it was one I knew less well. Having now rediscovered it, I can see how remarkable it is. Britten’s technique was fully formed when he composed it in 1936, at the age of 22, and although it’s his first mature work to include orchestra the scoring is both impeccably judged and extremely imaginative in ways that would have been unusual at the time. He himself regarded it as his first ‘real opus 1’, so clearly felt he had achieved something important. It’s also his first large-scale expression of pacifism. Fascism was on the rise throughout Europe at the time – the Spanish Civil War erupted while the piece was being composed – and Auden’s juxtaposition of ‘German’ and Jew’ (dogs in a hunting pack) at the close of The Dance of Death has a chilling prescience in light of how the world would look ten years later. In some respects it’s an atypical work for Britten, a reason why even some of his detractors have a soft spot for it.
How would you describe Britten’s ability at scoring for orchestra?
As mentioned above, there’s a certain glow to his sound, as well as a clarity and lightness of touch, which I’ve always loved. His music is the opposite of ‘dense’, and he disliked orchestral music that sounded heavy (famously so in the case of Brahms – though also in some Beethoven). He discovered new ways of approaching the orchestra throughout his life; the textures of Peter Grimes, for example, are completely different from those of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Death in Venice. The melodic and harmonic aspects of his music are always perfectly aligned to his orchestration, and can’t really be divorced from it. For this reason, in this arrangement the original orchestral colour has been kept as possible, and elsewhere I’ve tried to imagine what Britten would have done were he scoring for a small ensemble.
What other Britten works do you particularly admire?
I drift in and out of pieces, and am at the moment re-familiarising myself with Rejoice in the Lamb, another early work. Death in Venice is my favourite opera, and Les Illuminations has always been high on my list. A Boy was Born, which predates Our Hunting Fathers, is to my mind one of the most extraordinary works in the repertoire, and the pinnacle of his choral writing from a technical angle. I discovered the cello suites through the superb Tim Hugh recordings around 15 years ago, and they became a big influence on my work. They are perhaps his most private, intimate pieces.
In recent years I’ve enjoyed getting to know his more obscure works better: Prelude and Fugue, for example, and The Journey of the Magi, both wonderful pieces. Occasionally pieces I haven’t listened to for several years suddenly come alive again through an unfamiliar recording, as with Noseda‘s live LSO recording of War Reqiuem, or Iona Brown‘s riveting take on Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge.
How did the commission come about?
I was asked last year by Roger Wright at Britten Pears Arts – on Colin Matthew’s recommendation – to make this new arrangement, in part due to COVID restrictions. I discussed the instrumentation with William Conway, Artistic Director of the Hebrides Ensemble, and we decided on a scoring that would be compatible with the Sinfonietta Op.1, in the hope that these two pieces might be programmed together in the future. Boosey and Hawkes, who publish the work, granted permission, and it was then then a matter of gaining an overview of the whole piece, isolating particular sections that might be more challenging than others, and then working from beginning to end.
In Britten’s scoring for Our Hunting Fathers I felt I could detect the influence of in the idea of chamber-like passages in a work set for symphony orchestra. Was this something you were conscious of?
The chamber ensembles that emerge in parts of Mahler were clearly an influence, and his imagination had also been fired by Schoenberg, Berg, and Stravinsky, if not harmonically then in a more transparent, colouristic approach to scoring. It’s an unusual piece for the time in which it was written, when a denser approach to orchestral writing in England would have been more typical. I don’t know a work of Britten’s that is more fastidiously scored; every bar is packed full of instructions, and one has the impression he was setting out the full extent of his orchestral technique for the world to see. It left the audience – including Frank Bridge – fairly baffled after the premiere, and was savaged in most of the press. Though it was performed the following year, under Adrian Boult, it had to wait until 1950 before resurfacing.
Did you refer to other smaller-scale Britten works when you were doing the arrangement? I was thinking of the economical scoring in works like Curlew River or the Nocturne.
The Sinfonietta was my closest reference point, although some of the chamber operas, in particular The Turn of the Screw, were also in my mind. Every one of the 12 instruments were essential to do justice to the piece; without, for example, the strident, brassy quality of the horn, the moments of high drama would have been lost.
It must be quite something having the premiere at Snape, and to have your own work back in the live environment.
To have something of Britten’s performed which I’ve tampered with, in the concert hall he built, feels a bit daunting. I can only hope he’d be pleased that one of his most original and neglected works might reach a wider public, albeit in a new guise.
Has Britten been an influence on your own music? I’m thinking particularly of the string quartets.
His instrumentation and orchestration has probably had the biggest single influence. The way he reinvents old forms, such as the passacaglia – which he used many times – is also intriguing. But more than that, it’s his willingness to be emotionally direct which I find so appealing. His music has a spontaneity which I adore; there’s no struggle in order to enjoy it, since his technique is so impeccable. The music seems to move in a direction that it could only go, and in this sense there’s a mastery of judgement – of effortlessness and inevitability, as in Bach or Mozart – which is extremely seductive. His ability to enthral and yet not confuse is, for me, one of the hallmarks of his genius.
How would you describe your new Cello Sonata?
This is a joint commission between Wigmore Hall and Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival, which will host the premiere by Guy Johnston and Tom Poster at the end of September. I got to know Guy’s playing more intimately while composing the work, and have since become a huge fan. Tom, who I’ve worked with before, is also a superb musician, so I couldn’t hope to be better served. The work is written in memory of someone I’d worked with closely, who passed away in his early 50s, and this lends the piece an elegiac quality at times. It’s in several movements, some linked, and includes an arrangement of a 16th Century pavane, in a movement entitled Ghost Dance, as a link to Hatfield House, where Elizabeth I lived as a child.
Is it important for you to have a friendship / understanding with your performers in the way that Britten had with his?
In a few cases, such as my Clarinet Concerto or Letters from Warsaw, I’ve written for close friends whose playing I know well. In other cases, it’s important for me to have a clear grasp of the technical capabilities of the performers, assuming it’s a commissioned work. Aside from that, it’s a question of trying to ‘ find the right notes’, as Britten put it, and to that extent the process is a personal and sometimes chaotic one, involving a large number of ideas and sketches. I get nervous sharing drafts before the piece is finished, as a player’s response – whether positive, negative, or silent – can divert you from what you intended to do.
What else are you working on at the moment?
I’m writing some guitar miniatures for a superb young player, Alex Hart, as well as a set of pieces for Tom Kimura – a wonderful pianist who I studied with at The Purcell School. After that, I’m starting a string piece for the Britten Sinfonia, and also gathering ideas together for a Violin Concerto.
JosephPhibbs’ arrangement of Britten’s orchestral song cycle Our Hunting Fathers for the chamber forces of the Hebrides Ensemble and soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn receives its world premiere at Snape Maltings on Tuesday 24 August. More information can be found here.
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