MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2024
60,000 reviews
... and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             


CD REVIEW
RECORDING OF THE MONTH


Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger

alternatively
 CDs: Crotchet  AmazonUK  AmazonUS

 

Jonathan HARVEY (b. 1939)
Tranquil Abiding (1999) [14:46]
Body Mandala (2007) [13:18]
Timepieces (1988) [18:42]
White as Jasmine (2000) [15:41]
… towards a Pure Land (2006) [17:17]
Anu Komsi (soprano)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Ilan Volkov (with Stefan Solyom on ‘Timepieces’)
rec. City Halls, Glasgow, February–May 2007. DDD
NMC D141 [79:59]
Experience Classicsonline


This beautifully produced disc of orchestral music from the prolific Jonathan Harvey shows a couple of interesting connections between the various works. The most notable is probably the fact that four of the five pieces draw their inspiration from aspects of Eastern mysticism; the composer’s fascination with Buddhism, Hinduism and other philosophies is well known, so it is good to have a selection of major works that explore these interests. The other link is the performers: Harvey was composer-in-residence for the BBC Scottish SO during 2005-7, and it’s good to have such superbly played and authoritative readings of the two works from that period.
 
The first piece, Tranquil Abiding, comes from 1999 and was jointly commissioned by New York’s Riverside Symphony and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. It is scored for chamber sized orchestra with large and exotically diverse percussion section. It is in many ways the most impressive work on the disc, casting an unusually hypnotic spell over the listener. The structure appears to revolve around the oscillation of two chords that rock gently to and fro, gradually building in intensity and orchestral colour. It’s not as static as Feldman, though Harvey seeks to interpret the work’s Buddhist title as exploring ‘a state of single-pointed concentration’, and Michael Downes’s liner note refers rightly to Harvey creating a sense of ‘breathing as an organic phenomenon’. He goes on to say that several listeners have reported to the composer that the most effective way to experience the piece is to breathe in synchrony with the repeated oscillation – something I found myself doing. It’s a quite extraordinary experience, very much repaying repeated listening, and if I’ve made it out to be uninteresting, this is most certainly not the case. Yes, a trance-like state is possible while listening, but the increasingly complex melodic outbursts intensify to a climactic point where the percussion’s full range is brilliantly exploited, only to subdue and end with gentle scatterings of wispy, almost pointillistic sounds (bamboo clusters and string pizzicatos) that bring us full circle.
 
Body Mandala shocks us back to life with its restless pulsations of sound and almost jazz-like improvisatory solos. The work this time takes its influence from Buddhist rituals that Harvey witnessed in Tibetan monasteries, and the composer seems to want to recreate these authentic sounds within the augmented Western orchestra. Thus we get lip vibrato on brass instruments and circular bowing on the strings and, best of all towards the end, Tibetan cymbals dipped into water. Once again, it’s a thoroughly captivating experience and one which seems, in Downes’s words, to ‘create the sense that we are witnessing a mysterious ceremony’.
 
Harvey’s titles are carefully picked and the three movements that constitute Timepieces, the earliest work on the disc, are ‘at once representations of various fantastical types of clock, and pieces that explore how music can manipulate and transform our perception of time’. Clever use of metre and rhythm is one of his structural devices here, as is the use of a second conductor who beats in tempi different from the main conductor, something which immediately recalls Stockhausen’s Gruppen, though the result is very different. Once again, a great variety of orchestral timbre and colour is employed to take the listener on the journey, occasionally sounding like a bizarre, psychedelic trip round a clockmaker’s studio, at other times like a minimalist dance.
 
White as Jasmine is the only vocal work here and is also the only one inspired by Hindu texts rather than Buddhist origins. It also differs from the others in its sparing though effective use of electronics. What the listener makes of the texts will be entirely personal, but they represent – as might be expected – a physical, emotional and spiritual journey towards a transcendental state. Once again, Harvey’s brilliance as an orchestral magician is in evidence, with wind, brass and percussion all imaginatively deployed and the synthesised sound, making a telling appearance in the final song ‘Looking for your Light’, taking us a stage further in the quest for enlightenment and spiritual fulfilment. It is sung with a beautifully gauged purity by contemporary specialist Anu Komsi, fast becoming the Jane Manning of our times. The full texts are included in the booklet.
 
towards a Pure Land rounds off the disc in impressive fashion. It is meant, with Body Mandala, to be part of an eventual trilogy (the centrepiece is still forthcoming) and, rather like White as Jasmine, takes us on a complex journey. Seemingly chaotic fragments build, clash and subside, with many familiar orchestral instruments asked to produce unusual sounds (as at 6:50). This chaos abounds over basically slow moving harmonies and the whole work, like most of the others, eventually finds a peace and calm that ‘point towards the possibility of still greater beauty in the future’.
 
It’s all superbly played and conducted and the audio quality is first rate. I am indebted, like most listeners these unfamiliar scores will be, to the liner note by Michael Downes which is lengthy and informative. No-one will be complaining about value for money with a whisker short of 80 minutes, and if you care about contemporary music, especially that of one of our finest elder statesmen, you should have this disc.
 
Tony Haywood
 



 


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Chandos recordings
All Chandos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 


EXPLORE MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL

Making a Donation to MusicWeb

Writing CD reviews for MWI

About MWI
Who we are, where we have come from and how we do it.

Site Map

How to find a review

How to find articles on MusicWeb
Listed in date order

Review Indexes
   By Label
      Select a label and all reviews are listed in Catalogue order
   By Masterwork
            Links from composer names (eg Sibelius) are to resource pages with links to the review indexes for the individual works as well as other resources.

Themed Review pages

Jazz reviews

 

Discographies
   Composer
      Composer surveys
   National
      Unique to MusicWeb -
a comprehensive listing of all LP and CD recordings of given works
.
Prepared by Michael Herman

The Collector’s Guide to Gramophone Company Record Labels 1898 - 1925
Howard Friedman

Book Reviews

Complete Books
We have a number of out of print complete books on-line

Interviews
With Composers, Conductors, Singers, Instumentalists and others
Includes those on the Seen and Heard site

Nostalgia

Nostalgia CD reviews

Records Of The Year
Each reviewer is given the opportunity to select the best of the releases

Monthly Best Buys
Recordings of the Month and Bargains of the Month

Comment
Arthur Butterworth Writes

An occasional column

Phil Scowcroft's Garlands
British Light Music articles

Classical blogs
A listing of Classical Music Blogs external to MusicWeb International

Reviewers Logs
What they have been listening to for pleasure

Announcements

 

Community
Bulletin Board

Give your opinions or seek answers

Reviewers
Past and present

Helpers invited!

Resources
How Did I Miss That?

Currently suspended but there are a lot there with sound clips


Composer Resources

British Composers

British Light Music Composers

Other composers

Film Music (Archive)
Film Music on the Web (Closed in December 2006)

Programme Notes
For concert organizers

External sites
British Music Society
The BBC Proms
Orchestra Sites
Recording Companies & Retailers
Online Music
Agents & Marketing
Publishers
Other links
Newsgroups
Web News sites etc

PotPourri
A pot-pourri of articles

MW Listening Room
MW Office

Advice to Windows Vista users  
Questionnaire    
Site History  
What they say about us
What we say about us!
Where to get help on the Internet
CD orders By Special Request
Graphics archive
Currency Converter
Dictionary
Magazines
Newsfeed  
Web Ring
Translation Service

Rules for potential reviewers :-)
Do Not Go Here!
April Fools




Return to Review Index

Untitled Document


Reviews from previous months
Join the mailing list and receive a hyperlinked weekly update on the discs reviewed. details
We welcome feedback on our reviews. Please use the Bulletin Board
Please paste in the first line of your comments the URL of the review to which you refer.