5 hours ago
19
There’s no one quite like Meredith Monk. So often grouped with her lionised contemporaries Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and La Monte Young, she is 83 to their 90-odd years and sports long plaited hair as reliably as Reich wears a baseball cap. Yet she refuses the label “minimalism” for her music, and composition is just one element of a creative life that also takes in singing, choreography, film-making and drawing.
Monk was not present at this performance marking the launch of Phaedra Ensemble’s new album of her music, though she did loom briefly over the audience on video, professing “it’s a dream of mine for this music to be recorded and played”. (Compare that to the fortunes of Glass’s works.) But she had been closely involved, having invited the group to record some of her music after hearing them play.
It was therefore a shame that the ensemble on stage at Kings Place wasn’t quite the lineup of musicians that had joined Monk on her exploration of how voices might become instruments and vice versa. There were fleeting rough edges – pinched soprano sound, rather abrasive violin – in her Realm Variations, and some uncomfortable tuning in her quartet Stringsongs, which I can’t imagine feature on the album.
But there were also some moments of pure, polished beauty. None more than in the opening extracts from Monk’s film score Book of Days, where the softly keening loop of a single tenor blossomed into the otherworldly polyphony of six unaccompanied voices. The texture was always limpid, communication between the singers intense. The rapid exchange of bell tones in Stringsongs was similarly transparent, the string instruments audibly reaching towards a kind of abstract sound. Voluptuous clarinet lines and the weird slow clang of oboe multiphonics injected colour into the otherwise rather austere repetitions of Backlight. In Realm Variations, the sculpted phrasing of the singers and woodwind was not matched by the strings. But conductor Lucy Goddard wove this larger ensemble into a compelling warp and weft: a thread of metallic piccolo, a grainy growl of contrabass clarinet and, in between, the mellow, breathing warmth of amplified voices.
