Red Note Ensemble, Tolbooth, Stirling

Arts Editor

Monday 16 May 2011

Whether or not it split the available audience, the short tour by Scottish cotemporary music group Red Note, which ended in Stirling on Saturday night, made for some interesting points of comparison with US superstars Kronos.

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Keith Bruce

John Harris and Robert Irvine’s ensemble was also clearly aware of the necessary theatricality of the repertoire in their programme, with only the tape and quintet composition Differences by Luciano Berio really concerned with purely musical exploration.

That performance element was largely in the hands (often quite literally) of soprano Angela Tunstall in Salvatore Sciarrino’s Infinito Nero. It required her to dramatise the visions of 17th-century mystic Maria Maddalena de Pazzi with articulations that are explicitly unintelligible. Trios of winds and strings and percussive piano, drum and bells provide a compelling soundtrack similarly on the outer edge of what is usually understood as music in a what was a mesmerising monodrama.The programme opened with Sciarrino’s treatment of four baroque works by Carlo Gesualdo, arranged for nonet and also using the female voice as a dramatic top note. Much more superficially accessible, La Voci Sottovetro is clearly designed to illustrate the earlier composer’s important influence but never seemed a purely technical exercise, rather the warmest of tributes.Carolyn Sparey’s commission for these concerts, Out of the Ashes, was no less theatrical, its four movements a story of the interaction of a Chopin Nocturne with the Second World War experience of Polish pianist Wladyskaw Szpilman, saved from the camps by a music-loving German officer. Here, in the hands of Tunstall, Red Note and conductor Garry Walker, was a wonderfully original approach to the telling of a story through music.HHHH

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Red Note Ensemble, Tolbooth, Stirling

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