Proms, Brass Day: Albert Hall/Radio 3
Richard Morrison
The Times: August 07
It was a happening worthy of the zany sixties. At the front of the Albert Hall platform stood five Uzbek musicians, fabulous in gold robes, their terrifying 5ft-long karnays (trumpets with the decibel power of ships’ hooters) aimed menacingly at the audience. At the back of the arena, facing them like the thin red line of imperial days, were a dozen trumpeters from the Coldstream Guards, equally striking in bearskins and scarlet tunics.
Circling the arena, a broadside of tubas. Behind the stage, a blitzkrieg of trombones. Up in the gallery, a regiment of trumpets. In the stalls, brigades of horn and euphonium players. On the platform, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. And in the middle of the besieged audience, the trumpeter Torbjorn Hultmark and trombonist David Purser- the agents provocateurs whipping up this brass army then engaging in increasingly panicky instrumental dialogues as the vast ensemble became more and more unruly.
This was Peter Wiegold’s He is armoured without. And if it sounds like sonic anarchy, that wouldn’t be far wrong- especially near the end when the separate bands cut loose, Charles Ives style. Heaven knows how it sounded on the radio.
But in the hall it had irresistible drama. Wiegold (who conducted) described the piece as a study in the “stupidity, lust and melancholy of war”. With primordial fanfares splintering the air from every direction, it certainly gave the impression that war is a noisy and chaotic business. Unfortunately (from the pacifist viewpoint) it also sounded rather thrilling.
That was probably the loudest thing in Brass Day (which is saying something)…
by Peter Bale
2-Aug-2007
Brass Day at the Proms - Prom 21
Royal Albert Hall, 28th July
“He is armoured without”
The second half commenced with a BBC commission, Peter Wiegold’s “He is armoured without”. Written especially for the brass day, and to exploit both the forces available and also the possibilities offered by the Albert Hall itself, the title is taken from the writings of Horace, the full quote reading: “He is armoured without, who is innocent within, let this be thy shield, thy wall of brass”.
The composer also drew inspiration from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, thus tying in with one of this year’s themes for the Proms. It was very much a work of music theatre, featuring a solo trumpeter depicting the magician-king who brings the world into existence, and a solo trombone portraying a jester, constantly shadowing the king and often poking fun at him. Making imaginative use of the hall, two brass choirs were positioned in the stalls, one at either side of the stage, the eight brass players and two drummers of the Fanfare Team of the Coldstream Guards were posted at the far end of the Arena facing them, and a row of seventeen trombones stood towards the back of the stage, flanked by two standard bearers.
The brass choirs and trombonists were dressed in black, with white flashes on each arm. The strings of the BBC Philharmonic were in place, as was a single side-drummer, and there was a large diameter, shallow bass drum at either side of the stage. Looking up to the gallery, there appeared to be some music stands at the ready, but no players were visible at that point. Just before the composer mounted the podium to commence the work, the Uzbek trumpeters who had made such an impact during the afternoon took their places either side of the rostrum. The scene was set, but it is very hard to do justice in words alone to what followed:
As the trombones and brass choirs set up a gentle wash of sound, the two soloists walked to the platform in the centre of the Arena, making great play of getting their instruments out of the cases and preparing the music on the stands. The trumpeter was the catalyst for what then developed, bringing the various elements into the action, with imaginative use of mutes adding variety. During the ensuing exchanges, sixteen or so tubas entered the Arena, taking up their positions round the edge, and surrounding the promenaders. As the music developed, sound emanated from various areas, with the two brass choirs at one point playing a semitone apart, and a duel ensuing between the fanfare trumpets and the Uzbek karnays.
When the trumpeters in the gallery entered the fray, with the sound rippling round between the four groups, it brought an almost mesmerising effect as their flourishes added to the general panoply of sound. A lone flugel intoned its solo – what an occasion for the young player involved! – and the Uzbek’s sarnay added its own plaintive, reedy sound. As the music became more intricate, at one point there were at least six conductors in action, and then clones of the lead trumpeter emerged from various points in the hall – the organ loft, the gallery, boxes on all sides – imitating their master’s lead. After all the excitement, the quiet ending came as something of a surprise, with the music fading away to leave the quiet wash of sound from the opening bars, the trombones gently edging up and down their slides.
It was a very engaging piece, given added vitality by the enthusiastic – and often very humorous – performance by the two main soloists, Torbjorn Hultmark on trumpet and David Purser on trombone. Whether anyone will ever gather together the required forces in a suitable venue for a second performance remains to be seen, but those present in the Albert Hall will be able to say to future generations, in the immortal words of Max Boyce, “I was there”!
“Sinfonietta”
After the massive numbers of brass featured in Peter Wiegold’s piece, the additional brass called on by Leos Janacek for his “Sinfonietta” seemed almost restrained!
By Nick Kimberley
Evening Standard 30.07.07
Peter Wiegold's He is Armoured Without, ... with players in every nook and cranny it had an unruly magnificence. At first there was an eerie sense of music emerging from nothing but the piece quickly gathered momentum and drama, exemplified by the musical battle between the Coldstream Guards' Fanfare Trumpets at one end of the hall and the two-metre-long karnay horns of Uzbek musicians at the other.
By David Purser
Brass Herald Magazine 2007
One of the great things about improvising is that you’re not obliged to play anything you find difficult. You decide for yourself, you play to your strengths, so it’s all nice and easy. It didn’t feel quite like that in the middle of the arena at the Royal Albert Hall on the night of July 24th, when I found myself taking an almost entirely un-notated role in Peter Wiegold’s He is Armoured Without. The work was premièred towards the end of the wonderful brass day at the Proms this summer, and was commissioned by the BBC especially for the event. The title is taken from a poem by the Roman poet, Horace, and reads:
He is armoured without, who is innocent within.
Let this be thy shield, thy wall of brass.
The composition takes this literary cue to follow a dramatic scenario, using images of conflict and battle to guide its form. In his programme note, Peter wrote,
“The piece is a study in the sounds of war – the stupidity, the lust and the melancholy of war. Working in collaboration with theatre director Graeme Miller, a narrative evolved of an ancient magician-king – the solo trumpet – who provokes a world into being – a world beyond his control.” It became clear at an early stage that the role of king required a servant who is his side-kick or fall-guy. Various images and models were discussed: Lear and his fool or Prospero on his enchanted isle; the one that seemed to strike the most sympathetic chord was Blackadder and Baldrick.
I have enjoyed a close working relationship with Peter Wiegold over many years, so it was with a real sense of pleasurable anticipation that I accepted his offer to become an integral part of the Prom project – as well as its Baldrick. He is Armoured Without was imagined on a grand scale, to make use of the vast space of the Albert Hall and incorporating enormous forces. Peter is a composer who is as interested in improvisation as in fully notated music. A typical way for him to work would be to provide a group of musicians with the backbone of a composition: a fragment or two of melody; some harmonic sequences; some rhythmic elements; maybe some stylistic pointers. The group will then spend some days improvising around the material, developing a form for the piece, generating solos, ensembles passages, accompaniments and so on. When the stage of performance is reached, the music is mostly fixed – though not necessarily notated – but there is still scope for invention and further improvisation. I have always found this an exhilarating and liberating style of music-making. He is Armoured Without was actually mostly notated – the scale was too large to allow a great deal of freedom – but there was still plenty of scope for flexibility.
The following is an account of the journey from Peter’s first notated ideas to the performance, with 150 players, at the RAH.
March 24: Meeting at Peter Wiegold’s house with Dil’murid Mirzaef.
I first met Dil’murid five years ago on a project with the London Sinfonietta and a group of Uzbek folk musicians, when Peter was again the leader. The main inspiration for the project was the Uzbek karnay, possibly the most ancient existing form of trumpet. It is about 5 feet long, made of hand-beaten brass and constructed in three sections. At one end is a built-in mouthpiece, at the other, a long flared bell section with a decorated rim; and halfway along the bell, a raised section running around the circumference contains some loose pebbles, so that it can be shaken to produce a rattling sound like a percussion instrument. It is emphatically an outdoor creature, used for weddings and other celebrations. Normally played in groups of four or five, the performers blow it with immense force. The wave of sound that hits you when you stand in front of a group of karnay is positively visceral. At our first meeting, five years ago, Dil’murid had actually been playing an oboe-like instrument called the surnay, (though his principal instrument is in fact the lute). For the Prom project Dil’murid, who is now studying in England, acted as the main musical contact between our modern brass world and the ancient world of the karnay. At our meeting in Peter’s house, Peter gave us some simple material to work with, and we explored the differences and similarities between karnay and trombone, working on pitch and timbre to provide contrasts and areas of convergence.
June 23/24: RNCM weekend
The whole project was originally planned around Manchester forces: the BBC Philharmonic and students of the RNCM. When I joined the core team the BBC were kind enough (and my colleagues at the RNCM generous enough) to include some of my students from Birmingham Conservatoire. So in the third weekend in July, we all met together in the BBC studios in Manchester to start the process of developing, learning, creating and shaping material for the Prom.
Whilst improvisation was a key part of the process, Peter used it on this occasion as a way of loosening the players up, rather than as a route to generating music, allowing us to approach his notated material in a relatively free state of mind. He interacts with musicians in a way that says: “Do something like this”, an approach that positions itself between “Do this” or “Do anything” (loosely speaking, between notated music and free improvisation). So for example, presenting the trombones with a passage, he will ask for a particular characteristic – “Can you make it more eerie?” – and when he hears the effect he is seeking, or simply likes the sound of what he hears, he is able to say to the whole trombone section “Do it like that”. In this way passages of music build up in quite unexpected ways, and though directed by Peter as the composer, it is the performers’ input that provides the impetus. Jamie Prophet, taking the solo trumpet role, was influential in this process, playing Peter’s notated music with authority, but also able to move away from the page into improvisation with ease and assurance.
Work of this sort is (thankfully) becoming relatively common in music education nowadays, and the students took to it with scarcely a hint of difficulty – or indeed any of the diffidence or resistance one may have encountered as little as ten years ago. A development that was to prove particularly helpful was the affinity one of the RNCM trombone students found for the karnay. (Peter and I had both acquired a karnay on the Uzbek’s previous visit to the UK, and had brought them to Manchester for the students to try.) It was Heider Nasralla’s enjoyment of it that became an important part of the piece, as I will explain later.
So by the end of the weekend, the skeleton of each brass instrument’s contribution to the whole composition was beginning to take shape and develop a life of its own.
July 3: Meeting the Coldstream Guards.
I have to confess to feeling a bit nervous about our first meeting with the Coldstream Guards. I wasn’t at all sure how they would react to Peter’s style of music-making, let alone to me or Dil’murid. As it turned out, I needn’t have been afraid.
The session had a rather curious start. Peter, Graeme Miller and I had arranged to get together an hour before the scheduled session to talk through various aspects of the project. We met at Knightsbridge barracks, but in the light of recent terrorist alerts, entry was a seriously high security affair. It took some time for us to pass through the various checks and barriers before we could get inside and get on with our business. It was at this stage that we realised we hadn’t made any arrangements with Dil’murid, and that the soldiers on the security desk were about to be faced with an unknown civilian of Asian/Middle Eastern appearance, speaking limited English, carrying a bag of suspicious metal tubing. No prizes for guessing our train of thought. We made our military colleagues aware of the situation. They found the whole business highly amusing, and made sure that our karnay player would get into the barracks unscathed.
As usual, Peter had brought some material – work in progress, with space for development – for the Coldstream Guards trumpeters to explore. The sound of their fanfare trumpets, though not as direct as the karnay, still has a wonderful raw edge to it. The players were quick to get into the spirit of the music, responding to the sound of Dil’murid’s karnay, following Peter’s directions – “Make it more like Coltrane” “Can you make it wail?” – with gusto and imagination. We also found time to do some improvising, and to fix some complex notated rhythms; so the session successfully covered all bases.
July 20: Meeting of Karnay and Coldstreams
I had been looking forward to this session with a certain amount of malicious pleasure. I don’t know whether you’ve ever noticed that some trumpeters have what might be described as a competitive streak in them? I had wondered whether, when brought face to face, some of this spirit might emerge between karnay and fanfare trumpets. To add a bizarre touch to the proceedings, the session took place at BBC Studio 3, Maida Vale. This is the studio where the BBC Big Band works, and one of its distinguishing features is a plaque on the wall commemorating Bing Crosby’s last broadcast. The thought of the old crooner’s shade looking down on this meeting of raw brass muscle was positively bizarre.
The session began with the two groups of musicians playing to each other. The Uzbek musicians had arrived from Tashkent the previous afternoon. Dil’murid apart, they spoke very little English, but having few or no words in common is no barrier when presented with a totally new experience in brass instruments. While there was not quite the element of competition I had been anticipating, there was a tremendous surge of curiosity from both sides. After a lot of swapping of instruments and a fair bit of laughter we got to work.
It was here that Heider Nasralla’s value began to show itself. Most of the Uzbek musicians do not read music, and needed to learn the piece by rote. This is no easy matter at the best of times, but with the music is in a state of flux, it became quite problematic. Heider was able to keep a notated record of all the changes and developments, and help the Uzbeks when, as inevitably happened, they became disorientated. (As an unintended but very helpful bonus, Heider is of middle Eastern parentage, so when he was dressed up in traditional Uzbek costume - as he was for the Prom - there was no visible sign that there was an intruder, albeit an extremely useful one, in the line of olive-skinned, dark-haired karnay players.)
As in the other sessions, the musicians warmed to the task of developing the material Peter had brought, taking cues from each other as well as from his notated music.
One felt the piece really beginning to gather momentum.
July 21/22: Meeting the volunteers
It was now the weekend before the Prom, and He is Armoured Without had just weathered a potentially catastrophic misfortune. Jamie Prophet had succumbed to an unfortunate injury and was obliged to withdraw from the project. We were extremely fortunate that Torbjörn Hultmark could make himself available to take the trumpet soloist’s role. Both Peter and I have worked with Torbjörn many times over the years and we know him as an accomplished improviser as well as a terrific trumpeter. He fitted into the role with no trouble at all.
We spent the weekend rehearsing at Union Chapel, a kind of mini-Albert Hall in north London, joined by fifty or so amateur players who had volunteered to take part in the project. They came from a wide variety of backgrounds; some well-known stalwarts of the London amateur scene; some brass band enthusiasts; some students; even one young euphonium player who had travelled from Germany. The core group of students from the RNCM and Birmingham had to help to get the newcomers into the music, from a technical point of view as well as the spirit of it. This new group of musicians were for the most part less familiar with the type of playing that they were being asked to undertake, and there were moments of confusion and uncertainty. But gradually the piece started to come together, with an emerging sense of how the geography and drama of the theatrical ideas would link in with the music to make a powerful performance. For myself, I had begun to feel my way into a role that was part musical, part theatrical; a commentator on the proceedings as well as agent provcateur.
July 26/27: The Albert Hall at last
There were a couple of sessions in the Albert Hall before the day of the Prom. This was just as well, as the piece presents something of a logistical nightmare. The full forces were now gathered together for the first time, so we began to get some sense of the overall impact of the music.
This is how it looked: on the stage of the hall, the strings of the BBC Philharmonic, with two percussion players armed with – amongst other things – giant Verdi bass drums and tam-tams; behind the orchestra a row of twenty trombones stretched across the back of the stage; at the front of the stage the Uzbeks (plus our honorary Uzbek, Heider Nasralla) who also had two drummers of their own; in the stalls to either side of the stage, two quasi brass bands (mostly cornets and euphoniums) but each including a group of French horns, who had a distinctly “Star Wars” role to play; stretched around the gallery, way up in the Gods, a circle of forty trumpeters (some of whom will appear in other parts of the hall at the music’s climax); in a circle all around the arena, a ring of twenty tuba players; at the back of the arena, facing inwards towards the stage, the Coldstream Guards trumpeters; and in the centre of the arena, on a small square raised stage, Torbjörn and myself. The sense of scale that the vast area of the hall gave to the disparate forces marshalled around it suddenly put the music into perspective. Sections that had seemed crowded or claustrophobic now found the space and time to make themselves felt. The appearance of the tubas at the beginning of the piece as they came up the stairs from below the arena level, playing notes at the lowest end of their register, was quite extraordinary. The uneasy calm of the “night before battle” sequence, with the long string lines and the melancholy flugel horn solo, joined by the plangent tones of Dil’murid playing his surnay, was uncanny. And the climax (what Peter referred to as the “Stalingrad scene”) when trumpeters began to appear from all around the hall and Torbjörn’s solo was overwhelmed by a mass improvisation, positively hair-raising. An old friend of mine – a cellist/composer – who happened to be sitting in the hall waiting for another event later in the day, commented that it was the first time he had ever heard a really satisfying sound in the Albert Hall.
July 29: The Performance
The music begins with the eerie sound of the two quasi brass bands playing freely, pp in practise mutes – an extraordinary effect calling to mind Shakepeare’s line “the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs”. Torbjörn and I entered from the side of the auditorium, walking through the stalls and past the promenaders onto our stage in the centre of the arena. We had arranged a small piece of theatrical “business” to establish Torbjörn’s pre-eminence and my own subservience, (although as he stands 6’4” tall, while I am a mere 5’6” it scarcely seemed necessary) raising an encouraging reaction from the audience. Torbjörn began his opening solo, while I was left to unpack my trombone as swiftly as possible before my first entry. Starting to play, I found myself staring directly at my niece, who had found a place to stand right by our raised staging, scarcely a slide’s length away. This was disconcerting, to say the least – a disturbing, if unwitting, intrusion on the performance space; but as the tubas appeared from beneath the arena, adding their own unearthly basso profundo to the “isle..of noises” I was able to lose myself in the rhythms and atmosphere of the music. I can’t tell you much more about the performance, as I was busy improvising at the time, but the applause at the end told its own story. I know that the prom audience is famously enthusiastic, but this was something else; a memorable climax to a memorable project.
Coda
He is Amoured Without was designed to be played in the great spaces of the RAH, but it is too strong a composition to leave there. It deserves further performances. While there are fixed points in the music – the karnay, for example,would be irreplaceable – there is room for flexibility elsewhere. An amazing venue would also be useful. So if you run a festival in a castle in Germany, or in an amphitheatre around the Mediterranean, or in a university with a huge assembly room in the USA, get in touch. I can promise you a completely unforgettable experience.
Cologne Triannual Festival, 2007: Berio Accordo
by Annette Schroeder
Kölnische Rundschau 30.04.2007
The Triennale started: Impressions from the opening weekend of the Cologne sound marathon which was held inside the concert hall as well as in open-air concerts and covered a wide variety from big concerts to tasteful fringe concerts…
Swimming in an ocean of sounds
Cologne – A long drum roll – and then the musical state of emergency is proclaimed. Sound bits of Viva Colonia are mixed with Greensleaves and outside the Roman-Germanic Museum you can find Echte Fründe standing together. At the Cathedral Hotel wind instruments, lost in reverie, play clusters. Meanwhile the sound of the Internationale reminds everyone of the golden times of the revolution in which Accordo was created. Four wind ensembles on the sides of the Roncalliplatz apply the form of musical cannibalism that was Luciano Berio’s passion. The idea to start the piece by entering the plaza in a star-like walk had to be dropped by Louwrens Langevoort: the enormous size of the sheet music doesn’t allow for this form of mobility. Instead, one is able to drift freely through an ocean of sounds, watch very closely four different conductors at work, or sit at the feet of Peter Wiegold who conducted at the centre of this soft rocking tornado and co-ordinated the chaos of 170 amateur musicians. The comments from the audience covered the range from wonderful to eerie to hideous. They were also given a breeze of fluxes when the sound of the little train from the Chocolate Museum joined in with the Cacophony of sounds in the plaza.
(Translation: Michaela Korte)
Brief Encounter: A Snapshot of an Opera Wiegold
National Opera Studio
Apparently Peter Wiegold had long wanted to compose an opera based on David Lean and Noel Coward’s classic British cinematic weepie of 1945, based on Coward’s
1935 play, Still Life. Having met the librettist Dominic Power, Wiegold and he decided to work together, and then gained a commission from the National Opera Studio to work on a short version of the piece, under an hour long. The work was given six showings at the Studio, directed by the composer and featuring young artists currently studying on the course there.
The audience shared the workspace with the cast and orchestra; we were seated around two sides of the room, the orchestra sat opposite, and the cast used the space between; simple and effective. The result was impressive, with the scoring vivid and the words getting across.
The orchestra was the fledgling South Bank Sinfonia, serious in approach and lively in delivery. The music is approachable and pretty melodic, with characters nicely delineated and situations underlined. I enjoyed it well enough at the time, but it does fade from the memory quite quickly.
The libretto worked well, the ensembles were generally uncluttered, and the narrative unfolded naturally. The story has been diluted to five scenes, all of which take place in the railway’s station refreshment room. It starts with the doomed couple’s farewells to each other, and then flashes back, telling the development of their relationship. The cast is quite large, as a team of singers weave in and out of the central story, sometimes joining in the action, sometimes commenting on it from the sidelines. As well as Laura and Alec, the central couple, we also have the stationmaster and café manageress, other customers, Laura’s husband, two loudmouth soldiers and so on. They sang from their music stands, dotted around the performing space, and emoted in situ, with few opportunities to break away from the constraint.
The cast worked hard and with mixed results. As the central couple Cora Burggraaf and James McOran-Campbell fielded healthy voices, hers a silvery soprano and his an easy baritone, but both seemed curiously faceless performers: they poured out emotions with ample tone but their faces remained largely impassive. Maybe this was deliberately in keeping with the buttoned-up Englishness of the original piece, and too much gumming would have been hideous in such a small space, but more connection with the audience would be good, especially an audience sithin literal spitting distance. Lise Christiansen’s
Dolly, the café manageress, and Margaret Rapacioli, as one of the gossips, both had smaller roles but communicated much more of them. Robert Murray’s robust tenor sounded healthily stentorian in such a small space. All in all a success.
FRANCIS MUZZU
"Trumpets!", London Sinfonietta
THE INDEPENDENT
"Trumpets!, a day's celebration of this instrument, put together by the virtuoso
trumpet player John Wallace and culminating in one of the most delightful concerts
the Sinfonietta has surely ever given.
Most magnificent, were the three long copper trumpets played by Abbos, a specially
invited Uzbek group that also includes a reedy, virtuosic oboe-like instrument
and handheld drums. I'd have liked to hear more from these splendid musicians
in their own national music.
Yet most invigorating of all were Peter Wiegold's three pieces entitled the
great
wheel. These fruits of a visit that Wiegold made to Uzbekistan brought together
the Uzbek musicians and some of the players from the Sinfonietta - not in some
cheap exotic trip that relied on the frisson of the Uzbeks' priapic brass and
fun-filled drumming, but in something that offered, at least in the second and
third pieces, an entirely fresh and truly integrated approach to the mix of East
and West."
CLASSICAL SOURCE
"We were among trumpet, brass and woodwind soloists, two timpanists, a handful
of strings and six ethnic sound-makers.
Three pieces were 'modern'; one other combined tribal traditions with western-style
improvisation. A further glorious feature was a fanfare from 1597.
Abbos, from Uzbekistan, brought three trumpets [karnays], two sturdy tambourines
[doiras] and one pipe [surnay]. Each karnay is a staggering 7 feet or so. From
its glittering head of burnished copper comes one note only - arriving in short
rasps, booming rhythms or a powerful, prolonged blast.
Interspersed through the evening was "The Great Wheel". The Abbos feature.
In three parts credited to Peter Wiegold, "realised with Abbos and London
Sinfonietta".
"Great Wheel 1" introduced the ethnic instruments with panache.
"
Great Wheel 2" brought a sparring confrontation between East and West -
as trumpet and trombone individually brayed against the karnays' combined majesty.
In "Great Wheel 3" East met West in a spectacle of unity.
Processing in a stately circle, elemental nationalism met sophisticated improvisation
joyously as the karnays, brandished aloft, shone like golden lilies at the crest
of some resplendent tepee."
THE HERRALD, GLASGOW
"If you are going to bring the brilliant London Sinfonietta to Glasgow, merge
it with the exhilaratingly raucous trumpets and drums of a group of national
instrumentalists from Uzbekistan, and throw the Royal Scottish Academy Brass
into the resultant melting pot, you might as well make the most of the opportunity.
So, as the climax of a trumpet-orientated education project in Glasgow schools,
this three-hour contribution to Academy Now! was a cornucopia of musical excitements,
sonorities, and shocks, buttressed by excerpts from an evolving work by Peter
Wiegold, aptly entitled The Great Wheel. Long though the evening was, it did
not belong to the too-much-is-not-enough school of programme planning. Each piece
justified its presence.
................, and Wiegold's final jam session, with
its swaying, man-sized trumpets, provided full compensation."
THE TIMES
"It was definitely love at first blast
when the Uzbek musicians of the group Abbos pitched their long copper weapons,
the karnay, into the air, puffed out their cheeks and generated sounds that
could move mountains..
.......But all the night’s pieces faded alongside Abbos, flown from
Uzbekistan to collaborate with the Sinfonietta on Peter Wiegold’s cross-cultural
clambake The Great Wheel.
....... the voltage shot to danger levels once conventional instruments fought
the Uzbek trumpets in improvised combat."
THE GUARDIAN
"The Guardian At the heart of Uzbek music is the karnay, an ancient and beautiful
brass instrument made from a gleaming tube of copper that produces sounds
of rich but brutal force. Capable of everything from piercing high notes
to earth-shattering grunts and groans, the calls of the karnay have an apocalyptic
power.
As Wallace suggested, it was possible to imagine how Jericho might have fallen
to a phalanx of massed karnay players. And the Queen Elizabeth Hall just
about survived their sonic onslaught.
This improvisatory collaboration was part of Peter Wiegold's The Great
Wheel,
a set of compositions using the members of Abbos alongside the Sinfonietta.
With a mixture of musical styles, encompassing Uzbek melodies and jazzy modernism,
the pieces created a teeming diversity."
"Invisible Cities" BCMG
THE TIMES
"NOT so often in life do you get Timothy West, Marco Polo, Kublai Khan and Monteverdi all together on stage, but this odd bedfellowship assembled with successful results for the launch of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group’s 2004-05 season.
The music director of the event, Peter Wiegold, chose Venice as his theme — in particular the Venice depicted in Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities, in which the explorer Marco Polo describes, in imaginary dialogues with the oriental emperor Kublai Khan, 50 amazing cities, all of which are in fact Venice. And the great city’s external elegance is contrasted throughout with its invisible darker side.
For the musical translation Wiegold commissioned four composers to write music inspired either by the book or by Venice’s greatest composer, Monteverdi. So we had four world premieres, by John Woolrich, John Croft, Simon Holt and James MacMillan, alongside other Venice-inspired pieces by Mary Bellamy, Woolrich and Wiegold himself.
But this was only part of Wiegold’s plan: his bigger picture is a continuing programme of experiments with BCMG called Creative Exchange, in which he toys with the relationship between composer, music director and performer, reworking their roles in the creative process. The four composers were allowed to create only one page of their score, sketching out ideas that would be realised by Wiegold and the ensemble.
Croft chose fragments of the aria Per l’aer cieco from Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo to build a soundworld of ghostly resonances and faint musical breaths. This contrasted with Woolrich’s Time’s Sharp Tooth — more Monteverdi-inspired fragments, but here full of rhythm, substance, energy and life. Holt’s A City of Invisible Shadows featured an offstage (upstairs) oboe weaving a melody of slow liquidity round a dispirited line, plunging the mood again into quiet melancholy. Then in MacMillan’s Memory is Redundant, a fantastic swirl of energy built up, goaded on by wildly emotional score markings such as “hysterical” and “obsessive”.
High standards all round in composition and performance, then, but the highest points were the constant switches between the scored and the spontaneous. Wiegold had his players — strings, soprano saxophone, contra-bassoon, mandolin, piano, percussionists — jumping with delight in and out of improvised solos and duets, eyes on their scores one second, grinning at each other the next with the sheer joy of being let loose, all of them giving it the full Monteverdi."
THE INDEPENDENT
"Four world premieres all consisting of one-page scores. Players adding improvised responses in performance. A whole evening inspired by Italo Calvino's magical evocations of Venice in his book Invisible Cities. The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group certainly initiated its new series in characteristically enterprising fashion.
John Croft's Per l'Aer Cieco ("Through the Unseeing Air") traced the outline of an aria from Act III of Monteverdi's Orfeo, alternately compressed and expanded, that concentrated on the upper resonance of the notes rather than their original pitch. The players wove the five delicate melodic fragments into an enchanting tapestry whose sustained pianissimo timbres and vibratos created an ethereal imprint of Monteverdi like an indentation on a pillow.
In Times Harp Tooth, John Woolrich's 14 terse and spiky Monteverdi-inspired slivers formed the basis of a brilliantly inventive romp. Febrile oscillations powered the work, whose Italian dynamism even extended to a hair-raising crescendo. The conductor, Peter Wiegold, rightly chose to pepper the concert with snatches of material from this piece - its sense of liberation provided a joyous contrast to more contemplative responses elsewhere.
How easily identifiable the composers were, even from the fragments they supplied. Simon Holt's A City of Invisible Shadows took the form of a long, characteristically melancholic threnody for oboe. James Macmillan's voice was equally identifiable in the Celtic Memory Is Redundant, with its folk-like fiddle tune, rhythmic ostinati and rapid clusters.
The generous programme also included Mary Bellamy's Earth and Sky Reflect Each Other, seeping eerie string glissandi and harmonics, John Woolrich's deft reworking for oboe and saxophone of a Monteverdi madrigal for two voices, "Favola in Musica II", and Peter Wiegold's deeply affecting Farewells Take Place in Silence, half jam-session, half memorial, with barely remembered suggestions of composers connected to Venice such as Monteverdi and Wagner.
The pieces were interspersed by selected readings from Calvino's book by the actor Timothy West. He relished the beauty of the writing and also teased out a large helping of wit, throwing away and milking his lines with equal panache; the jewel in the crown of the event.
The BCMG continues to astonish and delight with its virtuosity. Its natural talent for improvisation, shaped by Wiegold's inspirational direction, made the evening last rather longer than intended. But no one noticed: the entrancing mood seemed to suspend time itself. Curiously, the one item in the programme that was completely notated sounded improvised, while the two pieces with the least "given" material seemed structured enough to be composed. It's an irony Calvino himself might have enjoyed."
BIRMINGHAM POST
"Birmingham Contemporary Music Group's capacity for innovation and imagination never ceases to surprise and delight.
Sunday's opening to their new season found these remarkable players, largely CBSO-based, delivering an enthralling sequence of new music all reflecting the mysterious magic of Venice - and the miracle here was that most of the performance was improvised.
In an impressive display of concentration, memory, mutual listening and trust, BCMG were magisterially marshalled by director Peter Wiegold through road-maps of building block stimuli provided by the "one-page scores" of several commissioned composers.
As if such skills were not enough the players also underpinned with great balance, timing and sensitivity well -nuanced reading by Timothy West of excerpts from Italo Calvino's bravura evocation of Venice, Invisible Cities. And it was the kaleidoscopic, shimmering persona of "La Serenissima" which inspired a range of response in the starting-blocks the composers created.
Several of these were premieres, though of course no two performances will ever be the same.
John Woolrich was a major presence, his Monteverdi-derived Favola in Musica II summoning communicative, almost human duetting from alto sax and oboe, accompanied by tuned gongs: a magical moment. His Times Sharp Tooth offered characterful ideas for development, leading to exciting continuations and permitting some driving rhythms - if only more contemporary composers realised the value of such devices.
More Monteverdi (Orfeo's great aria to Charon, the Stygian ferry man) lay behind John Croft's per l'aer cieco, a build up of atmospheric tension culminating in a well-prepared notated climax.
Simon Holt's A city of invisible shadows was mesmeric and quietly spectacular, with grumbling offstage percussion and the oboist plaintively marooned up in the gallery.
Totally different in mood was James Macmillan's Memory is redundant, its folk-like dance memories erupting in a skeletal whirl.
An important feature here was violinist Marcus Barcham-Steven's idiomatic contribution (another well imagined solo came elsewhere from violist Eugen Popescu).
Ironically, it was the two fully fleshed pieces framing the evening which seemed least successful. Mary Bellamy's Earth and Sky Reflect Each Other, delicate and patiently built, suggested a soundworld which Webern would have compressed to greater effect, and Wiegold's Farewells take place in silence puzzled at least two listeners with what sounded like a huge quote from Satie."
