Wednesday, May 6, 2009 Irish Times
DROGHEDA ARTS FESTIVAL: The Music of Alexander Knaifel
St Peter’s Church
The casual listener might think that Alexander Knaifel has things in common with contemporaries such as John Tavener and Arvo Pärt. His music often has specific spiritual meaning, and much of it is slow, evidently economical and very quiet. But, as this portrait concert, organised by the Louth Contemporary Music Society, showed, the resemblances end there.
Knaifel (born 1943) is a historically aware composer, but his fleeting references are glimpsed ghosts. The earliest piece on the programme, Ostinato for violin and cello (1964), starts almost like Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale, but it is so attenuated that it seems to come from another world. A Mad Tea Party – Royal Version (2007), which was receiving its first performance, flits, makes stabs at quasi-Beethovenian gestures, and treats commonplace sonorities with such keen sensitivity to context that even a standard major chord is tense.
Violinist Elizabeth Cooney, violist Joachim Roewer and cellist Elizabeth Wilson played the new work commissioned for this concert, E.F. and Three Visiting Cards , an extraordinary, razor-sharp, subtly expressive piece that features Knaifel’s distinctive technique of basing a work on a text that is not heard but is written on to the score as a guide to the performers.
Soprano Patricia Rozario, the Callino Quartet and pianist Oleg Malov gave a hauntingly beautiful performance of one of Knaifel’s best-known pieces, O Heavenly King . But nobody in the concert could begrudge special praise for Malov’s playing in the four works for piano solo.
Knaifel’s is music in which nothing seems to happen. It is not easy listening, but its beautiful and deceptive simplicity is uplifting. Malov understands it profoundly. Every note (and often there’s only one at a time) counted, thanks to his impeccable tone, timing and subtle physical language. Not just the sounds, but the silences too, were full of sustained expectation. MARTIN ADAMS
