Ensemble Écoute - Across Borders / entre les horizons

Ensemble Écoute - Across Borders / entre les horizons

Ensemble Écoute, 2024

Fernando Palomeque (conductor), Rachel Koblyakov (violin), Emma Lloyd (solo violin), Emmanuel Acurero (cello), Samuel Casale (flute), Youjin Jung (clarinet), Ezequiel Castro (piano), Quentin Dubreuil (percussion)

The Night With... at the Black Box, Belfast - 6th July 2024

Emma Lloyd – Orbites
Rebecca Saunders – the under-side of green

David Fennessy – The room is the resonator
Matthew Whiteside – Points Decay
Sofia Avramidou – An absurd reasoning
Pierre Boulez – Dérive I

A France-Ireland-UK project, the aim of Across Borders / entre les horizons is to bring new works commissioned from three young composers and present them side-by-side with three complementary works from notable well-established 20th century composers. Whether intended as a means of providing variety and some familiarity to the programme, as a means to reflect contrasts or commonalities, the first night presentation of these works at the Black Box in Belfast as part of composer Matthew Whiteside's The Night With... series succeeded in a number of ways. Played in pairs it seemed obvious to reflect on a dialogue between the two pieces, but perhaps unexpectedly the dialogue tended to be a two-way conversation, each showing the other in a particular light that might not have been the same in a different context. The same sensibility of a two-way dialogue also played into the instrumentation, with groups of instruments playing, responding, coming together to explore possibilities. It also reflected or highlighted the different approaches taken between the older and newer works, some of the newer pieces employing pre-recorded sounds in new ways with new technologies, working with and sometimes against traditional instruments.

Scottish composer Emma Lloyd's Orbites set the tone for this idea, using cycles of playing groups of instruments within the ensemble (woodwind, strings, piano and percussion with Emma leading on solo violin), each of the short cycles initiated by a bell. It's a delicate but deceptively simple work that gains complexity as the work progressively accumulates new sounds and resonances through MIDI samples automatically triggered by the tapping of the singing bowl and with the musicians in the ensemble even taking up glass harp wineglasses in one section. Even the conductor Fernando Palomeque had a hand - literally - in contributing to the variations of modulation, sending samples from a motion sensor glove. Orbites maintains a sense of delicate fragility even though the louder sections, constantly changing, creating a sense of breathless anticipation of what the next cycle would reveal. Even though controlled by pre-programmed triggers, the performance allowed room for the natural sounds to collide and resonate with the technological elements and it came across wonderfully in the clear acoustics of the Black Box concert hall. There was so much to take in here in this piece that it was a good idea to repeat it as an encore at the end of the programme, revealing in the process how tricky and delicate a piece it is to hold together.

Orbites was paired with Rebecca Saunders' the underside of green (1994), which came across as relatively straightforward in comparison, or as straightforward as any Saunders work can be, particularly one that is part of a cycle of works influenced by Molly Bloom’s closing monologue from James Joyce's Ulysses. Its musical contours play on notions of colour and shades of colour, how it reacts and changes barely perceptibly from moment to moment according to the interaction of fluctuations of light and shadow, a similar notion to the changing tones and resonances introduced in Emma Lloyd's piece.

Another world premiere, Northern Ireland composer Matthew Whiteside’s Points Decay was likewise a perfect accompaniment for Michael Fennessy’s The room is the resonator. The latter, a piece for solo cello with live electronics, is a thing of great beauty whose concept makes it essential to hear in a live context, and with some wonderful playing by Emmanuel Acurero on cello it succeeded brilliantly here in its aim of bringing other rooms into the room of the Black Box. The symbiosis was perfect, one drawing from the other, the cello’s acoustic bowing, plucking and tapping electronically amplified, bringing Fennessy's recording of the harmonium in a garage in Aberdeen into the room, forming a whole new unique resonance that was warm and compelling on a July evening in Belfast.

Following it almost in response, Whiteside’s Points Decay struck out with intent, working with the full ensemble, each instrument asserting a strong presence before falling into the pace and sound of the pre-recorded ambient backing track until the ambience ended the piece. In the context of the Across Borders programme and its emphasis on interaction, you could see it as an embracing of the old and new with the new winning out, or you could consider it reflective of the natural world being subsumed by technology. Either way it's an entrancing piece that could have lulled you into a sound-world of ambient contemplation if it were longer, but its necessary concision gives pause for thought on how much we could let ourselves - or perhaps have already let ourselves - hand over control to technology without a thought for the consequences, letting the decay set in.

There was no obvious contrast between acoustic and electronic sounds in Greek composer Sofia Avramidou’s short but intense piece An absurd reasoning. If there was any dialectic, it was in contrast or in response to the quote from an essay on Absurdity and Suicide by Albert Camus reproduced in the concert programme. Rather than take a contemplative approach, violin, cello and piano seemed to be in a furious battle with each other, each nonetheless finding space to say their piece in an attempt to reconcile conflicting, not to mention absurd, ideas.

Absurd ideas are what keeps contemporary music progressive, restless and challenging, never accepting the limitations of what has been defined as natural and acceptable within music. When it comes to crossing borders and extending horizons Pierre Boulez was one of the most important driving forces in the creation of, the promotion of and the gaining of acceptance for new music. In live performance his major works, even his Dérives explorations while composing Repons, show that he is still a force to be reckoned with. Dérives is a reminder of his mastery of bringing together the instruments of a small ensemble and taking them to adventurous places within highly original structures. It's simply a joy to see Dérive I performed live in a room by an experienced new music ensemble.

Such a legacy also presents a challenge that each of the three new composers of different nationalities in this programme nonetheless met successfully in their own works, each in their own way, and they could hardly be more varied and individual in style, technique and delivery. Highlighting significant works and pushing new ways of expression in music forward, contemporary music is all about crossing borders, and the vitality and range of what it can be was illustrated brilliantly in this programme.

External links: Ensemble Écoute, The Night With...

Janáček - From the House of the Dead

Leoš Janáček - From the House of the Dead

Aix-en-Provence, 2007

Pierre Boulez, Patrice Chéreau, Olaf Bär, Eric Stokloßa, Steron Margita, John Mark Ainsley, Jan Galla, Peter Hoare, Gerd Srochowski

Deutsche Grammaphon

Based on Dostoevsky’s novel Memoirs from the House of the Dead, which recounts many of the author’s own experiences as a prisoner in a Siberian Prison Camp, Janáček’s final opera, first performed in 1930, is inevitably a bleak affair. But like the original work that it is based on, the point of showing such misery and injustice is to highlight all the more the uplifting moments of human compassion that endures there which is never fully extinguished. That’s difficult to bring out of a group of hardened men, many of whom indeed are criminals and murderers, but it’s a work that is all the stronger for meeting this challenge, and conducted by Pierre Boulez and directed for the stage by Patrice Chéreau (the team behind the famous Centenary Wagner Ring Cycle), those qualities are superbly and sympatherically elicited from the singing, the staging and Janáček’s remarkable composition.

Of all Janáček’s work, From the House of the Dead is one that is rarely performed, principally because its difficult subject and its treatment lack a conventional narrative structure or resolution, to such an extent that the opera was considered incomplete at the time of the composer’s death. Even the orchestration itself is sparse, as if not fully scored, but Janáček’s music – so associated with rhythms of speech – has evolved here, finding harsh new sounds to suit its subject, using percussion, blocks, rattling chains and tolling bells, and integrating them into the fabic of a powerful score than needs no further elaboration. The dark tone that Janáček explores here points towards Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and, particularly in its prison setting, Weinberg’s recently rediscovered The Passenger.

Patrice Chéreau’s staging and direction doesn’t so much emphasise the dark setting, as fully envision what is already there in the score and the libretto. Considering Chéreau’s background, it’s entirely theatrical in this respect, the stark high grey walls that enclose the men in Act 1, the improvised stage in Act 2 and the hospital ward of Act 3, the blue-grey-brown tones all perfectly geared towards literal as well as metaphorical representation of the prison. Chéreau doesn’t point towards any specific cultural or political reading, but focuses on the human drama, on the nature of men, the stories they tell each other and the personalities that they reveal. By extension, this also sheds light on the deeper human behaviours that the situation brings out – the basic human needs for equality and freedom, the urge to communicate, the need for a sense of worth, respect and attention that, when denied, can be expressed in assertion of authority and in violent behaviour.

If the direction does everything to give the best possible staging for the opera and its themes – from the sense of movement and positioning of figures right through to the superb lighting of the stage – everything about the actual performance of this Aix-en-Provence production of From the House of the Dead is likewise as good as it could be. Pierre Boulez conducts the Mahler Chamber Orchestra through a magnificent performance of a remarkable score (from Sir Charles Mackerras and John Tyrell’s critical edition) that flawlessly captures tone, character and nuance for the situation as well as the characters. The singing is of an exceptionally high standard, not just for the actual singing, but the acting performances that Chéreau teases out of each member of the cast. This is as good a performance as you could possibly hope for of this particular opera.

On DVD, the performance at Aix comes across quite well. The NTSC resolution isn’t the best, and it can look a little blurry in movement, with hand-held camera inserts being used as an extra dimension to the live performance – but it fully captures the sense of the staging. The audio mixes in LPCM stereo and DTS 5.1 are wonderful, both of them exhibiting an impressive level of detail and a lovely tone. The DVD also has a 48-minute Making Of featurette, filmed entirely behind-the-scenes, following the rehearsals without any formal interviews.