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ENSEMBLE SOSPESO Elegantly Spiky or Spikily Elegant? In New York, Ensemble Sospeso devotes a program to the complex music of Brian Ferneyhough. By Jason Royal THIS IS AN EXCERPT ˇ VISIT ANDANTE.COM
English composer Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943) is often branded as a member of the "New Complexity" school, and his music can be described as easily with phrases like "clouds of notes," "streams of gestures" and "masses of sound" as with more traditional terms such as "melodic line" and "harmony."
One can listen to just a few seconds of any on his works on disc and hear the Ferneyhough signature:
agile, quicksilver figures, sometimes whispering in the distance and sometimes shouting and scraping in the very immediate present.
Without a doubt, this music can be harsh, edgy and challenging to listen to; it most definitely is not music one can comprehend on the first listening.
Some might call Ferneyhough's art "highly intellectual" - and it is - but to leave it at that would completely miss the most compelling dimension of this composer's work:
its inherent, visceral musicality. For underlying the streams of staggeringly difficult, jagged figuration, there is an intuitive, almost palpable "groove."
Ferneyhough doesn't simply shovel notes at us: the musical thread is, and remains, pulled tight.
This seems to be the key ingredient in Ferneyhough's most successful pieces:
regardless of how complex the texture and no matter how far "out there" the form of a given piece takes us, it's possible to follow the architectural yet organic trajectory of the composer's thought - even, and most intriguingly, when we can't quite tell where he's going to take us.
And, of course, it makes all the difference when this music is played by consummate new music specialists like Ensemble Sospeso.
This concert opened with the austere, transparent String Trio (1995).
Beginning with gentle, dark utterances on solo viola, the piece spins a web out of hushed sonic hieroglyphs and cacophonous yet transparent polyphony, each instrument performing angular acrobatics: wide and narrow leaps by turn, glissandos, harmonics,
jété bowing. Formally, the Trio isn't the sort of work one can perceive as a whole as it's happening.
Rather, the composer places formal "flags" - passages that sound like beginnings and endings, transitions and codas - throughout the piece; the flags are often contradictory, so that the listener's understanding of what's happening shifts as the performance progresses.
Most intense were moments described by Ferneyhough himself as "historically unidentifiable":
shimmering, vaguely diatonic sonorities that marked the stillest moments in the piece while also propelling the work to its conclusion.
Each of the three players (violinist Johnny Chang, violist Mark Menzies and the impressive cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick) made the music float with a bravura that barely hinted at its technical and interpretive challenges.
(As the composer remarked, there's no place to hide in the open texture of a trio for strings.)
The only real evidence of struggle were the ragged, cut-and-pasted full scores - with this music, one needs to see everything - from which each player read.
La Chute d'Icare (1988) is, comparatively speaking, quasi-Classical. A clarinet concerto of sorts, the piece begins with a glorious bloom of strident, polychromatic activity.
From there, La Chute works its way to a central section with "hanging" sonorities underlying solo outbursts; after peaking with a cadenza for clarinet alone, the work rounds itself out with a full ensemble coda that's drawn to a mercurial close by a fleeting, witty clarinet figure that twists into the stratosphere.
Here, clarinet soloist Anthony Burr was absolutely phenomenal, his technical facility matched by a real understanding of Ferneyhough's manic
lyricism...
Ferneyhough claims to write for the performer more than for himself or the audience; beyond the basics of execution, fearsome as they are in this case, his music requires a heightened state of interpretive awareness.
Sospeso, one of the best contemporary music ensembles in New York, has the chops to make this music come to life.
(Players who've rarely ventured beyond Schubert and Brahms wouldn't know where to begin.)
That not every work on the program was a masterpiece allowed one to glean a truer portrait of what goes on in Brian Ferneyhough's music - music that manages, at its best, to be both relentlessly spiky and impeccably elegant. THIS IS AN EXCERPT ˇ VISIT ANDANTE.COM |