Richard BLACKFORD
Niobe, for violin and orchestra (2018) [23.31]
Blewbury Air, for cello and piano (2020) [12.14]
Kalon, for string quartet and string orchestra (2016) [23.32]
Tamsin Waley-Cohen (violin)
Raphael Wallfisch (cello), Adrian Farmer (piano)
Albion Quartet
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/Ben Gernon (Niobe), Jiří Rožeň (Kalon)
rec. 2017/18, Dvorak Hall, Rudolfinium, Prague; 2020, Wyastone Studio, Monmouth, UK
NIMBUS ALLIANCE NI6420 [59.07]
The Greek divinities were a prickly lot, not prone to forgive insults, but in the case of Niobe one feels they might have had just cause for complaint. Richard Blackford in his booklet summarises her story as the tragedy of a woman who offended the goddess Leto by drawing attention to the plenitude of her offspring – seven sons and seven daughters – by contrast to Leto’s solitary twins, and was turned to stone perpetually weeping for her subsequently slaughtered children. Robert Graves in The Greek Myths provides further elaboration: Niobe apparently provoked the attack on her family by gratuitously insulting Leto during a sacrifice, and it seems that some of the innocent progeny may have been spared. The number varies according to the source, from a mere four to as many as twenty (God help us!) and the name Niobe itself means ‘snowy’ – so the myth was obviously invented to explain melting snows falling over rocks. Blackford views it as an analogy for the ill-treatment of all women through the ages (although how he reconciles the offending Niobe’s prolific fecundity with his well-established environmental credentials is not altogether clear); but he certainly suggests that his treatment of the legend has a feminist message. Other symbolisms also abound: because Niobe was the daughter of the King of Phrygia much of the musical material of the piece makes use of the Phrygian mode, although Niobe herself is represented by a chromatic theme which oscillates uneasily between major and minor thirds. But then the myth, and the message, are only part of a piece which stands or falls as music in its own right – a sort of hybrid between a violin concerto and a symphonic poem – and most certainly stands.
The music begins with an exposition of Niobe’s theme as an extended violin cantilena, with Tamsin Waley-Cohen playing with a sense of rapturous beauty which exactly matches the description of the protagonist as a lover. Throughout the turbulent music which follows, sometimes in combination with the orchestra and sometimes in strenuous opposition to it, she never loses this sense of rapt communication; and at the beginning of the finale, describing Niobe as the mourner, this petrifies into a contemplation in which – in the words of the composer – “like an insect struggling in the last seconds of its life to escape the amber that will encase it for millennia, the violin flails and struggles as the murmuring orchestra overpowers it in the final bar.” It would be impossible to better that description of the music at this point, which makes exactly the effect which the composer wishes to achieve. A marvellous piece.
The booklet notes for Kalon, for string quartet and string orchestra, similarly emphasise the technical aspects of the music which was written while the composer was studying for a doctorate at the University of Bristol. The score concentrates on the contrast between the two bodies of players, in the manner of the traditional concerto grosso, but achieves a greater sense of dichotomy by the use of two distinct rhythmic pulses contrasting them, frequently moving towards almost total disassociation. This could be a recipe for chaos and disaster (in a separate booklet note, John Pickard draws parallels with Stockhausen) but Blackford is cunning in his ability to bind together the different units into a convincing whole and the two elements combine with all the skill we might expect in similarly contrasted writing by Holst or Bartók. Some of the motivation in this is hinted at in the composer’s booklet notes, when he draws parallels with string quartets in Nazi concentration camps playing music by Beethoven and Mozart while horrors were being perpetuated all around them. Indeed a solitary quotation from the cavatina of Beethoven’s Op.130 quartet makes a solitary and desolate appearance during the section of the score marked Beklemmt, and the final section deploys all the energy of the traditional concerto grosso in a stile concertato with vital reserves of energy and impulse. The co-ordinated playing of the Albion Quartet (led by Waley-Cohen) must have been stupendously difficult to achieve in the polythmical sections, but fits perfectly with the rich sound of the Czech Philharmonic strings in a warmly resonant acoustic. (The same orchestra are equally accomplished in their accompaniment to Niobe, although curiously the woodwind soli sound rather more closely observed by the microphones than their string colleagues in a score that was specifically commissioned for these players.)
Between these two highly dramatic scores, the delicate Blewbury Hill for cello and piano forms an oasis of comparative calm; and the recording was made in the intimacy of the Nimbus studio at Wyastone Leys at the end of the first corona pandemic lockdown last year. It has already been issued as a download and a CD single (review), and its appearance in the context of this full disc is most welcome. It is a heartfelt and lovely reflection on the composer’s home village in Oxfordshire, and its three movements exactly reflect their titles: By the water’s edge, Incantation with bells and The wind in the branches. The second of these is a still rapture which has much of the atmosphere of Arvo Pärt in the manner in which the string soloist is reflected by the sound of distant bells in the piano; and the final movement is a swirling scherzo in triple time with plenty of contrast and a lyrical counter-melody in the cello emerging during the final bars. It need hardly be added that Raphael Wallfisch and Adrian Farmer give entirely sympathetic performances of another marvellous piece; in his earlier review for this site John Quinn comments on the evident enjoyment they clearly experienced in their return to performance.
Richard Blackford has been well served by the Nimbus label over the years, and this disc adds a further instalment to an impressive catalogue of recordings. The presentation is admirable as always (although for some reason “Phrygia” is persistently rendered as “Phyrgia”), and the sound recording is never less than exemplary. Those who already know and love the composer’s output, as I do, will need no further recommendation; those who have yet to make the pleasure of his acquaintance could do no better than to begin here.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
