Search - Garth Knox, Agnes Westerman, Sylvain Lemetre :: Saltarello

The skipping steps of the saltarello provide a fitting image for an album which leaps, imaginatively and gracefully, through almost a thousand years of music history. With repertoire ranging from Hildegard von Bingen and Guillaume de Machaut to Kaija Saariaho via Purcell, Vivaldi, and Celtic traditional music, it's a recording that attests to the scope of Garth Knox's enthusiasms and experience. The former violist of the Arditti String Quartet has long been a traveller through musical idioms. At the centre of the album is a pair of pieces by Kaija Saariaho for viola and electronics, which the Finnish composer (b. 1952) wrote for Gath Knox: Vent Nocturne I and II - their respective subtitles "Dark Mirrors" and "Breaths of the Obscure" indicative of the textural terrain traversed here. According to Knox: "Kaija Saariaho's work explores the sound the bow produces when it is drawn across a string, a soft breathy sound, like breathing or wind. This `white' bow noise is amplified and multiplied by electronics and woven into a tissue with the composer's own breathing sounds and some electronic wind-harp effects. Pitch becomes breath, breath blows into wind, wind swirls into music." The two parts of "Vent Nocturne" are here separated by Dowland's "Flow my tears", its three strophes `sung' by the cello, with free instrumental commentary from viola d'amore. In his Vivaldi adaptation Knox reduces a concerto (the D-minor concerto RV 393) to its barest essentials, retaining the melodic/harmonic viola d'amore line and its complementary bass played on cello. "In this intimate chamber version, the spontaneity and purity of Vivaldi's thinking is even more astonishing." Knox's "Fuga libre" described by its composer as a free fantasy, builds momentum from its "baroque jazz" beginnings, "until a vortex pulls it into a `crash', after which high and low notes are separated into different universes. In the slow central section we hear them evolving in their parallel worlds..." TRACKLISTINGS: 1. Black Brittany 2. Music for a while 3. I Allegro 4. II Largo 5. III Presto 6. Fuga libre for viola solo 7. Ave, generosa -- Complainte `Tels rit au main au soir pleure' 8. Vent nocturne 9. Flow my tears 10. Vent nocturne 11. Three Dance 12. Pipe, harp and fiddle