Knotwork: music for clarinet quartet

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Knotwork Fell Clarinet Quartet

DCD34065

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Knotwork

Giles Swayne: Music for cello and piano Robert Irvine, cello; Fali Pavri, piano (DCD34073)

Fell Clarinet Quartet: Colin Blamey clarinet & bass clarinet Helen Bywater clarinet Marianne Rawles clarinet & E flat clarinet Lenny Sayers clarinet & bass clarinet

Giles Swayne’s works for cello exhibit an astonishing array of moods and colours. The restless beauty of Four Lyrical Pieces and strident romanticism of the Sonata offer remarkable counterpoint to his Suite for solo cello. Canto seduces us with its symbiotic blend of African traditional and Western art music.

Graham Fitkin (b. 1963) 1. Vent (1994)

[8.58]

Eddie McGuire (b. 1948) 2. Celtic Knotwork (1990/94)

[4.39]

Pierre Max Dubois (1930-1995) Quatuor (1964) 3. Allegretto 4. Allegro 5. Pastorale 6. Musette

[1.27] [1.49] [2.33] [1.29]

Lenny Sayers (b. 1977) 7. For Four (2001)

The Cold Dancer: Contemporary String Quartets from Scotland Edinburgh Quartet Charles Mutter, violin; Philip Burrin, violin; Michael Beeston, viola; Mark Bailey, cello (DCD34038)

[5.13]

Eddie McGuire 8. Chinese Knotwork (2001)

[6.57]

Rich and personal contributions to the quartet tradition from four contemporary Scottish composing voices, ranging from the lyrical profundity of Kenneth Dempster’s meditation on a George Mackay Brown poem to a characteristically idiosyncratic and yet songful work

by Judith Weir. Under their new leader Charles Mutter, the Edinburgh Quartet deliver blazing, committed performances celebrating the immense variety and vitality of work on offer.

‘Superbly played by the Glasgow-based duo of Robert Irvine and Fali Pavri, it’s recorded with trademark spaciousness and clarity, and has the added appeal of including two of Swayne’s most recent large-scale compositions.’ – Gramophone, March 2008

‘the Edinburgh Quartet has never played better. It’s nothing less than a landmark’ – The Herald, February 2007

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New chamber music on Delphian Metamorphoses: Chamber Music by Hafliði Hallgrímsson Fidelio Trio; Matthew Jones, viola (DCD34059) A chamber-music portrait of Haflidi Hallgrimsson, one of the most important figures in the recent flowering of Icelandic music. Enigmatic yet eloquent, inscrutable and self contained, these exquisitely crafted, jewel-like works reflect the personality of the composer himself as well as his multi-faceted literary and artistic interests and influences.

‘A real winner here ... They grab you with their powerful emotions, in an idiom which is directly communicative and accessible without paying court to fashionable minimalism’ – Musical Pointers, February 2008

Eddie McGuire: Music for flute, guitar and piano Nancy Ruffer, flute and piccolo; Abigail James, guitar; Dominic Saunders, piano (DCD34029) Over the past 40 years, Eddie McGuire, British Composer Award Winner and Creative Scotland Award Winner, has developed a compositional style that is as diverse as it is concentrated. This disc surveys a selection of his solo and chamber works, written for his home instruments, flute, guitar, and piano. The writing, whilst embracing tonality, focuses on texture and aspects of colour, drawing on a myriad folk influences. At once bold and playful, the listener cannot help be drawn in to McGuire’s evocative sound-world. ‘… this is quite simply beautiful music … Performances are excellent, the overall playing as expressive as the music itself requires; Delphian’s sound is spot-on’ – Gramophone Editor’s Choice, Awards Edition 2006

Alfred Uhl (1909-1992) Divertimento (1942) 9. Allegro 10. Andante sostenuto, molto espress.

11. Allegro con brio

[4.06] [3:25] [5.00]

Nicholas Simpson (b. 1958) 12. Mardale Changes (2005)

[9.39]

Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) Histoire du Tango (1986) 13. Bordel 1900 14. Café 1930 15. Night-Club 1960 16. Concert d’aujourd’hui

[3.49] [6.36] [5.36] [2:56]

Total playing time

[74.20]

Recorded on the 2 & 3 October 2007 at Prestonkirk Church, East Lothian, Scotland Producer & engineer: Paul Baxter 24-Bit digital editing: Adam Binks 24-Bit digital Mastering: Paul Baxter

Design: Drew Padrutt Photography © Delphian Records Ltd Photograph editing: Dr Raymond Parks Cover image by Eddie McGuire Made and printed in the EU

© 2008 Delphian Records Ltd P 2008 Delphian Records Ltd www.delphianrecords.co.uk With thanks to the Reverend Howard J. Haslett.

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Notes on the Music For musicians who care about the renewal of their art, there are few pursuits more satisfying than the performance of new works and the revival of unfamiliar ones. In both cases, something fresh is added to our experience and, however imperceptibly small the difference, the parameters of our view of music are extended. Clearly relishing the challenge, the four young players of the Fell Clarinet Quartet have created a recital of pieces from the last century and our own that perfectly satisfies this urge. Moreover, by virtue of what they are playing, they bring to this pleasure the added excitement of the discovery of a little-known medium.

Underlying their achievement is an historical paradox: that of a versatile and highly expressive instrumental combination which at any time in the last two-hundred years might have become a fully-fledged form, yet which, before the twentieth century, had simply failed to exist. The prescient genius of Mozart touched upon its potential in five divertimenti for basset-horn trio, and in the basset-horn-and-clarinet quartet of the Gran Partita for 13 wind instruments. But not one of the triumvirate of the instrument’s early romantic exponents, Bernhard Crusell, Louis Spohr and Carl Maria von Weber, thought fit to write for this combination. And, while the path from the encomium to the instrument’s powers in Berlioz’s Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes of 1843 to the five clarinets in Richard Strauss’s gargantuan

Symphonia Domestica of 1903 follows an unbroken line of development in the orchestral sphere, it was unparalleled in that of chamber music. True, the Victorian bandmaster James Waterson (1834-1893) wrote a Grand Quartet for three B flat instruments and bass clarinet, which is still played. Moreover, in France and Belgium in particular during this period, growing interest in the clarinet choir laid the foundations of a revival. But until the twentieth century, when the contrasting forces of modernism and popular music gave composers a new impetus for stylistic innovation, the medium lay unexploited.

Just how vibrantly its possibilities have since been realised becomes apparent when Vent

by Graham Fitkin, born in Cornwall in 1963, bursts upon our ears. The vigour of the piece is that of an artist exploring virgin territory, and its bold tonality and block-chording speak with accessible accents. But its tone is as far removed from the banalities of contemporary pop as is the spirit of the Fell Quartet’s radical programme from the arrangements of classical hits and Mancini standards that are often still the bread-and-butter repertoire of this rare medium. Instead, eschewing easy paths, these four players strike out towards a goal of full emancipation, in a programme resonant both with contemporary vibrations and the calmer accents of two established scores. The stylistic range and diversity of the repertoire is fascinating. Yet even bolder is the synoptic range of techniques and aesthetic

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Fell Clarinet Quartet Colin Blamey clarinet & bass clarinet (1, 12-16) Helen Bywater clarinet Marianne Rawles clarinet & E flat clarinet (13-16) Lenny Sayers clarinet & bass clarinet (1, 7, 9-12) The Manchester-based Fell Clarinet Quartet is named after the late Sidney Fell, a renowned soloist, orchestral clarinettist, and teacher of great repute at the Royal Northern College of Music. Formed in 1999 at the RNCM, the Fell Clarinet Quartet has proved itself to be one of the most innovative and engaging chamber groups to emerge in recent years, giving recitals and workshops throughout the UK, and helping to raise the profile of this relatively uncommon chamber ensemble.

The ever-increasing clarinet quartet repertoire is unique in that, due to the versatile nature of the instrument, it is able to draw from a wide range of influences including folk, jazz, klezmer and contemporary classical music. New music is something to which the Fell Clarinet Quartet is particularly committed, and the ensemble has commissioned several new works by composers such as Marcus Blunt, Edward Dudley Hughes, Lenny Sayers and Nicholas Simpson.

Past engagements include highly successful recitals at the Purcell Room in London and the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, as well as recitals at both the Royal Welsh College

of Music & Drama and the Royal Northern College of Music. They have also performed live on BBC Radio. Collaborations have included touring a new live score for I Was Born But…, a Japanese silent film from the 1930s, and a partnership with The Imperial War Museum North where the Quartet was featured as part of the In the Mood Exhibition.

Since winning a Tunnell Trust Award in 2003/04, the Quartet has been fortunate enough to tour Scotland on numerous occasions. Closer to home, the Quartet has recently been appointed Woodwind Ensemble in Residence at the University of Salford, Greater Manchester, where they give regular recitals.

The Quartet also works extensively as part of the Live Music Now! scheme and is regarded as one of its flagship ensembles. This has seen them perform in such diverse settings as prisons and special-needs schools.

Future projects for the Quartet include a second disc for Delphian, featuring Eastern European and klezmer music. www.fellclarinetquartet.com

positions encompassed. Collectively, these pieces engage with many of the big concerns of twentieth-century music in a way that convincingly establishes the medium’s claim to mature artistic status.

Fitkin’s incisive rhythms and punchy sonorities, heightened by the clarity of the unmixed ensemble, decisively strike a pose. Yet there is also classical restraint in the music, in its unvarying crotchet pulse, in its opening ‘rocket’ figure extensively woven through melody and accompaniment, and in episodes of interlocking and inverting counterpoints for two B flat and two bass instruments. Within this abstract space there is room for the title to resonate its meaning – the winds of change, the wind in your sails, the four winds of the clarinet quartet. Stylistically, too, there are winds that blow from West-Coast America and, nearer home and in more pungent gusts, from the school of Dutch minimalism.

In the 1980s the composer studied with its principal author, Louis Andriessen. But the cool projection of feeling is very much his own, a distinctive manner in British music of the last two decades.

No other solo woodwind line-up, not even the wind quintet, could sound so effective here, nor so effortlessly make the transition between the world of Vent, composed in 1995, and the refined atmosphere of the music of Edward McGuire, born in Glasgow in 1948, with its contrasts both of mood and of ways of moving

forward in time. A senior compositional figure, whose oeuvre includes concertos, ballets and chamber works, McGuire is especially noted for his resourceful interest not only in his Scottish heritage but also other traditions, and for their imaginative union with Western music. The craft of knotwork, common to many cultures, is an ornamentation of intertwined and knotted cords, which implicitly suggests a technical process of unfolding horizontal and melodic aspects of a musical texture. There is a fruitful ambiguity here, too, between cords and chords, the former represented by the clarinet’s powers of sustained legato lines and the latter, made chiefly of intervals of major seconds and perfect fourths and fifths, arising from the intertwining melodies.

How this works in practice can be heard from the respective openings of Celtic Knotwork, of 1990, and its oriental companion-piece written eleven years later. In the earlier score, phrases arise out of silence, like musical quanta from which the structure of elaborate patterning builds to a climax and gradually returns to stillness. In the delicate grace notes that decorate each part, there are echoes of bagpipes, a Celtic fingerprint that adds distance and enchantment to the music. In contrast, Chinese Knotwork plunges in medias res, into a burbling stream of sound that flows, with complete musical equality of the four B flat instruments, in currents of trills and ecstatic phrases. Optionally, performers may start at

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the four corners of any performance space, and proceed to form a central ‘knot’ as the piece proceeds. The musical ‘cords’ are cast in the pentatonic scale, a cliché of the Chinese style common to much illustrative music. Yet in this work it here sounds as fresh as nature, and at one with the character of the instruments from which the material of the piece arises.

Historically, this quality of refined facture is most associated with the great French tradition of writing for woodwind, of which the Quatuor of Pierre Max Dubois (1930-1995) is both a fine example and popular specimen from the clarinet quartet’s twentieth-century repertoire. It was written in 1964, at a time when many young composers looked to Boulez and Stockhausen for the music of the future. Not so this winner of the esteemed Prix de Rome and respected teacher at the Paris Conservatoire. His style remained loyal to the values of the interwar movement known as Les Six, inspired by the example of Jean Cocteau and Igor Stravinsky, and espousing an anti-romantic position of objectivity, elegance, and above all the avoidance of boredom.

The formality of eighteenth-century music was an especially influential model; and so Dubois’ laconic Allegretto states its distinctive ideas with admirable economy, and repeats them in different keys and textures till its conversation reaches a gracious conclusion as punctually as any movement by Bach. The scherzo engages the four B flat players in more boisterous dialogues, but the Pastorale’s plaintive tunes restore the

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dream. Finally, as the ensemble pipes its way to an unruffled conclusion over long-held pedal notes or ‘drones’, we hear for a second time the suggestion of bagpipes; but rather than Celtic echoes, these are of the musette, a peasant instrument to which fashionable ladies and gentlemen at the court of Louis Quinze performed in rural costume as a popular rococo entertainment.

If this Quatuor is a delicious anachronism on two levels, For Four in contrast, written in 2001 for the Fell Clarinet Quartet by their own Lenny Sayers, is a celebration of contemporary energy – and that of this ensemble in particular. Born in 1977, Sayers is a gifted performer and arranger as well as a composer, and his vibrantly eclectic music, propelled by syncopation and changing metres, draws freely from the fountainheads of twentieth-century style while conveying its message with confident technical command.

That the many striking contrasts within this brief musical canvas hold the ear with such unity of purpose is testimony to this. No less impressive, however, is the aural illusion of musical movement by which the slow, sinuous and beautifully crafted opening melody is heard again, up-tempo, at the climax. Such cyclical returns are a time-honoured formal device by which not only romantic composers but also twentieth-century tonal masters established thematic unity. The effect here is no less authentic. Indeed, in its overall scheme, For Four is a miniature type of the Introduction and Allegro, a pattern

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And so, with Histoire du Tango by the legendary Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) the quartet concludes with the spice of the vernacular, in popular accents no less amenable to the flamboyant sound of four solo clarinets.

Originally written for flute and guitar, this version, for one E flat, one bass clarinet and two B flat instruments, is itself based on an arrangement for saxophone quartet, another versatile twentieth-century medium and a sibling relation. Rather than dwelling on the self-evident titles of the four movements, Bordel 1900, Café 1930, Night-Club 1960 and Concert d’aujourd’hui, we might recall that for nineteenth-century musicians the equivalent of the tango was the Hungarian gypsy style that both conveyed the erotic and the unconventional, and so fascinated Johannes Brahms – not least in his masterworks for clarinet. So turns the wheel of history; and, as this programme confirms, music renews itself in many ways. © 2008 Nicholas Williams A graduate of the University of Cambridge, Nicholas Williams is the publishing director of Stainer & Bell, as well as a regular commentator on music. Amongst his various writing activities, he is a music critic for The Independent newspaper

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established by Robert Schumann as a distinctive form, and one with hallowed examples by Elgar, Ravel and Bliss amongst others.

While each of the pieces in the collection separately displays how this versatile medium adapts to many musical styles, it is the Divertimento by the Austrian composer Alfred Uhl (1909-1992) that most fully engages the quartet with the challenge of playing chamber music from the mainstream of Western music. Aspiring without compromise to the full measure of the Austro-Germanic musical heritage, it was written for three clarinets and bass clarinet of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1942, a time when diversion was sorely needed, but which the work delivers in serious terms of chromatic counterpoint.

In the sonata first-movement, complex yet clear textures are skilfully woven with a view not only to polyphonic balance, but also to displaying the complementary lights and shades of the clarinet’s distinctive registers.

The linear writing here is as fluent as that of the German twentieth-century master Paul Hindemith, to which it bears a familial likeness.

In the pensive slow movement, disturbed by a brief canonic intrusion, the instruments sing wistfully to themselves. Only in the finale, where composers most often relax their style in symphonic forms, does Uhl feel at liberty to divert us. First a waltz, then jog-trot rhythms, then dark mutterings in the lowest register overtake the brio of its opening, till the music

grinds to a halt. A marching pulse, mock-sinister (to our ears at least), quickens the texture, yet fails to resolve. But the brio returns, saving the music from its quandary, and all is resolved in an animated conclusion.

The protean element of counterpoint is no less essential to the most recent item presented by the Fell Quartet, Nicholas Simpson’s Mardale Changes of 2005, but counterpoint renewed through an unusual influence: the patterned ringing of English church bells that is among the essential sounds of our native music. A Manchester-based conductor and a composer of symphonies, chamber music and oratorios, Simpson takes the familiar topos, or evocative sound-image, of the sunken church as the inspiration for his punningly titled score. In 1935, Mardale village was flooded to make Haweswater Reservoir, and in this Cumbrian response to Debussy’s La Cathédrale engloutie, a polyphony of slow changes grows to a ringing carillon of pealing motifs, in an overlapping cascade of sound shared between the two B flat and two bass clarinets.

Like all good programme music, it is founded on a firm structure and disciplined writing. Fragmented at first, it accumulates energy like a vastly relaxed and slowed down fugal exposition. Before the end, the opening paragraph returns. But the final gesture, a phrase from ‘Little Cornard’, Martin Shaw’s stirring tune for the reverberant Victorian verse of Charles Oakley’s ‘Hills of the North, rejoice,’ takes us beyond the programmatic frame, though whether to nostalgia, irony or even anger depends on the individual listener’s response.

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