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From BBC Music Magazine, December 2009: *****performance, ****recording
‘This penultimate release in the London Sinfonietta’s excellent Jerwood Series features works drawing inspiration from beyond the normal Classical sphere, ‘crossover’ if you like, though certainly not in the way used by bean counters at major labels. This is most obvious in Anna Meredith’s axeman, in which a single bassoon, aided by guitar pedals, makes a credible impression of a strutting rock-guitar solo. It is terrific fun, as reflected in the whoop of appreciation at the end of this performance, though it begs the question why not just have a guitar? Meredith’s other piece, flak, combines performers and electronics. Its inspiration comes in part from dance music, though this is only obvious in the relentless final section.
The rollicking violin part of Ian Vine’s wonderful ocre oscuro, played here by Clio Gould, opens the disc. It is soon adorned with rich layers, the title referring to the raw umber used as the initial layer of an oil painting. Emily Hall’s Think About Space uses laid-back guitar and melodeon with delay to build undulating cross-rhythms. Its quirky charms are hard to resist.’
Christopher Dingle
U-tube
and comments...(some I don't understand like 'Bilge')
The Guardian, November 16th 2007
LSO/Volkov, Barbican, London ****
Reviewed by George Hall
As part of its Sound Adventures initiative, the London Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov began its Barbican programme with a short new opener by a young composer. The title of 30-year-old Emily Hall's Plinth refers to the fact that she saw her work as a support for the two major works in the concert, and that "a plinth is the thing that always sits there and is looked at but forgotten".
In the event, such a view of the piece seemed too self-effacing. Plinth made a strong impact, thanks to Hall's clear and well-directed harmony and her strong feeling for orchestral textures. Indeed, its hard, percussive external surfaces and neat construction offered a closer analogy to the title than perhaps she imagined. In its matching of means to ends, it exactly fulfilled its purpose.
The first of the two big pieces it preceded was Bartók's Viola Concerto, left in the form of sketches on his death in 1945 and subsequently made ready for performance by his colleague Tibor Serly. It retains its place in the repertoire, though the result lacks the disciplined focus of the scores Bartók himself finished. The soloist was Yuri Bashmet, whose large and subtly flavoured tone conveyed the essence of the work's strongest element, Bartók's thematic material, especially in the wild folk-dance finale. But in the introverted slow movement, too, Bashmet's simple, unaffected eloquence sought out the music's expressive heart.
Volkov accompanied him expertly before letting the LSO loose on Shostakovich's mighty Tenth Symphony. He is not an ostentatious conductor, and the torment and tenderness of this complex and often enigmatic piece registered all the more powerfully for his refusal to add false theatrics to Shostakovich's compellingly dramatic diary of a Stalin survivor.
The Birmingham Post, July 10th 2007
Brodsky Quartet, Diana Baroniand Djivan Gasparyan * * * *
Reviewed by Richard Bratby
Quartets by Peter Sculthorpe and Tunde Jegede; a world premiere; and the concert premiere of John Tavener's Prayer of the Heart.
Add the astonishing Argentinean-born flautist/vocalist Diana Baroni, and the Armenian duduk virtuoso Djivan Gasparyan, and the result looked, on paper, like a genuine one-off - a real festival occasion, and the kind of programme that only the Brodsky Quartet could bring off successfully.
And so they did. Even with Mia Cooper deputising for leader Andrew Haveron, the Brodskys seemed thoroughly at ease.
That wasn't so surprising in Tunde Jegede's lively Second Quartet - a Brodsky commission dating from the Millennium. But it was doubly impressive in the premiere of Emily Hall's braid.
Sonorous, buoyant and immediately engaging, braid's rhythmic drive, ringing final climax and concise, effective pay-off revealed a composer as entertaining as she is skilled. The Brodskys played it like it was Haydn.
Diana Baroni is uncategorisable and her sequence of South American miniatures - in which she switched freely between wooden flute and her dark, fluid mezzo - remained un-named.
Baroni returned, kneeling between a pair of candles, as the soloist in the Tavener.
On disc, Björk's acid voice keeps this static, super-saccharine work on the right side of kitsch. The cathedral acoustic, and the pure, intense focus of Baroni's singing managed it here - just.
The evening's one disappointment owed nothing to the artists concerned. Gasparyan's duduk, taking the role of the optional didjeridu in Sculthorpe's Eleventh Quartet, was simply inaudible against the strings.
Still, the experiment was worth it; we were left with a luminous, smiling account of the quartet, and a brief, mouthwatering taster of Gasparyan's renowned artistry. Happily, he's not finished in Lichfield yet.