Next week sees the start of Autumn programming for classical concert venues – among them London’s much-loved Wigmore Hall.
Once again they will be presenting a series of weekly Monday lunchtime concerts, broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and featuring much-loved international artists and young, up-and-coming performers from the BBC New Generation Artists scheme.
Starting on Monday 14 September, the series can be viewed on the Wigmore Hall website but is spearheaded by an opening concert of Mahler and Tchaikovsky, from mezzo-soprano Alice Coote and pianist Sergey Rybin.
Further highlights include Barry Douglas playing Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, recitals by pianists Elisabeth Brauss and Richard Goode and performances from tenor Mark Padmore and pianist Jonathan Biss, wife-and-husband duo Elena Urioste and Tom Poster, the NOVO and Modigliani Quartets, the Orsino Ensemble, cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Connie Shih, mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston and pianist Sholto Kynoch, violinist Bomsori Kim and pianist Thomas Hoppe, the Leonore Piano Trio and Lawrence Power, clarinettist Olga Shebeta-Dragan and pianist Kristoffer Hyldig and finally a Christmas carol music from The Cardinall’s Musick. And that’s just for starters!
One of the landmarks in recent ambient music, Chill Out dates from 1990, and was conceived as a continuous album playing for 44 minutes. It shows off the versatility of The KLF and simultaneously paves the way for the music of The Orb. With snatches of songs and field recordings, it changes the way you listen as you’re listening to it, putting time on hold as the mind becomes fully immersed. Naturally, it is best experienced in full:
My favourite musician in the ambient sphere working today…Loscil finds music of rare natural purity, often evoking the stunning British Columbia coastline where he lives:
It is curious that minimalism – often a genre with a great deal of musical activity and kinetic energy – has provided some of the most ambient music in the modern canon. A prime example is the Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ of Steve Reich, whose music shimmers in the warm sun:
Tiriki Onus (narrator), Coady Green (piano), Roger Alsop (sound design) – Herring Island Piano Sonata; Jane Magão (soprano), Karen Van Spall (mezzo-soprano), Georgia Lewis (piano) – Winter Came Early
Linda Kouvaras Herring Island Piano Sonata Winter Came Early
Toccata Classics TOCC0734 [78’33”] English text included Producer / Engineer Haig Burnell
Recorded 16 & 24 November 2023 (Herring Island Piano Sonata), February 2024 (Winter Came Early)
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
What’s the story?
Toccata Classics issues the second volume in its ongoing survey of chamber and vocal works by Linda Kouvaras (b.1960), comprising two sizable pieces that examine those genres of the piano sonata and the song-cycle from unlikely while always thought-provoking perspectives.
What’s the music like?
A veteran of the New Wave scene from the early 1980s, Kouvaras studied in London and her native Melbourne where she has pursued her career as an academic and composer. Especially notable is her output for ensemble, with or without voices, which is currently being recorded by Toccata. Its second instalment demonstrates a keen sense of how to broaden and diversify genres that could all too easily be taken for granted as regards precedent then, in the process, making these relevant to the artistic and the cultural concerns of those having inspired them.
Inspired then dedicated to the physical and historical facets of an artificial islet in Melbourne, Herring Island Piano Sonata amalgamates an abstract entity with a text by N’arweet Carolyn Briggs and spoken by Tiriki Onus in the context of an environmental soundscape from Roger Alsop – though the piano component can also be performed independently (and can be heard here by selecting tracks 2, 3, 5 and 7). Musically it typifies Kouvaras’ predilection for modal harmonies and vibrant textures, allied to a determined if never excessive virtuosity. Just how far this three-way interplay comes together is for each listener to decide, though there can be no doubt as to the ambition of the whole. To which end, a visual (not necessarily illustrative) component might have helped with integrating these already interrelated aspects further still.
Written immediately before, Winter Came Early is a song-cycle to poems by Melbourne poet Catherine Lewis whose untimely death and her posthumous legacy is directly commemorated. The presence, indeed frequent concurrence, of two female voices represents a mother and her daughter – the latter being pianist Georgina Lewis who also contributes the central poem that gives the work its title – heard alternately and in dialogue, though this could be considered too much of a good thing given the overlap in vocal lines and consequent blurring of words such as makes it difficult (if not impossible) to discern what is being sung. Musically, the sequence alternates between knowledge of encroaching death and recollection of earlier but not always happier times, rounded off by an ‘Epilogue’ that sets the poet’s final love-note to her husband.
Does it all work?
For the most part. Kouvaras is evidently a composer with an inquiring mind and the means to realize her intentions, though the element of mixed media sometimes works to the detriment of her music by drawing attention away from its intrinsic content. All the performers provide contributions of unfailing sincerity, but there remains a feeling of sensory overload or merely reluctance to let this music speak on its own terms. Try those sonata tracks detailed above, or the final four tracks (11-14) of the song-cycle, to hear her music at its most communicative.
Is it recommended?
Yes, with these reservations in mind. Those who are unfamiliar with this composer would be best advised to start with the first volume in this survey (TOCC0729) with its works for solo piano or saxophone and piano that, in their different ways, find her music at its most potent.
Arcana.fm 