1. OWHIRO - The String Quartets of Gareth Farr
Quartet No.1 "Owhiro"/ Quartet No.2 "Mondo Rondo"/
Quartet No.3 "Frenzy"
New Zealand String Quartet (Helene Pohl - violin / Douglas Beilman -
violin
Gillian Ansell - viola/ Rolf Gjelsten - 'cello)
Trust Records MMT 2019
2. RHYTHM SPIKE - Music by John Psathas
Spike (Stephen Gosling - piano/ Brian Resnick)
Calenture (Dan Poynton - piano/ Neil Becker - guitar/ Murray Hickman -
percussion)
Motet (Michael Houstoun/ Deidre Irons - piano four-hands)
Drum Dances (Brian Resnick - piano/ Stephen Gosling - drums)
Waiting for the Aeroplane (Dan Poynton - piano)
Abhisheka (New Zealand String Quartet)
Stream 3.3 (Brian Resnick - percussion/ Stephen Gosling - piano/ David
Arend - bass
Neil Becker - guitar/ David Downes - E-Bow guitar/ John Psathas - samples
and sequencing)
Rattle Records RAT D008
Put on the opening of the new Gareth Farr disc of his three String Quartets (Trust MMT 2019), and hold onto something reasonably well-grounded so that you can enjoy without fear the sensation of spinning off into the ether, so spirited and vigorous is the attack with which the New Zealand String Quartet launches the whirlwind ride of the first few measures. But be sure to give yourself about twenty minutes to spare, because this single-movement work refuses to let go throughout its well-integrated but strongly-characterised episodes. Alternatively, try "Spike", the first track of the John Psathas disc "Rhythm Spike" (Rattle RAT D008) for an equally compelling and ear-pricking rhythmic adventure in the company of a piano and marimba, with pianist Stephen Gosling and percussionist Brian Resnick bringing the excitement of their interaction to fever-pitch, then fusing their sounds in a coda whose amalgam of glowing exhaustion leaves you replete with visceral satisfaction. Wow! (Who wrote this stuff?)
I couldn't help wondering, while listening to these two discs of engaging and exhilarating music-making, what Douglas Lilburn would have to say about these works, in view of his expressed concerns with what he called "the problem of rhythm". Lilburn talked about the 'enormous potential of characteristic rhythm in this environment about us", and the challenge that our environment posed for composers to be able to make the rhythms articulate in sound. In his own music Lilburn continually grappled with this problem, his motoric impulses as time went by deriving less from conventions and increasingly from his own melodic material, to the point where, in his succinct single-movement Third Symphony, the substance of the music IS its rhythm, colour, shape and so on.
It was Lilburn who referred to his childhood on a central North Island farm as providing a "richly varied and potent human and natural context to shape a young imagination", his point being that one's own experience would seem to be as powerful a springboard as any other influence when attempting to reach for the creative impulse which produces works of art. It's interesting to reflect how, on the face of things, the work of this country's younger composers would appear to have taken very little from Lilburn's sound-world in furthering that process of discovering a unique and home-grown music, rather like comparing the work of Benjamin Britten with the totally different musical language of Harrison Birtwistle, in an English context. But Lilburn would be more concerned with the idea that a composer expresses her or his unique experience of life, influenced by a particular time and place, rather than seeks to emulate an established or emerging style to be understood or gain acceptability.
Before I seem to digress further, let me lead the way back to Gareth Farr and John Psathas by way of Lilburn's remarks concerning rhythm. It seems that what the older composer sought in a naturalistic sense, working through that process of discovering those patterns which shape the way people live their lives, and later, in his electronic music, discovering what he called "the vast range of natural resonances locked away in material objects", the two younger composers express far more uninhibitedly, unhesitatingly using a wide range of influences, natural and cultural.
While both Farr and (especially) Psathas can conjure up worlds of stillness and slowly-evolving reflection, much of their music is strongly forward-moving, with complex patterns and interactions creating quite incredible levels of energy. Farr's skills as a percussionist undoubtedly give rise to his penchant for creating motoric excitement, while his interest in diverse and exotic sounds afforded by groups such as gamelan orchestras invest some of his work with strikingly heterogenous rhythms and colours. Psathas talks about his music's energetic character as coming from his involvement with jazz and from his Greek music roots, which he disarmingly describes as "warm-blooded and libido-connected". Both acknowledge influences from other people's music, Farr professing admiration for Shostakovich, and Psathas for Ligeti and Lutoslawski.
Farr's three quartets each have titles whose significance can be emphasised as much or as little as the listener feels necessary - each work capably stands as "pure" music, though it's undeniably interesting to reflect upon the composer's comments regarding these titles. The first quartet, "Owhiro", takes its name from the place where the music was composed, in a house overlooking Owhiro Bay, off the Wellington coastline. Farr describes the music as more of a kaleidoscopic response to change and contrast as represented by the changing ocean, rather than being an actual description of the sea in the style of, say, Debussy's "La Mer". Its single movement follows a fast-slow-fast pattern, with much of the material derived from a leaping unison idea played shortly after the work's beginning. Boundless exuberance and energy characterises the whirlwind-like opening, which then, after the unison tune's first statement, develops a fugato-like idea punctuated with ethnic-sounding "drones" that have a Middle-Eastern flavour. When the music's propulsion finally lets up, a deeply-felt cantilena follows, moving processionally towards and through a ghostly sequence of harmonics (for a brief moment at 12'28" one of the NZSQ's lines seems to my ears to be slightly uncertain of pitch), before summoning a 'cello melody from the depths, which quickens the pace until the momentum of the first part returns, the music driving with increasing excitement to a brilliant conclusion.
The second quartet, "Mondo Rondo" is cast in three diverse movements, the first a high-speed romp through various sonorities and rhythmic juxtapositionings, accompanied by a Shostakovich-like motto used with skill and imagination. Then comes "Mumbo Jumbo", mostly pizzicato with a minimalist accompaniment, conjuring up a primitive atmosphere at the beginning to which thematic strands are added, before bows are taken up to unfold some long-breathed lines. Finally, "Mambo Rambo" enjoys itself hugely, a few "are you ready?" bars leading to a mournful Eastern-sounding lament, the first violin playing in a folksy manner with plenty of evocative sliding between the notes. Eventually a toughened and tightened variant of the same tune is taken up by the other instruments, playing in close-knit harmony, an episode answered by several sequences, including a stunning sotto voce section in which the merest wisps of a rhythmic figure set off eerie harmonics from the lower strings, rudely debunked by some downward lurches and tumbles. Finally the folk-tune's dismissed somewhat peremptorily with a single pizzicato chord that ends the fun for everybody.
Farr describes the third quartet, subtitled "Frenzy", as "a high-energy piece, with a strong emphasis on rhythms, jaunty phrasings and gritty harmonies". Of the three quartets it's the most austere and tightly-worked, with irruptions of colour and rhythm which either spend themselves after a brief show, or smartly get themselves into line with the piece's powerful underlying pulse. What sounds like a corrected mis-hit by one of the players in a brief solo at 6'16" joins the "rogue harmonic" in the First Quartet's performance as the only instances of less-than-secure playing throughout the disc. Otherwise the quartet's teamwork and individual skills realise every facet of the piece's volatile nature. It's a work that deserves to be swallowed whole rather than dissected, so quickly do the colours and hues of the music change - so it's hardly surprising that the piece ends abruptly on a held 'cello note.
Small wonder after hearing this music that I was compelled to seek out the work of another New Zealand composer, the late Anthony Watson, whose three quartets have also been recorded by the New Zealand String Quartet, albeit a differently-constituted group in the early 1990s (Continuum CCD 1065). Watson was himself a violinist turned violist, whose writing for the medium shows an understanding of possibiities and capabilities "from the inside". Where Farr's work uses driving propulsion, volatile rhythmic patterns and exotic harmonic elements to achieve musical ends, Watson concerns himself with a more austere interaction and argument. Both composers paraphrase T.S.Eliot's words "My end is my beginning" in different ways. Farr firmly focuses on his goals at the outset, with rhythms inexorably driving the music towards exuberant, optimistic ends that contrast starkly with Watson's severe, more confrontational manner and ultimately bleaker destinations.
It's instructive to compare the different endings of each composer's first quartet, setting Farr's motoric accelerando leading to an exhilarating sense of release, against Watson's no less exciting, but grim-faced dash towards a vortex of coruscating final chords. The influence of Bartok on all subsequent twentieth-century composers of quartets is apparent in both composers' work, but with predictably different results - in Farr's work can be discerned some of Bartok's rhythmic volatility and use of exotic colour, while Watson's writing finds kinship with the Hungarian's austerity and thematic severity, as well as expressing a similarly all-pervading pessimism of outlook.
Pessimism is the last thing one might associate with John Psathas's music, if the different tracks of "Rhythm Spike", the new Rattle CD devoted to the latter's music, are anything to go by. One senses throughout (as with Farr) a positive, vigorous and engaging musical personality at work, untroubled at this stage by the kinds of emotional and psychological dilemnas which, with hindsight, one can read into some of the convolutions of Watson's music. Right from the opening of the first piece, "Spike", one is captured by those direct and purposeful rhythmic patterns whose syncopations and infinite variants are tossed between piano and marimba to haunting and mesmeric effect. The instruments pursue their own courses, each stressing its own stresses and biting into its own accents, almost challenging the other to imitate if it dares, before calling a truce with a bang and suggesting a synthesis, the coda leading to a blending of the two voices which trails into silence.
A deeply imbued quality in Psathas' music is a sense of the ineffable, of awe with the size of spaces, physical and spiritual, as in pieces on the new CD such as Motet, Waiting for the Aeroplane, and Abhisheka. Motet, a work for piano four-hands, is here recorded by Michael Houstoun and Deidre Irons. From the outset the work's resonance fills a cathedral-like space, with pin-pricks of light and snatches of chanting colouring the gloom. Kraken-like bass upheavals set off showers of treble sparks until a wonderfully sonorous pedal-point calms the agitation, allowing the glow-worm light clusters to reappear, the ever-increasing animation breaking into a dance-rhythm which the huge bass pedal puts an end to once again. From the depths comes a figure not unlike the opening of Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata, which enters into a dialogue with more stratospheric rejoiners, creating a sense of memory awakened from long ago. For the third time the great basses call for attention, and from the gloom comes a gentle, upwardly-growing tendril reaching for the light.
Abhisheka is played by the New Zealand String Quartet. The work begins with haunting, stratospheric chords echoing through what seem like huge spaces, recalling Ligeti's "Atmospheres". A solo violin intones an oriental-like chant, like the call of a muezzin, summoning the faithful to prayer, and answered by lower strings whose uncanny hairpin-like swellings and dyings of notes play out their agitations and return to the timeless sound-vistas which began the work. Dan Poynton's performance of "Waiting for the Aeroplane" is well-known from his solo piano recital of New Zealand music "You Hit Him He Cry Out" (on Rattle RAT D006), and although, according to the booklet timings in each case this is a faster reading by eleven seconds, the performance sounds much the same here. Poynton superbly recreates the music's evocation of distance both in time and place at the beginning, before plunging into the galvanic here-and-now of the music's middle section until all energies are spent and the distances surge softly backwards.
In "Calenture" Psathas blends piano, electric guitar and percussion, Dan Poynton being partnered here for this recording by guitarist Neil Becker and percussionist Murray Hickman. The opening movement is a kind of exploration of voices and blendings, an improvisatory mix of repeated notes and ostinato patterns given plenty of time in which to resonate and interact. The remaining movements explore more overtly rhythmic interaction, the finale embodying a surreal soundscape of intermittently-lit spaces strafed by high-flying and low-flying sounds, and punctuated by dangerous sforzandi. "Drum Dances" is an Evelyn Glennie commission, an energetic exploration of rhythmic and textural interactions between piano and drums, Brian Resnick and Stephen Gosling demonstrating their versatility as performers by reversing the roles they took in "Spike" to stunning effect.
Placed as it is immediately after the ethereal tranquility of Abhisheka's ending, the opening of Stream 3.3, the final track, may well cause cardiac and respiratory problems for the unprepared. Tantalizing mixtures of acoustic and synthesized sounds propel themselves forwards along a rhythmic path whose syncopations highlight a powerful underlying momentum. Sounds swell and recede like waves, with each breaker bringing a different frisson of excitement. Individual instruments dance their characteristic rhythms along with and over a bass figure whose energy seems limitless, while the piano gives up on trying to halt the dance and joins in, abandoning itself to frenzy until an orgiastic explosion of exuberance releases the tension and leaves the listener (and probably the players) gasping. Again Brian Resnick and Stephen Gosling acquit themselves magnificently, aided and abetted to sterling effect by Neil Becker (guitar), David Arend (bass) and David Downes (E-Bow guitar), with the composer in charge of the electronics.
Apart from the short measure of playing-time on the Gareth Farr CD (40'49"), I can't think of impediments or qualifications which would prevent anybody wanting to own and enjoy both of these recordings. The immediacy and spontaneity of the New Zealand String Quartet's playing in the Farr quartets, if not absolutely note-perfect in one or two places, makes for a totally compelling experience; while the range and scope of performing skills collected on the Psathas CD is little short of astonishing. Recordings each do the performers justice, Rattle managing splendidly to fuse into an acceptable single production the ambiences created by different performers in different venues.