(reviewed June/01)
An exhilarating and visceral-sounding affair, this concert by 175 East - when encountering music-making of such energy and sharply-defined focus in a physical space with the kind of intimacy of this venue (the Adam Concert Room), one couldn’t help but get involved, as much with the mechanics of instrument-playing as with the sounds the instruments were producing. I think this point’s worth making because I’ve heard people in the past (as well as my own voice) describe the experience of listening to contemporary music as confused, jumbled and ultimately uninvolving; yet on an occasion where one experiences music-making of this order - a combination of virtuosity with great elan, that unleashes all kinds of qualities from the music - one finds oneself (almost without thinking) crystallising reactions at the time with positive expressions from the vernacular, before going on to analyse just why one reacted in such a way. A pity there wasn’t a larger audience present - the weather obviously would have played its part in regulating the attendance, so that the room can’t have been more than two-thirds full.
Works were nearly all by New Zealand-born or -based composers, with the exception of Michael Finnissy, London-born and currently working in Britain. 175 East makes a point of performing as world-wide a range of contemporary music as it can manage in conjunction with New Zealand music, putting the work of home-grown composers in a global context. As well as ensemble works we had solo items for Eb clarinet, bass clarinet and bass trombone (the trombonist playing a bass kit-drum with his foot at the same time) - so there was a range of sonorities, colours and textures for us to enjoy over the evening.
One of the things of interest in the work of contemporary NZ composers, especially the younger ones, is the extent to which offshore influences and inspirations figure in their music - the last thing this country’s young composers could be accused of is being insular. For example, first on the programme last night was a piece by Patrick Shepherd called “geis”, which has its inspirational roots in Irish mythology, being a depiction of the personality of a great and mystical warrior Cu Chulainn. Then there was Michael Norris’s “Vitus”, a work which draws from the Christian legend of St.Vitus, whose story gave rise to the medical condition that bears his name. Incidentally, mention of Norris’s “Vitus” indicates yet another connection between the pieces, as Jeroen Speak’s work for solo clarinet, “Epeisodos” (played brilliantly and at times harrowingly by Gretchen Dunsmore) was inspired by the composer’s response to an electroencephalograph of somebody having an epileptic fit. Doubtless these are manifestation of the kind of internationalism that informs the work of many creative people nowadays.
All of the pieces had some rhythmical or colouristic quality which took little or no time to capture one’s attention. Shepherd’s “geis”, began with lots of rhythmic impetus which the composer described as “always agitated, often frenetic”- there was a spookiness about the piece reminiscent of some sequences in Delius’s Once-upon-a-time fairy-tale piece “Eventyr”. “geis” was a good piece to begin the concert with - as Michael Flanders used to say about his and Donald Swann’s opening number in their “At The Drop Of A Hat” show, it “helped to get the pitch of the hall”. The composer styled the music as depicting something “unpredictable and volatile”, and it certainly was that in performance. There was a definite “contouring” of the piece, too, the forward momentum involving various kinds of tonal agglomeration which lead to some concerted “shouting”, the last unison shout ending the work.
Jeroen Speak’s clarinet piece “Epeisodos” was visually as well as aurally compelling, as the clarinettist, Gretchen Dunsmore, moved slowly along an elongated music-score supported by four music-stands, giving us a very palpable sense of a journey (I recall flutist Bridget Douglas doing the same thing with Michael Norris’s “Wind Shear” at a Stroma concert last year). Composer and performer elicit an extraordinary range of sounds during the course of this piece, Speak equating its somewhat tortured progress with the “condition of artists and their need to push the boundaries”, parameters whose boundaries were unequivocally, and at times uncomfortably explored. In between this and Michael Norris’s eponymous piece on St.Vitus, Eve de Castro Robinson provided some light relief with “These boots (are made for dancing)”,a galumphing, jazz-inflected study of lower frequencies, double bass, bass trombone and bass clarinet fully indulging themselves.
Michael Norris’s “Vitus” made a vivid impression, with its almost Dali-esque “melting time” clock-ticking setting a scene across which violent dissonances occasionally rushed. The composer set out to depict an episode of St Vitus’s Dance in the piece’s middle section, which gave the brass ample opportunities to show their mettle, exchanging stuttering, jerking figurations that eventually ground to a halt. I liked the effect at the piece’s end, too, the clarinet intoning notes drained of colour, warmth and substance, as though all life had gradually ebbed away.
It would, I thought, have been interesting to have set the utterly different sonorities of works by Michael Finnissy and Ross Harris cheek-by-jowl, Instead, the interval separated Finnissy’s Song 12, with its largely intimate discourse for solo bass clarinet running through and below some wonderfully technological “Stuck CD” and “Jammed airways” notes (once again, superbly essayed by Andrew Uren) from Harris’s engaging, earthy “Music for trombone”, where soloist Tim Sutton’s energetic and often abrasive discourse was punctuated by the same player’s repeated pounding bass-drum notes (courtesy of a handily-placed kit-drum bass).
Then there was Matthew Crawford’s wonderfully-titled piece “Zealots versus rhyme and reason”, which the composer called “slightly satirical music”. The piece seemed not unlike a kind of elongated crescendo that made me think of pieces involving railway journeys, a sort of Pacific 231 effect, or Sibelius’s Night Ride without the Sunrise - some kind of juggernaut being brought into play. It contrasted well with James Gardner’s “a study for voicing doubts”, which was, in effect, a clarinet concerto, written expressly for Gretchen Dunsmore and 175 East. The title suggests a certain potential of fertility of disagreement, argument, dissension, while the music, in true concerto fashion, seems to have the solo instrument playing God, activating both impulse and consciousness in surrounding organisms and goading them into tangible responses. Wonderful counter-sonorities, at one point the clarinet in a high register was set against bass trombone playing what seemed like the lowest possible note.
I thought the potentially stunning theatrical device of the soloist suddenly absenting herself from the group, relinquishing her instrument in favour of a smaller clarinet, and taking up position on a separate platform set further back, could have had a whiff more stage-management (difficult to do well when it’s not your home venue, of course). But a point was made, the shift emphasising, with the help of some wondrously distant solo playing, and lullingly acquiescent accompanying tones, perhaps a compromise, perhaps an impasse, certainly an adjustment in inter-relationships. A very thoughtful piece, and a fine companion for Gardner’s comparably stimulating concerto-like work for violin and ensemble “some other plots for Babel”.
It’s a sign of the times (with, of course, no small thanks due to the pioneering efforts of 175 East’s director, James Gardner) and of the enthusiasm for new music and its performance engendered by the activities of our composers and musicians, that we’ve been able, here in Wellington, to experience the work of two first-class contemporary music ensembles within the space of little more than a month - Stroma during Massey University Wellington’s festival of NZ music, and now 175 East. Wellingtonians would doubtless be grateful for a visit sometime from “Five”, who are based in Christchurch, to complete the current contemporary performance picture - though of course travelling anywhere to play, let alone crossing ‘the ditch”, represents a formidable and expensive undertaking for any group of musicians. All the more credit, then, to 175 East, for once again bringing their flagship of new music performance to the capital, for our pleasure.