Alexander Goehr Since Brass, Nor Stone

Alexander Goehr Since Brass, nor Stone... Colin Currie percussion • Pavel Haas Quartet The Nash Ensemble Largo Siciliano • ... around Stravinsky www.nmcrec.co.uk/musicmap manere • Clarinet Quintet 1 Since Brass, nor Stone... Op 80 (2008) 13’29 manere Op 81 (2008) 9’16 Fantasy for string quartet and percussion 15 e = 80 ma poco liberamente 0’51 Colin Currie percussion ˆ 16 come sopra 0’56 Pavel Haas Quartet: Veronikaˆ Jaru˚sková violin • Marek Zwiebel violin 17 poco meno, sostenuto 0’54 Pavel Nikl viola • Peter Jaru˚sek cello 18 tempo 1 1’53 19 meno mosso 1’22 …around Stravinsky for violin and wind quartet Op 72 (2002) 11’24 20 in tempo 0’54 2 Prelude, ‘Dushkin’ 3’15 21 andante 0’41 3 Stravinsky: Pastorale 2’41 22 in tempo dell’inizio, ma liberamente 0’53 4 Introduzione and Rondo 5’28 23 in tempo 0’52 David Alberman violin • Gareth Hulse oboe • Richard Hosford clarinet Richard Hosford clarinet Ursula Leveaux bassoon • Richard Watkins horn Marianne Thorsen violin Clarinet Quintet Op 79 (2007) 18’40 24 Largo Siciliano Op 91 (2012) 20’13 5 I Maestoso 1’00 Richard Watkins horn 6 II Poco meno mosso 1’09 Marianne Thorsen violin Ian Brown piano Alexander 7 III Tempo 1 1’38 Goehr 8 IV Tempo 1, poco scherzando 1’13 Total timing 73’45 9 V Tempo 1, poco scherzando 0’54 10 VI Andante 3’34 Since Brass, 11 VII Tempo 1 1’29 nor Stone... The Nash Ensemble 12 VIII Lento 1’24 David Alberman violin • Laura Samuel violin 13 IX Mosso, allegro 2’01 Marianne Thorsen violin • Lawrence Power viola 14 X Saraband 4’18 Paul Watkins cello • Richard Watkins horn Richard Hosford clarinet • David Alberman violin • Laura Samuel violin Richard Hosford clarinet • Gareth Hulse oboe Lawrence Power viola • Paul Watkins cello Ursula Leveaux bassoon • Ian Brown piano Photo: Raoul David Findeisen 2 3 Since Brass, Nor Stone… of the singularly awkward duty categories altogether and start owed by today’s composers to their afresh. But Goehr has always Alexander Goehr’s Chamber Music forebears in the great Western sought to respect the continuity of tradition. A composer’s greatest listening, both in the sense that the by Guy Dammann hope is also the source of his listener needs to be able to follow deepest despair: ‘the illusion’, says the course of a musical work in Does growing older affect the way arises from such an attitude. He Goehr, ‘that one can add to what is some reasonable sense, but also in you write music? Some years ago, can’t start again. At best he can already there’. the sense that we use, whether Alexander Goehr put this question look again at ‘loose ends’, his own intentionally or unconsciously, the to Elliott Carter, a composer who and those of other composers he This awareness is primarily same ears and kinds of listening before his death in 2012 at the has admired, and try to make out manifest in his continuing efforts to for Bach as we do for Birtwistle. age of 103, was producing music of these something coherent and broker a marriage between Tradition, even if it ends up stifling at a faster rate than almost ever expressive. contemporary musical language one, is not something any artist before, and was thus in a better and the forms and concerns of can meaningfully work without. position than most to answer It is in some respects unsurprising older Western music. This is a Goehr’s question. Carter’s answer that the rather arbitrary factor of concern he inherited from This impassioned but nuanced was that composers should carry his own age should present itself Schoenberg, in direct line, so to view of historical relationships and on doing the same things as as of artistic significance to Goehr. speak – via the influence of his artistic identity is not merely before – which is of course exactly Among his contemporaries, Goehr father, the conductor Walter Goehr, evident in Goehr’s attitude to his what he did. But Goehr, though still has always been notable for his for some years a pupil of music, but frequently also visible only a sprightly 80 years, has developed historical awareness, Schoenberg’s – but it is also and audible in the scores remained unconvinced, fearing the something borne out not merely in something which derives from themselves. A good example is the implication of repetition or even ‘a his immense musical (and other) more recent history, where many Largo Siciliano (Horn Trio) where, resting on fading laurels’ which scholarship but in his recognition have sought to reject historical as in a number of other recent 4 5 pieces, he takes an idea or, in this material. The progress of the work, more traditionally conceived Burnner. As the title suggests, case, a direct quotation from then, is marked by an effort to working out of the Siciliano manere draws its material elsewhere. The source here is from work through the apparent material through to an elegant, principally from the so-called his former teacher Messiaen’s demands of the serial ideas while deceptively simple conclusion. In a ‘manere’ plainchant (from the Mode de Valeurs et des Intensités, a guiding them back to a more lyrical sense, then, one hears a Graduale Romanorum, to the words work which initially provided a point and perhaps ultimately more reintegration of a splintering musical ‘Sed: Sic eum vol manere’), of departure for the short-lived musical set of historical surface into the wood of the tree. reproduced at first literally and movement known as total associations – leading them gently then played with, fragmented and serialism, where in addition to the into an irresistible slow dance, as it As an essay in the integration of reconstituted in a sequence of pitch, the duration and loudness might be. A significant proportion structure and texture, the Largo close, sometimes breathless level of each note is juxtaposed in of the piece is given over to Siciliano is striking in the way it sounding variations, so that much a fixed order. The idea is then exploring the contrasting and presents a formal problem and is made of the Latin title’s contrasted with more traditional distinctive timbres of three proceeds to a musical solution. meaning, ‘to remain’. As in the material suggesting the dotted instruments, where each Perhaps this is what Goehr has in Horn Trio, the play of unusual rhythms of the Siciliano. combination and permutation is mind when he speaks of music textural combinations is itself part given extended attention (besides that ties up its loose ends, not of the motivation, as the two The work is in a single continuous the trio, three duets, three solo merely in a biographical sense but instruments dart in and out of each movement and opens with a passages). The passages act to in the exercising of discipline other’s lines, so the distinctive confident statement of the refract and refine the material and honed by a long career as a colour of each instrument comes in Siciliano theme in violin and horn. build up for the listener a musical master-craftsman. and out of focus. Similarly, although But instead of building on itself, heightened awareness of timbre. In Certainly, there is an air of this in Goehr never relaxes his grip on the the theme’s energy dwindles and it the final third of the piece, this the short duo for Clarinet and material, the piece has a strongly quickly dissipates, giving way to the awareness is drawn back with a Violin that Goehr wrote at the spontaneous, almost medieval flow fractured, unstable twelve-tone kind of irresistible force into a request of the clarinetist Eduard to it. 6 7 The more recent past is also visited If much of Goehr’s later music can Tippett, and later by Boulez. The two largest-scale works on the in Goehr’s short piece ... around be appreciated in this sense of Although he rarely composes present disc, the Clarinet Quintet of Stravinsky. This consists of a looking to provide solutions to without having one or other of 2007 and the quintet for Prelude for solo violin and a Rondo historical and music-aesthetic these figures on his artistic percussion and strings, Since for violin and wind quartet, intended problems which have occupied him conscience, offering sharp Brass, nor Stone..., bear out this to be performed either side of throughout his career, it would be a criticisms and expressions of horror facet of Goehr’s style in different Stravinsky’s early 1907 song without mistake to suppose this or disgust, Goehr has long since ways. Indeed, one wonders if the words, Pastorale. Goehr’s Prelude is seriousness of purpose is in some realised that it would never have composer was purposefully playing entitled ‘Dushkin’ after the sense equal to a uniform dryness been possible to please all three with his audience’s expectations composer’s friend and collaborator, and gravitas in the music. On the men at once, so he’s much better when he described the Clarinet violinist Samuel Dushkin, who contrary, though his thinking and off just trying to please himself. Quintet, in the programme note for worked with him on an arrangement working out remain as rigorous as This relates to another its first performance by the Nash of the song for violin and the ever, Goehr’s defiantly wry and compositional rule of thumb for Ensemble in the Wigmore Hall in combination of instruments heard quirky, even anarchic spirit is as Goehr, which is his desire to ‘bury’ 2008, as an ‘austere and motet- here, a quartet of oboe, cor anglais, present as ever.

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