Of Greek origins – origins which inform more than a few of his
pieces – Nickitas Demos is Associate Professor and Coordinator
of Composition Studies at the Georgia State University School
of Music in Atlanta. On the evidence of the chamber pieces heard
here, his own music is emotionally direct and powerful in an essentially
tonal language which most should find easily accessible. Indeed
there is an openness to the music which is thoroughly welcoming,
without ever being merely populist.
The earliest piece
here, Mnimosinon, takes its title from the name of a memorial
service in the Greek Orthodox church, held on the anniversary
of a death, at which prayers are offered for the peace of the
soul of the departed, hymns are sung, and a tray of boiled wheat
is brought to the church, as a token of the immortality of the
soul. Demos’ Mnimosinon was written for the anniversary of his
father’s death, his father having been a clarinet player, conductor
and professor of music and captures something of the purposeful
ritual of the service. An opening cadenza for clarinet sets
a suitably introspective (and retrospective?) mood and is succeeded
by delicate interplay between clarinet, cello, harp and percussion,
the lines initially rather fragmentary and often echoic but
later building in length, in which there are passages of real
beauty. A cadenza for cello – an instrument for which Demos
seems to write particularly well – sustains the elegiac mood.
Towards its close the rhythmic impulse of the work becomes more
insistent and there is also quotation from what is the final
hymn chanted at a Mnimosinon (‘May his memory be eternal’),
the off-stage clarinet deployed as a suggestion of that other
spiritual realm which the souls of the dead now inhabit. The
whole is moving and richly expressive.
In his notes, Demos
observes that when he wrote his Three Gestures for Solo Cello
(the year after Mnimosinon) he thought of the piece as wholly
abstract in character. He has since come to recognise its affinities
with the preceding work and sees the three movements of this
piece as also related to his father’s death. The opening movement
(‘Intently’), has a grave and meditative quality, the second
(‘Gently’) is dominated by some elegiac writing in fifths, and
the third (‘Playfully’) shifts the mood, becoming celebratory
in its use of elements from Greek folk song and dance, in a
lively movement full of technically demanding writing. The demands
of all three movements are well met by cellist David Hancock
who puts a persuasive case for the piece.
Tonoi I and II are
the first in an ongoing sequence of pieces for solo instruments.
Tonoi I, played with technical assurance and conviction by Tania
Maxwell-Clements, contains some striking passages and suggests,
once more, that writing for strings seems to be particularly
stimulating to this composer’s musical imagination. Certainly,
Tonoi II, while perfectly well played (so far as one can judge
without a score) by Cary Lewis, seems rather more of an exploration
of instrumental resource and idiom, less fully charged musically
and emotionally, as it were. There are rather more effects than
causes here.
The Suite for Oboe,
Viola and Piano, on the other hand, is an exciting, musically
sophisticated piece, full of tonal complexity and structural
sophistication without ever running the risk of being merely
clever. The impulsive speed, sudden bursts of dense of sound,
equally sudden droppings away into a far thinner texture, which
characterise the first movement (‘Circle Music’) contrast very
effectively with – and give a particular meaning to – the second
movement which lives up to its title – ‘in praise of stillness’
– through its prolonged melodic lines and barely shifting harmonies.
A finely put together movement, all the better when heard after
its predecessor. In the third movement (Aegean Counterpoint’),
the piano drops out, and the dialogue of oboe and viola is lively
and conversational in its counterpointed lines and phrases,
before in the final movement (Aubade’) the piano returns, in
music which grows and burgeons in ways not hard to relate to
its title. The whole makes a fine trio which deserves to be
more widely played and heard.
Postscript, fittingly
enough, rounds off a rewarding programme of chamber music, the
piece being described by its composer as an exploration of “the
interplay between silence and rhythmic activity”. At times I was
reminded both of Mediterranean folk phrasing and the bass-clarinet
of Eric Dolphy; these particular connections may be mine more
than the composer’s, but Demos is certainly a composer whose ears
are open to many different musical idioms, but who is able to
synthesise them into coherent music of a distinctive kind. There
is much here that I will return to frequently, I suspect.
Glyn Pursglove
1Yvonne
Powers Peterson (oboe); Tania Maxwell-Clements (viola); Cary Lewis
(piano); 2Cary Lewis (piano); 3David Hancock
(cello); 4William Rappaport (clarinet); David Hancock
(cello); Monica Hargrave (harp); Jeffrey Kershner (percussion);
Jessica Graham (off-stage clarinet); 5Tania Maxwell-Clements
(viola); 6Ted Gurch (bass clarinet); Craig Hultgren (cello)
