Apartment House OLIVIER MESSIAEN Quatuor pour la fin du temps LINDA CATLIN SMITH Among the Tarnished Stars

The UK ensemble Apartment House performs two works: Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du Temps in six movements, and Linda Catlin Smith's Among the Tarnished Stars, taking a fresh modern approach to the Messiaen, drawing out its experimental character, and the sense of drama and intricate gradations of sonority in Smith's rich and mysterious work.

Ensemble Grizzana JÜRG FREY & MAGNUS GRANBERG Early to Late

Jürg Frey and Magnus Granberg are two of the musicians who feature most frequently in the Another Timbre catalogue. So, when the label commissioned two new works in 2015, it was no surprise that they were the chosen composers. Performed by Ensemble Grizzana, including a stellar line-up of AT regulars alongside Frey and Granberg themselves, the resulting pieces were premiered at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival at the end of November 2017, receiving a prolonged ovation and rave reviews. Fortunately, immediately after that concert, both were recorded and have been issued together on Early to Late so they can now be listened to and savoured repeatedly. 

When commissioning the pieces, AT proprietor Simon Reynell expressed a wish that their music should have some kind of relation to Renaissance music, and this led to the compositions being based on Déploration sur la mort de Binchois by Johannes Ockeghem and O Lord, How Vain Are All Our Frail Delights by William Byrd. In fact, the new works sound like distant cousins of those that inspired them; it is possible to hear traces of the older works, but those of Frey and Granberg are stronger. Although some listeners may choose to check out the Ockeghem and Byrd compositions, the new works can be fully appreciated in their own right without knowledge of the older ones. 

One of the many fascinations of Early to Late is that Frey and Granberg were given the same brief and ended up producing different end results. Granberg's ethereal "How Vain Are All Our Frail Delights?" allows players greater individual freedom than Frey's more tightly co-ordinated "Late Silence." In addition to the core instruments, from the options available within Ensemble Grizzana, Granberg and Frey chose to add quite different instruments, giving their pieces contrasting sound palettes; Granberg played celesta on his own piece alongside glass harp and dulcimer played by Simon Allen, zither by Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga and electronics by her, Richard Craig and John Lely; Frey chose for Granberg and Lely to both play harmonica and stones. 

Despite such methodological differences, Frey's and Granberg's works complement one another so perfectly that they sound designed to be heard together. By meticulous placement of silences and sounds, each of them slowly but surely creates a mood compatible with Ockeghem and Byrd, one of exquisite melancholy. The resulting music is so subtly restrained and beautiful that anything played immediately after it can easily sound crass or tawdry by comparison. Consequently, this is one of those rare albums that one feels compelled to play again as soon as it is over. Ultimately, Early to Late must be judged to be a quintessential Another Timbre album, and surely there can be no higher recommendation than that. Already on my 'best of 2018' list. (John Eyles)

OSVALDO COLUCCINO Atto

“In this day and age, CDs constructed using bits of recordings of acoustic objects are ten a penny. Apart from how well it is done, what makes Atto so interesting is that its creator Osvaldo Coluccino is better known as the composer of more traditional instrumental and electroacoustic works, with past releases appearing on heavyweight contemporary music labels such as Col Legno and Neos.  For this release, in an attempt to challenge himself by breaking away from the clichés of the music he usually creates, Coluccino decided to work only with acoustic objects not normally related to music making, using them in such a way that their identity could not be figured out, thus attempting to return to a simple essence of sound apart from the cultural and historical baggage attached to his usual working methods.

If giant leaps were made by Coluccino personally, the end results here are less original in their form, but even so, you can hear the acute painterly ear he has applied to the arrangements on Atto. The sounds used are mostly quite small; little squeaks, crashes and scrapes, some crunchily brittle, others colourfully tonal, and all recorded in a large resonant space but then distributed and sequenced with great care and a consistently sharp consideration of structure. Coluccino doesn’t just stack sounds up; nor does he ever let the music slide into any kind of drone. Instead he gives every sound the space to stand up for itself alongside its companions and allows them to build an often quite dramatic narrative that forms finely balanced compositions.

In an interview on the label’s website, Coluccino states that Atto will not just be a passing diversion away from his usual work, and that he plans more composition in the same vein.  This can only be good news, as he brings a sense of compositional integrity that is quite hard to find in a growing field.” (Richard Pinnell / The Wire)

John Tilbury / Philip Thomas MORTON FELDMAN Two Pianos and other pieces, 1953-1969

The music featured on these two discs testifies to the intensity of Feldman’s experimentation with notation and sound during the 1950s and 60s. Considering the works chronologically one senses the composer trying out, teasing and developing means of notation to get close to his desired elasticity of time and duration. His experiments with indeterminacy of pitch – whereby Feldman specified only the register (high, middle, low) of sound rather than the exact notes themselves – do not feature here; after trying this method in a series of works in the early 1950s he abandoned the technique, with a few notable exceptions straying into the 1960s, because he was too ‘attached’ to the pitches he wanted. 

All notes are specified exactly in the pieces on these discs – the experiments are instead with duration and time. Durations of sounds are variously free, dependent upon the decay of the sound, worked out in coordination with other players, as well as at times exactly and complexly notated within a specific tempo. Sometimes the freedoms of notating time are worked through in combination with listening closely to the sounds of other players, allowing patterns to emerge without forcing the situation, whilst at other times different ways of notating time are combined, creating false alignments in the score and thus placing greater emphasis upon the individual performer’s journey.

The piano is an inherently indeterminate instrument - any given note will have a very different afterlife dependent upon the touch of the performer, the register of the note, the type and size of the piano, the acoustic of the space in which the piano is situated, and so forth. Put six or seven of these notes together as a chord and the situation becomes complex. In all these pieces Feldman specifies the dynamics to be quiet, or as quiet as possible, or very quiet. However the notion that Feldman’s music is ‘about’ quiet-ness is a misconception: the subject is sound, and in order for that subject to be properly attended to those sounds are quiet. The range of pieces presented here depict very many different types of quietness – from the delicate sounds of Piano Three Hands and Piano Four Hands to the massed complexities of Two Pieces for Three Pianos. Quietness in Feldman’s piano music is a performance instruction which is everything to do with touch and the desire to really hear the instrument. As such these recordings are a celebration of the piano (its tone and its decay) and piano playing, for all its frustrations and challenges – an instrument which is at the heart of Feldman’s music. (Philip Thomas)

JOHN CAGE Four4

“Another Timbre celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of John Cage's influential work "Silence" by releasing  "Four 4", a work written in 1991, the year before Cage died. It was written for four percussionists, but the composer in his typical way, chose to let the musicians decide which instruments to use! By selecting the general instrumentation, while still allowing players to choose the specifics freely, Cage showed that he does not really lack interest in how the music should sound, he gives up only on the detail of the choices.  So his ego drew back, but - paradoxically - that doesn’t mean that he allowed that it should sound like just anything. Cage was not a pronounced friend of improvisation, or rather, he saw it only as one of many methods.

These days the elements of silence, style and repetition are often used within improvisation.  Without thinking about it, improvised musicians work with sounds and materials that are often reminiscent of Cage’s music. In this piece he withdrew having created a meagre economy of musical means for the players to explore. He used so-called "time brackets" in the score, determining only how long the piece should be.  In "Four 4" he lets the first player start his "time bracket" choice somewhere between 0'00 and 1'00, but it must end somewhere between 0'40 and 1'40. When such different "time brackets" are used for multiple players, the result will vary substantially in each realisation, and that leaves the performers with an enormous amount of artistic nuance and sensitivity with regard to each other's playing. This method creates a narrow limitation on one plane, but leaves things wide open on another dimension.

This performance opens with 30 seconds and ends with another 90 seconds of silence, or rather of inactivity by the musicians. This extreme openness of structure inevitably creates a relationship with so-called free improvised music. The soundworld  that is heard is significantly interwoven with the kind of low-dynamic gestures that we are used to in improvised music. As soon as the performance begins we sense both a slowness of pace and an energetic rhythmic repetition that moves between the instruments (and especially the very special timbres produced by Chris Burn’s piano).

The piece sounds as  transparent as improvised music often tends to be. It's also good to hear how a piece with written instructions can sound playful at times so that the pauses seem to vibrate with sounds.  Paradoxically, this recording of Cage which is a tribute 60 years after  "Silence" provides the clearest evidence of how alive Cage is within today's music.  The musicians, seasoned within improvisation, have brought with them a sense of nuance and group interaction so that Cage’s work is taken into a completely different rhythmic and tonal space than usual.  So let Cage think what he wants about improvisation, but these improvisers have developed his sound gently and firmly in their own way.” (Thomas Millroth / Sound of Music)

MORTON FELDMAN Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello

"Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello" (often abbreviated to "PVVC") was Morton Feldman's final composition, receiving its premiere on July 4th 1987, less than two months before the composer's death from pancreatic cancer on September 3rd. This recording of the piece dates from January 2017 at Henry Wood Hall, where it was recorded by Simon Reynell. The quartet of Mark Knoop on piano, Aisha Orazbayeva on violin, Bridget Carey on viola and Anton Lukoszevieze on cello had performed "PVVC" the previous September at Café Oto, on a night that stuck in the minds of musicians and audience, alike, for being one of the year's hottest. 

Having come through that night successfully, the January recording afforded the quartet a valuable opportunity to apply what they had learnt from the Oto performance and the audience's reaction to it. As Knoop has commented, "I always like returning to things after a first performance as there are some aspects of the music which can only reveal themselves in performance, no matter how much rehearsal is done."

The recording runs for seventy-four minutes, making it a challenge to maintain concentration both for the performers and the listener. The composition is as uncomplicated as its title suggests. Lacking any formal structure or obvious peaks and troughs, it evolves at its own glacial pace, with the introduction of even the smallest motif acquiring significance. While it is in progress, its twin fascinations lie in the smooth, effortless ease with which Feldman achieved that evolution without disquieting the listener, and the skill with which the quartet perform the music without occasioning comment.

Throughout, piano and strings operate together as an integrated unit, seeming to think, move, inhale and exhale as one. Altogether, it makes a beguiling listening experience but, because of that, concentration can easily be lost. With time and effort, it is possible to maintain focus throughout, whereupon the true beauty of the piece reveals itself, more and more with each new listening. An important and valuable addition to both the Another Timbre catalogue and the Feldman discography.“ (John Eyles / All About Jazz)

ANTOINE BEUGER Ockeghem Octets

1996-1998 I had been focusing on solo music or, as i would call it now: music for solo situations, exploring in what ways solitude (as opposed to loneliness) can be reflected and experienced meaningfully in a musical situation.

1998 my musical exploration of  “being two”, of the duo, started and is still continuing. you certainly noticed, that a lot of my music is duo music, or: music about “being two”, or, more radically, about love. I strongly believe, that of all the arts, music, the art of sounds appearing and disappearing, the art of approximation (in tuning, timing, sound balancing …), can be the most reminiscent, commemorative, resonant of the single most important event, that human beings may experience in their lives: love. And if music can be this, it should be this. Especially in the constellation that is by itself closest to a love relationship: the duo. 

2003, very much inspired by Alain Badiou’s book Number and Numbers, a study of number with a very strong political subtext, it occurred to me, that the number of people, which constitute a group, might have an essential impact on what can happen, which kind of interactions, of sub-groupings etc. may emerge in such a group.

In other words: that going from 1 to 2, or from 2 to 3, etc. is not just adding one, but shifting from one situation to another, different one. Badiou’s book encouraged me to think of each number as having its own “ontology”, constituting its own special “world”, as it were.

My idea then was to create a series of musical situations in which all players do the same: play very long, very soft tones. So it is not their being different from each other, that primarily shapes the musical situation, but their number, their “being two”, their “being five”, …

Of course, the shifts are more overtly dramatic with the smaller numbers, as in real life. But continuing my search I was really surprised, how even situations like “being eleven” or “being seventeen” may induce very specific worlds. 

Since 2010 Johnny Chang has been putting the series into practice in Berlin, this way allowing the ensemble Konzert Minimal to gradually emerge along the growing number of players involved in the pieces.

Last year ‘van riel tunings for fifteen’ was performed. (Antoine Beuger)