A swirling carousel of music through time
On Friday night, the Manchester Camerata presented The Expansion of Sound, as part of their Here we Are festival running from 15-20 September. Performed in the Great Nave of their impressive home venue The Monastery Manchester, over 800 years of musical history touched the furthest corners of the heavenly ceiling.
Led by conductor Christopher Aldstaedt and rejoined by Artistic Partner Ethan Locke on piano, the programme commenced with Pérotin’s oral medieval soundworld, Viderent Omnes (1198). The scale of the venue and historical resonance of nearly a millennium could be felt as the musicians slowly gathered in the candlelight and entered in a swell of voices from all directions.
The programme then jumped in time from the oldest piece to the newest, arguably the heart of the evening: They are Our Life, A Listening Composer Project, composed by Professor Alan Williams at the University of Salford. Developed through the Camerata’s Music in Mind programme that supports people living with dementia, the piece was created alongside nine carers from across Greater Manchester over a series of weekly sessions to find untold stories and textures. The contemporary work is a narrative composed of seven movements, including reproductions of the hum, click and whirr of M.R.I. machines.
With a slight amendment to the programme, the Camerata continued with In C by Terry Riley (1964), a minimalist piece consisting of 53 short musical patterns. The performers were free to decide when to move from one pattern to the next, creating a unique, improvised layer and texture that would never be performed in the same way again. Janet Fulton on percussion must be commended for her continuous striking, around four times a second for over ten minutes – perhaps nearly three thousand strikes in all! The audience started to shuffle about two thirds of the way into this strange, existential build – though as conductor Alstaedt explained, the piece was originally meant to last at least forty-five minutes, so we merely observed the tip of the iceberg.
The programme concluded with the final two pieces: the philosophical The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives (1908), and the very recognisable Piano Concerto No. 3 by Ludwig van Beethoven (c.1800), joined by Ethan Locke on piano. These felt very appropriate to wrap up a programme entitled The Expansion of Sound, with radical composure showing the extension of the musicians’ and composers’ abilities, and the scope of human creativity.
The overall experience was extraordinary in such a beautiful, atmospheric venue – the massive old Nave lit up with candles allowed for a literal ‘expansion of sound’. The arrangements and order of the pieces worked extremely well, from the old to the new, from the experimental to the tightly constructed. The acoustics were good, maybe even too good – you could literally hear a pin drop, which meant the occasional crackle of snack packaging could be heard right to the top of the ceiling, plus the whooshing of the conductor’s hands flying through the air!
It was well worth experiencing the Camerata in their home venue, with musical pieces that left a lasting impression and invited the audience to think about the connections between music composed centuries ago to the music composed today.
Find out more about the Camera’s season at www.manchestercamerata.co.uk.