At Lunch 2

The Telegraph, Ivan Hewitt, 20 January
The Observer, Fiona Maddocks, 24 January

The Telegraph, Ivan Hewitt, 20 January
Rating: * * * 

Nico Muhly and Britten Sinfonia, review
Young New Yorker Nico Muhly may be one of the hottest composers on the planet, but his music also pays homage to some unhip influences - like the Jacobean composer Orlando Gibbons. 
 
IF anyone rivals Thomas Adès for the title of the planet’s hottest composer, it’s surely the young New Yorker Nico Muhly. So it was a very smart move on the Britten Sinfonia’s part to bag two world premieres from him. The first of them was premiered by the Sinfonia in Krakow last weekend, and had its first UK outing in Cambridge on Tuesday.

Muhly’s music has an urban, street-wise energy, much influenced by Steve Reich’s pattering minimalism. But he softens the hard edges of minimalism with other influences, some of which are decidedly unhip. One of them is the Jacobean composer Orlando Gibbons, whose gravely beautiful, immaculately crafted counterpoint seemed old-fashioned even in his own lifetime.

Muhly adores Gibbons’s music and paid homage to him several times over in this concert. First, we heard his arrangements of three of Gibbon’s sacred pieces, done for string quartet, clarinet and piano. Sometimes the quartet did duty for the viols, sometimes they were the chorus; the solo vocal lines were discreetly recoloured, now by a violin, now by a clarinet.
Occasional flecks of colour marked a new strand in the counterpoint, or an important word in the (absent) text. It was all very chaste, soft-toned, and touchingly sincere.

Muhly’s new piece, Motion, was also infused by Gibbons, but it began in his familiar territory of dancing patterns, punctuated by big pauses that were like those moments when a break-dancer poises perilously on one hand before continuing in hectic motion.

Over this dancing grid a viola line stretched itself, soon joined by violin and clarinet – until, lo and behold, there was a complete phrase of Gibbons floating over the restless backing track. It was as if this grave 17th-century gentleman in his black doublet and white ruff were dancing on a New York sidewalk with baseball-capped youth. It was a nice conceit, featherlight and puckish like the man himself.

In complete contrast came Herbert Howell’s Rhapsodic Quintet, a hazy post-First World War dream of an English rural idyll that might have been touching if the echoes of Vaughan Williams and Ravel hadn’t been quite so flagrant.

Fortunately, the Britten Sinfonia saved the best until last – Aaron Copland’s wonderful 1930s Sextet. A touch more razzmatazz in the playing would have made the perky American neo-classicism of the piece more vivid; it was all rather English and understated. But the tenderly balletic slow movement was beautifully caught.

Nico Muhly’s next premiere for the Britten Sinfonia is in February. Information: www.brittensinfonia.com

The Observer, Fiona Maddocks, Sunday 24 January 2010
Nico Muhly; Wigmore Hall, London

Arriving from New York, Nico Muhly, cool, blog-mad, cross-genre whizzkid composer, went out and bought “a million veal bones”. He needed to make stock. The act of skimming fat from liquid at 35-minute intervals, he said in a Radio 4 interview, keeps him normal, gives him a framework, a reason to sit down at or get up from his desk, and stops him being “a crazy workaholic”.

In print this reads like pretentious twaddle. On the radio it sounded funny and self-mockingly credible. Something has to keep the 28-year-old Rhode Islander from being swallowed up by his own vortex of activity. He ticks all boxes: he’s been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, writes film scores (The Reader), collaborates with the cultish likes of Grizzly Bear, Final Fantasy and Philip Glass. He also has a passion for early English choral music even greater than his fixation on baby beef.

This was the facet, of the many on offer, chiefly in evidence at a lunchtime series heard in London, Cambridge, Birmingham and Norwich, the start of his short residency with the Britten Sinfonia. His loving arrangements of three Orlando Gibbons verse anthems were pleasant, if not quite a revelation.

Muhly’s own quicksilver work, Motion (2010), was far more invigorating. It showed how his voice might develop if he sticks to his stockpot and isn’t lured by other glamours. Again he began with Gibbons but made a punchy urban anthem for string quartet, piano and clarinet out of glittering contrapuntal fragments. He has a new work for Mark Padmore coming up. Watch him.