Lunchbreak Concerts in association with Sound
ATHENAEUM WINDS
ALASDAIR GARRETT: Flute | CLARA LAFUENTE: Oboe | JENNA SLOANE: French horn | ANNA MARY LYNCH: Bassoon | JENNIFER DUNSMORE: Clarinet
SALVATION ARMY CITADEL
Thursday, 29 October 2015
The seven movements of Oliver Searle’s Pilgrim of Curiosity was a great choice to represent sound at today’s Lunchbreak Concert. It was one of those new twenty-first century works, attractively tonal, yet with a fresh and fascinating approach to melody and harmony and just one or two surprises. I am pretty sure our audience enjoyed it. Above all it was superbly written for today’s wind ensemble and brilliantly well played by the five young musicians representing Athenaeum Winds – all but one of them different from the performers mentioned in the programme, most of those having to fulfil previously booked playing commitments elsewhere.
In his pre-concert chat with the composer, Dr Roger Williams recalled the Edinburgh Quartet’s performance of Silent Shores by Tom Harrold which was inspired by the composer’s journey to the Isle of Arran on a misty day. The composer on that day warned us that his music was not intended as a graphic illustration of that journey. Oliver Searle said something similar but in discovering the seven movements, many of the features highlighted in the programme note come through quite clearly to me. Interestingly enough, the Isle of Arran was also one of the places visited by Searle and remembered in his fourth movement Waverley Dawn. Many of the movements however were musical memories of places you would not expect to be together, for instance Waverley Dawn was twinned with Wat Arun (Temple of the Dawn) in Thailand and in the following movement entitled Orthodox, a Kintyre Fishing Boat was linked to Orthodox Churches in Slovenia – that indeed is the way the memory stores our experiences finding connections and similarities that other people might not see.
The opening movement of the work, Blue Benedictine, began with a clear, strong horn solo beautifully played by Jenna Sloane. Attractive harmonies and counterpoints with just enough unusual twists were played by the ensemble visiting the composer’s memories of a visit to a church in Florence. A Benedictine monk chant merged seamlessly into just a suggestion of the blues celebrating the name of the tour that led to the church – Chicago River Tour.
Millport Godzilla began with horn and bassoon calling and answering to represent the sound of a foghorn. This remained as an important feature of the movement working as a kind of steadying bass while the other players capered busily on top.
Waverley Dawn had a delightful spicing of humour recalling a very bad, probably drunken, accordion player on the boat trip to Arran and then in Thailand, a busking percussionist who had built his drumkit from assorted rubbish. Here Oliver Searle got the performers to use a variety of avant garde instrumental techniques that changed the wind group into a surprising percussion ensemble. I appreciated this because these effects had a proper raison d’être in recreating part of the story told by the music rather than being included just to let the composer or the performers show off. At the end of the movement the flute had an eastern melodic quality that suggested Thailand.
Orthodox which we were told was marked by the composer as “delicately rhythmic and unassuming” began with rising scalar passages out of which memories of the Slovenian Orthodox chants emerged.
Illinois Acceptance was listed as an arrangement of the final movement of Erwin Schulhoff’s String Quartet No. 1. Oliver Searle’s wind writing totally transformed the music. It came across as having been originally conceived for wind quintet – quite an achievement in imaginative instrumental scoring – delightfully colourful woodwind writing showing real mastery of the medium.
In Namu, which we were told was very hymn-like, a water taxi on the river Clyde was twinned with a visit to the Haedong Yonggungsa Temple in South Korea. What was to become the full melody was slowly revealed starting with just three notes. The oboe had a lively part in what emerged as a series of variations.
The final movement brought together a speedboat from the island of Kerrera part of the Inner Hebrides with the Masjid Jamek Mosque in Kuala Lumpur. The title of the movement Selamat Tinggal in the Malay language means Goodbye. It was a bright and breezy movement, just right as a finale. I have often wondered what it is about final movements that you can always recognise that they are exactly that. I have never been able to pin it down because they are all so different but Oliver Searle clearly understood exactly how to write one. He shared some magical memories with us and as someone who hardly ever travels, it was much appreciated.
