Perfect Offering is a joint venture from Huddersfield Contemporary Records and NMC, and is a nice break from portrait discs which often, in my opinion, cram too much of a composer's work on a CD with little nod to thematic curation. This album is quite the opposite: four long-ish pieces from four high-profile UK composers, if in different ways, from the repertoire of the Explore Ensemble. Explore are led by Nicholas Moroz, a sort of Pierrot +1 +1 +1 outfit with an extra pianist, violinist or oboist as the case may be. Perfect Offering feels held together thematically by the works’ similar lengths and understated styles; perhaps this is the ‘affinity’ the ensemble writes of feeling with these works, a word that does not do enough but which does feel borne out in the selected pieces.
The most striking piece, unsurprisingly by Cassandra Miller, is the first, the eponymous track. The liner notes speak of bells and the imitation of bells, but as usual I find this direct reference less compelling than the music itself. The first section is a series of Debussyian piano impetuses, the decay of which is curiously and delicately padded out by the ensemble. This is music of breath and breathing, of waves, rhythm and pacing. It plays so directly with rhythm and our expectations, our attention so closely held to what might come next, that it almost reminds me of the sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave, which seems to prey not on our impulse for laughter, but rather just how exactly to place weird events in time to keep our disbelief perpetually balanced on a pinhead. Siwan Rhys’ piano stands out for her confidence and clarity, although this is not a place in which we will hear virtuosity.
This section alone would be a captivating piece, but of course there is more. The piano and ensemble coalesce eventually into a section where there is less decay and more continuous overlap – this somewhat spoils the suspense of the earlier section to me, but only compared to the latter's brilliance. It definitely builds anticipation in preparation for what is to come; I prefer cuts and jumps myself, but this is solidly paced. We are surprised by a sudden, soft, insistent clarinet solo on the same note, evocative of bells in a different way. A Wandelweiser sensibility should not be able to be ‘approximated’ by way of context, it should not be possible to reproduce the feeling without the scale, but Miller comes close with this clarinet solo. It is the ease, the patience, the love. I hear so much love in this music. After a few more skilful flourishes (a common tone modulation, a repeated chord that echoes the beginning) we are set down.
If you play this album without paying too close attention, I guarantee you will slip from track 1 to track 2 without knowing, and ditto for track 2 to track 3 and perhaps the whole thing. This perhaps does an injustice to Lisa Illean's Weather a Rare Blue. While at first coming off as the most conventional piece on the album, upon closer listening there is a lush soundworld at play. The ensemble is noise, wind, machines, seeping in, sneaking into the background, fading away, interacting with the piano. Piano features seem to be another thing tying at least the first three tracks together; here, Joseph Havlat punctuates and outlines the foggy texture. Later there is wonderfully lyrical cello playing by Deni Teo, accompanied by Havlat's perfectly muted, understated piano. I do wish the piece had picked a direction either towards motion or towards monolith; in this middle ground I never feel totally immersed. Its textures and moments, however, are full and comforting.
Lawrence Dunn's 22-minute Suite is bewildering in both source and result. Starting off like a 20-layered mensuration canon, the instruments wind around each other in soft-spoken, meandering melodies, none fully audible over the other. The liner notes promise ‘refracted counterpoint, ricercars, sarabandes, dances, fauxbourdon… concerned with history, migration, confinement, and colonialism’. The notes also make a big deal out of the ‘flatness’ of the way the piece is performed, and I struggled throughout as this flatness flipped back and forth in my mind, like a 2D cube drawing, between ‘meta-flat’ and ‘flat’. After 12:00, though, the texture breaks brilliantly, and the ensemble shifts into exhilarating fits and starts, complete with (again barely-audible) field recordings and electronic aspects. At 17:00 we enter into the most dramatic portion, with a strong pedal note in the bass that edges oh-so-close to ostinato, drawing the climax out for quite a while until the shimmering ending.
It is perhaps old school of me, but I am stricken by how the experience of this piece would be worlds away if one did not read the liner notes, or if the liner notes commented more on the technique of those musical forms rather than their sources. Politically, I wonder: what are we encouraged to do? There is definitely an aspect of Brechtian alienation, perhaps the frustration I feel at my inability to pick apart the texture should mirror the frustration I feel in the face of injustice in the world, all the better to practice breaking out of it. Perhaps I am meant to be motivated to research the piece's sources on my own time. The piece is a large achievement and cinematic in scope; the notes write of the work being ‘strange-but-familiar’, and I spent a good amount of time longing for more of the strange. Dunn seems to be taking the high road past the overt referentiality of a composer like Alfred Schnittke, and I am encouraged to explore more of his catalogue to hear how this treatment evolves.
The album closes with a version of murmurs by one of Europe's pre-eminent composers, Rebecca Saunders. Saunders is an expert sound-sculptor, and Explore Ensemble does not miss the opportunity to sound wonderful while interpreting her work. In performance, musicians are placed around the room in arrangements of soloists and duos, and this CD includes an extra track with a binaural mix of murmurs to better account for this immersive experience. murmurs is representative of the best of twenty-first-century musique concrete instrumentale, and one can easily picture oneself in the hall, the ear wandering among the exhibits while the body stays put. The clarinet of Alex Roberts, and the string section of David López Ibáñez on violin, Morag Robertson on viola and Deni Teo on cello, shine the most brightly as their piercing tones and tremolos push our consciousness through the fog into another realm, however briefly.
This record was a statement from the moment it was announced. From a distance, the four pieces could almost be seen as four individual answers to the same prompt, and yet the only redundancy here is the expertise of the composers and the consistency of the performances. While bits of the album perplexed me, as a whole it is a must-listen for a monumental snapshot of British new music of the past years.
