Tag Archives: Alex Taylor

2016BIFEM: Argonaut Ensemble, Diptych

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cjason-tavener-photography-di-ptych-rehearsal_mg_2057
Argonaut Ensemble rehearse for Diptych, Jason Tavener Photography

Review by Alex Taylor

BIFEM has been notable for its symmetries of programming and its commitment to singular (hardcore) aesthetics. Mirroring the opening concert Seeing Double, which paired double concertos from Australian composers, Diptych put together two substantial electronics-saturated quintets from composers working in Paris: Chilean Jose Miguel Fernandez and Italian Lara Morciano. Both composers have embraced the medium full force, drenching their sonic canvases in swathes of electronic and acoustic colour. This was a celebration of sensual overload, fecundity, excess.

Fernandez’s Amas (which translates as a “heap”, a “pile”, or an “accumulation”) opens with a sustained, glistening electronic texture rich in high partials. Over this, oboist Ben Opie sets out his crucial role from the get-go with piercing, microscopically oscillating trills that will return as a sort of refrain: a central trunk of sound from which the other instruments branch. The smooth oboe tone soon begins to splinter into virtuosic fragments, intersecting and colliding with the ensemble.

The jarring physical movements of both energetic percussionist Madi Chwasta and suave guitarist Mauricio Carrasco trigger live processing elements; soon Opie’s oboe darting arabesques are surrounded by scrunches and flicks of percussive sound. Conversely the violin and double bass parts seem, at least initially, more sympathetic to, even synergistic with the oboe line, hanging off pitch material and short tremolo phrases. But the oboe alone seems immune from electronic interference: all the other instruments are draped in the digital.

Fernandez draws connections between micro and macro forms: structurally the work oscillates, just as the oboe does, between chunks of dense, hyperactive texture and more restrained, relatively static sections. As listeners we’re continuously in flux: machines spin out of control; Liquids seize up. Near the middle of the work, cut-up static and percussion—accompanying a hugely virtuosic oboe cadenza—gives way to nothing but gentle electronic vibrato. But the innate disturbance of this germinal oscillating figure soon precipitates more forceful action. Over the sustained spectral base, a series of striking single sounds emerge: oboe multiphonics, gong strikes with upward bends, exaggerated double bass vibrato. Throughout, the oboe soloist maintains a vital presence, either against a stippled tachisme effect, or on a bed of gentle creaks and sighs.

The last chunk of the piece is notable for its sensitivity: it seems beautifully quaint and nostalgic after so much whirling virtuosity. Though the needling oboe trills return again, this time they herald a point of rest at the end of the work. The texture once again gravitates towards sustained sounds, and Fernandez hints at an underlying tonality with seagull glissandi, guitar harmonics and what to my ears is a simple Lydian mode, delicately adorned.

The periodic violence in Amas didn’t quite prepare me for what was to come: Morciano’s Estremo d’ombra was singularly relentless, primal in its pursuit of sonic saturation.

I found the staging elements (and particularly the lighting) a little tokenistic and heavy-handed. Before the piece began, the room was filled with smoke before being completely darkened. The instrumentalists entered one by one, beginning with bassist Jonathan Heilbron, extracting some wonderfully luminous colours from his instrument. This initial growth of the ensemble, subtly augmenting the existing pulsating sound mass, Morciano managed skilfully. However, often new sections of the work would coincide with stark lighting changes, undermining the sense of continuity and accumulation.

Nevertheless, if Amas might be characterised in geometric metaphor as a sine wave, Estremo d’ombra was a wedge, a shadow that grew from a single point to a huge mass, a trajectory that threatened to overwhelm the listener (or at least this particular listener).

As the other higher-pitched instruments entered one by one, the texture became increasingly jittery, chaotic, unbound from its drone origin. This culminated in a sort of hyper-toccata between flute and viola, almost a tremolo of continuous activity; later on an answering section laid out an intricate heterophonic duet between flute and alto saxophone. Throughout, electronics caught the resonance of the various instrumental techniques, building up wave after wave of gesture with echoes of crunch tones, multiphonics, battuto hits, slap-tongues and snap pizzicato.

With the instrumentalists moving to more and more extreme distortions of their ordinary timbres–the most vicious of viola crunch tones, the extreme high register of the flute, Michael Liknovsky exchanging alto for baritone saxophone–we braced for a final assault. And it came: the players gathered in tight around bassist Heilbron, ditching their scores for pure ecstatic free improvisation.

The physical spectacle of this was impressive, but by this point twenty or so minutes in, Estremo D’Ombre felt somewhat indulgent; where Amas held tension in the interplay of stasis and movement, in the mechanistic and the organic, Morciano’s work held little such tension, only relentless drive and growth. While I admire its bravado and commitment, I would have quite happily left the cramped hall ten minutes earlier.

Diptych
Argonaut Ensemble
Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music
Bendigo Bank Theatrette
4 September 2016

José Miguel Fernández, Amas; Lara Morciano, Estremo d’Ombra

2016BIFEM: Leah Scholes, Simulcast

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Review by Alex Taylor

Amid a concentrated festival program, Leah Scholes’s Simulcast concert was scheduled simultaneously with a Xenakis keyboard marathon by Peter de Jager, the afternoon a kind of meta-simulcast of scheduling by BIFEM director David Chisholm. Thankfully these performances were repeated for those wanting to experience both; though the Xenakis program might have looked on paper the more intensive of the two, Simulcast was its true equal in quality and presentation, no less of a physical feat and with its own singular aesthetic. All five percussion pieces shared a concern with the uncomfortable interaction, the friction, between sound and meaning, and the slippage and failure of language.

Marc Applebaum’s Aphasia enlists his percussionist not as a maker of sounds, or even as a striker of objects, but as a practitioner of a kind of fake sign language. There’s something absurd and yet sublime about the juxtaposition of mundane domestic signs—manipulating a rubix cube, swimming breaststroke, turning a vehicle’s ignition—with totally unfamiliar, otherworldly sounds, distortions of a human voice in the pre-recorded tape part. The voice is both synchronised with the signs and semantically alien to them: this is a form of puppetry more than any kind of meaningful sign language.

Scholes combines the substantial repertoire of hand gestures with an entirely deadpan expression. There’s impressive counterpoint not only in passages of simultaneous and rapidly alternating gestures (all memorised in sync with the complex and rhythmically irregular tape part) but also between this highly animated, angular physical virtuosity and the deliberate blankness of the performer’s face and body. Furthermore, despite the heavy processing, the taped voice is clearly recognisable as a deep male one. In this version of the piece, the disjunction between the sound of that voice (Nicholas Isherwood’s) and the physical appearance of the female performer heightens the sense of ventriloquism, an operatic alien puppeteer loading the performer’s semantic capacity with unfamiliar sounds, to be translated and performed as familiar but contextually meaningless gestures. What begins as a stream of audio-visual objects that could form meaningful language is revealed as a kind of expressive paralysis.

All the pieces on the program shared Applebaum’s interest in spoken language, and perhaps in questioning its communicative function. However some works took a less cynical viewpoint.

Far from deadpan, the emotional tone of Vinko Globokar’s Toucher was highly energetic, switching quickly between characters and conversations in an imaginary series of dialogues with the mathematician and astronomer Galileo Galilei. Toucher presented a kind of formalised musical lesson. After a short solfege-style key to the sounds we were about to hear (each specific syllable associated with a unique pop or swish of a percussion gesture), Scholes launched full speed ahead into these aphoristic encounters. Each section was clearly numbered and announced, including the pauses, much to the amusement of the audience. From what I could make out of the French, these sections were arranged in a non-linear order, and the spoken language came in and out of the texture while the percussive simulacra remained a constant, such that our focus (particularly for non-Francophones) was not on deciphering direct semantic meaning, but on observing the inner logic of inflection and phrasing.

Such was her familiarity with the material, so well ingrained was the cadence in her voice and hands, that Scholes was a perfect foil for the potentially didactic structure: nonchalant, incisive and theatrically convincing in embodying a whole cast of characters.

Francois Sarhan’s Homework #1 (part of a series of music-theatre works by the composer) has neither historical figures nor universal signs to tie it to the concrete. Instead Sarhan employs the jargonistic language of instructional manuals to imagine a seemingly innocuous mechanical object which the performer is involved in building or fixing (“take the lip of the pipe” etc.). What begins as a cheerfully optimistic charade (think daytime children’s television) soon dissolves into concern and then panic, as the exterior pragmatic world of systems and details comes into conflict with an interior emotional world—“no, not like that!”—and gets altogether out of control.

At its climax Homework recalls Georges Aperghis’s Le corps à corps, in a complex groove of hitting, twisting and ragged breathing. Although some of the tiniest sounds—the facial percussion, for example—may have needed amplification, the increasingly urgent trajectory carried the listener’s attention right through to a silent, hollow coda.

The longest and most texturally complex work on the program was Rick Burkhardt’s Simulcast, a riot of translation, miscommunication and fragmentation. Scholes was joined by fellow percussionist Louise Devenish, seated at a sort of radio announcers’ table and armed with microphones, suspended cymbals and a range of unusual percussion instruments, including harmonica and clickers. The pair were precise and in sync, down to the matching pitch and inflection of their voices in a dreamlike unison episode. Scholes and Devenish began as a kind of bilingual sports commentary team, but as the empty language of management speak intruded and complex interference patterns emerged, the narrative sense started to unravel. By the end of the work language was being described not in communicative terms but as a kind of interrogation or torture. “Most of what is happening now is shouting.”

Rounding off a sleek and satisfying concert was Australian composer Kate Neal’s declamatory Self Accusation. Like the Globokar, Neal’s work conflated language and percussion gestures, but in a more insistent pulsation, a list of self-reflections that ranged from neutral observations to descriptions of restriction and conflict. Peter Handke’s 1966 text had an appealing Beatnik quality, reveling in repetitive grammatical structures: it might invite comparison with Ginsberg’s seminal anti-establishment poem America.

The whispered control and formality of the opening, with its delicate metallic sounds and tentative self-discovery, opened out into a joyful looseness, proclaiming a rebellion against all the arbitrary constraints of society: “I did not husband my sexual powers! […] I CROSSED ON THE RED!”

In the course of these five works (mirroring the structure of the Xenakis concert), Scholes revealed not only an attention to the finest details of complex percussion music (with the exception of the Rick Burkhardt duo that gave the concert its title, Scholes’s entire program was memorised, to an extreme degree of precision), but also a theatrical flair in spades, a special combination required to pull off such ambitious works. In this regard the expert contribution of director Penelope Bartlau should be specially acknowledged. Scholes used her own body and voice as a site of crisis and discovery, a site for a fascinating interplay of emotional and intellectual currents, interior and exterior worlds. It must be mentioned too that both the works and their interpretation were serious fun, the concert an unashamedly flamboyant and engaging vision of what music can be.

Leah Scholes
Simulcast
Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music
Old Fire Station
3 September 2016

Vinko Globokar, Toucher; François Sarhan, Homework; Mark Applebaum, Aphasia; Rick Burkhardt, Simulcast; Kate Neal, Self Accusation

2016BIFEM: Argonaut Ensemble, Seeing Double (2)

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(C)Jason Tavener Photography HARP G UITAR DOUBLE CONCERTO_MG_1126
Argonaut Ensemble, Maxime Pascal conductor, Harp Guitar Double Concerto by David Chisholm, Jason Tavener photography

Review by Alex Taylor

Bendigo’s Ulumbarra Theatre, a converted jail, may soon be home to BIFEM’s resident Argonaut ensemble on a more permanent basis. At Friday night’s opening concert Seeing Double, Bendigo festival founder and featured composer David Chisholm waxed lyrical on the “criminal” lack of this kind of permanent new music infrastructure. “All criminals need to be brought to justice, and this is the jail where that can happen.” BIFEM’s opening double bill of double concerti showed us both the possibilities and temptations of that infrastructure, embodied here by large, skilful instrumental forces and consummate soloists and conductors; a veritable toybox for two precocious postmodernists.

Jack Symonds’s Decadent Purity is a work that attempts to blend quite disparate elements. At the outset a cloud of high harmonics hovers over a stop-start grumble of double bass and contrabass clarinet, opening up a chasm of registral space and spectral colour. The two solo instruments, too, carve opposing roles; the viola d’amore draws out its long line against percussive exclamation marks: elaborated argument against decisive punctuation. The first of seven movements also sets out another more uncomfortable dichotomy: two harmonic worlds in combat. A sturdy neo-Baroque tonality, reminiscent of Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, is pitted against the subtle slippage and inflection of microtones and textural nuance. It’s a promising collision.

Both soloists hold the drama of the work in their phrasing and movements. James Wannan sways on tiptoe, his viola d’amore an ornate, many-stringed creature of clear resonance and line, making the most of the acoustic at the front of the Ulumbarra Theatre stage. Wannan’s approach embodies the decadent purity of the title, imbuing Baroque details with a rich, almost Romantic sensibility. Percussionist Kaylie Melville moves with a pixie swagger, each entry dashed off with a cutting, almost sardonic precision. But her role for the most part remains one of commentary and fleeting gesture, unable to enter the harmonic and melodic realms that form the bulkhead of the work.

As captivating as the soloists were to watch and listen to, the dramaturgy and flow of the work itself at times seemed forced, imposed from above rather than extrapolated from the rich materials already at play. You couldn’t help but be seduced by sighing herds of ascending or descending microtones, but these remained as fixed objects rather than catalysts for generating gesture. The restraint and sensitivity of more spacious sections (for example the penultimate movement with its slow-moving scales) was several times undercut by overtly dramatic tropes. High-energy toccatas recurred throughout the work, most forcefully in the final movement where the marimba propelled us, no, forced us, towards cadential release.

The attractiveness of Symonds’s work is undeniable, but the promise of that initial collision of soloists, ensemble and the stylistic strains of both Baroque and modernist Avant-Garde is ultimately left unfulfilled.

David Chisholm’s Harp Guitar Double Concerto seemed a more natural and less masochistic pairing than viola d’amore and percussion: here were two forces of equal dynamism and resonance. A striking, hard-edged opening hints at the diverse gestural possibilities of those two soloists. Rapid pinball glissandi in the brittle high reaches of the harp answer a deep upward sweep in the guitar.

Like a flickbook, the opening cuts rapidly from gesture to gesture, often blurring in the orchestral maelstrom of an expanded Argonaut Ensemble. You get the sense that this is a kind of pastiche, but not of direct quotation, or even of particularly strong stylistic allusion. Occasionally more distinctive slivers poke through: swaggering muted brass recall Miles Davis, and later a frantic viola solo has echoes of Elliott Carter, a haywire cog spinning in the wrong machine. These are relatively rare moments, and you sense there might be a wealth of such detail hidden amidst some ambitiously thick, even clumpy textures. These aren’t helped by an acoustic that threw the soloists into relief at the front of the stage, while damping the intricacies beyond the proscenium arch.

For much of the work, the action continues in postmodern pile-up fashion, impulsive, rather than linear, time hammered out ecstatically. For a time, this was immersive, like those pools of plastic balls you used to get at some adventurous fast food chain playgrounds, a liquid made of solid objects. But as the piece progressed there was a more and more present feeling that these gestures, constrained as they were in a four-square metric scheme, rarely got beyond fragments. You have to say too that the obvious talents of conductor Maxime Pascal were utilised sparingly with so much martial time-keeping. However within the relatively square metric scheme, Pascal was able to draw out a range of bold shapes and colours from the ensemble.

It wasn’t until the fluid, effortless harp cadenza, a dazzling display of delicacy both from Chisholm and from harp soloist Jessica Fotinos, that we glimpsed an interior alternative to the glitzy, pluralistic mass offered by the front half of the work. Even though, like the rest of the piece, it might have benefitted from more space and breath, the finely crafted but rather lengthy cadenza allowed us to pivot towards lyricism and fragility. Out of the cadenza came a positively decadent cor anglais duo from Jasper Ly and Benjamin Opie, foreshadowing their oboe heroics at the exquisite, abrupt ending. In turn the cor anglais led us tag-team into a nostalgic, washed-out kind of texture, strings fluttering between solid pitches and combinations of ethereal partials.

The guitar soloist, Mauricio Carrasco, also had a chance to show off his solo chops, delivering both sheer brutality and lyrical nuance in a much shorter but no less impactful cadenza. In fact, it contained to my mind the evening’s most sensitive, fantastical moment. Out of the resonance of guitar harmonics came a delicate veil of sound, initially difficult to place but revealed as a falsetto vocal hum from Fotinos across the stage. The harmonics and falsetto continued, a true interior world, almost haunting in a fragile continuity against the flamboyance of what had come before. After a brief and brutal swansong in the guitar, we returned to that interior, but more confidently, as if a fresh discovery has been made. Over a breathy mass of sustained string harmonics, the oboes asserted this new, insistent lyricism: at the very end, a way forward.

Seeing Double
The Argonaut Ensemble
Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music
Ulumbarra Theatre
2 September 2016
Jack Symonds, Decadent Purity; David Chisholm, Harp Guitar Double Concerto

Jack Symonds, Decadent Purity (James Wannan Viola d’amore; Kaylie Melville, percussion; Jack Symonds, Conductor)

David Chisholm, Harp Guitar Double Concerto (Jessica Fotinos Harp; Mauricio Carrasco Guitar; Maxime Pascal Conductor)