AARON CASSIDY - metallic
dust for amplified bass clarinet; eight monophonic miniatures
for solo pianist [world premieres]
MARK R. TAYLOR - 'Comment ciseler les legumes'; For
Chris Newman at 40 [world premiere]
PAUL OBERMAYER - coil [world premiere]
RICHARD BARRETT - Invention 6
CHRIS DENCH - ruins within
***
IAN PACE - '...quasi una fantasmagoria Op. 120 No.
2...' [world premiere]
JOHANNES BRAHMS - Sonata for clarinet and piano in Eb Op. 120 No.
2
Following their 'Textmusic'
concert at King’s College last June, Ian
Pace and Carl Rosman introduced new music in another
characteristically innovative programme. For once, it was not a marathon
for listeners (fitting nicely into two hours!) but the executive difficulties
of most of the music, taken in their stride by Pace and Rosman, would
have beaten most famous performers on the ordinary concert circuit into
insensibility.
Aaron Cassidy, a young American composer from
Buffalo, explored a plethora of unusual playing techniques as an integral
compositional parameter. His virtuosic bass clarinet piece was
‘intensely physical’ with a ‘visual counterpoint’ arising from separation
of fingers from breath, the outcome created by ‘the interaction of the
two decoupled layers’. The result was exhilarating and it was followed
by deceptively listener-friendly monodic piano pieces (in the tradition
of Alain & Evangelista – Salabert SCD 9102).
He gave me a copy of the score, and I was hoping to tackle them at home
with my amateurish pianism, but was astonished to find (as recently
with the delightful piano music of Richard
Emsley) that although pretty on the page, their complexity is absolutely
daunting for ordinary mortals, which you’d never guess from hearing
alone.
The most interesting other novelty was a new ‘double
melodrama’, by Ian Pace himself, a primarily text-based work, constructing
parallel fantasies and commentaries on the worlds of performing and
teaching. At a time when treatment of repetitive muscle injury suffered
by musicians is advancing rapidly, it was notable that he featured the
masochistic pleasure in physical pain (with a real risk of disability
ensuing) as a component of technical prowess, against a backdrop of
distant fragments from Brahms's second clarinet sonata. He played most
of ...quasi una fantasmagoria with classical piano scores tucked
under his arm-pits (to ensure he kept his elbows in) whilst Rosman mused
about the ‘commodified emotive effects’ which some performers are taught
to impress gullible audiences, a ‘phantasmagoria’ – as Ian Pace writes
in his perceptive programme note - which makes serious music often become
‘little more than light and diverting, and as such easily assimilable
by the entertainment industry’. A little overlong at this first performance,
but a unique, challenging and thought-provoking text-music experiment.
After ...quasi una fantasmagoria… Carl
Rosman and Ian Pace (on a small K.Kawai piano with an old-fashioned
sound) ended with a forthright and satisfying performance of the Brahms
sonata, demonstrating that the best contemporary music specialists can
bring new perspectives to music of the past, and may be well able to
match their more famous rivals in masterpieces of the classical canon.
Superfluous to lament that the audience in the British
Music Information Centre’s spacious new home was sparse; to give
an illusion of intimacy for such esoteric events they would do well
in future to re-arrange the seating in a semi-circle close to the performers.
Peter Grahame Woolf
Ian Pace will play Messiaen’s
Catalogue d’oiseaux complete at King’s College, London on 25
October.
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