Review by Madeline Roycroft

Speicher, the title of Enno Poppe’s 2013 work for large ensemble has a number of translations in English, including reservoir, memory and storehouse. All of these mirror the complex structure within the piece, performed by ELISION ensemble and students of the Australian National Academy of Music. Over the course of 75 minutes, early snippets of thematic material are carried into new and expanded contexts as six individual works weave recurrent ideas and memories. The audience can then draw upon their own memories of the unfolding work to determine why the music becomes increasingly familiar.

Conductor Carl Rosman leads a polished and thought provoking performance of Poppe’s monumental work. Valiant and untiring, Rosman barely takes a second to pause as the six segments (which range in length from three to twenty minutes) move seamlessly onward.

Various sections are infused with popular music styles, allowing us to hear pitch bends and vibrato from the clarinet, snatches of laid-back drumbeats and bluesy influence in the muted brass. Poppe’s use of colourful instrumental pairings is a real highlight of the work. Nothing confirms timbral innovation more than audience members’ eyes darting madly around the stage, trying to determine the source of unusual instrument pairings. Sustained harmonics in the upper strings pass seamlessly to the flute; contrabassoon and bass clarinets deliver solo passages in the very top of their ranges. A sudden, feisty duet between soprano saxophone and accordion is exemplary of the innovative use of timbre. ANAM saxophonist Luke Carbon is show-stealing in numerous explosive solos that jump frantically between top register squeals and robust, overblown bottom notes which display just how well the instrument lends itself to extended techniques.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Speicher though is the impact that listening to microtones for an extended period of time has on the audience’s sense of pitch. From the very beginning of the work there are extensive periods that provide the listener with mere fragments or compressed versions of a melody. Sustained discordant clusters, coloured by members of the high wind section, repeatedly punctuate these passages. Rather than recoiling at the potentially unsettling nature of these chords, the audience is comforted by the rare moments of stillness they provide. There is also a physical dimension to the performance in which the musicians momentarily relax their jerky body language as they lean into sustained dissonances.

Adjusting to the busy, disjointed nature of the opening themes creates an equally unusual sense of rhythmic displacement in the listener. At the sudden appearance of a single coherent phrase, this characteristic becomes strikingly evident. Performed sensitively in the top range of the cello, a melody that spans only several bars is cleverly unprecedented to the point that it is perceived as a syntax error for the human ear.

A feat that the performers execute particularly well throughout Speicher is the evolving role of instrument groups within the ensemble. During the six sections we experience a quiet, playful opening of sliding and seesawing violas, dense chords in the strings and keyboards enhanced by solo wind and brass voices, then a sudden ‘attack of the high winds’ in the supercharged finale.

From the beginning of this concluding section, Poppe has already rewritten the rules of conventional voicing in an innovative exploration of the top register, which members of ELISION and ANAM treat with utmost musicality. Sustained, high-pitched cluster chords from piccolos, oboe, soprano saxophone and clarinet could easily result in a shambles; instead, balance is achieved to the point of borderline aural discomfort. Dissonances ring out across the auditorium, achieving dynamic strength that is seldom heard from woodwinds alone. The brass section adds to the effect towards the end, generating an energised and equally voluminous charge to the finish line.

The texture suddenly becomes sparse for the work’s gripping conclusion, led masterfully by ELISION veterans Paula Rae and Peter Veale. A continuous note from the piccolo and oboe is repeatedly bent up and down, like a wide vibrato played in slow motion. The woodwinds gradually fade, and the conclusion – which is strangely evocative of a fly trapped in a jar – is executed tenderly by Tristram Williams on the soprano trombone, buzzing softly in steady pulsations of the same eerie pitch.

Overall, ELISION and ANAM are to be commended for their outstanding interpretation of Poppe’s multilayered work. Australian audiences should cross their fingers that this premiere performance allows Speicher to find a place in future programming of contemporary repertoire.

Speicher
ELISION/ANAM
Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music
Capital Theatre
2 September 2016

Enno Poppe, Speicher (Carl Rosman, conductor)

Review by Bec Scully

Enno Poppe’s Speicher is a play on memory, a greatly expanding field of knowledge for our generation. We know our memories are malleable, largely illusory, constantly mutating, decaying or enriching. In German, the term ‘speicher’, meaning ‘storage’, and refers both to psychological memory storage, and also more specifically as a store of pitch class sets used in a compositional process.

At the opening of the piece there is no memory, only attention. Poppe’s atom of musical thought is the salty sul pont viola paired with bleak sonar-radio emissions from the accordion. These bare elements return recognisable, yet in eloquent settings and manipulated through unexpected readings. Vibrato is Poppe’s justification for challenging our traditional concept of a note as belonging to a fixed pitch. With intervals-wide, pitch-traversing vibrato we learn to reconsider our idea of a musical atom. We’re reminded of the pitch continuum at play in vibrato and reassess our assumption in our perception of the discrete tone.

By contrast, after this hypervibrato and ‘hyperchromatic’ divisions of less than a semitone, late-Romantic string vibrato is introduced only for a moment and suddenly we can hear this normally ubiquitous left-hand string technique as a chaotic, over-stimulating, maelstrom of thousands of incomprehensible musical events. And in these small moments we might experience an appreciation of sounds units on a small order of magnitude and perhaps experience the reverse operation of Schenkerian analysis which looks for the skeleton of a work, not for its biochemistry.

 Conducted by Carl Rosman and performed by a the champion forces of Elision ensemble joined by the fresh-blood of Australian National Academy of Music, the combined ensemble evoked cohesive textural moments, and colouristic effects convincingly. The students clearly delighted in their full-citizenship in any register of their instruments.

 Shout out to a grand-effort Parker-esque solo on alto sax by clarinettist, Luke Carbon. Kyla Matsuura-Miller tag-teamed the second violin part at the 4th movement and knocked it out of the park with rhythmic finesse and delicious tonal ferocity. Props to Eli Vincent in valiantly helming the nucleus of the work as first viola. Applause to the professionals: concertmaster Graeme Jennings who was a consistent and efficient leader, cellist Séverine Ballon, whose early attack on the cello was the first and true expression of musical violence in the work; her solo in section I explores the highest pitches of the deepest strings, creating an innocent, swallowed sob in melody that was reminiscent of the frailty of a child’s voice. Tristram Williams, a strong advocate of this work, played with precision and expression. There were seriously stunningly executed harp treats in the texture from Marshall Mcguire. Best and Fairest goes to James Crabb on accordion. The evolution from harmonics to accordion hums was sublime, and Crabb, master of camouflage, as a foreign species of instrument among the full palette of orchestral instruments. It returns to the fore of the texture evoking its unique voice; an imperceptible transformation before our ears, as if Escher himself could draw sound. Like Escher, Poppe is a numerologist and does not believe the 12-tone technique would have been so successful were it not for the cultural significance of the number 12. This piece appears to be based around the number six on multiple levels. Six movements, each containing six parts, the hyper chromatic use of 6th tones.

Stylistically, most of this work is in Poppe’s own compositional language of clear texture, and microtonal organic development. However, in a potential nod to Adams’ The Chairman Dances, Poppe enters the stylistic world of the foxtrot. Apart from minor technical details, challenge some students struggled to find their groove. Some bebop stomps were finely executed on the drum kit and one wished for similar conviction in the strings. From the ironic use of grotesquely pretty Hollywood strings to tone-dense Mondrian-esque geometric forces in the winds and Debussy’s harmonic-gravity defying language, textural transitions were the most spectacular feature of the ensemble’s interpretation.

A humble woodblock knock, emerging meekly from an apocalyptic orchestral force, elicited a chuckle from the audience, and true, a musical ugly-duckling it was. Our duckling returns as a pluck in the harp and we delight in its glorious transformation into a swan-tone adorned in overtones. Outside of this piece I would have serious doubts as to whether a single harp note held sufficient aesthetic power.

 All these micro-details are essentially developmental links in an 80-minute epic, expansive enough to puff its chest at Beethoven’s 9th. At the close of Speicher, it’s possible to hear the initial opening notes of Beethoven 9’s recitative, a melody symbolic of refusal for new material. One can’t help but feel Poppe reached the precipice of a musical mind verging on new material, only to reiterate and reaffirm the work’s fidelity to singular ideas and their possibilities and thus the piece exits before new material can be spoken, suspended on the trumpeter’s tongue.

Speicher
ELISION/ANAM
Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music
Capital Theatre
2 September 2016

Enno Poppe, Speicher (Carl Rosman, conductor)