Larry Goves – Borneo Rivers 2 (World Première)

by 5:4

One of the more memorable pieces to have been featured in the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival’s annual ‘Shorts’ day (comprising a conveyor belt of miniature concerts, all free to the public) in recent years is Borneo Rivers 2 by Larry Goves. In many ways it’s an unassuming piece: just six minutes long, for solo clarinet, not doing anything particularly acrobatic or obviously attention-grabbing or idiomatically-challenging. Perhaps that’s why it turned out to be so memorable.

A brief bit of jaunty music stops after only a few seconds, then continues haltingly, less spirited, its momentum gradually dissipating. At first it seems like a relatively straightforward slowing-down, but it soon becomes apparent that it’s transforming into something else, something entirely other from how it started. Multiphonics creep in, echoes of the original jaunt are ever briefer and more faint, and before long it’s clear we’re travelling very, very far from where we started. It’s such a basic premise, such a basic process, but being focused on just a single instrument lends it real intimacy, clarity and power, in an act of slow, steady, subtle shape-shifting that ends up with the clarinet in a decidedly remote place.

This performance of Borneo Rivers 2 was given by Heather Roche at HCMF 2021.

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