SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD UK CONCERT REVIEW

 

PIANOCIRCUS: Cheltenham Contemporary Concerts, Holy Apostles' Church, Cheltenham. 11.11.2010 (RJ)

 

It has been virtually impossible this year to attend a concert which did not feature a prominent musical anniversary – usually of a composer. Now I have been able to add another one to my tally: Pianocircus - an ensemble of six keyboard players, is currently celebrating its 21^st anniversary. Incidentally, the “circus component” refers to the fact that the musicians sit in a circle rather than swing on trapezes or walk the tightrope.

Yet the skills they employ are perhaps not so far removed from those in the Big Top, given the fact that they have no safety net in the shape of a conductor and the music they play demands stopwatch precision and considerable concentration. This was certainly true of the first work they performed, Transmission by Erkki-Sven Tüür with its constantly shifting sound textures. Starting with a single note rhythm on one piano, the other pianos were gradually drawn into the music developing their own rhythms and speeds and moving down the scale to produce a swirling sound picture.

The ensemble first came together in 1989 to play Steve Reich's Six Pianos composed in 1973. So it was appropriate that this work should feature in thiis particular recital. It started off with one piano playing a sequence which was taken up by the others, each diverging almost imperceptibly from the original to create an increasingly dense, almost hypnotic, pattern of sound which was constantly evolving.

Lynne Plowman's Hall of Mirrors adopted a more lighthearted, humourous vein and was based on the idea of the distorting mirrors sometimes encountered at fairgrounds. Fragments of different pianistic genres - from Chopin and Bach to barrel organs and boogie-woogie – appeared and then melted away, one theme overlapping with the previous one. By contrast, Duncan MacLeod's Elipsis was a more placid affair in which celestial bodies moved around in space each with different tempi and in different keys.

Martyn Harry's angst-ridden Digging Deeper proved to be an energetic and extrovert work in which the music seemed to drive itself forward in the manner of a juggernaut with explosive playing from all six musicians. Afterwards John Cage's piece, The Beatles, written when the composer was approaching eighty, offered some respite. Juxtaposing fragments of songs from the Fab Four it called on the musicians to adopt their own individual tempi, thereby ensuring that each performance of the piece is unique. The audience clearly enjoyed identifying the songs from which the fragments were selected.

There was an unexpected whiff of the Middle Ages in Face So Pale by David Lang which draws draws its inspiration from a fifteenth century ballad by Guillaume Dufay. The composer subjects the ballad to what he describes as “pulling” and “stretching” procedures to produce a “bizarre equilibrium”., but despite this the poem's medieval aura and spaciousness was preserved.

Finally, the audience was brought down to earth with Graham Fitkin's Totti, named after the Italian footballer Francesco Totti. This was a characteristically exuberant work played with the same enthusiasm and commitment that this remarkable keyboard ensemble had displayed throughout their uncompromisingly modern, yet varied, programme.

Roger Jones