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paul griffiths

snippet of the week

Midnightpiece from Selene

They sat in silence across from one another, each supporting his head on one arm, as the light burned low and the moon appeared wan, as if not daring to shine on a Christ by Guido Reni. For a long time they said nothing.
      ‘There is surely no immortality...’, Gustav asked at length and stretched, as if in a dream, though he moved not a muscle and it seemed he was asking himself.
      The prince looked at him and said quickly: ‘Ah, you remain silent for so long.’
      ‘You're probably mad, Gustav’, he said after another long pause.
      Outside great clouds moved across the sky, while in the west there was still a fiery glow in the heavens and the flowers spoke softly to each other. In the east a cold night storm dragged itself in; the wind blew out a window.
      Gustav stood up quietly and went slowly to that window; the wind shook his hair wildly. ‘Mad...’, he said, and went on: ‘At least for any human being, being still alive.’
      The prince made no response.
      ‘Gustav’, he sang out after a while. He took hold of him in a curious fashion and asked quietly: ‘Are you a human being?’
      Gustav mutely nodded.
      ‘So why do you nod, you mummy? Today I had a reasonable idea, so I thought. If people believed that after death would come nothingness, their hearts would cry out. It must be a strange God who lets us live only to die but who gave us a voice. You go on living, so why do you not call out, Gustav?’
      Gustav pointed at the clouds and said dully: ‘If you exist, God, why did you make people? And if you do not exist, why are we not gods?’
      ‘Because there are none’, said the prince. ‘Because there is no immortality, there is no god. Not so?’
      Gustav made no reply. They left.

(Robert Schumann, November 1828)

record of the week


15 The Cathedral of the Dormition in Kiev was founded nigh on a millennium ago, and, to judge from photographs, has the look of an ancient church. What we see, though, was built in 1998, to replace a structure—itself dating back only as far as the nineteenth century—demolished in 1935. If one were there, the physical building might seem tremulous, a mirage, for what really holds the place together is memory—and, perhaps, wishful thinking.
     This was an appropriate venue in which to record the sacred choral settings by Valentin Silvestrov that appear on the latest of several ECM albums devoted to his work (ECM 2117). The music has a hovering unreality, partly because so much of it is sung by a section of the choir (or soloists) against sustained harmony, but also partly because it is composed so much—like the church in which it is happening, and indeed like a lot of Silvestrov’s later output—out of the glow of vanishing memory. The dates given in the accompanying booklet—2005 and 2006 for most of the pieces—seem quite evidently mistaken, for these chords and these melodic figures do not belong to our time. They may not evoke medieval Rus, but they are drenched with the nineteenth century, or in some cases the popular music of the early twentieth, where Tosti’s shadow takes over from Tchaikovsky’s, or from the anonymous shadow of folksong as Romantically interpreted. Connections with other aspects of Silvestrov’s work are therefore close, and some of these pieces sound like numbers from his Quiet Songs with the piano’s resonances interpreted chorally; there is a soft naturalness to much of the solo singing, and the choral sound, too, is unforced, bending to the supple rhythm as grass bends in the wind. The title of Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich’s booklet essay, ‘Voices like Bells’, communicates another effect of these choral harmonies, an effect occasionally intensified by pealing entries. Most of the texts seem to be from the Orthodox liturgy, with the exception of the Latin ‘Ave Maria’, set twice. (No words are provided.) But liturgical performance would seem unlikely for music so personal, so nostalgic, so sweet, so close to the edge of the sentimental and so close, also, to disappearing—music that only just is.

14 Big music, boldly driving, expertly composed, seeming to come straight out of 1930s modernism (Schoenberg in the Barcelona sun): such is the art of Benet Casablancas as represented on a disc of orchestral pieces from the last three decades, delivered with appropriate energy by the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya under Salvador Mas-Conde (Naxos 8.579002). The main work is The Dark Backward of Time, from 2005, which owes its title to Prospero’s description of memory as ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’, and much of which fits the source in being tempestuous, though the composer’s unquellable imagination keeps the storm going—a few breathing spaces apart—for close on twenty minutes. An earlier piece of similar length, Postlude (1991), intimates a stage of reliance on imitative counterpoint before the vigorous style of constantly onward urging took over.
     Curiously for a composer with such a command of abstract symphonic poetry at expansive length, Casablancas has written a lot of what he calls ‘epigrams’—not as epigrammatic as many of Webern’s pieces, but all done in two or three minutes, or perhaps a little longer in the case of slow movements. This collection includes a set of three from 2001: a soaring opener and a mostly bright and festive finale around a nocturne (another favourite genre) that has some echoes of Mahler and Bartók.
     The catalogue on Casablancas’s website indicates a composer excited principally by instruments, so this programme is true to his output in offering just one vocal item, a dreamy love song that is also considerably the earliest piece here, dating back to 1981. From the nearer end of his career, Intrada sobre el nom de DALÍ (2006) is another epigram, quicksilver in tone but characteristically sure all through.
     A companion album (Naxos 8.579004) adds scores for smaller forces done by another fine Catalan ensemble, the Sinfonietta/Modern/InterContemporain-scale BCN 216. Shakespeare again features, in the Siete escenas de Hamlet for a narrator (Paul Jutsum) setting the scene for colourful musical illustrations, and there are more epigrams and nocturnes.

13 Following the forking pathways of Ligeti and Kyburz, Alberto Posadas creates music of fermenting self-similarity—and sometimes abrupt difference—in his Liturgia fractal of 2003-7, written for, and beautifully presented on record by, the Diotima Quartet (Kairos 0012932 KAI). At its simplest, as at the start, Posadas’s fractal music is a species of elastic canon: a small motif is copied from line to line, over and over, with more or less consistent change in some direction or other, whether a transformation of contour or a slow slide (often upward), producing an effect at once homogeneous and dynamic. The music is strongly determined, in that the generating element is a constant reference-point, and the resulting degree of stability provides a well-upholstered foundation for the ear, given that the music is so finely composed and played. We know where we are, and are happy to be there. At the same time, however, there is a fearful awareness of the arbitrary. Yes, we know where we are, but we know, too, that we could very easily be somewhere else. This tightrope of certain uncertainty is securely traversed by both composer and performers, and Posadas and his msuicians also masterfully overcome what could be a problem, that the emphasis on the minuscule rules out the possibility of long lines. These do appear in the fourth of the five movements—Arborescencias, a mini-concerto for violin and string trio that may be performed as a separate piece—though even there the melody is often evidently built from small, alike segments. Elsewhere the music is made largely from dust motes, but shaped into swirls and gusts so as always to keep the larger picture in sight. What may also surprise is the haunting and sometimes moving effect created by music whose genesis is so abstract and objective. The muted chords that run through much of the second movement, Modulaciones, strikingly convey the piece into a glistening new world, and the retrieval of that world in the next movement, Órbitas, is momentous within the context of this subtly nuanced music. The end of Órbitas is another powerful juncture, with the four instruments in galloping motion sounding indeed like four suns in orbit around their mutual centre of gravity, and then a peep into the harmonics at the begining of Arborescencias. All that seems puzzling is the title, with its suggestion that these five movements form a sort of string quartet mass, for there is nothing liturgical here, only an exciting freshness.

12 Of eleven works recorded at the 2008 Donaueschingen Festival for one of Wulf Weinmann’s regular compilations (Neos 10944), two make the set worthwhile. One is Ferneyhough’s Chronos-Aion, which he aptly describes as a ‘concerto for ensemble’, the ensemble being the Modern and the concerto aspect having to do with the frequent emergence and interplay of small groups or, more rarely, soloists. Concerto-style display and vivacity, however, are absent, or present only in negative guise. There is the persistent sense of a weighty piece of machinery falling apart, of a collective time fraying. Moreover, the concertante groups, when suddenly given the spotlight, seem most often embarrassed, even scared. They rush about in search of cover again within the ensemble, or they just stop, and wild solos are outnumbered by sad songs bumping around the same few notes. Frank Ollu conducts a strong, desperate performance.
     The other piece that stands out is Brice Pauset’s Fifth Symphony, Die Tänzerin, which at last provides an opportunity to hear one of this historically conscious but by no means retrogressive composer’s larger works, and which proves him as meticulous, resourceful, melancholy and questioning on this scale as in the chamber and keyboard works that have hitherto represented him on record. The background to Die Tänzerin, one of six symphonies he has produced in recent years, is explained in his programme note, which appears only in excerpt with the recording but fully on his publisher’s website. The piece itself fascinates and disturbs. Noises, piano sounds and a kind of tentative line in string harmonics at the start create the image of a fractured dance, and much of the music that ensues has this sense of something trying to piece itself together—against (or is it with the help of?) the might that comes rolling in every now and then, most alarmingly with dumb rotations in the bass a little before the halfway point in this fifteen-minute composition. These interventions suggest some mindless machine—but also the mindless machine that is the human body, with its more or less regular pulse. And there is a corporeality in the finer music that extends, one likes to think, the main continuity, even where the writing is gauze-thin and scintillant. Oppositions that manifest themselves powerfully seem also illusory; the music exists as if slightly out of reach, drawing us in, drawing us back.

11 An album of chamber pieces by Elena Mendoza (Kairos 0012882 KAI), born in Seville in 1973 and now based in Berlin, introduces a composer whose music conveys at once playfulness and mystery, like a ghost who smiles. Often the lightness comes from quick repeated notes, or from pitches bouncing rapidly from one instrument to another, whereas the strangeness derives from exploratory spectral harmonies that will sometimes, though created entirely by instruments, suggest the emergence of a voice. The two modes receive prominence in turn in Díptico (2004), scored for clarinet, saxophone, cello, piano and percussion, and beautifully presented by ensemble recherche. Even here, though, the expressive categories flow into one another and out again, all the time with an engaging directness of utterance.
     Mendoza seems concerned with other borderlands, notably between instrumental sound and vocal, not only in her instrumental synthesis of voice-like timbres but also in her use of vocal sound in an instrumental context. Akt Zeichnung (Nude Drawing, or Act Drawing), a piece for baritone and mixed sextet that apparently looks forward to her full-length music-theatre score Niebla (Fog), has the players whispering, and Lo que nunca dijo nadie (I never said no) joyously has its duo of violinist and guitarist hurling words as well as notes and figures at one another. Another, earlier duo, Contra-dicción for violas (2001), has some characteristic features—the immediacy, the echoing between parts—but not the humour; rather the piece suggests two figures huddling together as they falter in the darkness.
     Jürgen Ruck, formerly guitarist of the Ensemble Modern, gives a strong account of a solo written for him, Breviario de espejismos (Breviary of Mirages), whose comic eeriness and internal conversation relate to a Goya engraving, Nadie se concoce, in which a cavalier bows to a masked lady, not seeing the shadowy, sinister figures behind him. The most recent piece—also the longest—is a piano quartet whose title, Nebelsplitter (Fog Splinters), indicates again a connection with the composer’s biggest endeavour so far. One might think that fog had wisps or smudges rather than splinters, but the precision and incisiveness of Mendoza’s ideas makes the oxymoron appropriate.

10 The Ensemble Modern has been giving its members the chance to show off not only their performing skills, universally exceptional, but also their dreams and desires as programme builders, over the hour or so span of a cd. Ueli Wiget invites some of his colleagues to join him in chamber pieces by Skalkottas (EMCD 007), while Michael M. Kasper offers a concept album (EMCD 006), in which the cello is progressively defamiliarized along the route from the sonatas of Ligeti and Zimmermann to Lachenmann’s Pression and Michael Gordon’s Industry, then lost altogether, leaving the cellist just with his own body, itself disappearing as the naked, present hands of Reich’s Clapping Music give way to the merely implied foot of Lucier’s RPMs for car engine and acceletator pedal. The trumpeter Sava Stoianov covers a wide field in a sequence mostly of duets (EMCD 008), including a haunting exchange with a Bulgarian folksinger, Neli Andreeva, in Georgi Andreev’s Rodopi and a converse exercise in blending (with a soprano) and joint acrobatics in Vykintas Baltakas’s RiRo. Different again, the bassoonist Johannes Schwarz prefers to be alone, with or without electronic set-ups, on a record (EMCD 002) that offers the most startling instrumental reinvention here outside Pression: Pierluigi Billone’s Legno. Edre II. Edre of 2003, a piece from early in this composer’s lengthy absorption with the bassoon. Schwarz shows throughout his recital a wonderful combination of straightforwardness, just getting the job done, with abundant character, and the result is a flexible naturalness even when the sound world is estranged by electronic treatment or, in the Billone, new techniques. Playing around the axis of an intemperate tremolo, which returns several times through this fourteen-minute piece, Legno. Edre II. Edre is music largely of slow sliding multiphonics, with occasional stationary sounds in which harmonic spectra come to life, and it has the severe new beauty that seems to characterize Billone’s work.

9 The temptation is to take the Endymion Ensemble’s double album Sound Census (NMC D160), representing two dozen composers, as a thermometer telling the temperature of contemporary music in Britain, in which case the reading would have to be: more or less modal, alternately perky and ruminative. Of course, one has to take into account the patient’s condition at the time. Most of these pieces were written to celebrate the ensemble’s thirtieth anniversary or the seventieth birthday of Anthony Gilbert; miniature dimensions and a bright tone are therefore to be expected. But it is not so easy to explain the modalities, circling around the poles of Parisian Stravinsky, late Ligeti and Stockhausen, except as expressive of a desire for belonging, for finding the unfindable home—unfindable because, so often, tonal centres are makeshift locations, apt to disintegrate or alter at no notice.
     The other temptation is to rank order the pieces. One that stands out is Joanna Bailie’s Axis, music with a Feldmanesque combination of faintness and resolution. A piano, playing one note at a time, comes to be joined by other instruments (bass clarinet, strings, alto flute); then everything is becalmed, a continuous soft sounding, slowly fluctuating in content and colour, a grey glow. Also exceptional, and altogether different, is Simon Holt’s Disparate, a title to be understood in two languages, English and Spanish, with the sense in the latter, according to the composer, of ‘a foolish remark or an architectural folly’. Fittingly, perhaps, the piece is heard twice over: as an oboe solo, and as the same solo now given with auditors: piccolo, horn, trumpet, double bass and harp, whose echoes, shadows and silences lend completely different meanings to the oboe’s darts, its multiphonics and its singing games. Melinda Maxwell is the expert soloist. Yet another treat is Morgan Hayes’s Shatner’s Bassoon. Like Holt and others, Hayes takes advantage of the Endymion lineup to field an unusual ensemble: no bassoon (the title comes from a satirical tv sketch), but clarinet, trumpet, trombone, violin, double bass and soloesque piano. Manoeuvrings through an omnipresent idea—present even when it is absent, present in its absence—play tricks with time, and the piece is intricately, quickwittedly composed.
     Among the rest, there are strong, memorable contributions from the Anthonies Gilbert and Payne, from Philip Cashian and from Vic Hoyland. The playing is lively and beautiful throughout.

8 What we are all the time looking for is the unlooked-for sound we did not know was there but that suddenly, or maybe with some effort, shifts the limits of the possible to include it—not a new sound, in truth, for a sound by itself is nothing, but a new context for sound, a place we have not been before. Such a place is the half-hour title track on Rolf Riehm’s album aprikosenbäume gibt es, aprikosenbäume gibt es (Cybele SACD 860.701). After a sprinkling of words—evidently the title, in Danish as it turns out, recorded by the poet responsible, Inger Christensen—a contrabass clarinet starts to speak, with Kurtágian firmness, assembling and reassembling a small repertory of notes and motifs with something of the open yet secret purposefulness of change-ringing. There is the sense, perhaps from the pauses, of an instigation, but nothing is being instigated. Then something is. Other instruments begin to enter as if in sympathetic vibration: trumpet and trombone, and later violin and cello, after the presumed soloist has stopped a while. Events can be crude: imitations, doublings, a chime of octaves (in homage to Ligeti?), as if the musical language had been reduced to basics. But this is the primitivism of shipwreck survivors. The sound of assertion is also the sound of challenge, the sound of music that will not behave itself.
     This refusal to ingratiate—so rare and refreshing in the contemporary musical landscape—is found again in the two other pieces on the record: Ahi bocca, ahi lingua for four male singers and Schlaf, schlaf, John Donne, schlaf tief und quäl dich nicht for violin, bass clarinet, keyboard and accordion with recorded voices, those of a singer and, again, the poet involved, in this case Brodsky (from whose Elegy for John Donne comes the line ‘Sleep, sleep, John Donne, sleep deeply and do not torment yourself’), of which the latter shares the desperation and indelibility of aprikosenbäume. All three works are performed by the ensembles for which they were written: ascolta, Hilliard and recherche. Notes on them (in German) may be found at the composer’s website.

7 A collection of fifties Stockhausen from ensemble recherche (Wergo WER 6717 2) steps into a huge vacancy, for of these pieces—Kontra-Punkte, Refrain, Zeitmasze and Schlagtrio in the effective order on the record—only Refrain was easy to find before. Kontra-Punkte, though everywhere regarded as a classic, had not been recorded for many years, Schlagtrio perhaps never since its 1976 debut. It is very good to hear these pieces played expertly and with a modern feeling for shape and nuance, and yet the empty space around them, the isolation remains. Though all these works are now over half a century old—older, one would guess, than most of the musicians who play them here—they have not been assimilated into our performance culture. To some extent that must be because of Stockhausen’s decision to avoid conventional media—a principle that was exciting at the time but that has, in an increasingly standardized musical world, left his works without a home. However, their neglect also confirms an inner detachment. As Richard Toop points out in his excellent notes, the young Stockhausen exuded a love of sound, and these pieces are full of striking gestures and textures—things possibly all the more thrilling or atmospheric for what the music conspicuously lacks: a rhetoric of motion to be sensed, even unknowingly, not observed, as the composer’s processes can be. Almost any other composer would have dramatized the serial farewells of Kontra-Punkte, how the ten instruments drop out one by one, but with Stockhausen one has to strain to notice each ‘finis’. One can follow, and enjoy, the way the piano in Schlagtrio moves inward from its extremes and gives way to the timpani in the middle of the piece, but, again, there is no attempt to engage the listener in the operation. Instead, through whatever changes of tempo or dominant note value, the music retains a steady and sublime timelessness. Where most music would be futile were there not someone listening to it, this music would not. It would still be achieving its purposes, which are ineffable. One keeps wanting to come back to these pieces, not least for their strangeness, and these performances reward repeated listening with their beauty of detail and, not least in Kontra-Punkte, the feeling of wholeness that comes from sensitive interplay. There is also, for all the kaleidoscopic sound, the ultimate silence.

6 According to one of the legends, Orpheus was torn to pieces after returning emptyhanded from the underworld; dismemberment is equally the condition of Birtwistle’s Orpheus project, in which the story has been found written across lumps and particles over the last four decades. Among the most recent, Orpheus Elegies, composed in 2004 for oboe and harp with intermittent counter-tenor, comes across as extraordinarily poignant and powerful in a recording by Melinda Maxwell, Helen Tunstall and Andrew Watts (Oboe Classics CC2020).
     The work is a constellation of twenty-six fragments, most of which are made of song or dance for the two instruments, each element lasting around a minute and based on a quotation from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. In three rather longer movements a whole sonnet is sung, and in four others the singer comes in with part of the poem, his intervention generally displacing the oboe or confining it to functions of punctuation or drone, so that the texture remains one of melody and accompaniment—though Birtwistle’s typically strong harp writing includes a capacity to signal, initiate and dismiss, or to summon the echoing darkness of the nether regions. Tunstall is excellent at all this, and Maxwell projects the immemorial laments of her part with the high eloquence of total objectivity, superbly sustained and contrasting with Watts’s rightly more febrile, expressive presence. All three musicians are magnificent in Elegy 20, which they fittingly place in penultimate position (the ordering is free except where the first and last pieces are concerned, the entry into and exit from the labyrinth), and where, to Watts’s fine melisma on the word ‘singst’ and Tunstall’s wonderfully dull-bright ostinato, Maxwell makes the repetition of a three-note motif a haunting echo of the soprano saxophone from The Triumph of Time.
     There are correspondences, too, operating within the work. Elegy 20, before the juncture just mentioned, has an episode of dance that picks up threads from a couple of other segments, and several pieces exemplify what Birtwistle means, quoting Klee, by the ‘dividual’: that which is a sample of something potentially longer, even infinite. Some of the movements, whether fast and dance-like or slow and melancholy, seem to be switched on and switched off again; some bend towards the same kind of evocation, as in the case of three beautiful sections in which the oboe keeps varying a line of lament (Elegies 3, 6, 9 and 21, of which the last sounds like a double of the first and ends with a striking gesture of closure in the sound of a sigh Tunstall creates). The chain-of-fragments form may be a nod to Kurtág, but we are deep in Birtwistle territory all through this work—deep and at a peak.

5 One may think a stone falling into a pool does not so much disturb the water as identify it, or allow it to identify itself, bring it to life. In rather the same way, the sudden bursts in Joshua Fineberg’s generally slow music do not fracture it but allow it to continue its succession of steps, lighten (for a moment) the load of past collecting around these consecutive nows, each of which seems incomplete—a fraction, perhaps, of an always-sought, always-elusive spectrum.
     The term is inevitable. A spectralist connection shows up right away in the first and earliest composition on Fineberg’s second potrait cd (mode 208), his IRCAM commission Empreintes for ensemble and electronics (1995), though this recalls Grisey more than his teacher at the time, Murail. Its magical opening, with crotale twinkles ushering in a waft of high sustained sounds, invites the listener into a characteristic world of drifts interrupted by ruder gestures that leave echoes (or “imprints”) in which instrumental and electronic sounds are often fused. Jeffrey Milarsky conducts the Ensemble Fa in an incisive and colourful performance.
     All for smaller forces, the other pieces all bring forward a moment-by-moment searching or sifting for a completeness that will never be found, a species of melancholia that is perhaps most exquisite in The Texture of Time for flute and electronics (2006, written for an played by Patrice Bocquillon) and most moving in Broken Symmetries for flute, clarinet, violin, horn and cello (2000-01), where the return into the cello's lowest note comes as a token of inevitability and an expression of despair.

4 Rebecca Saunders’s album Stirrings Still, of instrumental pieces alertly conveyed by members of the Cologne ensemble musikFabrik (Wergo WER 6694 2), suggests music made stroke by stroke, breath by breath. Each sound, expressing a process of transformation that will often end in a diminuendo al niente with or without a bending away in pitch, seems to continue from what went before and to lay down its own promise or challenge. One by one they go—stirrings still indeed. (The title of Beckett’s last prose piece is specifically the title of the last, strangest and most touching of these five compositions.)
     Similarity in how these works speak, though, is not matched in what they say, for that is intimately bound up with the choice of medium. Blue and gray, being a duo for double basses, has a lot of lumbering wrestling, whereas Vermilion, for cello, electric guitar and clarinet, is tense with the strains of keeping these three instruments together. The less colourfully titled Duo for violin and piano—the only piece here dating back to the nineties—intriguingly comes up with snatches of precise keyboard melody that recall the composer’s use of music boxes during the same period, while Blaauw, written for and recorded by the outstanding mF trumpeter, finds two voices within the one instrument, for the player uses a double-bell trumpet and keeps the resonance going by projecting sound into an open piano.
     In Stirrings Still itself the stirrings are not single sounds but threads of a quiet, distuned chorale for flute, oboe and clarinet that proceeds, frail and noble, until it stops for a little under a minute, and then proceeds again. Bowed crotales enter later, and later still a piano, everything dust-soft and tending towards silence. The imagery is unique, and true to the dauntlessness in the writer.

3 Two composers associated with the ‘new complexity’ of the 1980s, Roger Redgate and James Clarke come together on Nicolas Hodges’s disc of their complete piano works (Coviello COV 60809) more as complementary figures than as companions. Redgate’s Pas au-delà of 1989 at the start wrenches us straight into new-complexity territory with its charges of rapid action, spiky-sparky in the right hand and thunderous in the left, all thoroughly directed and illuminated by Hodges’s astonishing pianism, the hands engaged in processes of thought that speak through a steely beauty maintained at bewildering speed. This is the kind of music—and, no doubt, the kind of playing—Redgate relishes, but he also offers an attractive triptych of miniatures denuded to suit amateur competence, écart–arc–trace, and the latest of his pieces here, Monk (2007), has moments more contemplative and humorous, besides bringing forward a jazz feeling discernible behind some of his other pieces.
     Clarke, even so, is worlds away—though perhaps not so many worlds as all that, his protracted ruminations being as searching and challenging as Redgate’s drives of intensity. Intelligent programming places the turn from one composer to the other at 1981, in works from the heyday of new complexity: Redgate’s Genoi Hoios Essi and Clarke’s Red Skies. The Redgate piece is explosive, trapped in itself and trying to get out, and Hodges brings it to an end with huge power. The Clarke is content where it is, at a vantage point from which clouds of luminescent notes can drift by, to take up an analogy of the composer’s. At an extreme point, in Untitled No. 3 (2006), the material is reduced to hardly more than a pair of chords, sufficient to sustain an eleven-minute piece.
     The alluring strangeness here comes not only from the music’s simplicity but also from its silence as to its derivations and destinations. Nothing is being proved; no historical necessity is being claimed. We are just left with an enigma, which Hodges presents as effectively and attractively as he does Redgate’s storms. He is outstanding, too, in the album’s most haunting track, Clarke’s Island, which starts out like a passacaglia, fiercely ruptured, and moves on to Bali, a repeating broken chord and exquisite resonance effects. An earlier recording by Hodges was included in an all-Clarke collection on the zeitklang label, but this alternative has more shape and nuance.

2 James Dillon’s first work for the theatre,Philomela (æon AECD 0986), is opera thrown at the canvas. The raw and rugged instrumental performance, by the Remix Ensemble under Jurjen Hempel, seems appropriate to the rather defeated heft and splash Dillon achieves with a relatively small grouping in a work where the voices are caught in dark swirls, recalling events that happened long ago and have left as their main residue the sullen passion of disgust. Harmonies are generally static, ideas circling, as in The Book of Elements, which came immediately before this 2004 score, but of course without the brilliance of resonance (except when piano, harp or tuned percussion come forward), in a dulled, perhaps stunned, universe. There is no attempt at the precision—or the concision—with which Babbitt treated the same story in his classic piece for soprano and tape. The voice one most remembers from this opera is the orchestra’s, and it comes from the belly.
     As Dillon points out, the myth is one of unvoicing. Philomela (Anu Komsi) is raped by her brother-in-law Tereus (Lionel Peintre), who cuts out her tongue so that she cannot speak of his crime; Procne (Susan Narucki), her sister and Tereus’s wife, then serves up their son Itys for supper, severing his communication with the future. There is, therefore, an argument for treating these characters as grumbling shadows who have largely lost their means of expression and can no longer connect with the emotions of desire, guilt and vengeance that drove them, those emotions washing around, defused, in the orchestral environment, whose sluggish rhythms will often suggest the nether world as a cellar club after everyone has gone or fallen asleep.
     Coming as a streak of lightning across this sombre collapse, the third of the five acts (which play continuously for a total duration of just over an hour and a half) is a violent scena for the violated title character—and, no less urgently, for the orchestra, raised from its slumbrous posture. After this the voices fade. In the fourth act they are heard only in recorded form within what is essentially an orchestral piece; in the fifth, which again belongs mostly to the orchestra, they seem to be abandoning their roles, as if even the fumbling memory had become exhausting.

1 Moving ever on towards a Lachenmann complete recorded edition, Kairos add a double album (0012652 KAI) that offers the first appearance on disc of Les Consolations (the extended and orchestrally accompanied version of the choral Consolations), a return to Salut für Caudwell after almost thirty years by the guitarists for whom it was made, Wilhelm Bruck and Theodor Ross, and, already, a second approach to the composer’s most recent large-scale piece, Concertini, from this label’s house ensemble, Klangforum Wien, conducted by Johannes Kalitzke, who is also responsible for Les Consolations.
     Concertini is already available from the team that introduced it, the Ensemble Modern, on their own label, where it plays for 41' 44", close to the score’s estimate of 43 minutes (unless, of course, that estimate was based on the Modern’s performance). Klangforum Wien get through the piece in 37' 06", largely, it seems, by underextending the slower music. Where the pace is faster the Frankfurt performance, though so much longer overall, has more zip, thanks to the clear articulation these crack players achieve under Brad Lubman. With them the piece has more spike, more humour; and the extra spaciousness of the desert music also contributes character. The Vienna account—recorded at a Konzerthaus performance in 2006 and suffering from some audience noise—has its points, especially in the more forward recording of the strings, but the chief value of this release lies on the first disc of the set.
     The Bruck-Ross performance of Salut für Caudwell has not changed so much over the years, the two players negotiating a wavering but strong line between contest and dance—the contest or dance of two iridescent moths, their gestures full of colour (especially in the glissading resonances) and comedy. This version will do very well while their original recording, on col legno, remains available only at a high price.
     What makes the new set indispensable is Les Consolations, which turns out to be a run-up from the late seventies to The Little Match-Girl: a telling of the story by voices speaking in snatches from within the small chorus, nipping in and out, hurtling by in characteristic Lachenmann fashion, with the two earlier choral pieces placed as stations along the way. The piece is scored for quite a large orchestra, though the continuity is carried almost throughout by the voices and percussion (plus other instruments used as noise-makers). Balance must be hard to achieve in an orchestral hall, given how slight and sudden the vocal sounds often are, and the project is probably to be understood as a radio conception, which is how it is presented here, in a 2005 WDR production by that authority’s symphony orchestra with the Schola Heidelberg (who have also recorded the separate choral items for Kairos). As in the opera, we seem to be hearing spasmodic but none the less urgent signals from a tragedy we cannot see, because it is all around us.