Noszferatu play Frederic Rzewski and Howard Skempton
FREDERIC RZEWSKI - FLOWERS (World Premiere) Finn Peters: Sax and Flute
James Allsopp: Bass Clarinet
Tom Allan: Trumpet
Oren Marshall: Tuba
Café Oto Dalston, London 20 November 2010
This programme brought together the usually dissimilar musics of Rzewski and Skempton. Rzewski's music is immensely various, as we learnt during a festival of his music in London, 2006. He came from his home in Brussels to attend this event in an increasingly important London venue for new and experimental music. A lot of Frédéric Rzewski's music has a radical/political substratum, represented in this concert by the famous Coming Together, a 'minimalist masterpiece' which pulverises you into submission by repetition, in this case of words by Sam Melville, one of the organizers of the Attica, New York prison riots (1971), relentlessly repeated again and again: Its effect in the unique informal atmosphere of Café Oto, the antithesis of London's regular concert halls, was particulary strong. Howard Skempton's own little pieces were minimal to near vanishing, and Rzewski's new Flowers for the group sounded surprisingly like some of Skempton's, but the collaboration of these two composers in concert was vindicated by Coming Together, the high spot of Noszferatu's unusual programme, with Skempton's powerful and rhythmically accurate narration of its text [Photo above]. A word about presentation; there was none! Some people got sheets with the titles of the items and biogs of the composers & the group. Nothing was said from the platform to introduce and give a context to important works such as Rzewski's Coming Together highlighted above. We had experienced a similar casualness on a previous visit to Café Oto. Peter Grahame Woolf Watch Rzewski himself playing the end of his huge
Further reading; some more Rzewski links :- http://www.youtube.com/watch http://icking-music-archive.org/scores/rzewski/trio.mp3
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