Martin Suckling: The Tuning | CD Booklet

MARTIN SUCKLING THE TUNING principal players of

Aurora Orchestra Marta Fontanals-Simmons mezzo-soprano

Christopher Glynn piano

with poetry by Frances Leviston

MARTIN SUCKLING (b. 1981) THE TUNING Marta Fontanals-Simmons

Christopher Glynn

mezzo-soprano

piano

The Tuning (2019) for mezzo-soprano and piano

String Quintet ‘Emily’s Electrical Absence’ (2017, rev. 2018)

1

The Present

[4:16]

7

Emily’s Electrical Absence

[1:37]

2

The River in Spate

[2:54]

8

I

[3:33]

3

Tears

[2:13]

9

White Box

[0:49]

4

The Tuning

[5:58]

10

II

[4:01]

5

Two Spells for Sleeping

[3:22]

6

Nocturne (2013) for violin and cello

[8:52]

principal players of

Aurora Orchestra Jamie Campbell violin 1 (String Quintet) / violin (Nocturne) Alessandro Ruisi violin 2 Hélène Clément viola Sébastien van Kuijk cello 1 (String Quintet) / cello (Nocturne, Her Lullaby) Alexander Holladay cello 2 Frances Leviston spoken poetry (tracks 7, 9, 11, 13, 15)

Martin Suckling’s music is published by Faber Music, London

11

I see thee better

[1:53]

12

III (after Emily Dickinson)

[1:58]

13

In an Alabaster Chamber

14

IV

15

The Pursuit of Universal Harmony

16

Her Lullaby (2019 / 2020) for solo cello

[16:10]

Total playing time

[75:39]

[2:12] [13:24] [2:21]

premiere recordings This recording was made possible by grants from the Leverhulme Trust’s Philip Leverhulme Prize, The RVW Trust and the University of York.

Recorded on 6-8 April 2021 in the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter Piano technician: John Tordoff

Cover image © Desmond Clarke Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com Design: Eliot Garcia Booklet editor: John Fallas Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com

@ delphianrecords @ delphianrecords @ delphian_records

Notes on the music ‘Much of my music has been written in the hours of darkness.’

The Romantic image of the composer burning the candle at both ends has been milked for all it is worth in every fictionalised depiction of the tortured artist. There is something intrinsically brooding, mysterious, sexy about an artist at work during the night: averse to sociable hours, unable to resist the call of the Muse.

Refreshingly, Martin Suckling’s reasons for composing at night are based on something much more practical – the desire for a worklife balance in which creativity does not distract from, nor is distracted by, family.

‘It’s good to write before the household has woken … It’s good to write after the household is asleep.’ Yet despite the pragmatic nature of this timetabling, Suckling is aware of the way time feels different, and passes differently, at night; and this heightened awareness of nighttime can be sensed, both stylistically and thematically, in the chamber works collected here.

The Tuning, to texts by Michael Donaghy, is nocturnal, moonlit, otherworldly; Suckling has written of the ‘magic’ these poems possess, and which possesses him as he reads them. Donaghy was an Irish–

American poet who moved to London in 1985. Alongside his writing he performed as a folk musician, and his musicality permeates his poetry – its ebb and sway and its carefully weighted words, picked up like pebbles on a beach and chosen for their colour and light.

As Suckling points out, this is ‘more than just pervasive lyricism’; Donaghy’s treatment of language exhibits a ‘precision of gesture and cadence and a delight in the union of formal elegance with expressive heft’.

Suckling has resisted binding these songs together tightly – this is not a cycle in the strictly unified sense of the term – but rather creates a looser, more fluid set of connections between songs that are independent yet share certain poetic themes and structures. Water flows through each twilit text. We begin, after an introduction of aqueous piano textures, with ‘The Present’: For the present there is just one moon, though every level pond gives back another.

The text concludes with a delicious exhortation to seize the day: Make me this present then: your hand in mine, and we’ll live out our lives in it.

Echoing the poem’s construction in couplets, Suckling fashions the vocal phrases – which sit deep in the mezzo-soprano’s register – in pairs, with the piano’s descending lines expanding over the course of the song.

‘The River in Spate’ and ‘Tears’ are found side by side in Donaghy’s third collection, Conjure, and are typical of Donaghy’s wordmusic; we hear of ‘soft rain gentling the level of the lake’ and, in ‘Tears’, of how ordinary stories pour, furl, crash, and spill downhill – as water will – not orient, nor sparkling, but still.

Stillness characterises both these songs.

For ‘The River in Spate’ Suckling writes almost motionless, sustained piano chords that throw into relief the shape of the vocal phrases. In ‘Tears’ the piano part is to be played ‘like a cascade of water captured on a high-speed camera viewed in super slow motion’, over which the vocal line gradually reveals itself. ‘The Tuning’ is a devastating poem contemplating death, ‘on the quietest night of summer’, through haunting, ultimately violent, imagery. The arioso’s unfettered rhythms are punctuated with gruff gestures from the piano, which slowly takes over and mummifies the melody in a shroud of overlapping lines. But the voice is left alone at the end, isolated and then

gone, ‘forever’. ‘Two Spells for Sleeping’, which starts ‘in a moonlit garden’, channels the magical quality of Donaghy’s words, the piano spinning a gossamer web (‘like a silvery ribbon’) as the voice unfolds its ethereal incantation.

Nocturne is a direct response to Suckling’s after-hours stints of creativity. He describes it as an ‘anti-duo’ because the violin and cello act and move as one; joined at the hip, they articulate an insistent, microtonal lullaby interspersed with looped, dancing figures. The music shifts imperceptibly as the violin’s curlicues waft skywards like smoke, floating free of the cello – a subtle change which reflects Suckling’s own experience of the slow arrival of dawn, signalling the composer to down tools and relish the moment ‘when the stillness starts to ripple with birdsong’.

Franz Schubert was no stranger to writing at this early hour, although he was usually starting rather than finishing work. The priorities were similar: fit composing around the rest of life. In 1820 Anselm Hüttenbrenner recorded that Schubert ‘used to sit down at his writing desk every morning at 6 o’clock and compose straight through until 1 o’clock in the afternoon’, after which he would have a long, smoke-filled lunch at a coffee house, often deteriorating into drunken nights out.

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