LPO late-night chamber concert freesheet: 9 Nov 2022 - Agata Zubel

L ATE- N IG HT CHAM B E R CONCE RT PURCELL SESSIONS: AGATA ZUBEL WEDNESDAY 9 NOVEMBER 2022 10.00PM

Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and the National Heritage of the Republic of Poland

AGATA ZUBEL MONO-DRUM FOR SOLO BASS DRUM AGATA ZUBEL NOT I FOR VOICE, INSTRUMENTAL ENSEMBLE AND ELECTRONICS* BERIO FOLK SONGS* *TIM MURRAY CONDUCTOR PLUS LPO MUSICIANS: KATE OSWIN VIOLIN MARTIN WRAY VIOLA GEORGE HOULT CELLO THOMAS HANCOX FLUTE/PICCOLO BENJAMIN MELLEFONT CLARINET ANDREW BARCLAY PERCUSSION* KAREN HUTT PERCUSSION RACHEL MASTERS HARP CATHERINE EDWARDS PIANO *LPO CHAIR SUPPORTED BY GILL & GARF COLLINS

© Jakub Pajewski

PURCELL ROOM AT QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL

AGATA ZUBEL BORN 1978

Polish composer Agata Zubel began her musical journey as a percussionist, studying at the Karol Szymanowski High School of Music in Wrocław.

This formative experience has infused her compositional style ever since, with a particular emphasis on rhythm and timbre. Zubel went on to study composition with Jan Wichrowski at the Karol Lipiński Academy of Music.

© Łukasz Rajchert

Her first commission for voice came while she was still a student; unable to find a student singer to perform the piece, she decided to sing it herself. Soon, Zubel’s fellow composers were writing for her voice, prompting her to embark on vocal training and a parallel career as a singer.

As both composer and performer, Zubel has collaborated with a wide range of artists and venues, with accolades including both the Polonica Nova and the International Rostrum of Composers prizes for Not I. She is currently a professor on the faculty of the Academy of Music in Wrocław.

AGATA ZUBEL MONO-DRUM

FOR SOLO BASS DRUM (2020) Zubel studied percussion at the Karol Szymanowski High School of Music in Wrocław before focussing on her dual career as a composer and singer. This early experience shaped her approach to composition, and returning to these educational roots often gives her a sense of focus and direction as she writes.

Zubel considers percussion to be not merely a rhythmic medium but, primarily, a means of exploring and communicating colour or timbre – to the extent that rhythm and colour are more integral to her relationship with sound than, say, melody and harmony. When describing her fascination with percussion, Zubel emphasises the sheer range of instruments available – and that anything which makes sound can be percussive – but in Mono-Drum she also investigates the remarkably wide range of sonorities that can be made on a single instrument.

Commissioned by Ensemble InterContemporain and the Théâtre du Châtelet, Mono-Drum for bass drum allows the performer to approach the instrument from a number of angles, in a way that is visually as well as musically arresting. Our attention is drawn to the performer’s toolkit of brushes and mallets, which are used to create colours ranging from feather-light watercolour washes to bold, primitive strokes. It is as though we are watching an artist creating a new work in real time, finger-painting or flicking paint onto a canvas using different sizes of brush. The piece opens with brushes soothing and scratching the drum’s canvas. The performer uses their hands and both ends of the mallets, as well as the full surface and edge of the drum, before unleashing some witty and playful surprises.

AGATA ZUBEL NOT I (2010)

LUCIANO BERIO (1925–2003) FOLK SONGS (1964)

Agata Zubel’s background as a percussionist infiltrates Not I, in which a percussive singing style is used to articulate words by Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906–89). Zubel was awarded both the Polonica Nova and the International Rostrum of Composers prizes for this work.

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Zubel was immediately drawn to this dramatic monologue, written by Beckett in 1972. The monologue is given by an older woman who has been mute throughout her life and suddenly finds her voice. This emotive situation and its powerful – sometimes comedic – potential, is delivered via an unusual, pithy literary form, with three dots following each short phrase. At first the woman stutters and stammers before a maelstrom of ideas – both ridiculous and profound – tumbles out.

Agata Zubel has worked with her voice for much of her life and was intrigued by the physical and emotional sensations this woman experiences as she finds speech. As Zubel puts it, Not I is ‘a story about the miracle of using our voices’. It is all too easy to take one’s voice for granted, but our capacity for expression is, as this work attests, there to be celebrated. The work may also be interpreted on a symbolic level as an exploration of what happens when someone has been silenced or oppressed in any number of circumstances – from a stifling regime to personal trauma – and finally breaks free of those shackles.

Zubel follows the structure of Beckett’s text in her musical treatment of Not I. The piece begins with the singer’s halting, breathy attempts to get the words out as the woman feels the physicality of speech after so many years of silence, her guttural utterances more about sound than meaning. Then the floodgates open, undamming decades of pent-up thoughts: intelligent and absurd, significant and trivial. The voice is given material that is often angular, visceral, even hysterical at times, but with moments of poignancy and humour. The ensemble offers a parallel narrative, at times conveying a haunting sense of the woman’s emotions, at others in dialogue with her as she gains confidence in the power of her own ability to communicate and, at last, to be heard.

BLACK IS THE COLOR...

(UNITED STATES) 2 I WONDER AS I WANDER (UNITED STATES) 3 LOOSIN YELAV (ARMENIA) 4 ROSSIGNOLET DU BOIS (FRANCE) 5 A LA FEMMINISCA (SICILY) 6 LA DONNA IDEALE (ITALY) 7 BALLO (ITALY) 8 MOTETTU DE TRISTURA (SARDINIA) 9 MALUROUS QU’O UNO FENNO (AUVERGNE) 10 LO FIOLAIRE (AUVERGNE) 11 AZERBAIJAN LOVE SONG (AZERBAIJAN) Mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian was a pioneer of daring vocal performance and inspired a number of composers, including Luciano Berio, to write music that stretched the boundaries of what was considered possible. Berio’s approach to vocal music reflected that explored in Zubel’s Not I: he was ‘interested in music that mimes and, in a certain sense, describes that prodigious phenomenon that lies at the heart of language: sound becoming sense’. He was particularly fond of folk song: ‘When I work with that music I am always caught by the thrill of discovery.’

By 1964 the marriage between Berio and Berberian was coming to an end, but they continued to collaborate, resulting in works such as the Folk Songs and the Sequenza III (1965). The Folk Songs were commissioned by Mills College in California and were written as ‘a tribute to the extraordinary artistry’ of Berberian’s singing.

Berio described the Folk Songs as ‘an anthology of eleven folk songs of various origins ... chosen from old records, printed anthologies, or heard sung from folk musicians and friends. I have given the songs a new rhythmic and harmonic interpretation: in a way, I have recomposed them.

The instrumental part has an important function: it is meant to underline and comment on the expressive and cultural roots of each song.’ For Agata Zubel, these works are significant not only as a collection of songs from around the world, but as ‘a collection of different voices, of different

styles of singing’. As a singer, Zubel relishes the opportunity to inhabit these voices, which represent several types of folk singing that are quite distinct from the classical tradition.

The first two songs are original but folk-like numbers by Kentucky folk singer John Jacob Niles. Berberian’s ancestors were from Armenia, from which country comes a song about a moonrise. In the French ‘Rossignolet du bois’, the nightingale offers advice to a serenading lover, after which comes a song popular with Sicilian fishwives. Of ‘La donna ideale’ and ‘Ballo’, Berio explained:

‘I composed them myself in 1947 to anonymous Genoese and Sicilian texts.’ The imagery of the nightingale returns in the Sardinian song ‘Motettu de tristura’, and the next two numbers use Occitan texts also found in Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne. Berberian discovered the last, Azerbaijani, song, with one verse in Russian; she heard it on a scratchy LP and transcribed the song by ear despite not knowing the language.

Programme notes © Joanna Wyld 2022

NEXT LPO LATE-NIGHT CHAMBER CONCERT KINAN AZMEH

Wednesday 18 January 2023 10.00pm Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall Hailed as a ‘virtuoso, intensely soulful’ by the New York Times, Syrian clarinettist and genrebending composer Kinan Azmeh performs his own music alongside LPO musicians.

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