Wrapping round these intense pieces, Kuusisto directed a brilliantly sunny performance of Le Tombeau de Couperin, his approach encouraging the players to listen to each other resulting in an organic sound, allowing space for musicians to emerge out of the mix. Kuusisto, and two players bowed the tuned wine glasses producing a sound like an ethereally wayward organ stop, while Philip Higham’s cello sang softly across the strange sound, disappearing off into high harmonics. The mystical theme continued with George Crumb’s God Music from his Black Angels, written during the Vietnam War. A sparse solemn piece, it was given a vivid and technically brilliant performance by Maximiliano Martín, developing long notes out of nothing, allowing the silences to grow and the bright hopeful fluttering fragments to fade in a truly mesmerising account. Messiaen’s Quatuor pour le fin de temps was written while a prisoner in Stalag VIII-A, the section for solo clarinet Abîme des Oiseaux a desperate yearning for escape and freedom. Ravel and Messiaen were only born a generation apart, yet wrote utterly different music. Ravel dedicated his Allegro (Sonata for Violin and Cello) to Debussy, Kuusisto and cellist Philip Higham taking turns to accompany each other in a sinuous exchange, passion growing more urgent before falling away to a deep sadness. The shadow of war was a theme, beginning with Bartók’s short tender Katonan ó ta (Soldier’s Song from 44 Duos), Kuusisto and Leader Benjamin Marquise Gilmore’s violins gently trading folk tune phrases moving in and out of dissonance. It is a dance with the dark expanse of the universe, but we are given no time to learn the steps.A continuous sweep of music formed the first half, the four movements of Ravel’s bright Le Tombeau de Couperin interspersed with his Allegro (Sonata for Violin and Cello) Bartók, Messiaen and Crumb providing a brilliant showcase for soloists within the orchestra.
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It provokes fear of the unknowable, of humankind’s inability to comprehend its own existence.
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The piece deals only in contradiction, disjuncture, and enormity, tearing apart the ensemble into a series of vast, irreconcilable tensions. Black Angels is, appropriately, both uplifting and crushingly morbid. Enigmatic movement titles and allusions to the music of Schubert and Beethoven form an interpretative mesh, one so dense that it threatens to destroy all sense of meaning.īut perhaps this is precisely the point. The work makes use of numerical symbolism, in particular the sacred seven and demonic thirteen. George Crumb has cryptically related the piece to fallen angels, mortality, and the Vietnam War.
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We are left uncertain how to interpret the composition that results. There, they must recite streams of syllables and bash tam-tams. Here, they are called to play crystal glasses.
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The musicians, too, are pushed to their limits at times, they seem to be attacking or ignoring their instruments. The viola, cello, and pair of violins are amplified and subjected to electronic distortion, their timbre radically transformed. With Black Angels, the string quartet, a form often associated with cool detachment, gives way to a visceral experience. As we fail to impose a sense of reason upon the sequence of events in which it is lodged, it glimmers just out of reach, revelling in our inability to order this chaos. A macabre tango strikes up, as if played on Death’s own fiddle. Shouts, moans, and all manner of strange, unclassifiable sounds ricochet about in the void. Percussive, plucked string patterns race through the darkness.