Tag Archives: The Night With . . .

The Night With . . . Ensemble Écoute

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Institut Francaise, Edinburgh

In French chamber group Ensemble Écoute, co-led by Argentinian conductor Fernando Palomeque and American violinist Rachel Koblyakov, it seems that composer and promoter Matthew Whiteside has found a crucial international partner for his The Night With . . . initiative.

Already trading across borders in the British Isles with its menu of box-fresh compositions from his peers and himself, presented in relaxed, user-friendly venues, this hook-up has taken the latest programme of new music to Paris as well as Dublin. The current hiatus in decision-making around funding for the arts in Scotland is chiefly responsible for Whiteside’s Scottish home base being late to the party.

Scottish compositional partners added significantly to the event, however, with two world premieres. Emma Lloyd’s Orbites introduced us to the full line-up onstage, the composer herself on amplified lead fiddle at the back of the platform and electronics in the mix alongside eloquent percussion and, eventually, wine glasses. Moving from delicious oscillations to more rhythmic material, there was a very particular balance in the combination of instruments, carefully controlled by Palomeque.

John Hails’ More Geese Too was the newest addition to the concert, a four movement work for an octet including the composer on Kurt Schwitters-like poetic vocalising, and with Lloyd on viola. Alternating between slow tones and instrumental as well as spoken outbursts, it had a dark, mysterious wit.

Ireland was represented by David Fennessy and Whiteside himself. Fennessy’s The room is the resonator is a virtuoso piece for cello and electronics, grown from a recording of the composer on harmonium. The ensemble’s cellist Emmanual Acurero produced a superb account of the work’s full exploration of his instrument’s possibilities in a performance where the source of the sometimes astonishing sounds was often deliberately unclear.

Whiteside’s premiere, Points Decay, was more oppositional, the taped element subsumed by the rhythmic playfulness of the syncopations and little glissandos written for the six instrumentalists, but ultimately having the last word.

The final premiere of the programme was Absurd Reasonings by Sofia Avramidou, whose most recent studies have been at IRCAM in Paris. The Greek composer’s dense five-minute work required extended techniques from strings and winds, with flautist Samuel Casale and Marie Guillot’s bass clarinet making a particular impact.

The programme was completed by two more established composers. Rebecca Saunders’ the under-side of green is an animated conversation between clarinet, violin and piano that takes some of its inspiration from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Koblyakov’s assertive violin was the clearest evocation of her voice.

The concluding work was from distant 1984, Dérive 1 by Pierre Boulez. It was an important inclusion as the instrumentation of Ensemble Écoute owes much to the requirements of his chamber works. Fittingly, it was when we heard the group most effectively working as an ensemble, a sense of common purpose in the interwoven lines, with not a moment of absolute stillness in the refined activity.

Keith Bruce

Programme repeated at Woodend Barn, Banchory on Sunday evening. Ensemble Écoute is at the Macphail Centre, Ullapool tonight with a programme that includes only the Boulez alongside Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Jolivet, Bordalejo and Tailleferre.

The Night With… Festival

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The Engine Works, Glasgow

The bold assertion by contemporary music evangelist Matthew Whiteside that the first festival under the banner of his concert series, The Night With … ,  aims to give classical music its own Glastonbury may not bear very rigorous scrutiny, but neither is it entirely nonsense.

The opening sessions established an atmosphere that was relaxed and informal, making full use of the post-industrial venue’s spaces, without disrespecting the music in any way. A food truck dispensed sustenance between sessions and a “Parlour” hosted conversations away from the performances, while the programme alternated between two areas, permitting a seamless flow of sounds, even if the planned schedule very swiftly began to slip.

The Hebrides Ensemble took The Night With … into new areas, and not solely because the quintet featured a concert grand, played by James Willshire. Cellist Will Conway’s ensemble, completed by violinist David Alberman, flautist Emma Roche and Yann Ghiro on clarinet, represents an older generation of players, and that was paralleled in some of the music they chose, from more established names than have been the regular fare at Whiteside’s events.

The oldest piece was Seven Pierrot Miniatures by Helen Grime, a Hebrides commission from 2010 which references Schoenberg in its structure and in some of its sound but makes complete sense in its own terms – sonically theatrical, especially in the exchanges between the top line instruments.

That sense of drama was also present in the world premiere of the Ensemble’s set, Rylan Gleave’s Leave John, take Michael, its possibly punning title also suggestive of liturgical choral work. If the quintet’s sound was sometimes hymn-like, it was at a distance, with percussive use of the piano and abrupt changes of dynamics and tonality. Most startling of all were the most conventional moments – a straightforward popular song-style modulation and a quaintly resolved final chord.

David Fennessy’s duo for violin and cello, Changeless and the changed, while beautifully played, perhaps sat rather oddly in the middle of a programme which was framed by two more quintets. It opened with Mingdu Li’s Superposition and Measurement, a quantum physics-inspired piece by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Masters student that was premiered at the conservatoire’s 175th birthday celebrations last year, and closed with Stuart MacRae’s lockdown composition from 2020, Ursa Minor. It probably presented the group at its most integrated and was, in its pictorial and atmospheric way, the ideal work with which to end.

The festival had begun by referring back to previous incarnations of The Night With … through a set by virtuoso violist Garth Knox that included pieces he played in 2019 at Glasgow’s Hug and Pint, by RCS composition student Nora Marazaite and self-composed. The second of his Entropies, entitled Pluie, was precisely titled not just in its sound but in its effect on the weather at the food truck, while his closing duet with fellow viola player Ruth Gibson, Still Points, repurposed the familiar “Theme by Thomas Tallis” that Vaughan Williams used to distinctive effect, much as Knox’s Microtonal Blues had earlier radically revised Muddy Waters.

But, perhaps surprisingly, its was the work of two dead composers that will be remain in the memory from Knox’s festival-opening gambit. The Prologue to Gerard Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques was specifically requested by Whiteside for its exploratory meaning as the event’s first utterance. Kaija Saariaho’s exquisite Vent nocturne (Night Wind), was composed for and dedicated to the viola-player by the Finnish composer, who died in June this year, and he played it in her memory.

Keith Bruce

Two Night Stand

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Matthew Whiteside talks to Keith Bruce about the festival of new music that has sprung from his concert season The Night With . . .

With dismal news recently about long-established events south of the border in Dartington and Cheltenham, this might not seem the most auspicious time to be launching a classical music festival, but Glasgow-domiciled Irish composer Matthew Whiteside is not a man to be looking over his shoulder at events elsewhere.

Since he arrived in the city to do a masters degree at the Royal Conservatoire, Whiteside has been an entrepreneurial force for new music in and beyond Scotland, his undergraduate student concert promotions at Queen’s in Belfast blossoming into a concert season visiting a touring circuit of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Belfast under the banner “The Night With . . .”

Next month, The Night With . . . becomes a two-day festival in Glasgow’s newest post-industrial venue, The Engine Works in Maryhill. On Thursday and Friday December 14 and 15, the two spaces on the site will have a rolling programme of 15 performances featuring five new commissions among a total of 12 world premieres.

There are in the line-up composers and performers that will be familiar to fans of The Night With . . . season concerts, but in the festival they sit alongside work by more established names both from home and abroad, Caroline Shaw, Alvin Lucier, Kaija Saariaho and Terry Riley on a list that also includes Helen Grime, Stuart MacRae, David Fennessy, Janet Beat and Claire McCue.

In part that is down to the involvement of the Hebrides Ensemble, whose Thursday concert opens the programme in the venue’s larger space.

“The Hebrides is an ensemble I’ve wanted to work with for a while,” says Whiteside, “but because of the venues I’ve used, an acoustic piano is not usually something I can programme and that’s one of their core instruments. For the festival I’m hiring a piano, so we can do that repertoire and we’ve commissioned a piece from Rylan Gleave for them to play.”

Paul McAlinden’s Govan-based Glasgow Barons are also bringing a chamber group to the party and their programme includes work by another Scotland-based Northern Irishman, Gareth Williams, as well as William Sweeney’s 1989 Sharakan for quintet and electronics.

The other large ensemble taking part is United Strings of Europe. Their Thursday night concert includes a new work written by Whiteside, teaming the strings with soprano Emily Thorner.

“United Strings of Europe is a scale of ensemble [13 players] that we couldn’t have toured with The Night With . . .,” say the composer. “Their leader and artistic director, Julian Azkoul, is first violin on my album, Entangled, and I’ve made them an arrangement of my Sixth Quartet.”

As well as Whiteside’s new work, United Strings of Europe will be playing Claude Vivier’s Zipangu and Henryk Gorecki’s Three Pieces in the Old Style at Whiteside’s instigation. “That’s a pairing that has been in my head for about 15 years,” he says.

Thorner has her own programme on the Friday, opening with a Berio Sequenza and including works composed specially for her.

Viola virtuoso and established The Night With . . . associate Garth Knox opens the event on Thursday afternoon, and he appears again on Friday in an ensemble that also includes Xania Pestova Bennett on Magnetic Resonator Piano. Her presence over the two days begins with a recital featuring two works for the instrument submitted to a call for scores from The Night With . . ., by Ollie Hawker and Rebecca Galian Costello.

“The Magnetic Resonator Piano is essentially 88 guitar e-bows that resonate all the strings of the instrument,” explains Whiteside, “so you can crescendo the piano from nothing, and have infinite sustain. It is like a crossover between a digital synth and a piano, and does things a piano shouldn’t do. It’s utterly stunning!”

As he has done with his season concerts, Whiteside will be recording everything at the festival, and a live album should appear in the Spring. Completing the synergy, one of the Friday concerts, by Ensemble 1604 and show-casing composer Timothy Cooper, is a live iteration of an upcoming studio release on TNW Records.

This side of Whiteside’s practice, as a passionate spokesperson for fairer treatment of musicians by streaming companies, as well as a self-made expert on techniques and pitfalls of selling your own music, will shortly arrive in book form.

“During the pandemic I started lecturing and giving webinars about how to self-release your music,” says Whiteside. “It’s not talked about in the classical world at all, although universities and tertiary education institutions are getting better at introducing their students to the business of music.”

“The webinars were selling out and people were really enthusiastic about the information I was giving them. There was a clear demand for more resources, like a book.

“It’s basically sharing my own experience and knowledge of releasing music. It goes into rights and registration, and distribution, but also recording sessions and the psychology of talking to performers, how to mark up a score, cover art, and the business of branding.”

If that seems like a packed 180 pages or so – and available for Christmas, the composer hopes – it is backed up by links to more information on his website. And that is not the end of Whiteside’s current entrepreneurial agenda.

“One of my other hats is as an agent for contemporary classical and avant-garde music, placing music with film and TV producers.

“I’ve gone to Los Angeles twice and had meetings with teams at Disney, Universal and Sony to tell them: ‘I’ve got all this weird stuff; the next time you’re doing a film like Shutter Island, come to me.’ It’s a long game but I’m building those relationships and that’s another side of where I’m going with TNW record label. Synchronisation could generate income in tens of thousands of dollars for composers.”

As well as taking an agent’s percentage, Whiteside is himself one of those composers and he sees none of his other work as separate from that essential self-description.

“It is not a distraction from composition, because I see it as being all part of the same thing. I write the music that I want to write, and I take any opportunities to sell it on. I just can’t be arsed waiting for gatekeepers!”

The Night With . . . festival is at Glasgow’s Engine Works on December 14 & 15.

https://thenightwith.com

Pictures: Soprano Emily Thorner and violist Garth Knox

The Night With . . Juice

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Drygate, Glasgow

Composer/promoter Matthew Whiteside’s strategy of presenting cutting edge new music in venues with none of the austerity often associated with that endeavour has never seemed as bold as it did on Saturday night, where the upstairs room was accessed through a pub/restaurant packed with folk who had probably been more concerned with sport that afternoon, and who were never inaudible.

If that meant the audience had to focus their ears more carefully as they quaffed the craft brewery’s ale, it was an exercise well worth the effort. Opening with Meredith Monk’s wordless call-to-attention, Offering, sung solo by Anna Snow, the vocal trio’s first set was completed by two world premieres, the second by Whiteside himself with an electronic underscore triggered from a laptop by himself. And This Too Shall Pass was a lockdown project full of signals of the passing on time – bells and metronomes, breathing and babble – which made considerable demands on the singers’ vocabulary of vocal effects, closely integrated with the instrumental soundtrack.

It was in contrast to the even newer work, by Royal Conservatoire of Scotland composition student Amy Stewart, Mountain High. Completed in workshops with the group, Stewart’s heartfelt lament for the stolen youth of the children caught up in the present conflict in Ukraine married the Kyrie from the Latin Mass with a Ukrainian folk song, There Stands a High Mountain.

Thereafter, the tone lightened, even if the music itself was often complex, three of the following four pieces being specifically concerned with the goddess Venus. Elizabeth Bernholz, a.k.a. Gazelle Twin, and the Afrofuturist Nwando Ebizie both start from the same point with their pieces Goddess Awake and The Birth of Venus, but travel in very different directions. With a looping soprano figure, sampled mezzo and narration, the precision-engineered performance of the former was the easier to appreciate, while the non-singing vocal techniques and pre-language story of the latter was a dense and complex climax to the programme.

The work of French-born sound artist Olivia Louvel has visited the 16th century before, and specifically the story of Mary Queen of Scots. Her composition Not a Creature of Paper draws on the Venusian love sonnets of Renaissance French feminist Louise Labe in a collage of overlapping text and tunes and fireworks in the electronic underscore.

With the rich alto tones of Steph Connor replacing Kerry Andrew in the line-up, these three works were perhaps the building blocks of a future Juice Ensemble album, the exception being Croatian composer Mirela Ivicevic’s Orgy of References, another solo – this one performed by soprano Sarah Dacey. An absolutely hilarious setting of the notional biography/curriculum vitae of a young musician, it plays with all the cliches in a jumble of showstopping moments and academic earnestness, and required huge amounts of skill and panache to pull off as successfully as Dacey did.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Sarah Dacey

New Antonine Brass

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Drygate, Glasgow

It would have been terrific to be able to report that the re-start of composer Matthew Whiteside’s enterprising presentation of new music in less formal surroundings, The Night With . . . , signalled a return to normal service for those with voracious ears. Alas, his 2022 season opening, with modern brass quintet New Antonine Brass, was beset by pandemic-related problems.

Horn player Lauren Reeve-Rawlings was already in for founding member Hayley Tonner when trumpeter Lloyd Griffin tested positive for Covid. Despite Whiteside’s best efforts on both sides of the Irish Sea, no dep could be found for the opening of the group’s short tour in Belfast or for the dates in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, which left only the Glasgow concert, for which Alistair Douglas was available to jump in, on the band’s dance-card.

At least they were able to play their inventive broad programme once this time out, and there was a good-sized audience to hear it – and huge plaudits to Douglas for his last-minute role in making the presentation of such challenging music possible. Although the intimacy of the project’s previous Glasgow home at The Hug and Pint was fun, it seems to me that the extra space at Drygate suits the artistic director’s vision for The Night With . . . even better.

Formed at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2014, and with original members Mark James (trumpet), Lewis Bettles (trombone) and Danielle Price (tuba) present and correct, the group’s programme embraced some famous names and brass quintet repertoire favourites alongside two box-fresh works and others that were nearly new. It is no slight on the safe reputations of Witold Lutoslawski, James MacMillan and Olivier Messiaen to say that the new pieces were at least as memorable on the night.

Following the Lutoslawski Mini-Overture that opened the concert, this web-site must give big thanks to Bettles for his solo feature (complete with audience participation and some radical playing techniques) of John Kenny’s Pandora’s Box, because it is the first occasion on which we have been able to mention the work of the trombonist composer since we began. As the Pictish war-horn he had reconstructed to play gave VoxCarnyx half its name, that recognition is long overdue.

The other solo of the evening was Messiaen’s Appel Interstellaire, from Des canyons aux etoiles, played by Reeve-Rawlings and similarly extending the usual sonic possibilities of her instrument. Tuba player Danielle Price perched on the edge of the stage to take the solo part in the world premiere of her own Room in Shared Apartment Looking for a Soul, which also involved all her colleagues as she moved easily from a rhythmic bassline to melodic improvisation.

That piece was followed by the first performance of Siobhan Dyson’s The Silence of the Blue Star, a commission by The Night With . . . inspired by a real celestial phenomenon and the composer’s fondness for science reaching into the unknown and finding itself surprised. That was reflected in passages of probing inquiry finding a calming, philosophical conclusion.

The other composer present was another trombonist, Ronald MacNiven. His JAPONICA was inspired by a Charles Rennie Mackintosh watercolour, its mix of colour of varying intensity reflected in the score.

The range of light and shade there was reflected throughout the programme, from MacMillan’s Adams’ Rib to the concluding Dowland Suite, Mike Svoboda’s smile-inducing re-purposing of tunes by the early English composer.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Matthew Whiteside by Julie Howden