12 Ensemble with Anna Meredith

& Jonny Greenwood

Start time: 8pm

Approximate running time: 65 minutes, no interval

Please note all timings are approximate and subject to change

Programme

Anna Meredith Moon 1. ‘Snow’ 2. ‘Pink’ 3. ‘Strawberry’ 4. ‘Sturgeon’ 5. ‘Hunter’ Jonny Greenwood Water Dmitri Shostakovich Chamber Symphony

Ariane Todes talks to Max Ruisi, Artistic Director and co-founder of the pioneering 12 Ensemble.

‘The whole thing should feel like a journey. It’s not a traditional format of a concerto, interval and then something else – it’s music that feels like it’s transitioning and you’re on a journey for 60 minutes,’ says Max Ruisi, cellist and co- founder of the 12 Ensemble, describing tonight’s concert, and his programming philosophy.

His starting point was the final work of the concert – Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony: ‘It’s something I’ve wanted to play for years, since our inception.’ He says he wasn’t looking to create any themes, but he may inadvertently have done so: all three pieces have five sections; two are connected by the theme of nature; and each one contains music and soundworlds that describe physical realities as effectively as any painting.

The concert opens with Anna Meredith’s Moon, a suite of five movements originally composed as part of an educational project based on Native American names for the full moon. She explains: ‘The names mark the time of the year – what was happening in that particular full moon, whether it was how the river was or what plants were growing. I read about these simple descriptions and thought they were lovely. I picked five that I liked – Snow, Pink, Strawberry, Sturgeon and Hunter – and interpreted the quality of how each month might be. I hope they each have quite a different character.’

Meredith plays electronics alongside the ensemble, and her sister Eleanor creates live illustrations. Ruisi says: ‘I saw it performed live in London a couple of years ago and I loved it; the music was bursting with energy and daring. It convincingly manages to incorporate disparate genres (electronic, classical, dance) in a really natural way, creating a completely different sound world to what we’re used to.’

Jonny Greenwood’s Water also reflects the natural world. Greenwood was inspired by the Philip Larkin poem of the same name, which imagines a religion based on the element: ‘And I should raise in the east, A glass of water, Where any-angled light, Would congregate endlessly.’ Across five sections, shifting soundscapes capture the way water drips, shimmers, ripples and surges. Each string player has their own part to create these many layers, and the score includes an amplified piano, as well as tanpura, an Indian drone instrument, played by Greenwood himself.

Having composers on stage is one of the advantages of playing new music for the 12 Ensemble, as Ruisi explains: ‘It’s exciting to have this link with the composer and to work in real time on a piece. You can ask them what their thoughts are on specific sections and what they had in mind. Musical notation is such a bad format – you lose so much by putting music into black marks on a page, so to be able to talk to the person who wrote it and work out what that code meant is liberating.’

Having said that, even when Shostakovich was alive (1906–1975), the codes he used to embed messages in his music while evading Soviet government censure were often interpreted in different and conflicting ways. For example, the dedication of his String Quartet No 8, from which his Chamber Symphony is adapted – ‘In memory of victims of fascism and war’ – has been seen both at face value or as self-referential.

He wrote the quartet in 1960 during a stay in Dresden, which had been heavily bombed during the war and was still in ruins. According to his friend, musicologist Lev Lebedinsky, Shostakovich intended it as his own epitaph, filling it with autobiographical references. The opening notes of the first movement are a musical cryptogram of his name, spelling it out in musical code. Using German notation, the D and SCH sounds of Dmitri and Shostakovich become D, E flat (Es), C and B natural (H). This was a motif that he used throughout his works – a musical autograph. Other references include the First and Eighth Symphonies, the Second Piano Trio and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

There are also further examples of music used in a visceral, visual way – towards the end the first violinist holds a dull drone note that sounds like the buzz of an aircraft, while the other three hack out notes that fall as if bombs on the city beneath, and one can imagine the decimation of the landscape as the quartet ends. When the composer first heard the Borodin Quartet perform the work for him in Moscow, he apparently wept quietly into his hands as the quartet members picked up their instruments and left the room.

The work’s chamber music origins are an advantage to the 12 Ensemble, according to Ruisi: ‘It benefits from our setup of not having a conductor and working in an in-depth way. We have much longer than regular orchestras would normally spend rehearsing – we can get under the score, with everyone in the group contributing. You can’t just sit at the back and follow the conductor, because there isn’t one, so everyone needs to know every part. That’s very powerful.’

There are advantages on stage, too, he explains: ‘The feedback we’ve had over the years is that people really feel a connection: firstly because there's no conductor with their back to the audience, so they can see everything. Also, the connection between the players on stage is much more apparent, because everyone is so engaged with both the music and each other. That translates into something visually very immediate and striking.’

Playing without a conductor can be a little risky, though: ‘There’s always an element of real excitement and an improvised feel because we’re in charge of everything that can happen on stage. That’s scary at times and it’s also liberating when it comes off because we’re in charge of our own destiny. If it goes wrong, it’s terrifying, but it can also make it vital.’

© Ariane Todes

Performers

Anna Meredith electronics

Eleanor Meredith live visuals

Jonny Greenwood tanpura

12 Ensemble violin I cello trumpet/flugelhorn Eloisa-Fleur Thom Max Ruisi David Geoghegan Roberto Ruisi Sergio Serra Venetia Jollands Peteris Sokolovskis percussion Yume Fuijise George Hoult Sam Wilson Juliette Roos double bass chamber organ/piano violin II Toby Hughes Siwan Rhys Alessandro Ruisi Gabriel Abad Oliver Cave Will Newell flute Ellie Consta Henry Roberts Sophie Phillips Rebecca Griffiths viola clarinet Luba Tunnicliffe Oliver Pashley Asher Zaccardelli Matthew Kettle oboe Freya Hicks James Hulme

Produced by the Barbican