OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, 8 November 2010

SPECIALISING in new, 20th and 21st century music for theatre, chamber ensemble and chamber opera, the Hebrides Ensemble led by artistic director and cellist William Conway delivered a thoroughly fascinating and engrossing performance of works by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Sir Harrison Birtwhistle and Thomas Ades.

Joined by virtuoso percussionist Colin Currie and dancer/ choreographer Michael Popper, this latest tour presented an exciting performance infused with vigour and theatricality.

The evening began with Maxwell Davies’s Renaissance Scottish Dances, arranged in 1973 and performed by the ensemble with flute, clarinet, cello, violin, harpsichord and percussion. The initial ‘Intrada’ and subsequent movements introduce a traditional blend of sound tempered by the insistence of individual solo instruments and added accents, such as a sliding bows added to phrasing.

Such nuances characterise the piece as a whole and add a modern twist to familiar sounds. Contrasting textures in this piece are an absolute pleasure; the wonderful joyous energy of Renaissance dance music punctuated by tambourine, melodic strands entwined like dancers encircling each other then coupled with interludes of harmonious courtly gentility.

This was a fine choice of opening material to break in the audience, a work that does not stray too far from its original source but delights in accentuating and heightening the inherent energy and musical dynamics of period works for contemporary ears.

Percussion soloist Colin Currie

Court Studies from The Tempest by Thomas Adès followed, adapted from the composer’s second opera, The Tempest, as a single movement for clarinet, violin, cello and piano. Intended as a series of five musical portraits evoking central character’s from Shakespeare’s play, each is vigorously drawn in terms of poise, disposition and attitude. Suggestive musical illustration is more abstracted here than in conventional opera; however, the human presence remains convincingly intact.

Performed by Colin Currie and pianist Simon Smith, Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s The Axe Manual reveals an interesting dialogue of sound. The two solo instruments, convergent in some sections, are intended to create a “composite instrument” while rhythmically maintaining their separate identity in others.

Originally composed in 2000 for the pianist Emanuel Ax and percussionist Evelyn Glennie, the piece utilises marimba, woodblocks, temple blocks, vibraphone and drums to create what are at times spatial placements of sound, creating passages of aural sparseness, unexpected density and delicacy. The span of the work and its demanding physicality culminate in the deeply resonant and dramatic sound of drums.

The final work of the evening presented the music art piece Vesalii Icones (1969) by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, for solo dancer, cello and chamber orchestra. This intriguing work inspired by 14 illustrations from Andreas Vesalius’s 1543 treatise on human anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica, together with the Stations of the Cross, provide departure points for the choreography, while recognisable melodic strands such as manipulated plainsong and popular song are combined with original composition to accompany and inform the movement.

The ringing of bells between each starting pose creates a ritualistic feel to the work in keeping with the symbolic vision of Christ’s body. Michael Popper’s incredibly articulated form, displaying every muscle, sinew and bone as if he were a living engraving, presented an image of corporeal suffering and of pure anatomical definition.

The prominence of the cello separated from the main chamber ensemble and the juxtaposition of sounds such as a typewriter with lyrical flute provided moments of incredible beauty, contrasted with the frightening violence of shrill whistles, percussion and scraped plates.

Dancer Michael Popper

The dynamics of the body in ‘The Descent From the Cross’ were an amazing spectacle in a religious sense, Popper’s body taking the full weight upon his shoulders, a fallen figure seemingly suspended upside down in space, contorted and alone.

In a dramatic twist Davies offers in the climax of the work not a resurrected Christ but the Antichrist emerging in red light posturing to jazzy strains of popular music, then confronting the audience knowingly with arms outstretched in a final question mark of a pose. It was a pleasure to see this challenging multidisciplinary work in an intimate setting, whetting the appetite for future performances of music theatre.

© Georgina Coburn, 2010

Links

• Hebrides Ensemble