SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

William Lawes: Consort Sett in C minor in 6 parts

Alexander Goehr: Shadow of Night (World Premiere)

William Lawes: Consort Sett in F major in 6 parts

Johann Sebastian Bach: Goldberg Variations (arranged for viols by Richard Boothby)

It’s an unwieldy instrument, the viol, and even its most accomplished exponents often seem like they are wrestling with it, or forcibly cajoling the correct intonation from its strings. For all that, the six-part viol consort is capable of producing sounds of exceptional beauty, as was amply demonstrated by the two works by William Lawes in this evening’s concert. The two ‘Setts’ are impressively varied proto-suites, and anybody more familiar with recordings that focus solely on the Fantazias will be pleasantly surprised by the range of timbres and tempos and moods.

Alexander Goehr is no stranger to the world of renaissance music, and his Shadow of Night, which premiered this evening is only his latest creative engagement with the period. His text (by George Chapman) and his instrumentation are the inheritance from that time that he works with, and from which he, happily, creates something quite new. Countertenor Michael Chance is getting on in years, but Goehr has shown him little mercy in the vocal writing. None of it is particularly fast, and there are no superhumanly long phrases, but its tonality (or shall we say ‘pitch content’) is inscrutably complex and much of the line is very high. Chance occasionally came to grief with both of these issues, although the occasions were rare. On the whole, his unaffected and focussed tone was the ideal medium for these verses. The writing for the viols is equally adventurous, and wholly idiomatic. Pizzicato is the limit of its extended techniques, although that would probably have seemed extended enough to William Lawes. But under the atonal surface, this is music with a deep affinity to those times. For here, too, canonic imitation is the basis of most of the textures. And in keeping with 17^th century convention, Goehr treats every instrument as an equal, creating a deep sense of unity within the ensemble, in spite of the often acerbic surface textures.

It seems churlish to complain about tuning in performances of viol music, but I’m going to anyway. True, the instruments go out of tune in the blink of an eye, and even the cool, dry environment of the Kings Place hall made little difference. And even when the strings are in tune, you’ve got the frets to deal with, preventing any tweaking of the intonation as you go along. In the pre- or early-tonal repertoire associated with the instrument, this is less of an issue, or at least is less apparent as phrases do not conclude with the tonal certainty of cadences, that can so easily go awry if a single note is even slightly out.

The final work in the programme was an arrangement by Richard Boothby of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Boothby writes in the programme that he anticipates many will think the venture foolhardy. I would disagree, if it weren’t for the tuning issues the work poses. It is a fascinating arrangement though, and much of the music sits very easily in this setting. The canonic movements in particular merely require the attribution of an individual instrument to each line. Elsewhere, pizzicato is used to good effect, such as the bass line in the opening Aria, and a range of interesting doublings, both in unison and in octaves, help to fill out the texture. It struck me, listening to a 16^th/17^th century instrumental ensemble performing this music, just how wantonly archaic it all is. Like Alexander Goehr, Bach was clearly a composer as attuned to the distant past as to his own times.

But tuning remained a problem throughout the Bach. There were somewhere between four and six tuning breaks in the course of the performance, so I can sympathise with the players. Curiously, the arrangement often calls for the players to use the top of the fingerboard, beyond the frets, and this made no discernable improvement to the intonation. If I were brutally honest, I would say that one or two players struggled with the intonation more than the others, but I won’t name names. Many of Bach’s variations call for playing speeds in excess of anything you would expect from a viol, and this too caused numerous intonation problems. Interestingly, though, the synchronisation between the players remained close to perfect throughout the performance. It just goes to show, whatever impossible repertoire challenges this group sets themselves, they tackle them as a team.

Gavin Dixon