After an acclaimed set of Beethoven Piano Trios, Trio Sōra turns its attention to Brahms in a complete set of Piano Trios including Brahms' own version of his Horn Trio. Released on La Dolce Volta label on 26 April, it marks the final project using the Trio's 2020 Borletti-Buitoini Trust Fellowship, which also included the commissioning of a Triple Concerto from Canadian composer Kelly-Marie Murphy, premiered in 2022.

Brahms Piano Trios (complete)

iii Brahms Piano Trio No 3 in C minor Op 101 iv Allegro molto (end)

ii Brahms Piano Trio No 2 in C Op 87 ii Andante con moto (excerpt)

i Brahms Piano Trio No 1 in B minor Op 8 (revised 1889 version) i Allegro con brio (excerpt).mp3

Geysir was a commission for the Britten Sinfonia. It was imagined as a partner to Mozart’s Serenade in B flat (K.361), the ‘Gran Partita’, drawing on the same instrumental forces: pairs of oboes, clarinets, basset horns, bassoons, four horns, and double bass.

Geysir’s relationship to Mozart goes beyond programming convenience. Geysir – the Icelandic word for geyser, from the Old Norse geysa, ‘to gush’ – is the surface emanation of two ideas in the Serenade. The first is the resplendent B flat major chord that opens the ‘Gran Partita’: fulsome homophonic textures, making extravagant and atmospheric use of warm clarinets, basset horns, bassoons, and french horns, are key to the design of Simpson’s piece – though Geysir extends the spread and range of these chords to generate a sound world very much its own.

The second compositional seed comes from an especially numinous moment in Mozart: variation five of the Serenade’s sixth movement. A quartet of clarinets plays various iterations of a spread B flat major chord, pianissimo, with horns underneath; above this an oboe sings a plaintive and lightly-ornamented melody. These murmuring, overlapping figures are where Simpson finds the ‘bubbling’ clarinets at the outset of Geysir, and they shape its further melodic impulses. Texture itself is an idée fixe in Geysir, summoning a musical landscape that is organic, intuitive, even atavistic.

The title’s volcanic logic manifests in different ways. Its textural organisation combines a pulsing underlay of lugubrious French and basset horns, thickened by oozing bassoons and double bass, with lyrical eruptions from pairs of clarinets and oboes. The denser lower registers of the piece slacken and quicken across uneven syncopated rhythms like flows of magma or shifting tectonic plates, supplying energy for outbursts from clarinets and oboes above, as if a superheated column of steam and ash has breached the surface of the musical crust.

This is evident in the most intensely pressurised climax. The accompanying lower instruments pulse faster and surge upwards into loud blocks of sound that cover the ensemble’s entire range, cracking open to allow a screaming oboe through, like an old-fashioned kettle at a furious boil; the work’s tremors gradually subside and the lower instruments cool to a more dormant state, the piece ending more or less as it began. Simpson’s instrumental ensemble itself represents another canny link between title and timbre. Clarinets, oboes, and horns have a similar mechanism to volcanic eruptions themselves, as pressurised air is forced through narrow pathways to expel sound, breath, and moisture, in ways that can be explosive, spectacular, sinuous, or languid.

© Benjamin Poore, 2020

Geysir

One of three commissions made possible by recorder player (and singer) Lucie Horsch's 2022 BBT Fellowship, Reza Namavar's Fetiapoipoi was premiered in May 2024, with Lucie and the Orchestra of the 18th Century. The three movements bear Tahitian titles, the first is titled ‘Pouri’, meaning darkness, the second movement ‘Fetiapoipoi’, the morning star rises, and the last movement ‘Poipoi’, the morning. So within the piece there is a development from darkness to light. And Lucie also sings in the middle movement, based explicitly on the text of Vivaldi’s aria ‘Sovente il sole’. More live performances are scheduled for December 2024.

Reza Namavar Fetiapoipoi 

Reza Namavar Fetiapoipoi iii Poipoi

Reza Namavar Fetiapoipoi ii Fetiapoipoi

Reza Namavar Fetiapoipoi i Pouri

Performed live by Ben Goldscheider (horn) and Phillip Dawson (live electronics) at the Purcell Room - 27th June 2024  

Darkness Moves II is a continuation of my exploration of the work and ideas of the Belgian-born poet and artist Henri Michaux (1899-1984). In 1955, he experimented with the drug mescaline four times over the period of six months. He found that the most striking effects were not profound transformations of external objects but rather the inner visions which poured through his mind like a weirdly agitated and vibrating film, often seeming to possess his whole being.

I've tried to recreate in sound what this experience might have felt like: a dark, frightening, ecstatic, earth-shattering dive into the unknown and a deep confrontation with the self.

Whilst Darkness Moves I featured a recording played almost simultaneously and manipulated in a slightly controlled improvised manner with live electronics in real time, my ideas for the electronic component of Darkness Moves II were more specific and, as a result, the piece is very much a duet between the horn and electronics.

Thanks go to Ben Goldscheider and the Marchus Trust for commissioning this work and also to Philip Dawson, whose expertise in realising my ideas for the electronic component have been exactly as I'd heard them.

Mark Simpson, 2024


" in Mark Simpson’s Darkness Moves II, inspired by the work of the artist-poet Henri Michaux and his experiments with mescaline, Goldscheider’s extraordinary virtuosity and the potential of the real-time electronics were fully exploited, and there was a true dialogue between the two. Simpson’s vivid, surreal musical gestures and their interactions with their digital transformations were spectacularly vivid, so that the piece acquired a theatrical dimension that was totally compelling." - Andrew Clements - Guardian

Reza Namavar Fetiapoipoi ii Fetiapoipoi

Borletti-Buitoni Trust

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