From: rtut@troi.cc.rochester.edu (Raymond Tuttle)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: More modern British music on Argo
Date: 26 Jul 92 15:36:43 GMT
Organization: University of Rochester (Rochester, NY)

Some ensembles seem to paint themselves into a corner; Piano Circus,
a group of six British keyboard players, must have an extremely limited
number of possibilities for repertoire. Having recorded Reich's "Six
Pianos" and Riley's "In C" for their first release on the Argo label, Piano
Circus now turns to music by Chris Fitkin, Michael Nyman, Tim Seddon
and Simon Rackham (Argo 433 522). 

Nyman's "1 - 100" is like watching an icicle slowly melt and resolidify,
inverted, on the ground beneath. Each pianist plays the same sequence
of 100 chords, only proceeding to the next one when the previous one's
sound has died away. By definition, the piece is slow, but not
uninteresting. 

Rackham's "Which ever way your nose bends" is similarly slow- 
moving, but here the music sounds more like Seurat, as little points of
sound coalesce into a melody. It's static, but rather pretty. 

The two shorter pieces, Fitkin's "Sextet" and Seddon's "16"  both are
uninteresting bits of Minimalist noodling made even more unpalatable
by the cheesy (cheese and noodles!) timbre of the electric keyboards.
They are busily cheerful and  little more.  

As is the case with all three discs reviewed here, it is impossible to
judge the performances on standards other than technical ones, but
these seem high. But where will Piano Circus go from here? Presumably
they must commission more works, or could it be that a transcription
for six pianos of Beethoven's symphonies is in the not-too-distant
future?  

The music of Graham Fitkin (any relation to Chris?)  has been described
as abrasive and confrontational, but it's hard to see why from a recent
disc containing three of his works (Argo 433 690).  Two of the works
("Huoah,"Slow") are heard here in arrangements for the Smith String
Quartet and two keyboard players (Fitkin himself and Shelagh
Sutherland), and "Frame" is for the keyboards alone. 

Fitkin  claims that "over-decorative use of colouristic resources can
often mask structural deficiencies in a piece of music," which may be
true, but the phony brass timbre of the keyboards in "Frame" and the
banality of the material in "Huoah" gets in the way of appreciating the
music's presumed lack of structural deficiencies!  These two pieces
make early Philip Glass seem rich. 

"Slow" finally gave me something to sink my teeth into; three
independently-developed blocks of material examined with methodical
precision. Admittedly, that doesn't sound very interesting, but the
feeling of ritual in the slow-moving music was enjoyable. 

Among the three discs, a CD of newly-commissioned concertos for
saxophone and orchestra takes the prize (Argo 433 847).  The soloist is
John Harle, whose tone can be either honeyed or raucously honky as the
occasion demands, and he is accompanied by the Bournemouth
Sinfonietta under the direction of Ivor Bolton. 

"The Green Ray" by Gavin Bryars takes its name from Verne's story, and
succeeds because it seems less preoccupied with with presenting the
composer's credentials as a member of a particular movement than
with just being a communicative piece of music.  The finely sustained
mood of ecstasy lingers after the last note has died. 

If  Harle were a vocalist, he would go from being a lyric soprano in
Bryars' piece to being a coloratura soprano in Michael Nyman's "Where
the Bee Dances."  A sequence of a few chords is fertile enough to make
the work's 17+ minutes seem enjoyable, even though much of it is made
up of the chugging kind of music that Nyman seems to like to write. 

Mike Westbrook's three movement "Bean Rows and Blues Shots" ends the
disc in the entirely different world of written-out symphonic jazz,
territory which which can claim both triumphs (Gershwin, Bernstein)
and flops (remember Sauter-Finegan's  experiment with the Chicago
SO?). 

Harle gets to sound louche here, and he does it well. I don't know about
the bean rows, but Westbrook sure grabs at the blues in the work. The
long (19 minutes) slow movement is as metaphysical as jazz gets.  

All three discs have state-of-the-art sound and a fresh attitude. I'd
recommend the Harle disc to just about everyone, Piano Circus to those
with a taste for this repertoire, and the Fitkin disc to the mopey kind
of people in black who dance to industrial noise in my favorite clubs. 







--
****************************************   Raymond S. Tuttle
"Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod,"       University of Rochester
but it's nothing to get depressed about!   (still with his two little 
****************************************   white mice).
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical