Contemporary Classics September 18, 2018 Interview with Oliver Leith and Music of Other English Composers

Tonight on Contemporary Classics we have our interview with English composer Oliver Leith who premiered his work “Dream Horse” at the Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival this past July at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox MA.  

But lets start with a work by another English composer Thomas Ades – who was the artistic director this year for the Contemporary Music Festival at Tanglewood and conducted Oliver Leith’s Dream Horse.   This work is Catch, Op. 4            written in 1991 for clarinet, piano, cello and violin.            Thomas Ades wrote about this work “Catch structures itself around various combinations of the four instruments. There are several games going on: at the start, the clarinet is the outsider, the other three are the unit, then, after a decoy entry, the clarinet takes the initiative. All four then play jovial “pig-in-the-middle” with each other. [pig-in-the-middle is a game also called keep away where two children throw a ball to each other and a child standing between them tries to catch it.] The clarinet is then phased out leaving a sullen piano and cello, with interjections based on the clarinet’s original tune. This slower passage gradually mutates back into fast music, and this time the game is in earnest: the piano is squeezed out, only to lure the clarinet finally into the snare of its own music.”    

Next is Harrison Birtwistle’s Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum            Birtwistle composed this piece in 1977/78 for the London Sinfonietta; he also conducted its premiere performance. It has become a standard work in the ensemble repertoire everywhere in the decades since then – and no wonder; it is highly appealing, playful and diversified instrumental theatre music (similar to Secret Theatre), in which “mechanisms,” i.e. groups of performers behaving like mechanical devices, declare hostilities against one another in various rhythmic patterns and registers. This work introduces the listener to several of the musical characteristic traits would come to mark Birtwistle’s subsequent compositions.    

Lets return to works by other English composers with a work by John Tavener  Lament for Phaedra.  Lament for Phaedra commissioned by the Musical Passages for a 1985 performance in the Athens Concert Hall is scored for cello and soprano. The soprano sings a single word Greek word Epoç (Eros). This Greek word is charged with a profundity without equivalent in the English language, and every aspect of love and death is implicit in it. The performers should endeavor to interpret and explore all these meanings in the stark and simple music. 

We will close tonight’s program of English contemporary music with Thomas Ades  Three Mazurkas for Piano, Op.27   Written in 2009 Mazurkas for Piano, Op.27 was a Co-Commissioned by the Barbican Centre, Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, San Francisco Symphony and Het Concertgebouw NV at the request of Emanuel Ax  to celebrate the Chopin bicentenary.  It was premiered by Emanuel Ax on February 10, 2010 at Carnegie Hall, New York, USA.

The selection of Thomas Adès to compose these works was a good choice as Ades has a pianist’s sense of the luminosity, a glowing and exploratory feeling for harmony, and a fascination with tweaking dance rhythms with his own stylistic characteristics. These mazurkas have their essence in Polish folk genre and in Chopin, except that its dotted rhythms in triple time and the heave of its shifting accents come from a more modern perspective.

The first piece opens at once in that world, with a theme based on a characteristic Adès pattern of widening intervals in descent and also on mazurka features. This theme trickles down and up, and develops towards music that is faster and strictly in tempo, music that introduces another mazurka element: the ostinato of gathering energy. A turn of speed ensues, followed by the initial theme again, very high, before the piece vanishes into the keyhole of it iridescent tonality: A.

Silvery and ungraspable, the second mazurka entwines lines that spiral downwards while tugging against one another rhythmically, the left hand at the start moving in even crotchets while the right whirls in alternating pairs of quavers. The delirium does not abate, though it changes. About halfway through, the left hand starts to sound like an unruly dance accompaniment, moving to a lower register and knocking the rhythm between triple time and duple; the marking is “boisterously”. Again the movement finds its harmonic destination, on F.

The endpiece brings forward yet another aspect of the mazurka: its melancholy. At the outset the weight in carried lightly, each hand playing one note at a time and moving among wide-ranging registers. There is a central section where, contrastingly, everything unfolds in the middle of the piano (and very quietly). Then comes a varied and texturally elaborated reprise, with the movement’s one rise in dynamic level before it subsides toward a close on a triton displaced across almost the entire width of the keyboard.