Alan Cooper reviews: Juliet Fraser, soprano and Maxime Echardour, percussion
COWDRAY HALL
Thursday, 30 October 2014
Thursday’s concert, a cooperative enterprise between Aberdeen University Music and sound, featured two astonishingly proficient musicians. The first was soprano Juliet Fraser. Her performing range includes early music by composers such as William Byrd and Don Carlo Gesualdo as well as contemporary repertoire from the far outer reaches of the avant garde. French Percussion wizard Maxime Echardour is an expert in both traditional and exploratory modern works. I stress the proficiency of these real musicians because we were about to hear performances of contemporary music that took us on a journey through music where every note was an adventure. It was impossible in this musical world to rely on the unfolding of familiar formulae or phrases. Here every single note demanded full attention. That was of course equally true for the listener as well.
The first piece performed by the duo was by Christopher Fox born in 1955 in York. The True Standard Advanced had a text for the singer that was printed in the programme but it took a moment or two for me to find my way through it because both in this piece and in the final work in the programme, To The People, by Andrew Hamilton, the words, at the beginning anyway, were broken up into separate syllables so that the voice in a sense also became a percussion instrument – or at least it was made to match the percussive attack of the music. In this first piece Maxime Echardour’s rousing drumming suggested a revolutionary “call to arms” to match the inflammatory words of the text.
The second piece Mobile Homme (2011) by French composer Gérard Pesson, born 1958, was written expressly for Maxime Echardour but the score was not delivered until the very day of the performance and being a work of the most alarming complexity had to be held back until re-cast as a duo. It was receiving its World Première at this Thursday evening’s concert. Both performers had in front of them a complex array of small percussion instruments including small porcelain bell, caxixi (a kind of tiny basket-work shaker), matchboxes, tuned wine glasses, pitch pipes and what looked like little Dutch clogs used as wood blocks. In addition they had the availability of their own bodies – stamping, clapping, whistling, other vocalisations and tapping the cheek to make various pitched hollow sounds (something that I remember boys in my school class doing to annoy the teacher). Maxime Echardour also had a version of the Brazilian berimbau using his mouth as a sound chamber. All these amazing accoutrements were used to create a dazzlingly colourful provocative and engrossing performance.
Benedict Mason an English composer born in 1954 originally studied film making at the Royal College of Art. He turned to music and composition in his thirties. His piece, Dreams that do what they’re told (1990) was a solo piece for Maxime Echardour. Centred on marimba and complex foot stamping it used conga and another hollower sounding drum and even a kind of blown instrument that you might find inside a Christmas cracker. Even the dropping of a music score on the floor became a part of the music. An inattentive ear could have heard this as pretty chaotic but patterns emerged out of the extravagantly generous sound world and soon everything made real sense.
The final, and longest, piece in the programme was another World Première – To the People (2014) by the youngest of the composers, Andrew Hamilton, born in Dublin in 1977. He was present in the Cowdray Hall to hear the first performance of his piece.
Like the piece which opened the concert, this work also used a text printed in the programme. The words initially were broken up and I felt the voice at the outset was itself being used like a percussion instrument. Gradually the voice began to shadow the percussion more independently especially the marimba played by Maxime Echardour. Juliet Fraser used a small Casio keyboard which had an amazingly convincing organ sound. Some of the nineteen sections were more extensive than others and gradually the deconstructed vocal parts began to develop and come together. In the eighteenth section, the voice matched the marimba magnificently and in the final section, Juliet’s full singing voice was unleashed and the work ended resplendently.
© Alan Cooper, 2014
