‘Observer Effect is an album fed by history, countless stories and books’, reports John Sellekaers. The Brussels-based musician, who also works in other art forms as an engineer, photographer and designer, is approaching this album through the view of a pioneer explorer. He is imagining the experience of visiting a new region for the first time in history, pondering how his arrival in an undiscovered area changes the previously unseen habitat – and exploring the effect it has on him. Given Glacial Movements‘ musical history the points of reference that come to mind are the North and South poles, and the remote areas on their approach – or even another planet entirely.
What’s the music like?
Observer Effect starts like an extended tidal system. Big, single chords ebb and flow with a reassuring regularity. Occasionally a less certain sound imposes on the cycle but generally the outlook is one of vast ambience. Slowly the landscape passes by, the listener seemingly positioned on a slow moving method of transport with the scope to take in wide vistas. Gradually the scenes change over time, but occasionally a darker side is revealed, as though the introduction of man-made elements is threatening the natural change.
A thicker treble pitch makes itself known at the start of On The Trail, an intense and sustained note, and as this track evolves a more distorted sound, like a long guitar note, creeps into the consciousness. After this burst of intensity, a dense blanket of sound descends for Shelter, which takes on more definitive brush strokes. In The Lightest Night takes on eerie harmonies and a strong current of uncertainty, heightened by the displaced harmonies of Optical Haze Pt. 1, which plays with the listener’s perspective, especially on headphones, before charting a much deeper course towards the end.
Parasomnia creaks as though under stress from something, before the substantial Water Sky takes a repeated phrase of one note and runs with it, the tidal system returning to the listener’s consciousness. Finally Optical Haze Pt. 2 offers a calmer scene and ultimately rest.
Does it all work?
It does – and is most effective when listened to as a whole. Sellekaer’s music is unusual, for it manages to imply melodies while using very few notes, and emotions are portrayed through texture just as much as harmony. It is coldly effective, difficult to always relate to on a human level but compelling all the same.
Is it recommended?
Yes. Observer Effect proves a worthy addition to the Glacial Movements canon of immersive ambience, telling a powerful story in its relatively few notes. Fans of the label need not hesitate.
The return of Dot Allison is big news indeed. Heart-Shaped Scars is her first album release since 2009, a follow-up of sorts to that year’s Room 7 1/2. Allison secured something of a cult following for her work in the early 1990s with Andrew Weatherall as part of dance band One Dove, before moving onto a solo career with the Afterglow album in 1999. For her new work, however, Allison has more or less pressed pause on the electronic side of things, removing drums too, working with producer Fiona Cruickshank and with several songs orchestrated by Hannah Peel.
It is, she says, a record about ‘love, loss and a universal longing for union that seems to go with the human condition’. Ideal, then, for a generation emerging from more than a year of lockdown conditions.
What’s the music like?
‘Ethereal’ is an over-used word in music reviews, but it is wholly applicable here. Allison’s voice is the principle reason, delivering the words in hushed tones but wholly immersed in the stories she has to tell. Hannah Peel’s orchestrations are another, sensitively complementing the melodies with thoughtful additions of their own, knowing when to hang back so that music keeps its concentrated intimacy.
The music often feels sparse and ‘old’ – in the sense that the melodies feel like part of a land with a great deal of history. Long Exposure embodies this approach, while Can You Hear Nature Sing does so with its lyrics, celebrating the natural world as many more of us have done during the pandemic.
Lyrically, Allison paints vivid pictures and emotions. One Love – which would surely have been a dance anthem with that title 30 years ago – is now a vulnerable soul at the start of a relationship, two cellos dovetailing as Allison tells the story. The Haunted draws the ear closer. ‘Step inside this haunted house’, sings Allison in lower tones at the start, the melody resembling a slower folk tune while the string harmonics shimmer in the middle ground.
Constellations tells of a wide-open freedom, the author lying ‘still in the lake, floating on my back, gazing up at all the stars’ – painted by a twinkling piano figure and shimmering strings. While this has a certain reassuring quality, Forever’s Not Much Time is truly haunting. ‘I miss you, like a dead man recalls life’, sings Allison, as a shiver passes over the face of the music. Cue The Tears has a similar chill. ‘Did we shut out the sun?’, asks the chorus.
Does it all work?
It does. Some of the songs are longer structures, and most are slow in their movement, but Allison makes them work, the music drawn out exquisitely with sensitive orchestration and backing vocals. Listening conditions will make a big difference to your enjoyment of the album, though – with a quiet room or headphones advised for maximum impact.
Is it recommended?
Wholly. If you have Dot Allison’s body of work already, then this will mark the start of a new chapter in the story of her music. If you are new to her sound, then it is a great place to start, a place of storytelling through simple and directly effective means – just like the best folk music.
Landscape with Ruth and Boaz (1823/5) by Joseph Anton Koch
Sonata no.8 for piano and violin in G major Op.30/3 (1802, Beethoven aged 31)
1. Allegro assai
2. Tempo di minuetto, ma molto moderato e grazioso
3. Allegro vivace
Dedication Tsar Alexander I
Duration 18′
Listen
by Ben Hogwood
Background and Critical Reception
For the third in his Op.30 set of violin sonatas, Beethoven moves from the turbulence of C minor to the fresh air of G major. This is a piece, in Gerald Abraham’s words, ‘so short and unpretentious that it can be easily undervalued. Yet there is no Beethoven sonata remotely like it, and it is one of his wittiest and most delightful works. Again he seems at once to revitalize the past and to point to the future.’
Abraham singles out the second movement, ‘an exceedingly beautiful slow minuet which, far from being old-fashioned…generates the sort of expressive warmth we have already found in the slow movement of Op.24 (the Spring sonata). Jan Swafford finds a lovely description of the opening of the piece, ‘a swirling unison followed by a lilting (and a touch tipsy) theme, complete with hiccup in the violin. The rondo of the G major is one of the most whimsical finales he ever wrote, its theme a spinning folk tune over a bagpipe drone, starting a brilliant and smile-inducing movement unlike anything else in his work. Call it Haydnesque wit and folksiness gone deliriously over the top.’
Thoughts
This is a fun piece and, as the commentators above have noted, a compact marvel. Not a note is wasted, from the exuberant beginning, where violin and piano toy with a phrase like a cat with a ball of string, to the airy slow movement, which has the air of a Bach sicilienne in its beautiful simplicity. Here the instruments finish each other’s sentences in an intimate setting.
Beethoven packs his faster music with good melodies, many of them derived from the opening mood. The second movement has a softer side but is warm with it, though a central section finds Beethoven moving to further and less certain keys and musical language.
The finale is as good as they say, high-spirited and bubbling with energy. It is essentially a jig, the ideas once again passed between the instruments, with bird-like calls from the violin recalling an early Haydn quartet from the Op.33 set, the Bird.
A lovely piece – and a guaranteed mood-lifter.
Recordings used and Spotify playlist
Midori Seiler (violin), Jos van Immerseel (fortepiano) (Zig Zag Classics) Yehudi Menuhin (violin), Wilhelm Kempff (Deutsche Grammophon) Josef Suk (violin), Jan Panenka (piano) (Supraphon) Alina Ibragimova (violin), Cédric Tiberghien (Wigmore Hall Live) Tasmin Little (violin), Martin Roscoe (piano) (Chandos) Frank Peter Zimmermann (violin), Martin Helmchen (BIS) Paul Barritt (violin), James Lisney (piano) (Woodhouse Editions) Arthur Grumiaux (violin), Clara Haskil (piano) (Philips) Augustin Dumay (violin), Maria João Pires (piano) (Deutsche Grammophon)
Some very enjoyable recordings here, the approach again falling between the leaner sound of the period-instruments (Midori Seiler and Jos Van Immerseel) and the more overtly romantic approach of Suk and Panenka. Yehudi Menuhin and Wilhelm Kempff have fun, while Dumay and Pires enjoy the work’s exuberance too.
The Spotify playlist below does not contain the Barritt / Lisney version, but does also include a highly powered account by Gidon Kremer and Martha Argerich, recorded for Deutsche Grammophon:
You can chart the Arcana Beethoven playlist as it grows, with one recommended version of each piece we listen to. Catch up here!
Also written in 1802 Samuel Wesley – Symphony in B flat major
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla
Gipps Symphony no.2 Op.30 (1945) Adès: The Exterminating Angel Symphony (2020) [CBSO Centenary Commission: World premiere]
Brahms Symphony no.3 in F major Op.90 (1883)
Symphony Hall, Birmingham Wednesday 4 August 2021
Written by Richard Whitehouse
This unexpected yet worthwhile addition to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s season saw the revival of two works recently heard along with a belated premiere – twice postponed – for one of the most notable among the orchestra’s impressive roster of Centenary Commissions.
Its UK premiere guardedly received four years ago, Thomas Adès’s third opera felt limited as to provocative intent by the difficulty of transferring its theme of Spanish religious fascism to a different era. What was undeniable is the suitability of its numerous orchestral passages to being rendered in a more abstract context, hence The Exterminating Angel Symphony heard tonight. Its four sections arguably amount to a symphonic suite rather than symphony per se, yet their formal follow-through undoubtedly makes for a cohesive and finely balanced entity.
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla evidently thought so – obtaining an incisive response in the ‘Entrances’ music whose expressive ambivalence intensifies second time around, then a virtuosic one in ‘March’; its malevolence building over a remorseless side-drum tattoo in a vivid foretaste of what lies ahead. Although it draws on one of the opera’s love-duets, ‘Berceuse’ seems a little unyielding in its emotional content despite the allure of scoring as was always apparent here. It remains for ‘Waltzes’ (following without pause) to provide a suitable finale and, while this extended and ingeniously organized sequence of fragments from across the opera undeniably evokes a notable precedent in terms of its inexorable motion toward ultimate catastrophe, the animation and sheer panache of the CBSO’s playing brought about a suitably emphatic close.
Before this MGT again made a persuasive case for the Second Symphony by the orchestra’s one-time oboist Ruth Gipps, the contrasted sections of its single movement – a martial scherzo and eloquent Adagio framed by an ambivalent Moderato and cumulatively energetic Allegro – audibly unfolding as variations on an evocative theme heard at the start. An autobiographical aspect, concerning personal aspirations near the end of war, explains this piece’s confessional nature. Whether or not it will undergo several further decades of neglect remains to be seen.
After the interval came Brahms’s Third Symphony, which orchestra and conductor had given before the lockdown last December. Tonight, however, the first movement (exposition repeat taken) was purposefully controlled with real cumulative thrust, a less than decisive transition into the reprise affording the only lapse in momentum prior to a coda of unfettered eloquence. The Andante was once again unerringly shaped in terms of its ruminative contrasts, and if the third movement had now become a little torpid, this hardly affected its unforced pathos. MGT rightly made the finale the culmination in every sense, her tautening of tension at the apex of its development yielding as tangible an expressive frisson as did the coda – where the work’s main motif descends as if from afar to secure the most transfigured of emotional touchdowns.
A memorable addition to an inevitably truncated yet memorable (and for all the right reasons) season, which the CBSO repeated at the Proms the following night. Beyond that, the autumn portion of its 2021/22 season has just been announced.
You can find information on the CBSO’s new seasonhere.
Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) Respighi Concerto gregoriano (1921) Mendelssohn Symphony no.5 in D minor Op.107 (1830)
Royal Albert Hall, London Wednesday 4 August 2021
Written by Ben Hogwood
A fascinating concert, notable on several counts. It marked the first Prom for Vasily Petrenko, recently transferred from Liverpool, in his new role as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s music director. It featured three works paying tribute to a distant musical past – Vaughan Williams, Respighi and Mendelssohn expressing their admiration in very different ways. By way of an aside, it was your correspondent’s first live music in 17 months. A happy experience indeed!
In a sense my ears were in alignment with those who would have been at Gloucester Cathedral on 6 September 1910, for the world premiere of Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis. The Royal Albert Hall, in its current reduced capacity, offered a similar acoustic, suitable for a performance where the quietest statements could be clearly heard. In the wake of a pandemic, this was wholly appropriate music to be listening to.
The Fantasia is written for two string orchestras, the second of which, nine players strong, might normally be distributed high in the gallery. Here they were positioned on stage, upper left from the conductor’s viewpoint, and projected beautifully to the back of the arena. Petrenko did not linger over the serenity of the opening, but allowed Vaughan Williams’ invention plenty of space to breathe as the Fantasia formed. A sensitive audience ensured every little nuance could be heard, and the RPO strings – in particular the solo quartet within the main orchestra – played beautifully. Petrenko has recorded a good deal of Elgar with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, so it will be interesting to see if he decides to look at Vaughan Williams in equivalent detail.
There followed a Proms premiere of a work written 100 years ago. As David Gutman’s excellent programme footnotes pointed out, Respighi has not enjoyed good representation at the festival over the years, and in general his music still languishes in the repertoire. This first account of the Concerto gregoriano could hardly have been more persuasive, with a passionate advocate in violin soloist Sayaka Shoji, who quarantined on her arrival in the UK prior to this performance. Respighi was a violinist, writing with skill for the instrument, but chose not to use this concerto as a display piece. Rather he paid homage to the Gregorian chants with which he had had been preoccupied in recent years, and he used these as the basis for a piece containing some particularly lush harmonies and idiosyncratic rhythms.
This was a compelling performance, Shoji soon into her groove and leading with faultless intonation in the high passages of the slow movement, carrying beautifully into the wide open spaces of the hall. She was aided by the horns and trombones of the RPO, positioned along the back of the orchestra, the punctuation of harp and celesta adding glitter to the edge of the sound.
The first movement found nicely judged contributions from oboe (John Roberts) and cor anglais (Patrick Flanaghan), with a sheen from the strings not unlike that of the Vaughan Williams. The third movement presented faster music and a greater sense of drama from its main theme, the brass again involved. This pulled back to peaceful climes, and a recap of the second movement material. Concerto gregoriano was certainly a work benefiting from a live performance, deserving of a higher profile.
Shoji was a sensitive performer, allowing Respighi’s music star billing, a sign of her maturity as a soloist. She also chose a wholly appropriate encore, the soft pizzicato beginning the Sarabande from Ysaÿe’s Sonata for solo violin no.4 (À Fritz Kreisler) the only audible noise in a rapt hall.
Mendelssohn wrote his Reformation symphony in 1830, making it the second in his output chronologically, but it was not published until long after his death. He appears not to have been wholly satisfied with it, leaving it unperformed. It carries a powerful impact, anticipating Schumann’s own D minor symphony (no.4) while including the Lutheran chorale Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (A mighty fortress is our God). In this the composer, perhaps inevitably, was including Bach in his homage.
Petrenko had the work’s measure, leading us straight into the ‘sturm und drang’ of the first movement with its grim, D minor struggles. They were captivating, especially at the end of the introduction when rapt strings introduced the ‘Dresden Amen’, a striking alternative to the flurry of activity around them. The second movement had an attractive lilt, the third a nicely poised subject, before flautist Emer McDonough gave an impeccable solo to lead us into the finale. It fell to her to present the chorale theme, taken up with greater number and power by the rest of the orchestra. The mood turned from struggle to victory. Petrenko’s pacing was ideal, as was the phrasing, while the final reverberations of the chorale were more than sufficient in lieu of an encore.
This was a very fine if slightly understated first Prom for the RPO conductor in his new role, bringing the ideal combination of new and familiar. The orchestra appear to be in very good hands.
You can listen to a playlist of the works featured in this concert, including the violin encore, on Spotify below:
You can find more information on the BBC Proms at the festival’s homepage
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