Music

The Fairly Relentless Fitkins

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

PIANISTS Clare Hammond and Kathryn Stott joined composer Graham Fitkin and his partner, the Scottish harpist Ruth Wall, for an adventurous programme of contemporary music at the end of the couple’s short residency at Scotland’s Conservatoire.

As well as being a survey of Fitkin’s own music, from his student years to his latest work, it spanned the globe and the decades as Hammond and Stott added their own selections to the mix.

From Hammond that meant her recent discovery of the bluesy music of George Walker, the first African American to win a Pulitzer prize for music, whose Variations for Piano are even less well-known than his orchestral work, as well as the ferociously-fast Etudes by South Korean composer Unsuk Chin.

The work of Scotland’s own Anna Meredith shares some stylistic traits with that of Fitkin, and Stott played her Felix Mendelssohn tribute, Camberwell Green, as well as China Gates, a musical palindrome by US composer John Adams.

Two Pianos, by his American predecessor Morton Feldman, was in some ways the most conventional duo contribution by Fitkin and Wall, its slow dying chords on the two concert grands in contrast to the couple’s performance of Clapping Music, by Steve Reich, and Fitkin’s own I Swear, I Swear, I Swear which matches snatches of overheard dialogue with body percussion.

The most powerful music of the whole evening, however, happened when all four musicians came together. Fitkin’s early work for eight hands on two pianos is driving, powerful stuff, full of funky riffs and angular dance rhythms. Part of the evident skill required in playing them was to stay out of the way of your piano-partner as the prominent line in the compositions changed hands. Rarely is the exacting excitement of music-making so apparent as it was in the Conservatoire’s Stevenson Hall on Thursday evening.

If that was true at the start of the recital, when the players were at the two Steinways, it was no less the case when Fitkin and Wall switched to two digital keyboards for the concluding piece, Bla Bla Bla.

Premiered earlier this year, it takes an idea from environmental campaigning about the restricted perspective of much human thought, Shifting Baseline Syndrome, and uses it to explore tropes of political media-speech. With sampled dialogue and Fitkin’s own narration through a microphone headset, it is as thought-provoking as it is amusing. As a live technical exercise it was also impressively complex, and executed flawlessly.