Aberdeen music programme celebrates 20 years in style
Cities and towns need arts festivals. They give the arts - or particular art forms-a sense of identity within the locality, drawing national and international attention.
This is certainly true of Aberdeen's soundfestival, which is currently celebrating its 20th anniversary. A platform for new music, the festival has a well-earned reputation for reaching the parts that many other music festivals do not reach.
Wednesday evening's performance of Swiss composer Roland Dahinden's Theatre of the Mind (presented in a gymnasium in the King's Pavilion at the University of Aberdeen) was a case in point. The performance combined live playing - on bass clarinet and occasional percussion - by Gareth Davis with an electronic score by Czech sound designer Mikuláš Mrva.
The composition was Mrva's response to a commission from Mousai, a foundation in The Netherlands, whose noble purpose is to express in music "the invisible side of neurological progressive disorders such as Parkinson's disease" in order to "create empathy and understanding in the outside World".
In performance, the piece - which is intentionally fragmented, with jazz-like circularities, repetitions and variations - is, by turns, hypnotic, emotionally affecting and somewhat disconcerting. Davis's playing of the bass clarinet is, variously, deeply sonorous and minimal (as in his hollow blowing).
Mrva's soundscape - which often sounds like radio interference or disrupted digital sound - is equally uncertain. As he performs, Davis drops small, bent sticks onto kettle drums, their twistedness ensuring that they hit the drum skin multiple times.
One can sense how the consequent sounds-disruptive and unpredictable - join with the music to evoke something of the uncontrollable and frightening processes that take place in the minds of people with progressive neurological disorders.
As is, I'm sure, clear by now, Theatre of the Mind is not the most instantly accessible piece. It is, however, a profound work and one that is very much worth engaging with.
More nocturnal listeners to BBC Radio 3 will be aware of the show Night Tracks - which provides a platform for experimental music. If Dahinden's piece hasn't already appeared there, it's about time that it did.
In all honesty, I can't make the same recommendation for Kate Soper's Ipsa Dixit: Texts and Translations (also presented in the King's Pavilion gymnasium on Wednesday night). The piece is an ambitious and frustratingly varied attempt to engage with a number of cultural concepts explored by the Ancient Greeks, such as the nature of art and the meaning of tragedy.
Leaving aside the erroneousness of two key assertions (namely, that art is mere imitation and, by way of Aristotle, that tragedy serves a cathartic purpose) the work irritates in its neck-breaking turns. In one moment, spoken speech, interlaced with bursts of operatic song, cannot be heard above the music (played live on flute, violin and percussion).
In another, a classical dialogue is insufficiently theatrical. Moments of choreographed movement also fail to prevent this impressively executed piece from descending into alienating disappointment.
There was nothing alienating about the concert given by young, Glasgow-based harpsichordist Tiffany Vong in the splendid Cowdray Hall on Thursday afternoon. Mingdu Li's piece Moonlight Tides impressed with its radically varying musical registers and its gentle collisions of the Modern and the Baroque.
The demanding and distinctive Soundlapse: a ruin for solo harpsichord, by Polish composer Nikodem Rodzeń, was the perfect showcase for the versatility of both the harpsichord and Vong herself. By contrast. Alison Beattie's Break the Cycle bears a discernible debt to Mozart, with Baroque ornamentations segueing with minimalist syncopations.
THIS short afternoon concert was intelligently diverse in its programme and beautifully performed by an excellent, young musician from whom, I'm sure, we are going to be hearing a lot more.
If Vong is a future star, the great percussionist Evelyn Glennie is an undoubted titan of music in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. From her damehood and OBE, through two Grammies, a Bafta, and more than 100 international awards (including music prizes and honorary degrees), the Aberdeenshire-born musician has more accolades than you could shake a drumstick at.
Glennie became profoundly Deaf during her childhood, and insists that. "losing my hearing meant learning how to listen differently... [it] made me a better listener". This profound listening - which she says occurs within her body - was expressed magnificently in a concert at the Music Hall on Thursday evening that was titled Evelyn Glennie & the New London Chamber Ensemble: Music & Conversation.
The conversational element of the show comprised fascinating explanations of the compositions, instruments, techniques and (in the case of the ensemble) some company history. The programme began with James Keane's Piece for Dance, an extraordinary monster of a work in which a raucous, resounding premonitory, humming, volcanically explosive, disturbing electronic soundtrack required of Glennie a high-octane, extremely dynamic and, at times, surprisingly subtle performance.
Her drumming, for example, was breathtakingly energetic and compelling. Her playing of the xylophone rose and fell like radar signals.
By stark contrast, Dobrinka Tabakova's Frozen River Flows-in which Glennie accompanied the wind ensemble on the metallic, xylophone like instrument the vibraphone - is a beautifully elegiac piece that gives delightful prominence to a meandering clarinet. Ailis Ni Rain's Revelling and Reckoning - described by its composer as "manically tormented" -draws purposefully on the discordance of the great, early modernists (such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky) and makes way for Glennie's brilliantly spectral playing of the remarkable waterphone
The great percussionist continues to collect instruments (3800 and counting) and to innovate for them. Orologeria Aureola is an exciting highly original piece composed by Glennie and Philip Shepperd for the halo (a handpan instrument that was only invented in 2007).
Accompanying a simple, double beat electronic soundtrack, Glennie gave a gorgeous and utterly enthralling performance of a work that in its brevity, circularity and brilliant urgency would make a fantastic signature tune for a film.
It was, all in all, a glorious, early-evening concert. The New London Chamber Ensemble was superb and Glennie's virtuoso performance was nothing short of a world-beating masterclass in percussion playing.
