Red Hedgehog £12, £9 concessions
Trio D'Angelo: James D'Angelo, piano; DerShin Hwang, mezzo-soprano; Stephen Bennett, clarinet;
Trio D'Angelo are a newly formed ensemble of soprano DerShin Hwang, clarinettist Stephen Bennett and pianist James D'Angelo, mixes standard repertoire with contemporary works. For their London debut at the Planettree Music Festival they will perform works by Arvo Part, Alan Hovanhess, Jean Catoire and James D'Angelo. They will present a complete performance of Hovhaness's Saturn, Op.243 with text by the composer and one of Part's most popular works Spiegel im Spiegal. They champion the remarkable works of Jean Catoire, a very prolific minimalist composer who pre-dates such figures as Riley, Glass and Reich. The trio's founder James D'Angelo will be represented by two works, on poems of Walt Whitman, written especially for the group in 2010.
Programme
Spiegel im Spiegel 9' Arvo Part
Piano Sonata No. 9, Op. 204 15' Jean Catoire
Toward the Unknown Region* 6' James D'Angelo
(text- Walt Whitman)
The Whirling Butterfly* 4' 30" James D'Angelo
(text- Karin Karbanova)
Tears 8' James D'Angelo
(text- Walt Whitman)
INTERVAL
Clarinet Sonata No. 3, Op. 445 15' Jean Catoire
Saturn** 25' Alan Hovhaness
(text- Hovhaness)
* World premiere ** UK premiere
Jean Catoire is a reclusive prolific composer of a unique kind of sacred music whose full importance has yet to be recognised. Born in Paris in 1923 and nephew of the Russian composer Georges Catoire (1861-1926), Catoire was a student of Olivier Messiaen and the conductor Leon Barzin. The composer eventually rejected the aesthetics of Messiaen in favour of those of Bartok and Hindemith. From this point on he marginalised himself within the fashionable French musical circles. He found himself drawn to an altogether different sacred mysticism from Messiaen's and between 1948 and 1955 wrote more than 30 choral religious works. By the late 1950s his music was becoming increasingly stripped of embellishment to the point where it was anticipating the minimalist music of the late 1960s. Thus his first creative period (102 works of which 24 were destroyed) closed followed by two years of silence (1959-60). The second creative period (1961+) consists of 502 opuses for every standard instrumental and vocal combination plus works for synthesizer and Tibetan bowls. The volume is even greater when one considers that most of the works are over 30 minutes long, many lasting much longer (a few could continue up to 12 hours). Because he had to devote himself to much teaching and because of the labour and energy it took to write down what he calls his "auditive visions" (the works are seen, not heard), he had no time left to promote performances of his music. He realised too that musicians would be reluctant to play music that seemingly left no room for ordinary expressiveness. If one had to identify his sacred phenomenon of sound world with that of an established composer, it would be the music of Arvo Part. Suffering from ill health, he remains in Paris, doing some teaching and preparing his voluminous essays on the phenomenon of sound and other esoteric subjects for future publication. Catoire, who does not claim the title of "composer" but rather "transcriber", has stated that his works "...were realised with the objective of revealing sound in its pure state before it has passed through the filter of musical conception. The works are a juxtaposition of sounds characterised by a synthesis of structure and regular rhythmical values in a dynamic continuum, thereby creating elemental forms which represent the anterior, pre-sound values before their integration into any kind of musical conception or mould. This phenomenon of sound gives birth to a different sense of time and duration; it also lends to the structural elements a value and dimension beyond anything one finds in 'music' so-called."
James D'Angelo is a multi-faceted American musician living in England whose professional life encompasses that of a composer, pianist, organist, teacher, sound therapist and author. In fluenced by the music of the Medieval and Renaissance eras, the works of Hindemith, the structure and theory of Indian music and his experiences as a jazz musician, his music has its own pantonal, stylistic unity in which flowing and joyous melody and intriguing harmonic progressions are its chief features. His vocal music, including over 40 songs and a number of choral works, are especially appealing. Three of his extended, partially improvised keyboard works have been recorded on his own label. His Portraits of Krishna pieces have appeared recently on a Virgin Classics CD that includes works by Copland, Bernstein and Barber. An authority on the therapeutic application of music and sound, he has established workshops entitled Healing Vibrations: The Power of the Resonating Voice for the purpose of integrating body, mind and spirit. He is the author of the forthcoming book Healing with the Voice: Creating Harmony through the Power of Sound
James D'Angelo Website: www.soundspirit.co.ukJean Catoire stands as a unique figure in twentieth century music. Working in isolation and without recognition for most of his creative life, he has produced a prodigious number of works that can, at best, be described as minimalist. When Catoire states that he is merely the transcriber of what he 'sees', a listener can sense this because it is as though the composer has no personality of his own. That he has somehow tapped into another dimension of musical time and space that draws the listener into that dimension as an act of meditation. This transportation into such a deep space beyond waking consciousness is partly created by the repetitive patterns as well as the very slow tempos marked. The absoluteness and purity of purpose of the music is further enhanced by the fact that it is in no particular way idiomatic for the instruments and voices. To a great extent he need not bother indicating which instruments should be involved in a performance. If anything in music can be described as 'archetypal', it is Catoire's works. Inherent in its structure is a profound sacred geometry as the music unfolds in its permutations of the basic materials. This applies to all his works in their evolution from those that are freely chromatic to those which contain only permutations of two tones.
In his programme notes for the recording entitled Extasia that he produced of Catoire's Requiem, Op. 573 (Virgin Classics 7243 5 45324 2 9), Malcolm Bruno states: 'Unlike most of his contemporaries, Catoire has maintained the language of triad and ritual repetition. But like the 'thin-bodied' sculpture of Giacometti's late period, there is an inexplicable attrition of pace in his mature work towards a continuous, uninterrupted stillness - a stasis which remains increasingly unchallenged. Catoire's musical thought is essentially Pythagorean; it is the laying bare of pure musical sound, in which a worldly concern for the language of words and the rhythms of speech are of no consequence. As a 'music of the spheres' it recognizes only the resonance and pulse of pure being perceived in sound.' The Sonata for Piano No.9, Op. 204 (1971), with a special dedication to the composer/pianist James D'Angelo, is a very typical work of this period. It consists entirely of shifting triads juxtaposed chromatically in which the alternation of the major and minor third frequently occurs. On occasion in such works the two thirds will appear simultaneously causing a momentary 'blues' effect. The Sonata for Voice and Piano No.5, Op.293 (1973) is, to some extent, similar to the 9th piano sonata. As in almost all his vocal works, there are no texts and the singer must choose one or more vowel sounds for his or her part. In solo vocal pieces Catoire occasionally specifies whether the singer should be male or female. This highly chromatic work with much changing between the two thirds has less notes than Op. 204. One of its features is silence, points where Catoire uses a fermata (a long pause) over a double barline. This occurs in other works throughout his output.
The Sonata for Clarinet and Piano No.3, Op. 445 (1976) has the same essential characteristics of Op.204 and Op. 293 but it is all greatly reduced - in this case to three chords with the fluctuating major/minor third. Catoire employs the great silences, too as in Op. 293. The Sonata for Solo Voice No.2, Op. 195 (1970) could be described as a kind of modern day plainsong with its naturally melismatic chromatic line fairly narrow in range and occasional pauses. It represents a distillation of the Catoire style of this time. All of the composer's works are a tour de force for the singer as they require such sustained breathing to achieve their effect. The Sonata for Flute and Harp No.6, Op. 382 (1974) and Sonata for Voice and Harp, Op. 401A (1974) is in stark contrast to the previous works. These could almost described as diatonic tonal or modal in character. For example, in Op. 382 the flute in the first variation plays nothing but the notes of the C major scale up until the 100th bar while the harp plays only open fifths occasionally adding an F sharp. Overall this work, which will be played in an abridged version, contains only three accidentals sparsely distributed over its very long span. It is quite demanding for the flautist for there are no pauses whatsoever unlike Op. 401A . James D'Angelo August 2000
Jean Catoire: James D'Angelo
Aquarian Music: James D'Angelo