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.
The Times, Tuesday, 23 May 2006
World premier of Sante, 24 May 2006, ****
Geoff Brown
Father disapproves of his daughter's lover. All hell is let loose. The synopsis could serve for many operas. Tchaikovsky's Mazepa covers the territory in three and a half hours. Sante, generated by the Genesis Opera Project, mounted by the London Sinfonietta and Aldeburgh Productions, whisks through in 59 minutes.
This length seems just right for a young composer new to the genre, and Emily Hall -- the winner of last year's Royal Philharmonic Society composition award -- doesn't waste a second. She and her librettist Kit Peel tell an urgent, painful tale, set during the Rwanda genocide in the spring of 1994. Sante, a Hutu villager, is in love with Obietsu, a Tutsi travelling salesman Her surrogate father, the village priest, urges upon her a local man, Anastase, a Hutu militant. Violence spreads; the last scenes bring a forced marriage, a rape and a death.
No surprises in the plot, or the plain words of Peel's libretto. They fuse nonetheless with Hall's music to create powerful sequences of foreboding and terror. Hall's ensemble is individual: clarinet, two trombones, single strings, electric and bass guitars, an accordion. Their sounds come in two chief categories, the atmospheric blur and the dramatic stab; African elements are used lightly.
Some of these effects are overdone: repeated notes plucked from guitar or harp are a blunt weapon of expression. You might also wish for larger drops of lyrical phrasing, at least to lubricate the singers. Yet Hall need only tighten the screws slightly for music and drama to explode; the finale's rhythmic stamping and ugly thrusts prove devastating for everyone.
Performances, Philip Walsh's conducting and Tim Supple's staging? All to the point. A tree; a cross; a Sante worth rooting for (Yannick-Muriel Noah); an Anastase (Rodney Clarke) of fearful power. Joey Masemola's Obietsu needed more heft, but it wasn't crucial. The big news is simple. Youth is on the march, making and singing a dynamic new opera, worth everyone's time and hopes.
The Guardian, Friday, 26 May 2006
World premier of Sante, Wednesday May 24, 2006, ***
Erica Jeal
Sante is the first opera by young composer Emily Hall and librettist Kit Peel. A fruit of Aldeburgh's Genesis Opera Project, which brought this rookie team together with experienced director Tim Supple, it goes to the Suffolk festival next month.
Peel has drawn on his journalistic background to provide a concise narrative for this 75-minute work. Its setting - rural Rwanda during the genocide of 1994 - carries a certain responsibility. But its real subject is a story of thwarted love of the kind that writers have been re-creating for centuries.
Hall's music, expertly performed by nine members of the London Sinfonietta under Philip Walsh, is sparsely scored, coloured with accordion and, especially, harp. There are suggestions of the soundworld of African music, but no more than that; Hall is no musical tourist, though she seems more confident writing for the players than for the singers.
The opera starts with the buzz of an untuned radio; a potent symbol considering that propaganda played such a role in Rwanda's tragedy. On stage, however, the hateful speech played on a battered 1980s wireless - hanging from a white cross representing the church in Ti Green's simple, evocative set - seems merely to reinforce decisions already made. There is little illustration of how hatred could spread so insidiously among normal people.
But do Hall and Peel intend to attempt an exploration of the genocide, or is the love story their priority? It's the former that sticks in the mind, but this is partly down to the individual performances. Yannick-Muriel Noah has expressive presence in the title role, but Joey Masemola is too stilted to be convincing as her lover. The strongest performance is from Rodney Clarke as Anastase, the Hutu agitator driven by desire for Sante.
The final scene, Anastase's thugs banging their machetes on the stage loud enough to make the audience flinch, is perhaps clumsily brutal, but it is hard to imagine what else it could be. It certainly makes an impact - and for a first opera, that's a good start.
Opera Magazine
Stephen Pettitt
"An impressively promising first opera"
The Guardian, 18 th November, 2003
Music of Today: Philharmonia, Royal Festival Hall
Reviewed by Geoff Brown
Youth had a ball earlier when two promising composers in their mid-twenties, Emily Hall and Anna Meredith, shared the platform in the Philharmonia's occasional series, Music of Today. We heard four pieces, none longer than eight minutes, all with substance, bite and a refreshing desire to connect with an audience.
Clear points of reference helped, from a drunken jazz trumpeter in Hall's Chatelet to the minor ninth interval that haunts Meredith's The Seventh Door. Music with a human face , ebulliently performed. More from both, please.
The Guardian, Saturday January 29, 2005
London Sinfonietta, LSO St Lukes
Reviewed by Andrew Clements
Emily Hall's Think About Space, sounded fresh and distinctive.
The Times, Saturday January 31, 2005
London Sinfonietta, LSO St Lukes
Reviewed by John Allison
It was good to hear the angst-free sound-scape of Emily Hall's think about space. Disjointed rhythms jostle each other in this short piece, to which a reedy melodeon and electric guitar lend strong colour.