Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4.0 out of 5 stars
I cannot believe I am writing this, 5 April 2009
A couple of years ago I was exploring what was the most far out in modern British contemporary music, mainly through perusing the website of the NMC record label. I found some things that were amazing, The Intelligence Park - Gerald Barry, Triumph of Beauty and Deceit [IMPORT], Burrell: Orchestral Works, some things that were QI (quite interesting), Thea Musgrave: Helios, Judith Weir: Blond Eckbert and one thing against which I banged my head many times but could make no headway with. This item, Ferneyhough's Shadowtime.
Let us be clear right now, to save the 99.76% of music lovers who are not going to be interested the trouble of reading further. Shadowtime is out there with the very latest of British hyper-post-modernist, audience despising, squeakery, creakery. Ferneyhough is of the school known as 'the New Complexity' which is characterised by scores of outrageous difficulty, where the tiniest nuance of each instrument is specified with exhausting exactitude. Instruments are maltuned and malplayed to create soundscapes that are about as remote as possible from any standard orchestral experience. Shadowtime is called an opera but its a long way from Bayreuth, Toto. So there it has sat, on my shelf for a couple of years, deemed a sad mis-purchase.
Forward to now and a real shock. I've been on a pretty strict regime of late Romantics for the last few weeks, Bruckner, Mahler, Wagner (people ending in er?). And some reaction must have occurred because I suddenly found myself WANTING to listen to Shadowtime. What's more I found myself actually really absorbed in it, (I don't know if enjoy is the right word for something so cerebral). It's now the following morning and I'm playing it again and yes, there is genuine enjoyment taking place. I think I was trying too hard before. The trick seems to be to just let the sounds wash over one and to ask occasionally, "what am I feeling", and I find that, more or often than not, it is a response to beauty, somewhat akin to that found in Barbara Hepworth's garden or one of the less nasty Tate Modern canvases (the sort they keep in St Ives rather than on the South Bank). Despite the musical language seeming superficially harsh and abrupt the overall effect makes a soothing change to all the fate-ridden crashing abouts and unbearable beauty of the guys ending in 'er'. Much as I adore them one can have too much of even their supremely good things, so it would seem.
So, once more it is proved to me how very capricious musical taste, or at least my musical taste can be. I would give it five stars, however, although I've found oneness with the music my original impression of the libretto, by someone called Charles Bernstein, remains unchanged. The libretto, purportedly based on the imagined speculations of the cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, immediately after his suicide, is really just fragmentary nonsense, and nonsense of neither a poetic or philosophically interesting kind. The questionable libretto however, does not prove to be that much of a drawback as the 'opera', at least at my current stage of understanding, has so little narrative structure that the words serve little more than an onomatopoeic function. The arch contemporary pianist Nicolas Hodges gets to 'sprechstimme' some of these words, but he also gets to play some extraordinarily beautiful piano music.
I hope I've managed to make clear the kind of folks who are going to respond to this music. This is Angels fear to tread stuff. But for those committed to exploring the outer limits of serious music then, no guarantees, you might just get an, out of the blue, inimitable experience from this one.
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~ Iannis Xenakis
~ Iannis Xenakis
~ Jimmy Holliday
~ Meshuggah
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