Purcell, Reich, Pärt, Howard & Andriessen

PURCELL, REICH, PÄRT, HOWARD & ANDRIESSEN Thursday 25 March 2021, Perth Concert Hall –––––

PROGRAMME NOTE

SCO.ORG.UK

Season 2020/21

PURCELL, REICH, PÄRT, HOWARD & ANDRIESSEN Thursday 25 March 2021, 7.30pm Perth Concert Hall

Purcell Chacony Z730 Reich Nagoya Marimbas Pärt Fratres Howard Shades Andriessen Workers Union Purcell Fantasia in D major Z731 ‘Three parts upon a Ground’ Introduced by Louise Goodwin

Our Musicians

YOUR ORCHESTRA VIOLIN Marcus Barcham Stevens Gordon Bragg Rachel Smith VIOLA Brian Schiele

PERCUSSION Louise Goodwin Richard Cartlidge HARPSICHORD Jan Waterfield

CELLO Donald Gillan DOUBLE BASS Nikita Naumov

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––––– Rhythm and repetition are like musical siblings– after all, you can’t establish a

WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

memorable rhythm without playing or hearing it a few times. Both together and separately, in various different guises, they ricochet across several centuries in today’s concert combining music ancient and modern, percussive and fluid.

Purcell (1659-1695) Chacony Z730 (c.1678)

We begin (and close) more than three centuries ago, when English Baroque composer Henry Purcell was beginning his first adult job. It was as composer for the Twenty-Four Violins, one of the musical ensembles at the court of Charles II (and, despite its name, the group encompassed stringed instruments of all sizes). And though Purcell’s works are notoriously difficult to date accurately, he probably wrote his Chacony in G minor in this period, around 1678, as music for that royal string ensemble. Its specific title, however, remains something of a mystery: the more usual French term ‘chaconne’, referring to a

Reich (b. 1936) Nagoya Marimbas (1994) Pärt (b. 1935) Fratres (1977) Howard (b. 1993) Shades (2017) Andriessen (b. 1939)

piece built over a repeating bassline, was in common use at the same, but it may simply have been Purcell’s choice to anglicise the word.

Workers Union (1975) Purcell (1659-1695) Fantasia in D major Z731 ‘Three parts upon a Ground’

(c.1678)

In his Chacony, Purcell creates an immediately recognisable repeating bassline over which he constructs increasingly elaborate, complex melodic variations that seem to grow in power and invention at each new repetition. He wasn’t afraid to break conventional rules, either, making subtle changes to the piece’s repeating harmonies, for instance, or even modifying his all-defining bassline when it suited him. The result is a graceful miniature in a stately dance rhythm, though there’s a certain hypnotic quality to the repetitions, too, as if we’re viewing

Purcell creates an immediately recognisable repeating bassline over which he constructs increasingly elaborate, complex melodic variations that seem to grow in power and invention at each new repetition.

Henry Purcell

the same object from constantly shifting perspectives.

In Nagoya Marimbas, however – commissioned for the inauguration of

American minimalist composer Steve Reich does something quite similar in the next piece in today’s concert, though Nagoya Marimbas was written some 316 years later (or thereabouts), in 1994. Reich is one of a clutch of US composers who reacted against what they saw as the increasing complexity of new music with a focus on simplicity, slow change and – to quote the title of an influential essay by Reich – music as a gradual process. At its simplest, in works such as Piano Phase or Violin Phase, that meant repeating a melody over and over again on one instrument, while its partner does the same but gradually moves out of sync, creating fascinating aural patterns.

Shirakawa Hall in Nagoya, Japan, hence its name – Reich’s changes are more rapid and more dramatic. He creates a beguiling soundscape using two marimbas, lowerpitched cousins of the xylophone, whose deep, resonant, woody tones conjure an entrancing sound world for Reich’s rippling, jazzy syncopations. The piece begins with a classic Reich device: as one marimba repeats a confident, quite funky melody, the second slowly builds up a complementary part a few notes at a time, gradually revealing that it’s actually playing exactly the same melody, just offset by a few notes.

After this gradual process of its opening, however, Reich quickly moves on with more rapid changes in harmony and balance between his two instruments, as they chase each other using similar material, gradually

Reich is one of a clutch of US composers who reacted against what they saw as the increasing complexity of new music with a focus on simplicity, slow change and – to quote the title of an influential essay

by Reich – music as a gradual process.

Steve Reich

rising ever higher in their ranges as the piece’s expressive intensity increases.

If Reich plays games with our perceptions of time in his rippling repetitions, in much of the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, time seems to stop entirely. Pärt is a fascinating figure, shocking the Soviet Republic’s authorities early in his career with his freewheeling experimentalism, then immersing himself in medieval and Renaissance church music, and developing an austere, ascetic musical style that he calls ‘tintinnabuli’, referring to the sounds of bells.

He has sometimes called for real bells in his music, but more often the term refers to the clear, ringing, bell-like harmonies that abound in his music, not least in today’s Fratres.

mind, though several alternative versions have since emerged, for orchestra, brass, percussion, recorders, guitars, saxophones and numerous other combinations. The string quartet version you hear today dates from 1989, although this performance comes with the addition of percussion – not an official combination, but nonetheless sanctioned by Pärt’s publishers.

Pärt wrote Fratres in 1977, originally

The piece develops, slowly and inexorably, as a contrast between two ideas.

Occupying the bulk of the piece are simple, slow melodic passages played in chords, which begin high in the violins and slowly descend to the lower instruments as the music progresses. Punctuating those passages come low thuds on the cello and percussion, as though signalling different verses of a poem or song.

without any specific instrumentation in

There’s a sense of slowed-down, spiritual-

The result is unavoidably meditative, engrossing and – quite literally – entrancing, sounding both unutterably ancient and bracingly modern.

Arvo Pärt

minded, Reich-like repetition in the music – not for nothing has Pärt been dubbed

an electronic device that allows the player to record what they’re playing, then play

a ‘holy minimalist’ composer – and also of underlying repeating patterns in the manner of Purcell that give the piece its overall shape. The result is unavoidably meditative, engrossing and – quite literally – entrancing, sounding both unutterably ancient and bracingly modern. Spare a thought for today’s players, however: this slow, apparently simple music makes extraordinary demands on its musicians in terms of consistency, balance and pinpoint accuracy, in a sparse sound world where every sonic inflection is exposed.

it back while they move on to playing something else over the top of it. The result can be a bewilderingly rich texture of sounds – just the thing to convey Howard’s inspiration in a graffiti-adorned street in London, whose bright colours and bold shapes she captures in this vibrant music.

Rhythm and repetition mingle in a very different way in the dynamic Shades by young Hong Kong-born British composer Dani Howard. Shades is written for several

The piece begins with an extrovert solo for vibraphone (which has some similarities with Reich’s marimba figures heard earlier).

That solo then magically reappears – courtesy of the loop pedal – while the percussionist adds new material on top of it, setting the tone for the rest of the piece. Howard brings in quieter episodes, and moves from vibraphone to unpitched cymbals, woodblocks and drums, building

percussion instruments plus loop pedal,

to an impressive, multi-layered conclusion.

The result can be a bewilderingly rich texture of sounds – just the thing to convey Howard’s inspiration in a graffitiadorned street in London, whose bright colours and bold shapes she captures in this vibrant music.

Dani Howard

If Steve Reich represents the elegant, graceful, sometimes unquestionably

the dictatorship of a conductor, the power relationships between players, how much

pretty end of minimalism, then Louis Andriessen’s music – raw, dissonant, propulsive, downright challenging at times – could be said to inhabit the opposite extreme. Andriessen is the senior figure in a new musical movement that sprang up in the Netherlands, one that took a decidedly energetic, somewhat cacophonous slant on American minimalism, while also injecting it with radical political ideas – nowhere more so than in Andriessen’s 1975 Workers Union.

a composer can impose their ideas on musicians. He wrote Workers Union for the orchestra he co-founded called De Volharding (or ‘Perseverance’ – even his ensemble had a name with political connotations), and intended the piece for any loud instruments. There’s no key, no melody, not even any defined pitches in the piece: players get to choose their own starting note, and they go on from there, following indications as to whether to move up or down. What there is, however, is rhythm: strict, tightly controlled, incessant, ever-changing rhythmic figures that unite all of the piece’s players in a single voice.

Andriessen has long grappled with political issues embedded in classical music – not so much in works that set political texts (though he’s done that too, in pieces including De Staat), but more in the nitty-gritty of musical performance:

The political symbolism couldn’t be clearer: the musicians might individually

The political symbolism couldn’t be clearer: the musicians might individually be saying what they want to say, but they’re doing it together, in a single, unified voice, and the result is immensely powerful and galvanising.

Louis Andriessen

be saying what they want to say, but they’re doing it together, in a single, unified voice, and the result is immensely powerful and galvanising. It’s also – intentionally – more than a little ferocious, as one of Andriessen’s own performance instructions makes clear: “Make the piece sound dissonant, chromatic, and often: aggressive.” Workers Union can sound like a furious aural assault, but it’s an exhilarating sonic ride, and shows entirely different sides to rhythm and repetition to those used more quietly by Reich and Pärt.

‘Three Parts Upon a Ground’. But there are undoubted similarities in both pieces’

We’ve travelled a long way from Purcell’s elegant repeating bassline during the course of the concert, but we end up back there. It might be hard to imagine a more abrupt jump than one from Andriessen’s fierce Workers Union and the rapt elegance

inexorable senses of movement. The Fantasia dates from around the same time as the concert’s opening Chacony, and the ‘ground’ in its alternative title refers to its repeating bassline. Here, unusually, that bassline is just six notes long, and it repeats no fewer than 28 times during the course of the piece. Above it, three violins play increasingly elaborate variations, going through several different rhythmic relationships, and even taking over the bassline itself part way through the piece.

It might be a similar technique to the one Purcell used in the opening Chacony, but perhaps after experiencing several 20thand 21st-century composers’ responses to rhythm and repetition, it will sound both familiar and entirely new.

of Purcell’s Fantasia in D, often called

© David Kettle

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