James
MacMillan
Chamber Music
with
Robert Plane,
clarinet
BIS
- BIS-CD-1269
Visions
of a November Spring (String
Quartet No.1 - 1988/91)
Why is this night different?
(String Quartet No.2 -1998)
Memento for
string quartet (1994)
Tuireadh for
clarinet and string quartet (1991)
The
Independent
"The loneliness one dare not sound": Emily Dickinson's
frightened image could well serve as the motto for James
MacMillan's Tuireadh (Gaelic for lament) where Robert
Plane's gull-like clarinet swoops or hovers around the
anguished Emperor String Quartet in remembrance of the
ill-fated North Sea oil-rig Piper Alpha. Some have spoken
of the work's "keening", its sighing and sobbing.
But the overriding impression for me is of solitary witness:
the scrub of bows on gut like wave-slapped wreckage, or
a winged clarinet fighting off jagged string chords. Every
now and again MacMillan cues an ethereal chorale. A moment
of respite or the crooked finger of a summoning god? Tuireadh
shares its disc with MacMillan's two string quartets,
the First, Visions of a November Spring, taut and boldly
modernist, with D major swarms troubling the first movement
and recollections of early Bartok in the second. Memories
of later Bartok inform sections of the Second Quartet.
Never one to pose, MacMillan strips his language for Momento,
a brief evocation of Hebridean psalm-singing that conjures
the modal serenity of Beethoven's A minor String Quartet,
Op. 132. It concludes a remarkable programme that's beautifully
played and superbly recorded.
The
Strad
Here is a feast for the serious musician, as James MacMillan's
chamber works contain some of the best of his output.
Although a few of his larger works have inclined towards
an awkwardly contrived 'accessibility' he remains a master
at blending his modernist background (notably Lutoslawski,
through his teacher John Casken) with an inspired, fresh
voice harking back, above all, to early Celtic chant,
much as East European composers have delved into their
folk origins.
Both
Tuieadh and the brief Momento are a lament for things
lost, past or dead: the former an elegy for the victims
of an offshore oil rig disaster, helped to crysallise
for him the idea of incorporating into his music the melodic
shape of the Scottish caoine, or 'keening'. This sad,
evocative, rising semitonal (or even microtonal) form
of prayerful lament infuses Tuireadh's slow passages to
poignant effect.
The
spirited Emperor Quartet reveals itself immensely sympathetic
to MacMillan's idiom - magnificent, for instance, in the
hushed harmonics which lend an eerie commentary late in
the Second Quartet, and in the mesmerising final cello
fadeout. It is particularly affecting in the violin harmonics
and trilling that precede the fading in of clarinet halfway
through Tuireadh, and in the work's final apotheosis (the
BIS sound could not be better). The performance is vital
yet brilliantly controlled in the nervy and searing outbursts
that energise the First Quartet (written a decade before
the Second), whose foreshadowing of the composer's later
style becomes all the more apparent.
The
Observer
…Maintaining the technical precision we've become
accustomed to with the superb Emperor Quartet, the performers
gently mould their treatment of the different scores in
constant sympathy with MacMillan's shifting accent.
