James MacMillan: Visions of a November Spring by Delphian Records

Visions of a November Spring

Etwas zurückhaltend; For Sonny; String Quartet No 3

Edinburgh Quartet

Tristan Gurney violin Gordon Bragg violin Jessica Beeston viola Mark Bailey cello

Etwas zurückhaltend (1982/2009)* [20:41]

Visions of a November Spring (1988, rev. 1991)

2 I [4:11]

3 II [17:48]

4 For Sonny (2011)* [6:52]

String Quartet No 3 (2007)*

5 I [11:18]

6 II [8:34]

7 III. Patiently and painfully slow [6:27]

Total playing time [75:56]

* premiere recordings

Recorded on 25-27 July 2013 and 29-30

January 2014 in Broughton St Mary’s Parish Church, Edinburgh

Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter

24-bit digital editing: Adam Binks

24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Quartet photography: Julie Tinton

Cover image: Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), The Old Yew (oil on canvas), 1888 / Private collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library

Design: Drew Padrutt

Booklet editor: John Fallas

Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK

This disc by the Edinburgh Quartet of music by their patron James MacMillan is framed by his earliest and most recent substantial works for string quartet. And yet from another point of view the works in question – Etwas zurückhaltend and String Quartet No 3 – are his two most recent in the genre, premiered respectively by the Edinburgh Quartet in March 2010 and by the Takács Quartet in May 2008. The latter work is prefaced here by a still more recent piece, premiered (again by the Edinburgh Quartet) in March 2012 – the latest in a line of short pieces for quartet or piano quintet, most of them birthday tributes or memorials – and by MacMillan’s first published work for quartet, Visions of a November Spring.

that there was a lot in its ideas which seemed current and relevant to my recent work. The title comes from Wagner’s indication for the final pages of Götterdämmerung, and the work reflects an ongoing interest in this composer, which has been reflected at various points since in my own work.

We’ll come back to those ‘reflections’. For now let’s follow MacMillan’s account, amplifying as we go …

The work opens with a static, floating music which accompanies little fragments of increasingly expressive phrases on the first violin. This builds towards a series of outbursts of pizzicatos and arpeggios before the music heads off into more mysterious territory.

Join the Delphian mailing list: www.delphianrecords.co.uk/join

Like us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/delphianrecords

Like the Missa brevis (composed in 1977 but not prepared for publication and performance until 2007), or the two orchestral works –Symphonic Study (1981) and The Keening (1986) – similarly rediscovered and given belated premieres in January 2014, Etwas zurückhaltend was composed before MacMillan’s professional career had begun, and unearthed only when the composer was nearly fifty and internationally famous. Writing before the work’s premiere in 2010, MacMillan explained that it

was written in 1982 when I was a student of John Casken’s at the University of Durham. The piece was forgotten until last year, when I realised

What must have been at the centre of the composer’s mind in 1982, even if he did not mention it twenty-eight years later, is the remarkable harmonic structure of that ‘static, floating’ opening. Starting from a simple pattern of stepwise movement split between the three lower instruments – all playing together, muted and senza vibrato, in a close middle register –MacMillan gradually opens out the chromatic space of an octave from B below middle C to B flat above it. The sixth pitch is added in bar 8, and the seventh in bar 9. By bar 15 all twelve chromatic pitches are in play and yet each of the instruments involved only ever plays four pitches, fixed in register (that same middle octave). The pitch-space is simultaneously saturated and stratified.

James MacMillan

This radical arrangement of harmony and texture continues for a full two-and-a-half minutes, with tension increased by a gradual rhythmic acceleration; and then, after a scurrying pizzicato interruption for all four instruments, the three lower parts resume it again for another minute and a quarter, now decelerating back to the slow rhythmic values of the opening. For the best part of four minutes each of them has only played four different notes. What the first violin has been preparing in that time is something equally radical, but far less abstract – or abstract in a different way. It is something that even the most attentive listener is unlikely to be aware of on a first hearing, although if on reaching the end of the piece one were to go back and immediately listen again, the shape adumbrated by the first four high notes at 0:45 – or again by those at 3:12, after the pizzicato interruption –might already have come to seem pregnant with associations that are made more explicit later in the piece. But on a first hearing the listener’s ears will probably first register something unusual around 4:23, when, finally unmuted, the first violin plays a three-bar melody which soars upwards and then descends into a strangely familiar-sounding cadence.

It is, in fact, the ‘Fate’ motif from Wagner’s Ring If it has a symbolic meaning here, it is an opaque one. Perhaps MacMillan was remembering the use of the same motif in the finale of Shostakovich’s then recent Symphony No 15; perhaps not. In any case, having heard this

relatively explicit quotation the listener may go on to notice other motifs from The Ring: such as a hint of Magic Fire in ghostly high cello harmonics at 5:50, joined by viola at 6:02 and then in the three upper instruments (all in harmonics) at 6:15. By the time of the long, expressive cello solo starting at 8:09, this latter motif – alternating a semitone and a whole tone mordent above the main held pitch – seems entirely assimilated into the quartet’s own instrumental style, although MacMillan makes no attempt to disguise the source. Indeed, throughout the piece there is no clear boundary between quoted and original material, as is perhaps most spectacularly apparent from 11:33, when a Shostakovichian organ-grinder-like passage is topped with a melody again drawn from The Ring. This time it is the ‘Redemption through Love’ motif – the very motif whose appearance in the closing pages of Götterdämmerung, the final part of Wagner’s immense tetralogy, carries that expression mark which MacMillan takes as his title.

The hushed, slow passage that follows is again cadenced using the ‘Fate’ motif (at 13:17 and again, after a cello interjection, at 13:31). From here, to quote MacMillan again:

A rhythmic and energetic Allegro eventually establishes itself which rushes towards a frantic and free climax. The work ends with a tentative and tense coda, with nods still being made in the direction of The Ring’s final Immolation Scene.

From 17:31 the Redemption melody is heard in full and with its original harmonies, radiant but halting, its texture broken into by odd pauses and the melodic line displaced, with notes appearing in the wrong octave: the continuity not so much disguised as audibly undermined. The work ends inconclusively, as if something else were waiting to start but not yet quite ready.

synthesis of several of them. MacMillan writes of Visions of a November Spring that

the piece is a celebration of (or comment on) a newly emerging fecundity of expression which seemed to absorb me in the latter part of 1987 […] As well as marking the beginning of a particularly prolific time for me, it also marked a fusion of earlier influences and a departure on a style of writing which is both naturally and deliberately more direct and explicit.

As alluded to in MacMillan’s programme note, Wagnerian references (many of them to Tristan und Isolde, although he has also returned on occasion to The Ring) recur in various other works: in the Piano Sonata of 1985;1 in Symphony No 2 (1999), which reworks material from the Sonata (self-quotation as well as quotation from other composers being a characteristic feature of MacMillan’s music); in Symphony No 3 (2002, subtitled ‘Silence’); and in the St John Passion of 2007. As far as Etwas zurückhaltend is concerned, these references are in the programme note’s past, but in the work’s future – in some cases a very distant future, from the standpoint of the then twenty-three-year-old composer. His immediate progress took several different directions, and when he returned to the quartet medium in 1988 it was with a grand, unselfconscious

1 MacMillan’s complete piano music (to 2002), including the Sonata, is recorded by Simon Smith on Delphian DCD34009.

The piece is divided into two very unequal movements. The first is in the nature of a prelude, if a very single-minded one; it centres on a single note, D, which emerges out of inaudibility on the viola at the outset, is gradually decorated by different playing techniques (sul tasto, tremolo, harmonics, and glissandi down or up a quarter-tone from the main pitch) from the other instruments, and grows in intensity towards a central ‘violent shuddering’ (as MacMillan’s expression mark in the score has it). Here, fast runs of notes in contrary motion and weighty chords from the entire quartet enclose an impassioned melodic fragment in the middle of the texture. The starting pitch returns, now an octave higher, and draws the movement towards a magical close in gentle skeins of natural harmonics.

The second, main movement is contrastingly various in manner and in matter. A strange, rattling dance comes round three times; each time, it is cut off by the abrupt intrusion of

runs of fast notes and replaced by an entirely new, apparently unrelated texture recalling the heterophonic keening of Gaelic psalmody. A jagged, unsettled passage intervenes before the dance rattles its way back in. After the third cycle of dance and lament the jagged idea returns again, but now begins to acquire a more substantial identity of its own, led by the alternately lyrical and febrile cello. The dance from the opening appears for a fourth time, more assertive now than before but rapidly subsiding. From here, at almost the exact mid-point of the movement, many of the same ideas and moods recur, combined or superimposed where before they were separate and successive. The high, singing cello remains a feature, as does a continual striving for dance-like expression, often held at bay by the brittleness of the music’s surface. But underlying it all is a lyrical and visionary impulse, which seems to be confirmed by the hushed intensity of the ending.

instruments provide changing tonal – and atonal – contexts. The piece also exists in a version for string orchestra, premiered in that same January 2014 concert as the two revived early orchestral works mentioned above.

A similar combination of modality and chromaticism informs String Quartet No 3, the first quartet to be numbered rather than named.2

violins. It is by such subtle means that MacMillan unifies this powerfully diverse movement.

possible conclusion to such intense music were in a realm outside the normal capacity of the instruments playing it.

Since Memento, written in 1994 in memory of the much-loved David Huntley of Boosey & Hawkes music publishers, the string quartet has been important to MacMillan as a medium for short tributes as well as large abstract statements. The most recent such piece is For Sonny, written in memory of a friend’s grandson who died shortly after birth. A simple, child-like pizzicato melody is repeated over and over again by the first violin while the three accompanying

This is MacMillan’s most substantial quartet work to date, both in length and in its weight and astonishing range of expression. The first movement begins with a descending melody in a minor mode, decorated with folk-like grace notes and assigned to the first violin and viola playing two octaves apart. More subliminally present –but providing an important counterweight of slow rising motion – is an ascending chromatic line in long held notes, just occasionally audible through the stiller moments in the descending melody (against which it often produces ‘false relations’, subtle harmonic clashes). Starting in the second violin and transferring to cello, this line continues to rise until 1:30, where it releases into a moment of canonic imitation between the two dancing

2 Etwas zurückhaltend, not yet revived at the time of No 3’s composition, remains outside the numbered sequence. Visions of a November Spring and the 1998 Why is this night different? are now, if only by implication, String Quartets No 1 and No 2; the latter work will appear on a future Edinburgh Quartet release along with some of MacMillan’s equally substantial quintets, as well as more of the short ‘occasional’ pieces for quartet.

Another important unifying feature is a stabbing semitone motif derived from the end of the opening melody. Meanwhile, the melody itself returns in various instrumental guises, in a variety of keys and textures, including some very richly ornamented counterpoint from around 6:00 (those folk-like grace notes again) and, at 7:00, a high cello version of the melodic incipit in a rising sequence that sounds suspiciously like a deliberate invocation of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. The intense passage to which this leads brings about the first of several remarkable moments which will punctuate the whole piece. It is a sort of ‘dissolve into impossibility’: at once an evaporation and an intensification, in which the players are directed to play at so ‘high’ a pitch that pitch definition is attenuated (or, in even more extreme cases, that the instruments no longer produce any sound). Here in the middle of the first movement it could be taken as simply an ultimate relaxation of harmonic constraints, in the context of a sonata form development section. Certainly, what follows at 8:23 sounds distinctly like a conventional sonata recapitulation, with the dancing violin duet following (transposed, indeed, in conventional recapitulatory style into the home key of G minor) at 9:51. But in the final bars of the coda that follows, the pitchless notation returns, and this time it really is an ascent into the instruments’ highest registers and beyond – as if the only

Outside norms almost entirely is the second movement, an extraordinary landscape of unearthly noises with just here and there a wisp of an ascending scale, a burst of harmony or the mysterious appearance of a waltz or march. Towards the end of a strongly rhythmic passage at the centre of the movement we find all the instruments playing, again, up off the top of the notated pitch spectrum. Then comes a precipitous descent; a return of the waltz and the march; and a disembodied ending of tappings and ghostly whispers. The finale is at once a change of mood and a crystallisation: a consolatory arc of rising melody, utterly simple and utterly right, reversing the work’s earlier descents in an unbroken rise into the heights. And there again, at the close, the inevitable instruction to all four players to keep going higher and higher, until all that is left is silence.

John Fallas has written extensively on the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, and has a particular interest in the development of the string quartet repertoire in that period, from Bartók and Stravinsky to Ferneyhough, Birtwistle, Górecki and Haas.

Edinburgh Quartet

The Edinburgh Quartet was founded in 1960 and quickly became established as one of Britain’s foremost chamber ensembles. It achieved international recognition after winning the Contemporary Prize at the Evian-les-Bains String Quartet Competition and has since toured extensively across Europe, the Far East, North and South America and the Middle East, as well as appearing regularly at prestigious venues across the UK including the Southbank Centre and Wigmore Hall, London.

In addition to a busy concert schedule the Edinburgh Quartet is frequently featured in radio broadcasts for the BBC and other stations. Recently this has included live appearances on Classics Unwrapped (BBC Radio Scotland) and Jazz Line-Up (BBC Radio 3) as well as video recordings for Studio One Sessions, which appear on the BBC Radio Scotland website.

The Edinburgh Quartet is committed to nurturing talent and is resident at Edinburgh Napier University and the University of Aberdeen. It is also about to embark on a new residency at the University of Stirling, and continues to maintain a strong association with

the University of Edinburgh. As well as giving a regular classical concert series at each of these institutions, the players work with composition students, instrumentalists and student teachers. In addition to its work with university students the Quartet’s outreach programme encompasses workshops for primary and secondary school pupils, and tutoring adults at the Variations Summer School in Ullapool and on an annual Spring Chamber Music Course in Linlithgow.

The Quartet has always been a champion of new music and has worked with many important and prolific composers of our age including James MacMillan, Michael Tippett and Howard Blake. Its extensive discography is available on labels including Delphian, Linn, Meridian and RCA, and includes the complete string quartets of Hans Gál, Kenneth Leighton and Mátyás Seiber, as well as discs of Bartók, Robert Crawford, Haydn, Schubert and Thomas Wilson and, most recently, a Russian-inspired recital, Postcard from Nalchik (Delphian DCD34081), of works by Haydn, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. www.edinburghquartet.com

Gordon Bragg wishes to thank the instrument-maker Andreas Hudelmayer for the loan of one of his fine violins. The Quartet also thanks Chris George for assistance at the sessions for String Quartet No 3.

Also available on Delphian

Postcard from Nalchik Haydn – Prokofiev – Shostakovich Edinburgh Quartet DCD34081

The Edinburgh Quartet, Delphian regulars for nearly a decade in 20th- and 21stcentury music, showcase their recent changes of personnel by delving further into chamber music’s glorious past. Here, two of the quartet repertoire’s most familiar – and challenging – works are linked by the less commonly programmed but equally virtuosic Second Quartet of Prokofiev, which shows a Russian composer writing home from the geographical margins just as 150 years earlier Haydn had looked outwards, to the Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna of Russia and her husband the future Tsar, dedicatee of the six quartets subsequently published as the Austrian master’s Op. 33. If the Prokofiev displays all of the new line-up’s corporate and individual dynamic nuance in its energy and folk-inflected vigour, Shostakovich demands, and receives, total expressive commitment in a work which, the composer darkly suggested to a friend, was written in his own memory.

‘The playing – perky and pristine in the Haydn, gutsy and attitudinal in the folk-inspired Prokofiev, movingly sustained in the grim delights of the Shostakovich – is richly considered, rigorously balanced and, ultimately, a musical treat’ – The Scotsman, March 2014

Robert Crawford: String Quartets Nos 1–3

Edinburgh Quartet

DCD34091

Delphian’s second disc of chamber music by Robert Crawford: the first (DCD34055) also featured the Edinburgh Quartet, joining Nicholas Ashton in the Piano Quintet. This second volume was released shortly before Crawford’s death in January 2012, aged 86, and pays fitting tribute to a composer whose long friendship with the Edinburgh Quartet ultimately brought him back to composition after three decades’ silence. Given here in characteristically vivid readings, these three fine works thus offer a fascinating overview of Crawford’s stylistic development; the second in particular, with its inspired wit and infectious musicality, deserves far greater renown.

‘Dedicated performances … a worthwhile release’

– Gramophone, February 2012

Mátyás Seiber: String Quartets Nos 1–3

Edinburgh Quartet

DCD34082

Mátyás Seiber’s three string quartets span his career, from the astonishingly assured student essay of the first – composed in 1924 at the age of just eighteen – to the mature synthesis of his third and final Quartetto Lirico.

Seiber’s work was nourished by several of the twentieth century’s most significant stylistic trends, from jazz and serialism to the folk music of his native Hungary. He was also, like many of the mid-century’s most important artists, an émigré and an influential teacher; fifty years after his untimely death, Hugh Wood’s booklet essay pays tribute to his lasting influence on a generation of British composers.

‘[The Edinburgh Quartet] marry technical address to expressive insights, and the results are illuminating not least because the fine recording, in Prestonkirk Parish Church, East Linton, is first-class … Seiber’s quartets are in the best of hands on this enlightening disc’

– MusicWeb International, September 2010

Thomas Wilson: A Chamber Portrait

Edinburgh Quartet, Simon Smith piano, Allan Neave guitar

DCD34079

An influential figure both personally and musically, Thomas Wilson (1927–2001) was the leading light in a group of composers whose vision and technical assurance brought an international modernism into twentiethcentury Scottish music. In the chamber works collected here, moments of extraordinary stillness continually release into fast, propulsive writing whose compelling energies are matched by the individual and collective virtuosity of Simon Smith, Allan Neave and the Edinburgh Quartet.

‘Delphian are to be warmly congratulated for bringing these tough but elegant, closely argued and well-crafted works to a wider public … Superbly committed performances in vivid recordings’

– Tempo, October 2009

The Cold Dancer: contemporary string quartets from Scotland Clapperton – Dempster – Sweeney – Weir

Edinburgh Quartet

DCD34038

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 leader Charles Mutter, the Edinburgh Quartet delivers blazing, committed performances celebrating the immense variety and vitality of work on offer.

Includes three world premiere recordings.

‘On this outstanding CD, driven by scorchingly focused performances from the Edinburgh Quartet, the impact of the four pieces is colossal … Each of the composers is at his and her peak, and the Edinburgh Quartet has never played better. It’s nothing less than a landmark’

– The Herald, February 2007