Joanna & Arve

The Times T2, Geoff Brown
Queen Elizabeth Hall
**
In their mission to keep us refreshed, the Britten Sifnonia regularly present the unusual, somtimes the downright odd. The odd certianly dominated Tuesday’s concert, curated and directed by the pianist Joanna MacGregor, but dominated by the extraordinary playing of the Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen.

There’s no one quite like him. Young fiendish breathing control. New felicities in embouchure and close contact with a mike, Henriksen ditches the trumpet’s heraldic gleam and coos reatily, jazzily, just like a flute, especially the Japanese shakuhachu. So it was in the moody landscapes sampled from his album Cartography. The flute-trumpet also ruled in MacGregor’s own Lost Highway, half an hour of doodles on gospel songs and blues from the American Deep South.

Only a perverse genius or a fool would remove a trumpet’s innate qualities and replace them with qualities summoned without sweat in other instruments. Given Henriksen’s extraordinary skill he’s certainly no fool. But that didn’t make Tuesday’s music any more nourishing. Melancholy meditations on modern life, the Cartography extracts were at least short and to the point, virtues missing from the aural fog of Lost Highway.

MacGregor had reworked the pieces to embrace Henriksen and the Britten Sinfonia strings. Through semi-improvised pereginations and minimalist fuzz, characterful tunes such as Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child had their corners knocked off and emotions smothered. A strong stucture would have helped; instead the piece wobbled like jelly.
Items at either end of the concert provided welcome ballast. The ritual progressions of Arvo Pärt’s Fratres gave the Sinfonia their best chance to demonstrate silken subtlety.
MacGregor’s own turn to shine came with the madcap whirl of James MacMillan’s Piano Concerto No 2, inspired by Edwin Muir’s poem Scotland 1941, an angry elegy for a noble nation traduced by the pursuit of pelf. Fists clubbed the keys and fingers leapt. Strings kept busy too, hopping through the crazy patchwork of ancient Scottish melodies, dizzy reels and mashed-up bits of Lucia di Lammermoor. The concerto’s venom went missing, but after Henriksen’s amazing watery trumpet we all needed a carnival ride.

Bach Track, Hannah Gill

It’s not often in classical music that the performers themselves are the main focus of our attention; more often than not they are at the service of the composer. But this evening was an exception to the rule, showcasing the multi-talented Joanna MacGregor and Arve Henriksen. In the absence of a conductor, the musicians performed with a great sense of rapport throughout, ably directed from the keyboard by MacGregor.

The concert began with the hushed, ritualistic opening of Arvo Pärt’s Fratres for strings and bass drum with claves. In his tintinnabuli style (literally ‘little bells’), Pärt writes remarkably effective music using very little material. From the subdued opening, the homophonic string texture grew more impassioned with each refrain. This was such an atmospheric performance that the applause had the effect of a broken spell, confirming Pärt’s assertion that ‘it is enough when a single note is beautifully played.’

The next two works by MacGregor and Henriksen themselves fused a variety of styles, with mixed results but always fascinating, for I had no idea which musical direction they would take next. Here the two musicians showed us the full range of their abilities as both composers and performers.

Described as a ‘sound innovator’, Arve Henriksen plays the trumpet like no one else. He has cultivated a flutey, silken tone that though at first was a little disconcerting, often had a highly emotive vocal quality. He was perfectly matched by MacGregor’s smoky piano chords for the opening of Lost Highway, a work that draws on gospel and blues as well as music by Tom Waits and Nick Cave. At times the music had a driving quality that suggested the endlessness of the American highway, using piano riffs and percussive string figures.

Most effective was Lowside Blues (known to some as an ABRSM Grade 7 piece), arranged here for piano, trumpet and solo violin. The instruments seemed to transform themselves in the manner of a chameleon, the muted piano strings recalling bass guitar while the trumpet provided a low, percussive impetus. Thomas Gould’s elastic violin solo had a raw, liberated approach that was present throughout the piece, epitomised by the tinny 1920’s recording of two children singing Everybody Help the Boys Come Home. The main problem here was that sometimes there were just too many ideas and overly lush orchestration - a more judicious balance would have been welcomed. The four pieces by Henriksen opened with a spoken work recording that spoke of travel, people and places, punctuated by gamelan-like bells. Then a laid-back looped drum motif fused with silvery strings while Henriksen improvised a solo, also using a piccolo trumpet and guttural vocal cries. This was soulful playing but ultimately there was not enough variety to distinguish the different movements and hold our interest.

From American blues to Scottish jigs, James MacMillan’s Piano Concerto No. 2 brought a much needed contrast, drawing heavily on folk music as part of a ballet score. This was an altogether more boisterous work, opening with a vigorous string unison and ‘snap’ plucked bass, alternating with more elegant, ornamented interludes from the solo piano. In between the murkier episodes was a playfully deliberate waltz in the manner of Strauss, with MacMillan often toying with a faux-sentimentality. Other humorous episodes came in the form of a Henry Cowell-esque ‘clusters’ episode that simultaneously obscured and made a mockery of the main theme.

The finale ‘Shamnation’, was a riotous reel, at times delightfully bonkers as it evoked drunken festivities with whooping from the orchestra members. This culminated in a remarkable athletic display of pianism. MacGregor dispatched muscular palm clusters whilst maintaining the spirit of the reel, ending with a sweet smile as if it had all been child’s play.

Bath Chronicle thisisbath.co.uk, Peter Lloyd Williams
Bath Festival Opening Night concert

One of the most fascinating discoveries in this remarkable programme was that the two main presences, Joanna MacGregor and James MacMillan (though alas not in person), were born on the same day. As she confided to Petroc Trelawny, presenting for BBC Radio 3, “We’re twins!”. And what an astonishingly versatile musician she is, pianist, composer and conductor, equally accomplished in Bach, Messiaen and Gershwin et al. And she shares with MacMillan the courage to take risks, to experiment – to boldly go where none had ventured before. Sometimes it doesn’t come off. But this programme was a triumphant vindication of both her talent and her judgment.

We heard her own composition, Lost Highway for piano, trumpet and strings, a compilation of Gospel and Blues from the Deep South, a ravishing set of sounds, magically played, with Arve Henriksen’s plangent trumpet adding a silvery dimension, leaving us alternately galvanised and dreaming. James MacMillan’s 2nd Piano Concerto is a reworking of a ballet score, Cumnock Fair, with two additional movements, Shambards and Shamnation, made up words as he describes them, with a distinctive Scottish flavour. It is a remarkable piece, requiring a bravura piano technique and it has a lovely solo violin obbligato from Thomas Gould, whistling while he played, with gorgeous string playing from the excellent Britten Sinfonia too.

It brought the audience to their feet in admiration for the adventurous personal quality of the music and the virtuosity of the players.

MacMillan’s choral music is always a pleasure to hear, imbued, even in the secular works, with his powerful Catholic faith and we had five pieces, the Gallant Weaver, A Child’s Prayer, After Virtue, So Deep and The Halie Speerit’s Dauncers, beautifully sung by the Wells Cathedral School Chamber Choir under Nigel Perrin.

I particularly enjoyed the setting of After Virtue, a piece of prose in honour of St Benedict, performed with a combination of vigorous energy and reflective contemplation. It was courageously experimental and these young singers produced a range of rich sounds which would have delighted MacMillan. It was, in every sense, a breathtaking evening’s music, with a strong tartan influence, emphasized, as we reeled out of the Abbey, by a reprise from the City of Bristol Pipes and Drums.
Peter Lloyd Williams

The Guardian, Rian Evans
Bath festival – review ****
Bath Abbey

For the opening of Bath MusicFest, its artistic director, Joanna MacGregor, put herself centre stage with the Britten Sinfonia. Their concert has toured other venues, but MacGregor added the bells and whistles here. Bagpipes and drums, actually – processing in to Bath Abbey and reflecting the festival’s Celtic theme. MacGregor’s fearlessly eclectic approach and her pianist credentials have helped push the once-staid festival into a new era; the buzz in the abbey was palpable.

After the piping came crystalline purity, in the form of the chamber choir of Wells Cathedral School, under Nigel Perrin. They sang three part-songs by James MacMillan, the impeccably articulated harmonies coalescing into a misty, ethereal haze. With After Virtue, an unusual setting of words from Alasdair MacIntyre’s study in moral theory, the pulse quickened towards an impassioned climax. The haunting lines of So Deep and the exuberance of The Halie Speerit’s Dauncers then set the scene for MacMillan’s Piano Concerto No 2, for piano and string orchestra, originally conceived for New York City Ballet. Although listeners could connect with the tight weave of folk melodies, seeing on a screen the fisticuffs and elbowing of the keyboard by soloist MacGregor was, for many, surely an eye-opener.

Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen performed in Lost Highway, MacGregor’s own piece for
piano, trumpet and strings. MacGregor’s invocation of Charles Ives, John Cage and Steve Reich in her essentially jazz score added its own interest, but the flutey quality of Henriksen’s sound was simply dazzling.

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