Psappha - webcast 2 programme notes

Claude Vivier

Et je reverrai cette ville étrange

Claude Vivier

Shiraz

Claude Vivier

Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele?

Claude Vivier
Journal

Nicholas Kok conductor
BBC Singers

PSAPPHA ENSEMBLE

Tracey Lloyd trumpet
Richard Casey Piano/Keyboard
Paul Janes & Jeremy Young keyboards
Tim Williams percussion
Raymond Lester viola
Juliet Welchman cello
Jeffrey Box double bass

Claude Vivier (1948-83)
Et je reverrai cette ville étrange

One of the most remarkable composers of his time – hailed as such by György Ligeti – Vivier created a personal style of incantatory melody floated in shadowy clouds of tone. He was born in Montréal, where he studied with one of Messiaen’s pupils – Gilles Tremblay – before going to Cologne in 1972 for two years of further training with Stockhausen, who made a crucial impact on him. Soon after returning to Canada he established himself nationally, while working towards the new voice he sought – one that would express the sensuality and spirituality he felt integral to himself as a homosexual. This voice at last came to sound in his Lonely Child for soprano and orchestra, which he completed in March 1980.

After that, for a year and a half, he composed at a furious pace, one of the last works of this period being Et je reverrai cette ville étrange (‘And I will again see that strange city’), which he wrote for the Canadian group Arraymusic. Perhaps the title refers to his restless search for an ideal place, musical and social. The six players, on trumpet, viola, cello, double bass, piano and percussion, project a melody that goes out into the world steadfastly without harmonic support, like plainsong, creating for 15 minutes a strange and memorable location indeed.

Claude Vivier
Shiraz

Along with Stockhausen, what most influenced Vivier as a musician was the journey he made in 1976 across Asia, and in particular his visits to Japan, Bali and the ancient Iranian city of Shiraz, all of which he directly recalled in subsequent works. On Bali he had been exceedingly impressed by what he called ‘interlocking’. One pattern (note-rest-note-rest-note-rest) is played simultaneously with its displacement (rest-note-rest-note-rest-note), and so the result is a regular rhythm (note-note-note-note-note-note). This duly happens in Shiraz, which in its often Messiaenesque harmonies, its virtuoso speed and its fracturedness suggests a facetted jewel. Vivier described Shiraz, which he visited on his way back from Bali, as ‘a pearl of a city, a roughly cut diamond’, and he included in the dedication of the piece ‘two blind singers I followed for many hours in the market place’ there. A sense of wonder at great architecture and exotic life is thus fused with a sympathy for the underdog that was among Vivier’s strongest human features.

Claude Vivier
Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele?

In June 1982, wearied by the provincialism he felt around him in Montréal, Vivier moved to Paris. For any Québecois, the French capital was the centre of cultural life; for Vivier the city was more specifically the home of new music – the home, particularly, of the spectralists who were his contemporaries, composers such as Gérard Grisey and Hugues Dufourt. At a distance he had shared their exploration of overtone spectra as models of orchestral sound; now he was at the source, though it is unclear how much time he was willing to spare from other kinds of experience: Mahler in the concert hall, sex in bars. His life became a fling into the abyss. Meanwhile, he tried to find an operatic outlet for the new musical style he had discovered the year before, planning at one point a kind of opera-requiem on the last days of Tchaikovsky. Eventually, in January 1983, he set that project aside – or diverted it into answering a commission from the Groupe Vocal de France to write Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele? (‘Do you believe in the immortality of the soul?‘).

‘Listen to me, listen to me!’ says a tenor near the start of this piece. ‘You know I always wanted to die for love but...how strange it is, this music that doesn’t move.’ ‘Speak’, says a contralto, and the tenor goes on: ‘I never knew –.’ ‘Knew what?’ ‘Knew how to love.’ The contralto then asks him to sing a love song, and one follows – in the ‘invented language’ Vivier had often used before. But the song fades away, and the voices turn to what sounds even more alarmingly like autobiography. One of the synthesizer players, speaking into a vocoder, recounts an episode that Vivier told as a dream in a letter he wrote to one of his Montréal friends. The narrator is attracted to a young man on a Métro train, who sits down next to him, introduces himself, pulls out from his black jacket a dagger, ‘and thrusts it right into my heart’. There the score ends. On 12 March 1983, Vivier was found in his apartment, where he had lain dead for five days. There were 45 knife wounds in his body.

Claude Vivier

Journal

All the way from Chants (1972-3), which he regarded as his Op.1, to Glaubst du? (1983) – a distance of only a decade, but also a creative lifetime – Vivier kept returning to the sound of human voices gathered together: the sound of a human community, and the sound also of a liturgy. It was the sound of his opera Kopernikus (1979), which clinched his reputation in his native Montréal.

The model of choral harmony was surely fixed in his mind by his upbringing in zealously Catholic Quebec, but its particular form also owed something to a work by his teacher Stockhausen: Stimmung (1968), in which six singers vocalise for over an hour within a continuing chord based on the overtones of a low B flat, a warm bath of consonance at one exciting and serene.

Like this Stockhausen work, Vivier’s Journal, written in 1977 to a commission from the Festival Singers of Toronto, is at once cosmic and personal. It was, with Shiraz, among the works of exuberance and self-discovery he produced on returning from his Asian trip. It was also designed as a musical, spiritual and sexual autobiography – a summation, perhaps, before the next step forward. As in most of his vocal works, Vivier assembled the text himself, drawing – and again this was normal for him – on favourite texts (Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, the poetry of Novalis and the Catholic liturgy in this case) and on his own words, in French and in his invented language.

The presence of a solo percussionist, signalling, adds to the ritual atmosphere. The work lasts for a little under an hour.

Nicholas Kok principal conductor, Psappha

An extraordinarily versatile musician, Nicholas Kok’s work as a conductor and pianist has led to his engagement in major opera houses and concert halls, and at leading festivals, throughout the world. He has recently been appointed Principal Conductor of Psappha, the leading new music and music-theatre ensemble in the North of England. Concurrently with this role, he continues his association with sinfonia Viva (formerly East of England Orchestra), of which he was Principal Conductor (1996-2006), becoming Principal Guest Conductor last year.

With a remarkably wide operatic repertoire ranging from Monteverdi, Handel and Mozart to Humperdinck, Britten and beyond, Nicholas Kok has established a reputation as a longtime champion of contemporary music, conducting numerous world and UK premieres. He has also collaborated (as conductor, composer and arranger) with several leading choreographers.

Nicholas Kok has worked with many of the UK’s major orchestras and ensembles, as well accepting many overseas engagements. He has composed, arranged and recorded regularly for radio and television, as well as being involved with recordings for Opera Rara and Chandos.

Future plans include new productions of Gluck's "Orphée" for Stuttgart Staatsoper, Piccinni's "La Cecchina" for Münchner Kammeroper, two Stravinsky programmes with Birmingham Royal Ballet and concerts and recordings with Psappha, ViVA and the BBC Singers.

BBC Singers

Established in 1924, the BBC Singers constitute the UK’s only full-time professional chamber choir. The versatility of this virtuoso 24-voice ensemble makes it both an important resource in the BBC’s music broadcasting and a major force in British musical life. The BBC Singers’ repertoire includes everything from Renaissance music to the latest contemporary scores, and the choir’s unrivalled expertise with the latter has brought about creative relationships with some of the most important composers and conductors of the 20th and 21^st centuries.

As at home on the concert platform as in the recording studio, the BBC Singers also regularly work with the BBC’s own orchestras, a number of period instrument and contemporary music ensembles, and with a host of internationally renowned conductors. The BBC Singers’ expansive outreach programme includes regular collaborations with school children, youth choirs and the amateur choral community, as well as with the professional composers, singers and conductors of tomorrow.

Sopranos
Jennifer Adams-Barbaro
Ildikó Allen
Margaret Feaviour*
Micaela Haslam*
Elizabeth Poole°
Olivia Robinson*
Lesley-Jane Rogers

Altos
Lynette Alcántara*
Jacqueline Fox*
Siân Menna°
Jennifer Ord
Stephanie Seeney
Penny Vickers*

Tenors

Basses
Simon Birchall*
Michael Bundy*
Sam Evans
Charles Gibbs
Adrian Peacock*
Edward Price°

*Glaubst du

°Journal soloists

For more information visit bbc.co.uk/singers

Christopher Bowen
Edward Goater*
Stephen Jeffes°
Robert Johnston
Neil MacKenzie*
Andrew Murgatroyd*

Psappha
The leading new music and music-theatre ensemble in the North of England, Psappha was formed in 1991 by its Artistic Director Tim Williams. With Nicholas Kok as its first Principal Conductor, Psappha has an extensive and exceptionally varied repertoire of over 300 works and a reputation for technical assurance and interpretative flair. Its eight-strong regular membership encourages a refreshing diversity in the instrumentation of its repertoire, but its performances all bear the hallmark of sophisticated ensemble playing, marked by a high degree of communication and empathy among the players.

Its distinctive concert series and mini-festivals have featured commissions and other premieres of works by a wide range of composers including Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (Psappha’s Patron), Anthony Gilbert, Gordon McPherson, Karen Tanaka, Ronald Caltabiano, Rebecca Saunders, John Casken, Piers Hellawell and Steven Mackey.

In 2000 Psappha gave the premiere of Mr Emmet Takes a Walk, a music-theatre work by Maxwell Davies (with direction and libretto by David Pountney) which it co-commissioned. The production won the Manchester Evening News Theatre Award for Opera 2000, was enthusiastically received on European and UK tours, and has just been released on Psappha’s own CD label.

Based in Manchester, Psappha has appeared throughout the UK, at such major music festivals as Aldeburgh, Bath, Buxton, Cheltenham, Huddersfield, Oxford and St. Magnus (Orkney); at the BBC Proms (where it made its sensational debut in 2004 with a late-night concert marking Maxwell Davies’s 70th birthday); and in Henze and Maxwell Davies portrait series in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.

On the international platform, Psappha has made highly successful tours to North and South America, Australia, Belgium, France, Holland, Ireland, Jersey, Portugal and Spain. In 2004 it established its own CD label with unconducted performances of Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King and Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot. It also has six recordings on a range of other labels.

Education projects represent an important part of Psappha’s busy schedule both in the UK and abroad. Currently the University of Manchester’s Contemporary Ensemble in Residence, it collaborates with people of all ages, devising and participating in composition workshops and courses, and was awarded the Swatch City Life Award for Best Concert Series and Education Work.