Contemporary Music Series: Julian Anderson, Composer in Residence – Wigmore Hall, Saturday 7 November
Stravinsky: Three Pieces
Ravel: Chansons madécasses
Anderson: The Colour of Pomegranates; Seadrift; Ring Dance [UK premiere]
Woolrich: Pluck from the Air [London premiere]
Anderson: Van Gough Blue [World premiere]
Claire Booth (soprano), Nash Ensemble [Philippa Davies (flute/piccolo), Richard Hosford, Marie Lloyd (clarinets), Laura Samuel, David Adams (violins), Laurence Power (viola); Adrian Brendel (cello), Peter Buckoke (double bass), Sally Pryce (harp)]
Alexandre Bloch, conductor
Review by Richard Whitehouse
The Nash Ensemble. © Hanya Chlala/ArenaPAL
Julian Anderson’s residency at Wigmore Hall has brought a variety of artists and ensembles in performances of music – notably from the early twentieth century – so often difficult to schedule in recitals. One such opened tonight’s programme: Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for string quartet (1914) – a work no less radical than the ballets preceding it, given with the rhythmic trenchancy, gestural precision and harmonic plangency as characterize each piece.
Quite a contrast with Ravel’s Chansons madécasses (1926), a song-cycle whose singular scoring – soprano with flute, cello and piano – makes it awkward to find the right context. Not that this inhibited Claire Booth, whose unforced eloquence in the sensual ‘Nahandove’ and languorous ‘Il est doux de se coucher’ was balanced by the accusatory wrath of ‘Aoua’.
Anderson was represented in this first half by two pieces from two decades ago. The Colour of Pomegranates (1994) is less the encapsulation of Sergey Paradjanov’s film so much as a recollection of its magical aura, Philippa Davies unfolding the alto flute part with admirable dexterity as partnered by Ian Brown. Seadrift (1993) is a continuous sequence of songs such as renders Walt Whitman’s fabled text from a decidedly fresh perspective – soprano joined by flute (doubling piccolo) clarinet and piano in music that, without downplaying the purely emotional or even sentimental qualities of this poetry, enfolds it within a sonic canvas that underlines the aspects of union and separation at its core. Another fine showing from Booth, with members of the Nash taking its harmonic and rhythmic intricacies decisively in hand.
After the interval, Laura Samuel and David Adams gave the first UK hearing – and the first anywhere in 27 years – of Ring Dance (1987), Anderson’s piece which combines his then fascination for microtonal tuning with harmonic and timbral facets of Norway’s Hardanger fiddle tradition. The result pivots between relative consonance and dissonance in a way that intrigues rather than provokes (though first-night listeners in Stockholm evidently thought otherwise!) and, as with Anderson’s recently revived First String Quartet, a reminder of how early preoccupations have continued along more oblique lines. John Woolrich’s Pluck from the Air (2013) sprang few surprises in comparison, this tensile quintet for piano and strings outlining a longer-term engagement which might have been pursued in a second movement.
All the members of the Nash Ensemble then took the stage for the first hearing of Van Gough Blue (2015), Anderson’s homage to the artist whose preoccupations with colour and shade are embodied over its 20 minutes. Thus ‘l’Aube, soleil naissant’ evokes a tangible awakening, its inwardness duly offset by the pungent rhythmic and melodic interplay of ‘Les Vignobles’ and the ‘coming into focus’ of ‘Les Alpilles’ with its lively apex. The suspenseful harmonic stasis of ‘Eygalières’ then makes way for the culmination of ‘la nuit, peindre les étoiles’: a musical translation of the morning (4:40am on 25th May 1889) when Van Gough sketched his Starry Night painting, heard in terms of a ‘cosmic dance’ as carries all before it to the disintegrative final lament. Alexandre Bloch presided over this assured reading of a significant new work.
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