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Britten Sinfonia at Lunch
West Road Concert Hall
15 November 2005
Joanna MacGregor
Jason Yarde
Britten Sinfonia
What could be more invigorating than
a lunchtime tango with Joanna MacGregor? And while you ponder your answer,
let me describe this scintillating concert. It was a quintessential Britten
Sinfonia affair. On paper it looked like an accident in a time-machine.
But in performance its wild collisions of epoch and continent were infused
with such irresistible energy that what might have seemed weird and whimsical
came over as cogent and compelling.
Thus MacGregor at the piano, the
jazz saxophonist Jason Yarde and five fine string players from the Sinfonia
whizzed from the 17th-century John Dowland to the present-day Brazilian
composer Egberto Gismonti. Then they came back to Britain for the premiere
of Yarde’s Who Knows the Beauty?, before crossing the Atlantic again for
three pulsating MacGregor arrangements of Piazzolla tangos.
And if that whirlwind dash round
the globe isn’t enough, a substantial slab of Russian brooding — in the
shape of Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet — is added for later dates on this
tour (Wigmore Hall tonight, Chelmsford on Sunday, Leeds on Wednesday).
The high points? Everything was
differently fascinating. But MacGregor’s treatment of three Dowland pieces
was even more striking than her excursions into Piazzolla, perhaps because
the latter is now familiar territory. Dowland is one of the great glums
of English music, and MacGregor’s transformation of his lute-and-voice
originals for modern piano and string quintet was suitably infused with
dark mystery.
But in the second piece especially,
Mr Dowland’s Midnight , she also found a way of expressing that Jacobean
angst in highly contemporary language: a plucked double bass supplying
jazz patterns at the bottom; the piano making something astonishingly
bluesy out of Dowland’s plangent harmonies; and the strings adding edgy
tremolandos.
Yarde’s Who Knows the Beauty ?
couldn’t compete with the intensity of that reimagined sound-world, nor
with Gismonti’s crazily freewheeling pieces with their epic flights of
passagework, lush romantic harmonies and stomping samba rhythms. By contrast,
the saxophonist’s composition seemed uncertain in construction, as though
he was learning the classical piano-quintet medium as he went along. Indeed,
some of it sounded like cocktail-lounge background fill. But when he gave
himself the chance to cut loose as a soloist — sending his sax spirally
into the stratosphere, or honking with primordial glee — we got a much
better measure of his extraordinary talent.
Richard Morrison, The
Times
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