Chamber Work rewind

The stream’s still broken, it’s ridiculous, I thought this was the 21st century…

So how to describe in a little more detail what just went down?

First there were the Kodaly pieces. The first of them required placing a silver hotel mute over the strings. This made for such a quiet sound that I didn’t dare take notes because the paper would rustle. More obvious than innocent little me, though, was leakage from an adjacent street festival, blasting what might be known as Kölsche Schlager (let’s translate that as German pop music for violently sociable people after a gallon of beer or so). By the end of the intro, Adrian seemed in tune with the noise situation, it really didn’t bother me from then on. Though it came back as welcome reminder of real life during the short pauses between tracks.

Interesting how Kurtag’s pieces related to their titles, The Shadow definitely was furtive, while the two titled Science were the most overtly gestural of the set. By the second of them I think I would be forgiven for thinking that there was some irony at the concept of objectivity here.

Then came the Saariaho. I’ve already described how I heard it in the backrooms of the LOFT, and the two forces at play within the piece, but still a stage performance always is another thing. She uses the complete array of (mostly traditional) playing techniques in very quick succession, you know, tremoli, glissandi, nothing frightful, arpeggioed flageolets (that are a bitch to play since they’re much closer than they usually would be in cello literature, Adrian tells me), but they’re all so very integrated it’s impressive. My favourite though where the two-tone parts with little notes escaping in different directions.

Next up was a surprise, nine miniatures in the manner of Birtwistle by Adrian and Simon Nabatov on piano. Birtwistle is currently writing a piece for Adrian which originally was programmed for this event, so instead we got a tribute to the composer. I frankly don’t know what to say since I sat there under the delusion that they both were playing from sheet music, it was all so exactly cued. I’m speechless that this was improvised. Wow.

Last came Hayden’s piece with the quartet, the spontaneously named Critical Mess. Part of the episodes within that were twelve-tone, but played with incredible bounce, following a European tradition of what was formerly known as jazz, how to describe, I don’t know, maybe someone like Michael Riessler did stuff from the ballpark next to that. Some of these were really short though, clear Webern references. And Hayden is much more eclectic even if he gets serious. My favourite were probably the more elegiac parts, minimal and unashamedly beautiful in a lazy kind of way. Hayden chew gum. What’s the attitude.

Since this has grown so long, the second part will start before I’m there. Precious Storm with Simon on Rhodes, John both on guitar and drums, Hayden on soprano and steel drum. From the rehearsals you can expect an 80s revival party, but you can never trust rehearsals. I’m now going to try and crash it.