United Kingdom Where Art Meets Science – Marin, Campbell, Mendelssohn-Hensel, plus Professor Dame Athene Donald (speaker): Marsyas Trio, Rosalyn Hart, Emily Chung (violins), Rachel Stott (viola), Ewan Campbell (double bass). Wolfson Hall, Churchill College, Cambridge, 28.9.2024. (CC)
Manu Martin – Lim Fantasy of Companionship Suite; La Fantaisie d’ALAN
Ewan Campbell – Written in Air
Mendelssohn-Hensel – Overture in C (arr. Mark Gotham)
Professor Dame Athene Donald – Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science.
This was part of Churchill College, Cambridge’s Association Weekend (events included a rather delicious formal dinner in the evening). The conjoining of music and lecture in one event has always struck me as a successful format; this was no exception.
The Manu Martin pieces are part of a greater project whose Creative Director is pioneering surgeon Dr Susan Lim (whose specialisations include not only transplantation, robotic and stem cell research, but also space medicine). The music itself is by French composer Manu Martin, often beautiful, always easy on the ear. The main project consists of three parts: ALAN I, the original Fantasy of Companionship; ALAN II, Cosmic Rhapsody (human and inanimate partnering in space). And ALAN III, Symphony of the Oceans, an exploration of marine conservation and the need to protect oceans and ecosystems (ALAN is an inanimate given the soul of a baby lion cub, who is quantum entangled with a human named Christina). In the project, Martin writes the orchestral music, while songs are composed by three main composers (Joi Barua, Ron J. Danziger and Jerome Buigues).
Two offshoots of that project are presented here. Firstly, the quarter-hour Fantasy of Companionship in its chamber versions, highlighting piano (Mark Bebbington), flute (Helen Vidovich) and cello (Val Welbanks), together the Marsyas Trio. The piece has already been premiered at St Giles, Cripplegate. The music is overtly descriptive (at one point, the solo cello takes us through the act of teleportation). Cast in six ‘acts’’ (ten tracks on the recording) the music moves from the more static ‘Origins’ to the free and easy jazzy stride of ‘Off to College moving via an ‘Ode to ALAN’ and a ‘Transition to New World Order’. to the final ‘Teleportation’. All credit to Val Welbanks’s warm-toned, expressive cello, Helen Vidovich’s flute and Mark Bebbington’s superbly musical piano playing for creating a convincing musical experience.
La Fantaisie d’ALAN has been previously recorded by Tedd Joselson, the excellent and cruelly under-rated pianist who was involved in the original Fantasy of Companionship recording at Abbey Road with the London Symphony Orchestra. That recording is for piano and orchestra, though (the world premiere at Cadogan Hall with Mark Bebbington and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was reviewed here). The Fantasy is on the original song by Joi Barua (with lyrics by Lim). What we heard in Cambridge was the world premiere of the piano Fantaisie. It began with what sounded like a notated improvisation. Jazzy inflections mirrored some heard in the first piece. Mark Bebbington is a superb player. Although this was a touch less technically clean, the feeling of exploration was superbly conveyed.
A recording of the Suite was released on a 15-minute CD single on Signum Records in April this year (SIGCD 858, where Bebbington is joined by members of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra).
Next, a piece by Dr Ewan Campbell, the Director of Music at Churchill and Muray Edwards Colleges. Much of his music is inspired by the natural world and environmental challenges. His Written in the Air for flute, cello and piano finds each movement notated directly onto an image of birds in flight by Spanish photographer Xavi Bou (from the Ornithographies series). The images capture the flight of wild birds, but with each image actually a composite of hundreds of frames. Thus, birds’ journeys are condensed into a single image. Campbell notates directly onto the images: there is an exhibition of this in the College itself, plus the images themselves are projected during the performance. The music directly reflects the spirals of the first photo, ‘Brush of a Thousand Feathers’; the virtuosity of the Marsyas Trio (Helen Vidovich, flute, Val Welbanks, cello, and Olga Srezhko, piano) ahead of that, to my ears, of the world premiere (incidentally also performed by this group). The short second movement, ‘Parallel Curves’, is astonishingly delicate: the Lento was in maximal contrast to the Presto of the first photo. Next, ‘Spiral resonance’, cello against plucked piano strings, a study in resonance beautifully done (all credit to Stezhko for mastering the harmonics). The fourth image, ‘Lines in the Sky’, shows a bare tree, alone like a symbol of the Weltschmerz of the Romantic period. The flute sings, a winding line that circle around certain pictures, a canon of post-Bachian purity, with all the beauty of an icy winter’s day. From simplicity of image to complexity: the ornate curves of ‘Dance of the quills’, marked Allegro capriccioso. I did wonder if there was a direct relationship between photo and musical surface (the technique therefore parallels Villa-Lobos’s tracing of mountains to generate melody). Campbell’s musical language is certainly different from Villa-Lobos’s more muted, more pastel perhaps. This is particularly true in the final ’Infinite horizons’, a Lento, calmando where the flute descents seemed to invoke Debussy’s faun. A lovely piece, brilliantly performed: Vidovich’s flute was particularly expressive here,
The world premiere is available on YouTube (but note the projection of the images on a brick wall was less successful than the cleaner projection at Churchill College).
Finally for the musical segment, an Overture in C by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, arranged by the previous Director of Music at Churchill, Mark Gotham. Dating from around 1832, this was Fanny’s only work for orchestra. It begins with an extended slow introduction; the Allegro begins with a punch and much use of fanfare. The move to flute and cello of the horns’ opening octave works well. the transition to the Allegro was particularly well done here, a deceptively soft line cruelly interrupted. Lots of cello tremolando on open strings must have been a joy to play, the music is positively joyous, anyway, as well as skilfully constructed; the coda is delightful.
Last but by no means least, the talk by the formidable Professor Dame Athene Donald, Professor Emerita in Experimental Physics (a nice tie-in to the Lim, therefore) and Master of Churchill College at the time of the concert (she was shortly to leave the post after a long and distinguished tenure). This is not my field, but the lecture (Not for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science) was fascinating, from word clouds taken from advertisements to considerations of power imbalances, including on a peer-to-peer level. An illuminating talk, then, and one that seemed perfectly placed, particularly when one considers the long neglect of music by female Romantic composers such as Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel (and we should remember, the likes of Louise Farrenc, too, so brilliantly championed by the Insula Orchestra from Paris).
Colin Clarke
Athene Donald’s book Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science is published by Oxford University Press, 2023, in hardback, ISBN: 9780192893406.