United Kingdom Romsey Chamber Music Competition 2025 [3] – Numerous: Romsey URC Church, 6.6.2025. (CK)
Ravel – Oiseaux Tristes (Ziteng Fan [piano])
Hildegard von Bingen – O Virtus Sapientiae (Lydia Hillerudh [cello], Coby Mendez [guitar])
Messiaen – Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (Junyan Chen [piano], Emma Roijackers [violin], Lydia Hillerudh [cello], Gerbrich Meijer [clarinet])
I might write an entire piece on Laura Rickard’s unique, creative and adventurous programme planning for RCMF 2025 (or every other yr), however let this afternoon live performance stand for example. Ziteng Fan’s efficiency of Oiseaux Tristes – a sprig of notes, a blossoming of birdcalls – from Ravel’s Miroirs led and not using a break into Hildegard of Bingen’s O Virtus Sapientiae – a Christian hymn given wings, made sensuous – performed by Lydia Hillerudh (cello) and Coby Mendez (guitar) from the gallery. Eight centuries of quiet musical ecstasy spanning the size of the church. How higher to arrange for Messiaen?
The circumstances of the composition and efficiency of Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps in a focus camp are properly sufficient identified – a lot in order that it’s tough now to separate truth from delusion. Clarinettist Gerbrich Meijer, introducing the efficiency, spoke of ‘a relentless battle for hope in a darkish place’. What adopted was extraordinary.
The primary motion, Liturgie de cristal, immediately ushered us into Messiaen’s world: birdsong on the clarinet in opposition to calm piano chords and quiet harmonics on violin and cello. And between the declamatory sounds that open and shut the Vocalise, the calm chant of the strings in opposition to tiny gamelan sounds on the piano. After which, in all probability the best-known of the eight actions, for clarinet (silent within the previous motion) alone: Abîme des Oiseaux, the abyss of the birds.
In Gerbrich Meijer’s efficiency the completely different parts of this seven-minute solo – the lengthy, sluggish crescendos, the intervals of silence, the temporary outbursts of freedom and pleasure – have been held in excellent stability, in order that the entire appeared weightless, timeless. Her breath management was phenomenal: and in these single-note crescendos it was inconceivable to pinpoint the second when silence gave option to sound – one thing parallelled solely, in my expertise, by the flautist Emmanuel Pahud. It was, as I’ve stated, extraordinary.
After the temporary Scherzo interlude – the piano silent this time, the opposite devices chugging cheerfully in attribute Messiaen vogue – there was one other lengthy, sluggish, contemplative solo from Lydia’s cello, accompanied by comfortable, barely transferring chords from Junyan Chen’s piano. Candy-toned, at instances inside a whisker of sounding saccharine: music that solely Messiaen might have written. After which the Dance of Fury: angular, rhythmically complicated, the devices in unison to counsel the trumpets of the Apocalypse. The music requires an exceptional degree of focus and precision, the 4 devices in absolute synchrony: it’s dumbfounding to observe and to take heed to. The large, climactic augmentation of the theme was terrifying in the way in which the Statue Theme in Turangalîla is, summoning ‘the oppressive, horrible brutality of historical Mexican monuments’.
Cluster of Rainbows returns us to a relaxed cantilena on cello and piano, which supplies option to complexity and even violence because the ‘mighty angel’ seems. The music traverses dizzyingly diversified terrain: the strings present an imitation of an Ondes Martenot; and simply once we suppose we now have reached our vacation spot, bathed in a glow of radiance, there’s a additional dislocating shock. Maybe Messiaen’s visions – in a efficiency as intense as this – are too vivid for us (and maybe Bernard Herrmann discovered the inspiration for his Psycho music right here).
Radiance and calm are restored within the final motion, an extended, sluggish meditation for the violin, supported by comfortable piano chords that chime like bells. Emma Roijackers performed it fantastically, rising and falling in depth, her line all the time managed, her poise by no means disturbed, taking us gently upwards till her sound handed out of listening to.
It was an exquisite efficiency from begin to end. I discovered myself remembering St Paul’s phrases, that we see by means of a glass, darkly: in Messiaen’s music – in a efficiency as high-quality as this – it’s as if the glass shatters. We could not glimpse the Past, however we’re dazzled by the shards.
Dowland – In Darkness Let Me Dwell (Lydia Hillerudh, Ellen Baumring-Gledhill, Margaryta Dorosh, Rainer Crosett [cellos])
Bruch – Aria (Lydia Hillerudh, Ellen Baumring-Gledhill, Margaryta Dorosh, Rainer Crosett [cellos])
Schubert/Liszt – Litanei (Ziteng Fan [piano])
Vasks – Lonely Angel (Laura Rickard [violin], Lydia Hillerudh [cello], Ziteng Fan [piano])
George Crumb – Black Angels (Emma Roijackers, Alice Ivy-Pemberton [violins], Martin Moriarty [viola], Rainer Crosett [cello])
Within the night live performance – entitled Angels – we have been once more ready imaginatively for the primary occasion: first by a quartet of cellos (Lydia Hillerudh, Ellen Baumring-Gledhill, Margaryta Dorosh and Rainer Crosett). This was one of many Competition’s side-by-side tasks, bringing college students from Hampshire and the London conservatories to affix the resident artists. They performed an association of Dowland’s In Darkness Let Me Dwell, with out vibrato, sounding like a viol consort. As Laura’s word advised us, ‘The nameless textual content speaks of self-imposed exile and despair, its imagery mirrored within the music’s stark harmonies and expressive dissonances’. They adopted this with an association of Max Bruch’s frankly Romantic Aria from his 4 Items for Cello and Piano; then Ziteng Fan performed Liszt’s association of Schubert’s easy musical prayer for the souls of the departed, Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen.
The primary half’s closing merchandise was additionally probably the most substantial, and the one in starkest distinction with what was to return. Pēteris Vasks wrote Lonely Angel, for violin, cello and piano, in response to a imaginative and prescient of an angel stooping over the war-torn Earth to deliver therapeutic with a contact of his wings: the music touchingly enacts this, Laura’s high-lying melody descending to entwine briefly with Lydia’s low-lying cello over static piano figuration earlier than separating and returning to her unique station. As easy, and maybe as hypnotic, as Tavener’s The Defending Veil.
George Crumb’s Black Angels for amplified string quartet, written in protest in opposition to the struggle in Vietnam, derives a few of its disturbing energy from the absence of any center floor between the often-brutal violence of its foreground exercise and the hardly audible sounds that appear to emanate from an immeasurable distance: a distinction that was finely achieved on this efficiency. The opening is actually violent: like a swarm of monstrous bees, the amplified strings imitate the sound of assault helicopters (together with the music’s Departure/Absence/Return construction this provides the piece a distant and unlikely kinship with Coppola’s 1979 movie Apocalypse Now). Crumb instructs at one level that the quantity must be ‘on the edge of ache’.
As in different of Crumb’s works there’s a robust component of formality, of theatre embedded on this music: it’s a must to see it in addition to hear it. It’s tempting to catalogue the gadgets that the gamers are required to make use of to supply sound (together with two massive tam-tams and their very own voices), however it’s in all probability higher to deal with key moments. With the gorgeous efficiency of Schubert’s Dying and the Maiden earlier within the Competition nonetheless very a lot in our minds and ears, there was an actual frisson in listening to Crumb’s model (extra kudos for Laura and her live performance planning): the devices held like viols, the palms reversed in order that the music was performed the other way up. The sound was unearthly, as if struggle – napalm and mechanised killing – had obliterated all however a faint echo of Western tradition and the civilised values that it’s presupposed to characterize.
The monstrous bees/helicopters return; so does quiet music, the violins making no extra sound than the wind by means of grass. After which, probably the most putting and indelible picture of the entire efficiency: three gamers use bows to attract glacial chords from tuned wineglasses, heedless of the cello’s more and more anguished music. I can not consider a extra telling depiction of a universe detached to human struggling; it’s a starker sound-image than the untroubled strings in Ives’s The Unanswered Query. Crumb’s Black Angels are the negation of Vasks’s Lonely Angel: there is no such thing as a therapeutic contact, solely unimaginable distance.
Quiet cello harmonics in opposition to tiny insect exercise on the opposite strings; a tam-tam is bowed; wineglasses are tapped with metallic rods. Finish.
Chris Kettle
