Download Programme notes Stevie Wishart The Rough with the Smooth

The Rough with the Smooth Tuesday 12 May 2015
The Rough with the Smooth
Tuesday 12 May
7pm
Queen Elizabeth Hall
Violins 1
Kati Debretzeni
Huw Daniel
Madeleine Easton
Roy Mowatt
Claire Sansom
Mark Seow*
Violins 2
Alison Bury
Andrew Roberts
Claire Holden
Jean Paterson
Emilia Benjamin
Magdalena Loth-Hill*
Violas
Oliver Wilson
Nicholas Logie
Kate Heller
Louisa Tatlow
Emilia Benjamin
Daniel McCarthy*
Cellos
Jonny Byers
Helen Verney
Ester Domingo Sancho*
Basses
Chi-chi Nwanoku MBE
Cecelia Bruggemeyer
Recorders
Rachel Beckett
Catherine Latham
Lute
Elizabeth Kenny
Chi-chi Nwanoku MBE double bass
Frances Kelly harp
Elizabeth Kenny lute
Harp
Frances Kelly
Harpsichord/Organ
Steven Devine
*OAE Experience participant
Programme notes
Stevie Wishart
The Rough with the
Smooth: Concerto à
Double Entendre
i
ii
iii
Kati Debretzeni director/violin
Prelude & Fugue
Air
Passacaglia
This concerto is Wishart’s
third major orchestral
commission. The inspiration
for it arose in part from a
desire to recreate the role
of improvisation in musical
performance, which was
explored while the composer
was a Visiting Music
Fellow at the University of
Cambridge in 2014.
Except in the specialised
area of the organ, the role of
improvisation has steadily
diminished since the time
of the Baroque, in favour
of an increasingly exact
following of increasingly
precise instructions from the
composer. This is by contrast
with the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, where
such things as continuo
realisation and ornamentation
– and sometimes even
such fundamentals as
orchestration – were
entrusted to the discretion
of the performers. The result
of this progressive change
has been that something is
lost: the performer is less
empowered as his or her
scope for contributing to the
overall sonic outcome is more
circumscribed.
The Rough with the Smooth Tuesday 12 May 2015
Programme notes
Over the course of the last
year, Wishart has carried out
some research into the role
that historically informed
improvisation might have
in contemporary music, and
this concerto is a practical
manifestation of these
theoretical ideas. The OAE
– with its background in
music of the 18th century – is
ideally placed to perform it.
However, the more space
there is for the performer to
be involved in the creative
process, the more the
performers need time to
rehearse, so that in many
ways the score is a timesaving device. In writing the
piece, a central concern has
been how to work within
the constraints on rehearsal
time, and the piece will only
continue to evolve through
successive performances.
Wishart has therefore
decided to make this piece
for Double Bass in the form
of a Concerto Grosso using
a small core group of soloists
as in the baroque ‘concertante’
that would then have a
trickle-down effect when
the rest of the orchestra, the
‘ripieno’, came together to
rehearse.
The melodic material
is based upon the open
strings of the bowed string
instruments (violin, viola,
cello and double-bass),
and is exemplified on the
theorbo (something of a bass
lute) which has a special
tuning using these same
pitches: when the theorbo
strums through all its open
strings (which is its main
role throughout), it passes
through the resonances of
the entire string section.To
enhance the resonances of
the open-strings (and their
overtones and harmonics),
the “laisser vibrer” technique
is used throughout the
Concerto so that all notes
are allowed to fade away
naturally without damping.
This principle guides the
string allocation of musical
pitches as well as the musical
pitches themselves. The
musicians’ ability to master
this technique of playing each
successive note on a different
string is intrinsic to the entire
Concerto. Only the soloist
occasionally wanders outside
the open-string pitches,
hinting at tonal centres of
D major or minor, whereas
all the rest of the orchestra
concentrate on chords made
up of the open strings, giving
the entire piece a fragile
melodic and harmonic
transparency, providing a
modern twist on the forward
motion and security of
traditional Baroque harmony.
In the Concerto Grosso
form, which is ideal for
improvisatory playfulness,
the piece unfolds in true
Baroque form with a Prelude
and Fugue (‘a succession of
timbral as much as melodic
motifs’, based on the form of
the ‘ouverture’ used by many
Baroque composers).
The Rough with the Smooth Tuesday 12 May 2015
Programme notes
It is followed by an Air
which plays off the ‘airiness’
of harmonics, and the lead
violin’s long held note – a
sonic tight-rope hovering
over the double bass’s
cadenza.
In the final Passacaglia the
open-string pitch-series
becomes intensified as a
Baroque-like repeating chord
sequence, framed in minute
detail by the repeating and
continuously waxing and
waning harpsichord clusters.
During this movement there
is a timbral sub-text as the
entire orchestra gradually
shifts from smooth to rough,
from bowing to plucking,
while the soloist does the
reverse, rough to smooth,
drawing the piece to a close
with hermetic bowing of its
lowest notes.
Along the lines of Handel’s
Concerti a due cori, there
are two concertino groups,
divided into a ‘rough’ group
made up of plucked strings,
and ‘smooth’ group with
bowed strings. The solo
double bass is included in
both groups, forming a sonic
‘bridge’ between the two.
The piece is performed
without a conductor,
being led by violinist Kati
Debretzeni who features
as a soloist, alongside the
principal double bass soloist
Chi-chi Nwanoku, to create
a musical sound-world
rooted in the 18th century’s
passion for improvisation and
hypnotic harmonic loops.
“The piece is all about
resonance, overtones and
sympathetic vibration. The
entire orchestra play only
open strings and harmonics
so that melodies only surface
through a barrage of ‘soundclouds’ and gentle noise.”
Stevie Wishart
The composer would like to
extend warmest thanks to the
FoAM studios in Brussels
where she is composerin-transience, and to the
musicians and colleagues who
have helped bring this work
to its first performance.
Biography
Stevie Wishart
composer
The Rough with the Smooth Tuesday 12 May 2015
Stevie Wishart studied composition and
electronic music at the University of York
with Trevor Wishart and Richard Orton, as
well as improvised and aleatoric music with
John Cage in Edinburgh. She continued
postgraduate studies in early music (baroque
violin and voice) at the Guildhall School of
Music and Drama (Diploma in Advanced
Performance) and with a Vicente Cañada
Blanch Junior Research Fellowship at New
College, University of Oxford. As a composer,
violinist and hurdy-gurdy player/improviser,
she often looks back to look forward, and is
passionate about exploring music’s unique
ability to express new ideas on a level which
transcends other routes of communication.
Wishart likes the challenge of creating music
for a wide range of contexts such as working
with Wayne McGregor, and performing (solo
violin)/composing for the designer Philippe
Starck’s Le son du nous (Exit festival, Paris),
as well as more conventional composing
including a BBC Proms commission, choral
works such as her Vespers for Hildegard
(a full-length setting for the Feast of St
Hildegard, part of which was performed
in St Peter’s Rome and then in full in York
Minster), her Cantata The Seasons for the
Ipswich Choral Society, and a series of
acapella works for St Catharines’s Girls
Choir, Cambridge and for Voice. Her work
has been supported at the Künstlerinnehof
Die Höge, at ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst
und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe; at the
ADK, Akademie der Künste, in Berlin, with a
Visiting Music Fellowship at the University of
Cambridge, and with an on-going Composer
in Transiency at FoAM studios in Brussels.
She has recorded for Hyperion, Decca and
numerous indie labels.
Recent CDs/ DVDs
The Sound of Gesture, for violin, sensors and
computer sound transformation/synthesis.
A series of solo compositions which are
conceived as visual pieces and filmed by Berlin
video artist Yvonne Mohr.
Vespers for Hildegard, for voices, harp, organ
and remix tracks (Decca).