Lenguas de Fuego composed by Kevin Volans
credits
Mia Cooper, Violin; Anna Cashel, Violin; Joachim Roewer, Viola; William Butt, Cello; Silvija Scerbaviciute, Flute; Brian Dungan, Percussion; Andrew Synnott, Conductor.Recorded in Windmill Lane Studios Dublin March 2021
- release Date
June 2, 2021
- Executive Producer :
Eamonn Quinn
- Recording Engineer
Debbie Smith
- Producer :
Simon Kiln
- Funded by
the Arts Council and Create Louth.
Lenguas de Fuego is an Arts Council Commission
Though Kevin Volans has said he chose the title for its rhythm, we might also want to note its meaning, as ‘tongues of fire’, with reference to the dramatic moment recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, when the twelve were gathered in the same room and suddenly had such emanations hovering on their heads. Strangeness, similarity and, indeed, hovering are written into the music, which proceeds in two broad arcs.
The first, hesitant, has spikes and repetitions, which it alternates and combines. Repeating patterns emerge to dance, but soon subside into the expectancy. The opening is revisited, but goes another way. Moments of rotating continuity and of quietly radiating stillness are later discovered, but any kind of definition is sooner or later drawn back into possibility.
Around the sixteen-minute mark, the music thins to a thread, until a gentle rocking from the cello sets it in motion again, now much more decisively. The spikes are still there, even the same spikes, and so are the points of radiant stillness, but contained within, and contributing to, an ongoing dance – one whose up-down figures might indeed be heard as tongues of fire. There is a spacier middle section, and then the dance picks up again to reach a higher temperature before winding down.
(Paul Griffiths, 2021)
Special thanks to Bára Gísladóttir, Skúli Sverrisson, Ólöf Arnalds, Derek Turner at the Spirit Store, Ken Finnegan for the live photographs, David Stalling for the audio.
This one is dedicated to Bob Bielecki.
EMBERS
- LABEL:
Louth Contemporary Music LCMS2021
- ARTIST:
Carducci Quartet, Crash Ensemble.
- FORMAT:
Compact Disc (Audio)
- RELEASE DATE:
05-03-2021
- GENRES:
Chamber Music, Classical
As the pandemic goes on making regular concerts impossible, the Louth Contemporary Music Society continues its work in the studio. Last autumn’s CD release Meadow, featuring music by Linda Catlin Smith, won praise from leading critics on both sides of the Atlantic, including the New Yorker’s Alex Ross. Now comes a follow-up, Embers, which again is devoted to music for strings – instruments that, in their intimacy, seem to touch our moment.
In the similarly titled radio play by Samuel Beckett, the main character stands at the sea shore, sifting through fragments of memory and story that are still living embers, hot to the touch. So it is in this recording, in which music by the distinguished Irish composer Raymond Deane robustly supports an important quartet by one of the great masters of our age, Valentin Silvestrov.
The opener, Deane’s Marthiya, is named after a form of lament traditional in the Middle East, and is itself a lament over Iraq, composed as that country was suffering invasion, bombardment and dire economic sanctions. The music’s “atmosphere of mourning”, Deane writes, is “not unrelated to the devastation wreaked on Iraq since 2003, and to the wider carnage inflicted upon the Arab and Islamic world by the west over the last century.”
Deane’s other contribution is the title track, written thirty years earlier but by very much the same individual. Though perhaps more questioning than elegiac, Embers is music again on the edge of tears. Ideas, bits of tune, come and go, and recur, very much as things come and go, and come back once more, in the Beckett play. To quote the composer: “The piece obsessively turns over musical fragments which seem to have some remote but uncertain origin.”
Silvestrov’s music gives voice to the sense we may all feel of being bereft, left behind by what was once a social culture of sympathy and togetherness. Listening to his Third String Quartet, we seem to be watching from the dock as a great liner slowly slides away, taking with it our hopes and our dreams. Something of this feeling of being on the sidelines of history may come from the composer’s inheritance as a Ukrainian. Ireland, he notes, is not so far away: “I believe there is some Irish accent, and some simple melodies, that permeate the whole work and may sound as symbols of this wonderful country, in whose destiny and historical legacy I perceive a close spiritual affinity to Ukraine, my homeland.”
All three works are captured in intense, poignant performances by leading ensembles: Crash (for Marthiya) and the Carducci Quartet.
Embers was released on 5 March 2021.
Reviews to date:
“Crash Ensemble sound excellent here, though the music is at times supremely challenging, with the very softest tremolos at one point, or the violin playing haunting harmonics high above the other instruments.”
Panm360: “Sound is excellent, and the Carduccis and Crash Ensemble (well three of them in Marthiya) create wonderfully purring bass sounds, contrasted by luminous points and scintillating lines where needs be. Superb release from a label we here on our side of the big lake wish to know a lot more soon.
Louth Contemporary Music Society is funded by the Arts Council and financially supported by Create Louth.
As the pandemic goes on making regular concerts impossible, the Louth Contemporary Music Society continues its work in the studio. Last autumn’s CD release Meadow, featuring music by Linda Catlin Smith, won praise from leading critics on both sides of the Atlantic, including the New Yorker’s Alex Ross. Now comes a follow-up, Embers, which again is devoted to music for strings – instruments that, in their intimacy, seem to touch our moment.
