Category: Manchester Collective

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Manchester Collective: Cries and Whispers – Live Review

The White Hotel, Salford

Saturday 14 March 2020

Everything they touch turns to musical gold

*****

Dmitri Shostakovich

This was a concert for troubled times. Manchester Collective’s Managing Director, Adam Szabo thanked us for braving the weather and the virus. He said that this performance, the end of a short tour, would be the end of Collective concerts for a little while. He asked us to share our thoughts with freelance musicians. For those who work in the gig economy, everything is uncertain.

We had been promised dark music, unsettling art for unsettling times. We began with the deep dark twisted fantasy of a madrigal by Carlo Gesualdo, set for string quartet, Moro Lasso whose original words began, 

I die, alas, in my suffering,
And she who could give me life,
Alas, kills me and will not help me.

The chromatic harmonies of the piece are as warped as the character of the composer, whose depraved history was mentioned in the introduction by violinist Caroline Pether. It would not be until the dark days of twentieth century when such harmonies be used regularly in western music again.

Caroline introduced the next piece, Benjamin Britten’s First String Quartet, as dark but also magical and human. Written in America during WWII, it began with sparkling partials from the upper strings, before the main theme appeared. At another point, the notes fell like gentle rain.

Throughout the piece, the variety of sound produced by just four string players was remarkable. Sometimes quiet and ethereal, at other times gutsy and grainy, always visceral. The playing was always passionately rhythmic, driven by a fierce musical intelligence. As the Collective themselves put it,

Our string quartet concerts are some of the most personal shows that we build. There’s something about that particular lineup which feels terrifyingly intimate – like there’s a direct connection between each of the four players, and every listener in the room.

This being the White Hotel, the venue itself provided its own soundtrack to the music. The garage door behind me rattled – was it just the wind, or spirits trying to get in, or out? Snatches of chatter, a ring pull on can snapping open, a police siren, a car rumbling past. In the middle of it all, the players sat undisturbed, watching each other with undivided concentration, external distractions somehow making the emotional power of the music even more focused.

The final piece was Shostakovich’s deeply personal eighth string quartet. It began with a doleful melody, then the sound of a wounded creature crying in the night. Painful sweetness led to stuttering, manic dance. Fierce sawing of bows, a lumbering rhythm, then eerie high strings. A nostalgic melody, then shimmering, aching beauty. Then a bitter calm. The performance was spellbinding, drawing us deep into Shostakovich’s dark and anguished world. It seemed to be over very quickly, as if we had stepped outside time for a while.

Having heard the Collective performing several times recently, I can now safely say that everything they touch turns to musical gold. Please come back soon!

Gesualdo Moro, lasso
Britten String Quartet No. 1
Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8

Caroline Pether Violin
Doriane Gable Violin
Ruth Gibson Viola
Jack Bailey Cello

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Manchester Collective: The Centre is Everywhere – Live Review

Manchester Collective

The White Hotel, Salford

Saturday 30 November 2019

A stunning concert of metamorphosis and a curious incident of a dog in the night time

*****

The White Hotel in Salford is neither a hotel nor is it white (more like a little off-white). It’s a former car repair garage, now a night club. It still feels more like a garage than a night club. And it was cold, very cold – to be fair, I had been warned. It reminded me of another local venue, The Haçienda, a former yacht showroom, which was cold and cavernous in the days before it became an extension of Ibiza and was always full. And before the concert itself started one of the songs sounded played by the DJ sounded like Manchester band The Fall, who played at the Haçienda.

I forgot the cold in the intense white heat of the stunning first half, as one piece metamorphosed into another to create a strangely coherent whole.

The Collective performed only a few feet away from the audience who surrounded them. And being so close to the performers (I could read the cellist’s score over her shoulder) meant that we felt part of the music making. The intensity of the performers’ concentration was almost visceral.

The first half began with a gently-sung, quietly kind, introspective Bach chorale which metamorphosed into some of the most fiercely rhythmic string playing I have ever heard, in part of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. There were also excerpts from Ligeti’s terrifying First String Quartet Métamorphoses Nocturnes, which echoes the quartets of Bartók to the extent that the composer György Kurtág called it ‘Bartók’s seventh string quartet”. Having just re-watched Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining for about the fourteenth time, Jack Nicholson limping through the snow with an axe in his hand and a snarl on his face, sound-tracked by Ligeti and Bartók, loomed in my imagination. The pieces were seamlessly glued together by interludes or Vignettes composed by Paul Clark, to make a cohesive whole.

The baleful barking of a lonely dog outside in the empty Salford night punctuated the first half of the concert; at one point I was convinced it was barking in perfect time with the music. A curious incident of a dog in the night time.

The second half began with Rakhi introducing The Centre is Everywhere, a new piece for strings by Edmund Finnis. She said we would need to listen intently to the sounds that Finnis conjures from the strings, starting with almost white noise. It’s a remarkable piece, with scurrying strings above more slow-moving themes, like the wind disturbing the surface of the ocean.

Then came Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss, introduced by a quote from his diary, written as he sat in the ruins of Munich at the end of WWII,

The most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve-year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany’s 2000 years of cultural evolution met its doom.

Originally written as a piece for 23 solo strings, it metamorphosed into something entirely different in this version for seven solo strings. The post-Romantic, smeared, almost surreal blur of the original became at times as limpid as a Haydn string quartet, every line sparklingly clear. A revelation.

Bach Selected Chorales
Clark Vignettes
Ligeti Métamorphoses nocturnes
Vivaldi Four Seasons
Finnis The Centre is Everywhere
Strauss Metamorphosen

Rakhi Singh Solo Violin

Violin Steve Proctor, Caroline Pether, Helena Buckie, Will Newell, Will McGahon
Viola Ruth Gibson, Kimi Makino, Kay Stephen
Cello Peggy Nolan, Will Hewer
Bass Sam Becker