JVXTA is presented as a relatively anonymous DJ project – but it turns out to be the London-based DJ Charles Field, who runs his own label Hardmatter. This release, slightly confusingly, references a London area in the title but is released on Brooklyn-based imprint Scissor and Thread. Field wanted it to work across a number of genres, utilising elements of deeper and classic house, improvisation and experimentation – all with an ambient finish.
What’s the music like?
Euston Blues has a very satisfying ebb and flow, down and up. We start in relative stillness, with the murky textures of No One Needs To Know, which blossoms into the classic deep house of Hold On, equal parts Detroit and Chicago in style but with a piano profile that takes on an improvised life of its own.
Water Temple goes deep too, before reaching for the stars with richly voiced keyboards – after which a nocturnal piano solo takes over. The city mood continues as a saxophone leads Lost In Place, another classy house number, and then to Beyond, which has the thick ambience of a city at night. The Stolen Child adds a strong sense of mystery, piano and flute duelling in the heights, before the closing title track, a broadly conceived nocturnal sketch of eleven minutes. It ends the album in softer ambience, though a busy drum track gives it energy three minutes in.
Does it all work?
Most of the time. A lot of Euston Blues is mood music, meaning it doesn’t always hold melodic interest, but it is never less than descriptive.
Is it recommended?
It is. Subtle on the surface but giving more reward to closer listening, this is a deep and evocative piece of work from a talented producer.
This was the image posted on Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s Twitter account earlier today, confirming the sad news many had been dreading – the Japanese composer and instrumentalist had sadly died of cancer, aged 71.
Sakamoto’s career began in the Yellow Magic Orchestra, whose drummer Yukihiro Takahashi passed away only three months previously. He then went on to a long and illustrious career that included numerous memorable collaborations, solo albums and film scores.
Yet a single tribute would seem to sum him up best at this point, before a full appreciation. Here is the composer himself at the piano, playing one of his most enduring and emotional pieces:
Filmed at Worcester Cathedral, Saturday 4 June 2022
by Richard Whitehouse
The English Symphony Orchestra’s concerts at last year’s Royal Jubilee Elgar Festival have already yielded several online performances of note, with In the South perhaps the finest yet in terms of vindicating a work that can all too easily fall victim to its seeming ‘indulgencies’.
The main issue is in setting a tempo flexible enough to accommodate this concert overture’s extended sonata design without it becoming episodic. At around 24 minutes, this unhurried take was mindful of Worcester Cathedral’s expansive acoustic and utilized it to the music’s advantage. The surging initial theme, its speculative transition and suave second theme duly emerged with a formal continuity – the underlying tension carried through to a development whose impulsiveness was maintained despite (even because of?) the intervening first episode.
Evoking the grandeur of ‘empires past’, this episode necessitates astute handling so that its implacability avoids bathos. Kenneth Woods judged it accordingly, and if his tempo for the second ‘canto populare’ episode felt just a little reticent, its expressive raptness (along with Carl Hill’s playing of its indelible viola melody) more than compensated. Nor was there any loss of continuity across the reprise of the opening themes, with Woods’ gradual building of momentum at the start of the coda ensuring an irresistible but never overbearing apotheosis.
Certainly, the response suggested anyone who may previously have harboured doubts about this piece was won over on this occasion. Further evidence of this orchestra and conductor’s empathy with this music as augers well for the First Symphony at this year’s Elgar Festival.
Royal Academy of Music Students [Christopher Vettraino (oboe), Silvia Bettoli, Johan Stone (horns), Magdalena Riedl (violin), Gordon Cervoni (viola)], Members of the Nash Ensemble – Adrian Brendel (cello), Alasdair Beatson (piano)
Colin Matthews Time Stands Still (2004) Balency-Bearn Entre-Deux (2022) Alberga No-Man’s-Land Lullaby (1996) Keting before we were ocean (2021) Colin Matthews Dual (2021) Abrahamsen Congratulations Greeting (2022)
Nash Inventions
Claire Booth (soprano), Mark Padmore (tenor), Nash Ensemble [(Philippa Davies (flute), Gareth Hulse (oboe), Richard Hosford, Marie Lloyd (clarinets), Richard Watkins (horn), Sally Pryce (harp), Benjamin Nabarro, Michael Gurevich (violins), Lars Anders Tomter, Jennifer Stumm (violas), Adrian Brendel (cello), Graham Mitchell (double bass), Alasdair Beatson (piano)] / Martyn Brabbins
Casken Misted Land (2017) Colin Matthews Seascapes (2021) Anderson Van Gough Blue (2015); Three Songs (2018-22) [World Premiere of THUS] Benjamin Viola, Viola (1997) Turnage A Constant Obsession (2007)
Wigmore Hall, London Tuesday 28 March 2023 (5pm and 7.30pm)
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
It has become such a fixture on the London calendar that Nash Inventions, given annually by the Nash Ensemble at Wigmore Hall, could easily be taken for granted. As tonight’s concert proved, however, the range and quality of those works performed is anything but predictable.
His long-time drawing inspiration from the landscape of the North-East might suggest Misted Land as a ready-made title for John Casken. Yet this quintet for clarinet and strings focusses on emotion as much, if not more than evocation by unfolding from the intangible impressions of its initial movement, via impulsive contrasts of its intermezzo, to a finale whose visceral progress is curtailed by a timely return to the initial equivocation. Richard Hosford made the most of his alternately insinuating and forceful writing in a piece that well deserved revival.
Although settings by Michael Tippett early on confirmed the musicality of his verse, Sidney Keyes (1922-43) has been relatively little set – making this selection by Colin Matthews in Seascapes the more welcome. From the unforced rhetoric of The Island City, it takes in the fleeting sensations of From : North Sea and the tense rumination of Night Estuary; a brief Interlude leading to the heartfelt expression of Seascape – one of Keyes’s greatest poems, in which Claire Booth’s commanding eloquence (above) more than vindicated the cycle as a whole.
Last in an informal trilogy centred on the colour, Van Gough Blue sees Julian Anderson pay tribute to this artist in a sequence traversing dawn to night. A speculative emergence of sound and texture in l’Aube, soleil naissant precedes the heady rhythmic and melodic interplay of Les Vignobles then mounting animation of Les Alpilles. Nothing, though, prepares for the inward rapture of Eygalières or the dance toward destruction of la nuit, peindre les étoiles: pieces wholly characteristic of this composer and as finely realized as anything he has written.
Further music by Anderson followed the interval – three in an ongoing series for soprano and ensemble identical to, but very different in usage from, that of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. The viscerally sensual overload of Mallarmé’s Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe (here made a tribute to Debussy in the centenary of his death) contrasted with the disarming sincerity of le 3 Mai – an email by composer Ahmed Essyad written during the pandemic, then lines by Longfellow in THUS – Claire Booth here enacting what is less a setting than a musical riposte to its text.
Writing what had become a tribute to Takemitsu 18 months after his death, George Benjamin turned what might have reflected the viola’s innate introspection into an intensive exploration by two of these instruments of how they might discover rhythmic then melodic and harmonic accord. Music diverse in content and logical in its unfolding, its technical challenges remain considerable – making this performance by Jennifer Stumm (having replaced Timothy Ridout at short notice) and Lars Anders Tomter the more engaging through its audible conviction.
It might come a fair way back in his sizable output, but the song-cycle A Constant Obsession remains among Mark-Anthony Turnage’s finest vocal works. This reflection on ‘love’ – what it might be, what it becomes and what it could have been – is articulated across five settings of Keats, Hardy, Edward Thomas, Graves and Tennyson; its course predicted in a ‘Prologue’ and encapsulated in the bleakly humorous final poem. Mark Padmore (above) conveyed its measure now as 14 years before, as did Martyn Brabbins (below) with his attentive and unobtrusive direction.
The early evening slot brought together players from the Nash and Royal Academy of Music. Entre-Deux saw Andrea Balency-Béarn opening out the timbral and harmonic space between pitches with discreet elegance, and No-Man’s-Land Lullaby found Eleanor Alberga working toward a totemic melody with combative fervency. Sun Keting contributed music laced with nostalgia but also indignation in before we were ocean while, in Congratulations Greeting, Hans Abrahamsen commemorated the RAM’s bicentenary in lively and resourceful terms.
Colin Matthews provided a more quixotic take on that event in the subtle contrasted sections of Dual, with his music also opening and concluding this selection. Time Stands Still marked Simon Rattle’s 50th birthday in (surprisingly?) inward and even inscrutable terms, while 23 Frames marked the 30th anniversary of the Nash through that number of miniatures whose character felt as distinctive as their order was random. The outcome found this composer as his most entertaining, with no complaints if several ‘frames’ exceeded their 30-second remit.
A lengthy evening, then, and an impressive showcase for the Nash in term of marking those achievements past or present. Now is hardly the time for any complacency regarding events such as this, which remains a template for what is possible in matters of artistic excellence.
Qwalia are a quartet making music in the most instinctive way possible. The four musicians have illustrious connections – headed by drummer Yusuf Ahmed, they also include Tal Janes (guitar and vocals), Ben Reed (bass) and Joseph Costi (keyboard), All have plenty of experience with ‘featured’ artists such as Frank Ocean, Jordan Rakei, Orlando Weeks and Hayden Thorpe – but this project represents a healthy artistic freedom dating back to the pandemic.
Setting up in a studio for two days in April 2021, they made recordings of pure improvisation, since distilled into an album of seven tracks.
What’s the music like?
The drum tracks do dictate the outcome on this album, but in a wholly musical way. Listen to The Trip, a fine opener whose percussion track is complemented by plush synth line – or the title track, which has an easy, low slung groove and good vocals. Meanwhile Electric Highway has a slightly staggered gait, whereas Haven’t You Heard is spacious, syncopated and with a chance for the keyboards to wig out. The initially woozy Waghera actually has animated vocals, while In Your Own Words becomes a thoughtful piano contemplation over thoughtful drums.
Fool Me Once is one of the best moments, a first track that has a catchy line but opens out nicely, with spacey keyboards
Does it all work?
Yes – the instinctive approach reaps dividends, and the music bursts with ideas. The drum lead from Ahmed is very strong, too.
Is it recommended?
Yes. Jazz and funk bases are safely covered, with a healthy amount of experimentation too.
