More Post-Gig Euphoria Concert Notes

Written Sunday night.

Tonight at Norwich's Theatre Royal I heard what has to be the most beautiful piece of modern music yet composed.
But before that … let's get the pervy stuff out of the way first.

Alina Ibragimova. You know her from all the bodily fluids splattered over many a past post. Alina is not just the greatest violinist of her generation - and with the staggering virtuosity of the latest generation, by definition the greatest to have yet lived; she is also - through no fault of her own - one of the world's most truly beautiful women.
This evening she hit the stage in a clingy, strappy black, crushed silk top and a long skirt of sheer scarlet silk no thicker than the air. Her perfect feet were encased in piano-black stilettos with pure white soles with a shiny black triangle at the apex of the ludicrously pointy toes (I was ten feet away; you can't help but notice these things).
She dances. I mean she moves on stage like a modern dancer while she plays. It's not a conscious thing like Steven Isserlis's ludicrous Robert Plant impersonations; it's like the music is playing her; sometimes she'll stay stock still, balanced on her stilettos and frowning fit to bust - and this girl can frown like nobody else - but most of the while she's prowling the stage in that sheer, transparent and VERY clingy silk like some semi-naked blood-red dæmon caught up in St.Vitus' dance.
Hoo, boy!

Right … Deep breath …
The Britten Sinfonia (yes, them again) are famously the most exciting chamber orchestra in this or any other universe, and infamously, the most wilfully outrageous programmers of music ever.
This evening, they took great delight in presenting us with a typically dissonant juxtaposition, the music ranging from the twelfth century to a piece so new that the composer started writing it in January and finished it during rehearsals. Tonight was world premier night.

First up: darkness. Pitch.
Pérotin's Viderunt omnes. The first time the world had ever heard four part polyphony. This piece exploded into being on Christmas day in 1198 in Notre Dame de Paris and it sounds as shocking and modern today as it must have done then. Especially as it's pitch bloody black and suddenly we find the singers are up in the gods behind us.
Okay, so that's a fairly predictably unpredictable opening from these guys … except that the peerless punks of modern classical music have now been augmented by their brand, spanking new vocal ensemble, the Britten Sinfonia Voices. Led by the deputy director of The Sixteen (if you know who I'm talking about you know it's going to be good) who has been let off the leash of their strictly mediæval diet and allowed to play with the modernists, the result promises to astound, and if this evening is anything to go by, to produce ear-semen in copious quantities (more of which later).

Before the echoes have died away and while we are beginning to applaud wildly, the elfin smile of Alina Ibragimova hits the stage and the lights go up to reveal a tiny fragment of the Sinfonia, grouped around a beautifully decorated period harpsichord.
Bach's First Violin Concerto.
On any given night of my life I would kill to see and hear Alina play Bach. This evening it's just part of the warm-up and it's brilliant. Breathtaking, delicate, perfectly poised and as startlingly uplifting as a Saturn Five rocket in the rectum. They play it as if it's brand new and it sparkles.

So already we've jumped five hundred years in two short pieces. Now comes the latest offering from Latvian Ēriks Ešenvalds, who's hiding backstage with the flu and whose ink is not yet dry on the manuscripts littering the music stands. Modern music does not get any more modern than this, nor does it get any more beautiful.
I kid you not; I gasped, sobbed and the tears just flooded my fat face in an unstoppable stream. It's not available on record yet as he only finished writing it in rehearsals and this is the first time anyone's heard it in public (including him).
People think of Gorecki and Pärt when they think of Baltic music. Well if you like that stuff, but find it a teensy bit slow in places, try Ēriks Ešenvalds; this piece is vaguely (yet not at all) like all your favourite moments from Gorecki and Pärt at once, only way more interesting and with a LOT more going on. And it truly is the most startlingly beautiful piece of modern music I have ever heard.
It's called Aqua and its three movements deal with liquid water, ice and steam. It involves five occasional tables, several glasses of water, some innovative yet not gimmicky weirdness, the Britten Sinfonia and the Britten Sinfonia Voices. It's only twelve minutes long. Put like that it doesn't sound much but when you hear it (and I'm going to make damned sure you do) you're going to rush right out and buy it and let it lift your life like it's lifted mine.
He's currently working on a much longer piece based on the northern lights. If this is what he can do with water, then I can't wait to hear what the aurora inspires in him.
"Ēriks Ešenvalds" … Have that tattooed somewhere you can see it so you don't forget.

Right … Interval. Booze and chat and the delighted realisation that I am not the youngest person in the audience this evening; there is a smattering of college kids and twenty and thirty-somethings. About bloody time they caught on.

The second half starts with more Bach: "Komm, Jesu, komm" (stop sniggering at the back).
Now the Voices are pared down and Eamonn Dougan (for it is he) has arranged them thusly:
Two basses at the extremes of stage left and right, then slightly in from them, two tenors, then two mezzos and two sopranos innermost, flanking cello, double bass and a charmingly baroque chamber organ in the middle.
The result of this vocal placement - especially for me in my regular third row centre seat - is revelatory. Eamonn has arranged the Bach to emphasise the counterpoint by not simply splitting the parts to stage left and right, but splitting each singer's parts and breaking them up in an insanely complex manner so that they're constantly swapping and changing.
The effect made my ears orgasm. Sorry, but it did. Ear semen all over the place.
Nuff said. The Sinfonia are never predictable and just a little thing like that can transform an already sublime piece into aural heaven.

But now for the main event:
Back to Latvia and this time Pēteris Vasks (quick digression: I love Apple Macs … I can effortlessly type in those little doohickeys from Latvian, Czech, Greek, Japanese, whatever, without thinking about it and without all the MS DOS crapping around with inserting symbols … message ends).
Anyhoo … Vasks is from the generation before Ešenvalds; the generation who grew up under Soviet rule and his Concerto for Violin and Strings simply reeks of deep spiritual darkness, yearning for banned Latvian folk tunes and revolutionary hope for the future (the piece is sub-titled Distant Light). Alina fled Russia when she was ten and can play this stuff raw and bleeding. It's an incendiary combination and she chose this very carefully as the focal point of the evening.

The piece starts slow; deeply longing and passionate with a glowing spirituality. Alina recently recorded the whole of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas using no vibrato (God knows how she managed it but she did it live, too), but she possesses a vibrato that can bypass your eyes and rip floods of tears right from your very soul itself and this piece calls for just that, and she delivers it in spades.

It builds. And I mean it BUILDS. Yearning turns at length to euphoria before sudden bursts of incredible virtuosic madness break in and then Alina is let loose at last with several long improvised passages, each more astonishing than its predecessor.
Holy crap! She's writhing around like a madwoman, the most incredible violinist of her generation going absolutely batshit crazy; her bow in tatters, she uses any tiny moment between lines to rip the shreds from it and fling them aside before diving headlong back into the mælström. Her beautiful golden hair is flailing wildly, caught up in the static from her bow as more and more of her bowstrings get torn away. I've never heard playing like it and I imagine nobody else has either. She's possessed! The latest Chinese players have insane technical skills drilled into them, but they have no feeling. Nothing compared to this. Alina has lived this music: its emotions, its politics, its yearning passion, its pain and she is playing out of her skin, improvising it all. It's a cathartic, unbearably intense, soul-baring scream.
No two versions of this music are ever the same and we're being treated to something transcendent. Apologies for going into hyperbole orbit but this truly was astonishing. I don't know how long I held my breath but if it were not for the final, gorgeous slow movement I'd have had a heart attack.
And at the end in the afterglow, Alina lolled like a rag doll over her gorgeous 1775 Anselmo Bellosio violin - or what was left of it - panting for breath, her hair a complete fucking mess and the rest of the orchestra emotionally and physically trashed.
Now THAT'S music!

The audience went predictably berserk, leaping to our feet and shouting and screaming like a bunch of teenagers.
So all in all a delightful evening of passionate intensity and incendiary virtuosic brilliance.
And now it's gone and I want it back!

They're about to announce their next season's programme so watch out for more of this crap.