WAYS BY WAYS
Brisbane Music Festival
FourthWall Arts, 540 Queen St.
Saturday December 14, 2024
Alex Raineri
Stopping by for an end-of-year visit, I caught up with this festival through one recital only. It proved to be the inaugural appearance of a new trio, Ways By Ways, featuring festival director-pianist Alex Raineri, percussionist Rebecca Lloyd-Jones and flautist Tim Munro - and you have to admit that such a personnel grouping is more than a little unusual. So was its five-part program which began with a kind of structured elaboration of little material and ended with a 'happening' reminiscent of the 1960s (perhaps fortunately, it didn't involve audience participation).
After the opening exercise in artistic togetherness called Collaborative New Work, Raineri gave us a harpsichord solo by Chilean-born Perth resident Pedro Álvarez, Fosforesciamo which roughly translates as 'We are phosphorescing' - a state that is always appealing. Both of these works enjoyed their world premieres, the latter particularly welcome as it was composed 12 years ago. A duo followed for Lloyd-Jones and Munro in Irish writer Ann Cleare's unable to create an offscreen world, a touching 2012 essay in non-tangibility. Back to the trio format in one-time Brisbane-resident Jodie Rottle's blueprint in shades of green from 2022, and the group concluded its first communal foray with Thelma Mansfield, a tribute to the Irish broadcaster-then-painter by her countrywoman Jennifer Walshe, and also the occasion's oldest music, dating from 2008.
At the opening collaboration, Raineri started out on harpsichord, Munro on piano, and Lloyd-Jones on (I think) marimba. They enjoyed a staggered sort of entry, generating a kind of tintinnabulation, an airy chimes effect in the higher reaches of their instruments, Raineri eventually producing some variety by moving to molest the lower strings of Munro's piano. The whole thing appeared to ring its changes by a kind of mutual arrangement, without anything printed as far as I could see, eventually petering out in a reductio ad silentium.
Alvarez's piece for Raineri's harpsichord opened with a chain of splayed chord-clusters that were either sustained, cut short, or disappeared leaving one note reverberating. This output changed to treble action with lavish ornamentation, the whole a set of sound flurries. More emphatic chords followed, to be succeeded by a concluding segment where a minor 2nd tremolo stood out from the general movement, with the eventual post-phosphorescent fade to dun.
Munro and Lloyd-Jones chose to perform the (b) version of Cleare's piece with piccolo and a thunder tube (I believe) as well as a timpani and a metal sheet en passant. In line with the composer's program, this was tentative, spasmodic in effect, the players not following each other; not actually clashing, but failing to coalesce. Such a neurasthenic atmosphere was heightened by emphasized breaths and key-taps from Munro in particular, so that listeners were kept in a state of tension that I thought might have been overdrawn but in fact became quite unnerving as the work lurched along its intentionally disjunct path.
Rottle's work found the performers in a - for this occasion - strikingly normal situation with Munro breaking us in through a flute solo, Raineri striking a path with a prepared piano, Lloyd-Jones' contribution eventually noticeable for a scene-stealing vibraphone (Le marteau sans maitre has so much to answer for). A mid-stream duet for piano and flute impressed for the sharp synchronicity of its delivery, even if the main feature I drew from the work was the almost continuous activity from Munro.
But it wouldn't be a 2022 construct without the pianist eventually reaching for his own strings with a stretch of plucking and stroking that came as an unusually welcome respite from the stifled quality of the actual keyboard work. Lloyd-Jones gave us a soft upper pedal layer towards the work's end and the last moments made a fine impression with their soft whisperings from Raineri and Munro. The composer points to her work as a celebration of fruitful friendships and I suppose you can infer such a characteristic from her amiable, approachable creation.
Of course, it wasn't until well after the event that the juxtapositioning of Cleare's and Rottle's works struck me as apt: one representing a dissociation of temperaments that doesn't amount to a definite conflict but an absence of congruity on common ground, the other a melding of personalities demonstrating a kind of affirmative pairing which is sustained by a continuous, malleable underpinning.
With Thelma Mansfield, we came upon a piece of musical theatre where what the players did distracted from the actual sounds that they generated. My notes wound up being a set of observations on action, like the rather incongruous sight of Munro shadow-boxing, or Raineri miming a rifleman and also slicing (admittedly with a stick rather than a sword or knife), while Lloyd-Jones poured a white substance (sugar? heroin?) into a bowl from a colourful container, making minimal audible impact.
As far as I could tell, the intention was to plunge us observers into a set of scenarios that might have amounted to a character sketch of the title character if only we had some kind of key. But the work became more opaque as it progressed, complicated more by the sudden emergence of a taped contribution that came from a mobile phone set into action by Raineri. To be fair, the work presented a sort of narrative structure through a monologue/address begun by Munro (and taken up by others) in which he (they) set out a slew of rules that were preceded for some time by German numbers.
After stopping for a taped downpour (harbinger of what was waiting for us outside at the recital's end) the trio decided to sweeten the pot by singing for us - at least two hymns, in the end. To follow, all three threw scraps of paper in the air . . . and on it went: event after event in an off-beat Dada demonstration. Raineri sat at a table and dealt cards - loudly; Munro vocalized through his flute, punctuating his pseudo-singing by tapping his instrument's keys.
One of the performers flashed number cards at us - 4, 7, 3, 5, 2 - and then the ensemble started on the verbal numbers game, now in English. Lloyd-Jones poured her white grain from one bowl into another or picked a handful up and let it dribble back, like a fey Nigella. And we were once again treated to a fizzling finale which contained isolated intervals for Raineri's piano as one of the few coherent strictly musical memories I've retained from this specific exercise, which kept your attention centred on the musicians/actors, most of the focus falling on Munro.
While willing to go a fair way with composers in their search for the everlasting verities, I'm not sure that I gathered much from Walshe's personal (I presume) salute. It brought the hour-long recital to an entertaining conclusion with its variety and the intelligibility of its discrete parts; even the air-slashing exercises that obtained in the work's earlier stages made some kind of excoriating point, if Mansfield was in real life the sort of trenchant personality such gestures might imply.
A fortuitous welding of three talents, then, in this short exhibition. I don't know whether there's much repertoire for the flute/piano/percussion combination; still, Raineri has shown impressive talent at organizing programs like this one where the performers have ample room to display their talents as soloists, duettists or members of a larger ensemble. Without a doubt, he is flying a lone, brave flag for contemporary creativity in all its colours through this annual festival and I'm only sorry that I couldn't get to more of its many parts; they are distinctive for their quality of participants and for the catholicity of presentation styles - a true music festival.
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