Review Details
UNIVERSITY NEW MUSIC GROUP
Alan Cooper
30 April 2009
King's College Chapel
After listening to Thursday’s concert given by the University New Music Group led by Paul Tierney, I would have to say at once that this group has now fully come of age. Their performance was as accomplished as anything I have heard recently, and it included one of the most technically challenging pieces in the repertoire, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. I was absolutely blown away by their entire performance. The two other pieces which prefaced the Schoenberg classic were by lecturer Miriama Young and by Paul Tierney himself. These proved to be ideal companion pieces to Schoenberg’s classic since each work explored different facets of vocal technique and all three used highly colourful and surprising poetry as texts.
For her piece entitled The Inner Voices of Blue, Miriama used a small instrumental ensemble almost identical to that used by Schoenberg. The main difference was that Miriama included a vibraphone (sometimes played with a bow) which Schoenberg, who also used a bass clarinet, does not. In addition, Miriama employed special techniques, percussive and otherwise on the piano, played expertly by Richard Bailey. The greater part of the poem by the American poet Sarah Arvio (b. 1954) was sung by Heather Ireson. Her rich creamy mezzo, often supporting very long held, unwavering slow passages was a real delight. Some of her lines were spoken rather than sung and Richard Bailey also spoke one of the stanzas. This threw these words into high relief. The poem Côte d’Azur speaks of the sea, of water and of tides and Miriama’s instrumental writing coloured many aspects of this seascape most effectively. It was a moving and wonderfully imaginative piece of sound painting.
Paul Tierney’s Nightsongs set three poems by the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin for unaccompanied soprano. Enter the amazing Frauke Jurgensen who was to astonish us with her performance in these songs and later in Pierrot Lunaire. Paul’s settings of the words were expansive, sinuous and often startling in their chromatic changes of melodic direction but if Frauke ever got lost, I was not aware of it. (This being the first time I had heard these songs.) It was a thoroughly convincing and completely compelling performance.
There was a short interval before Frauke reappeared dressed in proper Pierrot costume and white makeup, much to the delight of some of the young female students in the audience. It was not long however before our splendid Pierrot, now ensconced in the pulpit of the Chapel, launched into a thoroughly spellbinding performance of these surprising and often deeply unsettling poems. Sometimes whimsical, sometimes fiercely dramatic and then, once or twice, with a broad and rather macabre turn of comedy, this part a little disturbing for the more elderly follically challenged members of the audience like myself, Frauke took us on a madcap ride across a pale moonlit landscape of dreams and nightmares. The six instrumentalists conducted by Paul Tierney gave a marvellous performance mutating from a small orchestra into individual soloists or groups of different sizes giving the music an extra dreamlike transformational quality. I can only marvel at the amazing feat of concentration that these young musicians achieved. Lose one note in any of these pieces and you will not easily pick yourself up again. There were no hitches in this smooth flowing performance which is why I say once again that this group has truly come of age.