In a refreshing break from the large number of groups and ensembles that have dominated HCMF so far, yesterday was given over to three individuals. The first was Berlin-based flautist Erik Drescher, in a recital of works, all receiving their UK premières, specifically composed for the glissando flute (fitted with a variable-length headjoint). It’s an alteration that immediately suggests obvious glissando possibilities, which formed the entire content of Alvin Lucier‘s Double Himalaya. Lucier provides a slowly undulating contour which the flautist plays against a recording of the same thing made previously, resulting in endless tiny clashes and beats. It didn’t take long for the effect to exhaust its interest; three or four minutes of this would have been okay, but 12 was just self-indulgent. Its one saving grace was the clarity of its motives; the same couldn’t be said for Michael Maierhof‘s splitting 51, which involved placing the headjoint such that it is both amplified and resonated/coloured by a plastic cup. What resulted was simply shapeless and arbitrary, uninteresting sounds emanating from a gimmicky environment. Il pomeriggio di un allarme al parcheggio by Salvatore Sciarrino was a risky endeavour, as though it had been created from different colours of smoke, which were then placed within a snowglobe and shaken vigorously. Read more
HCMF 2015: Erik Drescher, Jonty Harrison, Biliana Voutchkova
Alvin Lucier – Slices
It’s Ash Wednesday, and therefore the start of my annual Lent Series, which this year i’m devoting to contemporary concertos. i’m going to treat the term ‘concerto’ with a certain amount of latitude, focusing primarily on works where one or more soloists act in relation to a larger body of players.
To begin, a relatively simple but beguiling work for cello and orchestra by Alvin Lucier, composed in 2007. The title, Slices, is indicative of the relationship that the soloist has with the orchestra, which is presented here in oscillating modes of action. Initially, the orchestra forms a tight 53-note chromatic cluster (one pitch per instrument; the orchestra comprises 53 players); over this—barely audible at first—the cello picks out isolated pitches, moving in an expanding wedge formation. Gradually it becomes clear that the pitches played by the cello are being removed from the orchestral cluster, leaving erased pitch slices that over time become increasingly wide, until eventually nothing is left. Then the whole process is put into reverse, the cello again placing disjunct pitches that now magically hang in the air as members of the orchestra sustain them, slowly accumulating into another dense cluster; at its zenith, the process reverses once more, and the cello picks apart the cluster, reducing it to nothing. Read more
