Piers Hellawell: Airs, Waters by Delphian Records

PIERS HELLAWELL AIRS, WATERS

Fidelio Trio

Darragh Morgan violin

Robin Michael cello

Mary Dullea piano

Robert Plane clarinet

RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra

Alan Smale leader

Pierre-André Valade conductor

Agricolas (2008) for clarinet and orchestra

1 1st Movement: Recitative-Ensemble [0:58] 2 – Bridge 1 – [0:43] 3 Chorale Prelude (Chaconne) [1:34]

– Bridge 2 – [1:06] 5 Recitative-Ensemble [2:30]

2 nd Movement: Chorale Prelude (Blues) [2:56]

– Bridge 3 – [1:06]

Chorale Prelude (Canons) [1:46] 9 – Bridge 4 – [0:49] 10 Chorale Prelude (Sancta Maria) [4:21] 11 Epilogue: Chorale Prelude [1:37]

12 Airs, Waters and Floating Islands (1995) for piano [12:19]

Etruscan Games (2007) for piano trio

13 Con forza [1:38]

14 Fleet [2:23]

15 Pesante [5:03]

16 Feisty [7:36]

17 Basho (1997) for piano [7:16]

18 Degrees of Separation (2004) for orchestra [9:02]

19 Jan Palaˇc and the Flaming Skier (1990) for violin and piano [8:47]

Total playing time [73:39]

All premiere recordings except track 17

Recorded in the Harty Room, The Queen’s University of Belfast on 2-3 September 2010 (12-17, 19) and at the National Concert Hall, Dublin on 22-23 May 2011 (1-11, 18)

Producer & engineer: Chris Corrigan Engineer (1-11, 18): Richard McCullough 24-bit digital mastering: Chris Corrigan

Executive producers: Piers Hellawell & Paul Baxter 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Photography and cover image: © Piers Hellawell

Booklet editor: Henry Howard

Design: Drew Padrutt

Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk

Grateful personal thanks from the composer are also due to the following individuals for their support: The Artists, Michael Alcorn, Chris Corrigan, Gerry Hellawell, Christine Lee, Barbara Palczynski, Chris Ramsey

Delphian Records and Piers Hellawell gratefully acknowledge the invaluable support from the School of Creative Arts, The Queen’s University of Belfast in making this recording.

The music on this disc sets out to explore intimacy and rhetoric, drama and reflection, economy and fecundity. Though both orchestral and chamber pieces are represented, it does not follow that the dramatically expansive aspects of the music lie mainly in the orchestral music or that reflective expression is confined to the chamber pieces. In fact my approach to the orchestra since 2000 has been to fragment its sound-mass, while the main chamber work here is perhaps the most rhetorical and expansive in the collection. What continues to matter to me is to communicate fresh artistic territory.

The three larger works here seem to me representative of the search for new expression in my music since 1999 (following Inside Story’s premiere at the BBC Proms); to some extent I have moved away from the clear-cut rhythmic forces and harmonic warmth of the ’90s, the principle always being that once any artistic material becomes consciously characteristic, it is time to leave it on the shelf, rather than risk lazy expediencies taking the place of expressive urgency and truth.

The formal stories told by the three longer works are extremely diverse. During the last twenty years my large-scale formal narratives have taken two routes, both represented here: my main preoccupation has been with creating a mosaic progress through a work made up of contrasted and diverse pieces; Agricolas (2008) is the largest essay in this direction

to date. The other narrative type has been a single movement that curves from active, rhythmically driven music through gradual loss of pace to a closing stillness; Degrees of Separation (2004) is a thoroughgoing example of this pattern. Alongside these two we hear the four-movement Etruscan Games for piano trio (2007), whose layout was in fact suggested by its commissioner, and so stands outside the above preoccupations with musical story-telling.

That I should discuss approaches to the music’s dramatic forms, rather than for example contrasting approaches to the orchestra or the pieces’ non-musical backgrounds, says something about my priorities. Creating music to unfold in a period of time seems to me above all a narrative exercise, even if the creator intends otherwise: since we hear music in time, we make connections, so that what has passed informs how we hear what follows, as surely as it does in a novel. This is true not just of event-led music of plentiful contrasts, which gives us that sense of time bent out of shape that Stravinsky called ‘psychological time’, but also of static, or evenly proceeding, works of music that occupy what he termed ‘ontological time’. Narrative direction preoccupies me above all in the design of pieces, because it is through this that different stories are told in music. I also think it preoccupies the audience, at a conscious or unconscious level; how often does a bemused listener to a new piece mutter in frustration ‘I

couldn’t pick up the thread – it jumps around’?

Of course ‘dramatic narrative’ involves a lot more than just leading a listener by the hand: the composer must mediate between, on the one hand, ‘not making sense’ and, on the other, offering up a worn sequence of predictable platitudes. I believe art should strike us as right in its own terms even while we feel we do not understand it (T. S. Eliot said that ‘poetry can communicate before it is understood’); nonetheless, for me, some element of continuity is, to say the least, hard to avoid in a time-defined art form.

Before the listener even reaches for a narrative thread, however, it is the external wrapping of new music that creates the first impression. The label on this wrapping, the title of an instrumental work, is notoriously slippery territory: following the example of well-known Romantic tone poems, we expect a title to indicate expressive, and even narrative, intentions (Romeo & Juliet, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice), yet this connection has loosened through the modern age, whose titles may or may not be remotely useful starting-points for the listener. Composers of today (influenced maybe by the era of the rock album) often give considerable prominence to titles for private reasons, poetic or fanciful, but resist tying them down to anything very tangible, as does Birtwistle in Silbury Air. My own relationship to the non-musical scenery behind instrumental works is a problematic one: in 1999, weary

of composers fronting up their pieces with alluring and allusive titles, I entitled an abstract concerto Inside Story to make the point that the narrative is the inner, musical one (though people then asked me what was the hidden ‘inside story’!). The titles on this collection vary, from those with only slight specific import for the content (Degrees of Separation) to those reflecting a direct effect on the work’s shape (Basho). Where the title’s reference is influential to the piece, it is explained in the following notes.

Agricolas takes its title and concept of design from the work of the American sculptor David Smith, many of whose works were grouped into sets by their shared titles: for example his own Agricolas. The work avoids the typical long-range structures of a concerto; instead it reflects the modular structure of many of Smith’s pieces with a mosaic sequence of shorter sections, scored for ‘chamber’ ensembles; there are two sets of these sequences, forming two overall movements that are thus akin to sculptures. Each of these consists of three main pieces, internally linked by brief connecting sections (‘Bridges’) that concentrate on unison lines – groups of instruments playing the same melody – and simple ostinati These Bridge sections are analogous to the rods and struts that connect the objects in many of Smith’s pieces.

Another level of connection between several of the main sections is an unending harmonic

ground that I call an ‘escalator series’; this is unrolled in a wide range of treatments, so that several pieces become variations on this musical skeleton, chorale preludes, in effect, with separate identities. The last of these is heard at the end, a brief Epilogue to the two sculptures/movements.

Airs, Waters and Floating Islands also reflects, in its title, a concern with the juxtaposition of blocks of opposing musical expressions; it was begun very much as a patchwork of these blocks, or ‘floating islands’, though later it became a more unified ‘narrative’, with the coda, for example, reprising versions of the two main sections. The opening chunky cluster material – the ‘Airs’ – gives way to a stately flow of ‘Waters’; after a further clomping cluster section, the second idea is also reprised, as a chorale. The latter part of the piece moves into a more fluid world of passagework, relying heavily on a unison texture which gives way to a use of parallel intervals. Finally the coda brings back, refracted, the cluster and chorale ideas, growing ever closer together. The contrast between blocks that interlock and separately evolve was characteristic of my pieces in the ’90s, but it also pointed forward to multi-movement structures with segmented contrasts, such as my 2002 quartet Driftwood on Sand – or to Agricolas, with its connecting ‘Bridge’ episodes; I have often likened the smaller component pieces of these works to ‘offshore islands’.

Four pieces make up the piano trio Etruscan Games: three short movements feature, in turn, leading roles for piano, violin, and cello, while a single larger movement sees all of these ideas and solos revisited in an extended version. This design, a sort of ‘Games’ in the ancient sense of a competitive celebration of athletic prowess, was the suggestion of the work’s commissioners and dedicatees, and was one that I found creative and fertile. So each of the instruments in Etruscan Games has, in its ‘solo’ piece, a territory of ideas that is expressively individual; in the longer final movement, meanwhile, this ‘family’ is brought together into a turbulent confluence.

Unusually for me, therefore, the work’s shape has no extra-musical association. The lost Etruscan language, one of Europe’s ancient and now tantalisingly inscrutable tongues, came to mind during discussions with the commissioners about how new music speaks, or does not, to listeners (and performers) less familiar with its sound-world and syntax. Modern languages can be lost too. I was aware of the musical content of my trio moving starkly away from the ‘known’ sound world of my recent chamber music, and hence was especially concerned with the musical language of communication between composer and listener.

Basho began life in response to a commission, later abandoned, for a series of new works making only ‘amateur’ demands and each

linked to a repertoire piece, so that both could be played by young musicians. When I returned later to complete the fragment, its technical demands were allowed to grow with each of its paired variations, but these retained their structural debt to Haydn’s Piccolo Divertimento in F minor. Haydn’s famous major/minor duality became, here, one between a spiky unison and a richer chordal idea. Like the opposing ideas of Airs, Waters these then evolve, respectively, to be unfolded here in six pairs of variations after the twin themes. I borrowed the title of a Basho, or sumo wrestling contest, referring to its fifteen short bouts, while enjoying also the slightly percussive-pianistic overtones of the title to English ears.

in the back, so that the latter part of the piece, following a central riot, is a long, space-filled passage, losing all momentum as it moves into a coda where the orchestra is finally pared down to a pair of horns and double basses playing harmonics. The title indicates that two separate materials drive this piece: a two-part ground of my ‘escalator’ type (as described above for Agricolas) and, in other parts, a ‘contrary motion’ motif of two lines that push apart; although it is not obvious on the surface, these two are finally united in the coda’s stillness.

Jan Palaˇc and the Flaming Skier is an arrangement with piano of the fourth movement of my 1990 Quadruple Elegy (in the time of freedom), for violin and orchestra. The accompaniment sets out very obvious blues chords that gradually blur – as if the ink runs –toward the middle of the piece; this process is reversed thereafter, so that the chords are restored to plain form at the end. The four movements were elegies for victims of the 1989 revolutions. Palaˇc’s voluntary immolation is remembered in Prague; but Liviu Babes, a skier in Romania who set fire to himself and hurtled to his death in protest, also deserves remembering.

Degrees of Separation is the central item of a set of pieces, designed for various spaces and ensembles, that was commissioned by The Sage, Gateshead for its opening festivities in December 2004. In the context of my orchestral music of the last decade, this piece marks an exercise in restraint, since the chamber orchestra imposes boundaries of instrumental colour, a concentration on direction and syntax from which it is too easy to be distracted by the colours, registers and mixtures of larger forces. This piece is driven by a marked forward momentum and surface line: it also exposes various sub-groups from within the full ensemble. The form of the piece follows my favoured principle outlined above, the gradual slowing down from an initial shove ,

photo: Piers Hellawell

The music of Piers Hellawell has been performed around the world by leading artists such as the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Fidelio Trio and Hilliard Ensemble, Psappha, the Schubert Ensemble and Stockholm Chamber Brass. Large projects since his 1999 Proms debut (Inside Story) have included Cors de Chasse, a concerto commissioned for Håkan Hardenberger (trumpet) and Jonas Bylund (trombone) by the Philharmonia Orchestra, and Degrees of Separation, the commissioned work for the opening of The Sage, Gateshead, both in 2004. Hellawell’s works are represented on the ECM New Series, NMC and Metier labels as well as on three critically acclaimed discs of his music from the Metronome label; the third of these, Dogs and Wolves, appeared in spring of 2008, when Gramophone described the title work as ‘perhaps the most engaging orchestral showpiece this decade’. In June 2010, a new piano work Piani, Latebre was premiered by William Howard at the Spitalfields Festival; 2012 sees work on a joint commission for Stockholm Chamber Brass and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra.

Piers Hellawell is Professor of Composition at the Queen’s University of Belfast.

Pierre-André Valade was born in the centre of France in 1959.

In 1991 he co-founded the Parisbased Ensemble Court-Circuit of which he was Music Director for 16 years until January 2008. Since September 2009, he has been Principal Conductor of Athelas Sinfonietta, Copenhagen and is also actively involved in a symphonic career as a guest conductor with orchestras in Europe, North America, Australia and Japan. He regularly appears at such festivals as Aldeburgh, Bath International, BBC Proms, Strasbourg Musica, Ultima Oslo and Warsaw Autumn.

He is especially well-known and admired for his performances of repertoire from the 20th and 21st centuries. Of his many recordings, discs of music by Grisey and Dufourt have both won the Diapason d’Or of the Year and the Grand Prix de l’Académie Charles Cros. He much enjoys bringing to audiences programmes which show the music of today in its relation to the classical and romantic repertoires, and has recently started to present, for example, Schumann, Berlioz and Verdi along with recent orchestral works.

In January 2001 he was awarded the rank of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture.

Robert Plane has championed the music of British composers both past and present in concerts and recordings spanning twenty years, giving the premieres of concertos by Diana Burrell, Piers Hellawell, Simon Holt and Nicola LeFanu. He made his solo debut at the BBC Proms in 2011 in Holt’s double concerto Centauromachy. His recording of Finzi’s Clarinet Concerto won Classic CD magazine’s ‘Concerto Recording of the Year’ award and his disc of Bax Sonatas was shortlisted for a Gramophone Award.

Robert has performed concertos with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, Dortmund Philharmonic, RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, Scottish Ensemble, Ulster Orchestra and Zurich Chamber Orchestra. A guest of string quartets such as the Auer, Brodsky, Carducci, Dante, Maggini, Mandelring and Tippett, he also enjoys a close relationship with the Gould Piano Trio. Together they direct the Corbridge Chamber Music Festival in Northumberland. Their recording of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time was described by BBC Music Magazine as the ‘best modern account’ of this monumental work. Alongside his solo career Robert has held the principal clarinet positions of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Northern Sinfonia and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra plays a central role in classical music in Ireland through regular live performance and broadcasts, alongside regional touring and residency projects. As an integral part of the Irish state broadcaster (RTÉ) the orchestra reaches thousands of listeners through its weekly live performances on RTÉ lyric fm and through the international radio stations of the EBU.

The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra’s September-May concert season at the National Concert Hall comprises weekly concerts and pre-concert talks; Horizons, the contemporary music series featuring works by Irish composers; FORTÉ, the musical discovery educational programme; late night concerts; lunchtime concerts; a mentoring scheme for young musicians; and open rehearsals and annual regional concerts. The orchestra also presents an annual summer evening and lunchtime concert series during June and July. A major highlight of 2011 was a performance for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II during her historic visit to Ireland.

The orchestra has been critically acclaimed at home and abroad for its recordings across a variety of labels, including RTÉ’s own lyric fm label: notable in 2011-2 has been their nomination as Editor’s Choice in Gramophone (Stanford), as Classic FM CD of the Month (Fleischmann), and the international press acclaim for RTÉ lyric fm’s CD of works for solo clarinet and orchestra featuring RTÉ NSO Principal Clarinet, John Finucane (Clarinet Variations).

photo Claude Dufêtre

The ‘virtuosic’ Fidelio Trio (as described in The Sunday Times) perform extremely diverse repertoire internationally and comprise Londonbased Irish musicians

Darragh Morgan (violin) and Mary Dullea (piano) and Scottish cellist Robin Michael. Broadcasts include regular appearances on BBC Radio 3, RTÉ lyric fm, Radio New Zealand and WNYC, and in 2010 they were featured in a Sky Arts documentary First Love, with broadcaster Katie Derham.

Since their South Bank debut they have appeared at Kings Place, Purcell Room, Royal Opera House, and Wigmore Hall in London, at festivals including the Belfast Festival at Queen’s, Brighton, FuseLeeds, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and Petworth; at the National Concert Hall, Dublin and West Cork Music; and at MIT (Boston), Contemporaneamente Festival, Lodi, Symphony Space (New York), Centre Culturel Irlandais (Paris), Casa da Musica (Porto), Shanghai Oriental Arts Centre, and Palazzo Albrizzi (Venice). Recent international tours include China, South Africa and the USA.

The Fidelio Trio’s discography is rapidly increasing and represents important additions to the piano trio repertoire as well as works by Irish composers. Discs recorded for Delphian include Hafliði Hallgrímsson Metamorphoses (DCD34059) and The Piano Tuner: Piano trios from Scotland featuring music by Sally Beamish, Judith Weir and Nigel Osborne (DCD34084). They have given masterclasses at the Birmingham Conservatoire, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Stellenbosch Conservatorium and WITS Johannesburg and have been in residence at the AIC Composition Summer School.

Outstanding artists the trio have collaborated with include Roger Heaton (clarinet), Matthew Jones (viola), Lore Lixenberg (mezzo-soprano), Alexander McCall Smith (writer and narrator) and Patricia Rozario (soprano). They are supported by PRS for Music Foundation, Culture Ireland and the Arts Council of Ireland. Agricolas (clarinet and orchestra, 2008) commissioned by Robert Plane with funding from the RVW Trust and Britten-Pears Foundation: premiered by Robert Plane and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in Cardiff Cathedral, September 2008

Details of the music

Airs, Waters and Floating Islands (piano solo, 1995) commissioned by Susan Tomes with funding from the Holst Foundation: premiered by Susan Tomes in Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, March 1996

Etruscan Games (piano trio, 2007) commissioned by Beryl Calver-Jones and Gerry Mattock: premiered by the Da Vinci Trio, Glasgow University, March 2008

Basho (piano solo, 1997) (originally a projected commission for New MacNaghten Concerts in 1992) premiered by Herbert du Plessis, Salle Cortot, Paris, December 1997

Degrees of Separation (orchestra, 2004) commissioned by The Sage, Gateshead (from the set of pieces of this title for different Sage venues: premiered by Northern Sinfonia during the Sage’s opening ceremony, December 2004

Jan Palaˇc and the Flaming Skier (violin and piano, 1990) arrangement of finale to Quadruple Elegy (in the time of freedom) for violin and orchestra: premiered by Madeleine Mitchell and City of London Chamber Orchestra, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, March 1992

www.piershellawell.com www.pierreandrevalade.com www.robertplane.com www.fideliotrio.com www.rte.ie/performinggroups/nationalsymphonyorchestra

Hafliði Hallgrímsson:

Metamorphoses

Fidelio Trio / Matthew Jones viola DCD34059

A chamber-music portrait of Hafliði Hallgrímsson, one of the leading 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 multifaceted literary and artistic interests and influences.

‘powerfully poignant as well as beautiful’

– The Sunday Times, February 2008

‘The Fidelio Trio capture its delicate shades and mournful undertones to rewarding ends’

– The Scotsman, February 2008

The Piano Tuner: Piano trios from Scotland

Fidelio Trio / Alexander McCall Smith narrator DCD34084

On this, their second recording for Delphian, the Fidelio Trio bring together works by three of Scotland’s leading composers. Alexander McCall Smith narrates Sally Beamish’s The Seafarer Trio with a mingled intimacy and plangency, lending his inimitable lustre to this collection of world premiere recordings.

‘The fine Fidelio Trio plays each piece with deft understanding of its aesthetic stance’

– The Sunday Times, October 2010

‘... a thought-provoking release – recorded and annotated to Delphian’s customary high standards’

– Gramophone, January 2011

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies: Sacred choral works

Choir of St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh / Matthew Owens

Michael Bonaventure organ

DCD34037

In the 1960s few would have predicted that Peter Maxwell Davies would eventually write a set of Evening Canticles; yet religious texts have always been of fundamental importance to the composer, as this disc vividly demonstrates by bringing together sacred masterworks from both ends of his career. Tough, uncompromising and of surpassing beauty, Davies’ major contributions to the Anglican repertoire are given thrilling voice by these fearless champions of contemporary liturgical music.

‘The Master of the Queen’s Music would not find many more sympathetic advocates of his compositions in all Her Majesty’s Realm’ Organists’ Review

The Cold Dancer: Contemporary string quartets from Scotland

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 their leader Charles Mutter, the Edinburgh Quartet deliver 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

photo: Lucy Hellawell