BOHEMIAN RHAPSODIES – FELL CLARINET QUARTET
Colin Blamey – clarinet & bass clarinet (2-8, 16-29)
Helen Bywater – clarinet & C clarinet (1, 9-14)
Marianne Rawles – clarinet & Eb clarinet (5-8, 21-28)
Lenny Sayers – clarinet & bass clarinet (1, 9-15)
1 Béla Bartók (1881–1945), arr. Gregor Blamey: Ostinato (from Mikrokosmos, Bk 6) [2:20]
Lenny Sayers (b. 1977): Three Klezmer Melodies
2 Die Khasidim Forren Tsun Rebbin [2:36]
3 Der Gasn Nigun [2:08]
4 Sadeger Khosid [1:29]
Ferenc Farkas (1905–2000): Régi Magyar Táncok a 17. századból (Early Hungarian
Dances from the 17th Century)
5 Intrada [1:56]
6 Lassú (Slow Dance) [2:07]
7 Lapockás Tánc (Shoulder-Blade Dance) [1:14]
8 Ugrós (Leaping Dance) [1:20]
Bartók arr. •Gregor Blamey/ ºAndrew Sparling: Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm (from Mikrokosmos, Bk 6)
9 1 • [1:56]
10 2º [1:13]
11
Jirí Hudec (1923–1996): Rapsodia per Quattro [5:38]
Recorded on 21 & 22 May 2009 at Prestonkirk Church, East Lothian
Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Adam Binks
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Cover image: Dolores Padrutt
Photography: Joseph Lindley (joseph.lindley@gmail.com)
Design: Drew Padrutt
Booklet editor: John Fallas Delphian Records – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk
The Fell Clarinet Quartet use Eddie Ashton’s Superpads® www.woodwindco.com
16 Sayers: Mazel Tov! [6:12] Doina – Baym Rebin’s Sude – Sirba mit Harbester Betlekh
Antonín Tucapský (b. 1928): Malá odpolední hudba (A Little Afternoon Music)
17 Andante [2:03]
18 Allegretto
Lento
20 Allegro moderato [3:42]
Farkas: Magyar jelenetek (Scenes from Hungary)
21 Pohárköszönto (Toast) [0:52]
22 Játék (Play) [0:57]
23 A bujdosó dala (The Fugitive’s Song) [0:58]
24 A pásztor (The Shepherd) [0:52]
25 Gyászharangok (Funeral Bells) [0:38]
26 Lakodalmas (Wedding Song) [1:26]
27 Borúra deru (Sorrow and Consolation) [1:30]
28 Körtánc (Round) [1:01]
29 Sayers: Raisins and Almonds [7:19]
Raisins and Almonds – Badkhen Freylakh – Der Niklayver Bulgar
Total playing time [62:02]
premiere recordings except tracks 5–8, 10–12, 14 & 21–28
No other European nation can match Hungary’s rich brew of folk music. Its multiplicity of styles reflects the country’s constantly shifting borders, and the population shifts which have accompanied them. The Hungarians proper arrived from the East in their present homeland in the ninth century, and the music they brought with them was Turkic. Transylvania may now be part of Romania, but at various points in history it has belonged to Hungary, and its music also permeated this country’s culture. The Romanians, Tatars, Slovaks, Jews and Armenians who settled there blended their cultures with those of the three main resident ethnic groups – the Szeklers, the Saxons, and the Hungarians themselves.
Meanwhile Gypsy groups had settled. By 1700 almost every nobleman in Transylvania had his personal Gypsy violinist, who usually also served as a locksmith and blacksmith. And each Gypsy group evolved its own specialities. The Boyash were noted for their lullabies, and had a ‘slow song’ category which included ‘listening songs’, ‘tearful songs’, and ‘modest songs’ delivered parlando. The solos of the Vlachs burst out like flamenco riffs from unison group-singing. The Romungres developed the verbunkos army-recruiting dance: this evolved into the czardas, which became Hungary’s national dance. And at the same time, this Gypsy music became one of the first styles to span the folk music/art music divide, as middleclass amateurs learned to play it and composers
including Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven wove it into their works. In this respect, Béla Bartók had many distinguished precursors.
Bartók’s folk-music quest began in the summer of 1904 while he was preparing for a concert in the Slovak resort of Gerlicepuszta, where he chanced to hear a young Transylvanian servant singing a song to the child she was minding:
A red apple fell down into the mud Whoever picks it up won’t do so in vain.
This was a village song she had learned from her grandmother; when he asked her to sing more songs, a world opened up which was to fertilise his work for the rest of his life. Armed with wax cylinders, he delved deeper into the music of Hungary’s ethnic minorities, and then researched further afield; the results supplied a steady stream of compositions informed by the new melodic, rhythmic and formal patterns he had discovered. In 1906 Bartók and his fellow composer Zoltán Kodály issued a joint ‘appeal to the Hungarian people’ to support ‘a complete collection of folk songs, gathered with scholarly exactitude’. Though of course completion is not truly in the nature of such a project, they and their successors achieved heroic feats of preservation.
Bartók wrote his six-book series of solo piano pieces – aptly entitled Mikrokosmos, since each really does encapsulate a world
– over a 17-year period. His purpose was at one level didactic, to provide a progressive programme for young pianists. But the work’s deeper function was as a diary of his developing musical thought. Preceded by the joyously motoric ‘Ostinato’, the ‘Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm’, composed in 1937, formed the conclusion of the final book. Yet paradoxically, by arranging these pieces for clarinet quartet, Andrew Sparling and Gregor Blamey have taken the music back closer to its folk roots than Bartók himself was able to do, because to render the true spirit of this music, colourful instrumentation is the key. Hungarian – and Bulgarian – folk music was traditionally played on simple instruments with very characteristic timbres: cow horns and bagpipes; wind-clappers and bullroarers; wooden xylophones, jew’s harps and drums; flutes made by whistling across a piece of bark, and double-flutes with one pipe acting as the drone. In the piano version you sense Bartók straining every nerve to recreate the instrumental effects he wanted. The hocketing in 2 and 4, or the dramatic contrasts of texture in 5, can only be implied by the piano: with four clarinets the listener feels much closer to the soil. As the Fell Clarinet Quartet plays it here, the obliquely modal entry in 1 has a wonderfully suggestive reediness, as have the deep bass honkings in ‘Ostinato’. The low Cs in 2 were obtained by adding a clingfilm tube to the A clarinet, and – along with the use of the C clarinet throughout these Bartók
arrangements – greatly enhance the music’s rustic tone.
In Ferenc Farkas’ Early Hungarian Dances from the 17th Century (1976) and Scenes from Hungary (1980) we are in the same bucolic world. This composer was of a later generation than Bartók, and though he studied at the Budapest Academy of Music he was more influenced by Respighi, who taught him in Rome; best known for his choral works, Farkas was also the composition tutor of György Ligeti and György Kurtág. But he constantly reworked folk songs and dances, and these sequences reflect his charmingly evocative gifts. The physicality of each dance – leaping, shouldershrugging – comes across vividly, as do the village events which the Scenes suggest. His ability to condense an emotional world in less than a minute – as in ‘The Fugitive’s Song’ and ‘The Shepherd’ – is remarkable, as is the economy with which he creates his effects.
As professor of composition at London’s Trinity College of Music – a post he held for twenty years, after his move to Britain – Antonín Tucapský became famed for developing the choral oeuvre he had originally embarked on as a leading choirmaster in his native Moravia. His suite A Little Afternoon Music (2001) is as urbane as its title implies, and gives ample scope for the ensemble virtuosity it receives here. Though its sound-world is that of Western modernism, the final movement has a winsome
rusticity. Meanwhile in Jirí Hudec’s poised and graceful Rapsodia per Quattro (1993) one can sense that composer’s Czech roots.
The remainder of this programme is grounded in that great Central European tradition known as klezmer. The term itself derives from two Hebrew words, kley and zemer, meaning ‘instrument for song’; by the middle of the eighteenth century, klezmorim had become the generic term for all Jewish musicians in Eastern Europe. The typical klezmer ensemble consisted of two violins, a bass or a cello, a flute, and a hammered dulcimer called a cimbalom; in the early nineteenth century the clarinet joined the violin as a second lead instrument, and it’s usually the first lead in klezmer today.
The original klezmer repertory consisted of improvisations interspersed with dance tunes; liturgical laments and wedding genres like the mazeltov were also staple fare. But since Central Europe’s Jewish musicians always followed their own precept – ‘whichever wagon you get on, sing the same song’ – they could ride along equally happily on Greek, Turkish, and even Arabic wagons, without losing the essential spirit of their music. This is why, for example, the Muzsikas Ensemble (who are not Jewish) are able to present their laments, lullabies, and wedding dances as ‘both a hundred per cent Jewish, and a hundred per cent Hungarian’. Moreover, from
Greece northwards via Albania and Romania, the Jewish and Gypsy bands who acted as licensed professional musicians developed styles which were virtually interchangeable. Richer Jews in Hungary would hire Gypsy bands to play for them: much of our information about Transylvanian Jewish music comes from Gypsies who were playing it when the Holocaust wiped out both their patrons and their Jewish fellow-musicians 55 years ago.
But we have another source of information too, thanks to the work of the Soviet musicologist Moishe Beregovsky. In 1911 the playwright Shlomo Ansky – author of The Dybbuk – led a Jewish Ethnographic Expedition round villages in the Ukraine, transcribing and notating what they heard; their findings became the kernel of a huge Jewish music archive in Kiev which was run by Beregovsky until its closure by Stalin in 1949. At that point it ‘disappeared’ until, to the delight of Jewish musicologists, it was rediscovered in 1994. This music’s presentday health derives from the fact that the klezmorim simply carried on in America where European pogroms had forced them to leave off. Juxtapose recordings of klezmer in the Twenties with contemporary reworkings of the same songs – soulful, exuberant or surreal – and you will realise that klezmer can renew itself constantly, yet always retain its unique character.
based on traditional melodies – are essentially concert virtuoso pieces. But they are deeply imbued with the klezmer spirit, and were inspired by artists including Naftule Brandwein and The Klezmatics. Sayers has replaced the usual klezmer oom-pah accompaniment with a walking bass, and he has made a point of letting all the instruments share the lead: this, he says, is both more democratic and more practical, as playing constant offbeats is tiring.
Mazel Tov! (2000) – comprising ‘Doina’, ‘Baym Rebin’s Sude’ and ‘Sirba mit Harbester Betlekh’ – was the first concert medley Sayers wrote for the Fell Clarinet Quartet. A doina is a traditional improvised lament based on a Romanian shepherd’s song and performed by a solo musician. This one is an original composition in which the first clarinet (as soloist) is echoed by the other players; the low tremolos very effectively represent the sound of the cimbalom. The sirba is a fast Romanian dance very popular among the Jews of Eastern Europe. Here, ‘Baym Rebin’s Sude’ (At the Rabbi’s Banquet) gradually increases in tempo towards ‘Sirba mit harbester Betlekh’ (Sirba with the Falling Leaves).
‘Sadeger Khosid’ is named after the Ukrainian town of Sadgora.
Raisins and Almonds (2004), the most adventurous and flamboyant of these three medleys, is in Sayers’ view more of an ‘Overture on Jewish Themes’ than an arrangement. It takes its title from a Yiddish lullaby by Todros Geller (1889–1949), which is the basis of the opening section here:
Under Baby’s cradle in the night Stands a goat so soft and snowy white The goat will go to the market To bring you wonderful treats He’ll bring you raisins and almonds Sleep, my little one, sleep.
The central ‘Badkhen Freylakh’ is a playful portrait of jesters and entertainers (badkhen). Here and in the equally lively dance that follows, ‘Der Niklayver Bulgar’, Sayers has departed further from the original melodies than in any of the previous pieces on the disc, adding his own modulations, countermelodies and variations to bring the work to its toetapping conclusion.
© 2010 Michael Church
Lenny Sayers’ arrangements – though he prefers to think of them as compositions
‘Die Khasidim Forren Tsun Rebbin’ (The Chassids Visit the Rabbi), the first of Three Klezmer Melodies (2003), is a liturgical-style melody; ‘Der Gasn Nigun’ (Street Tune) is a very popular klezmer number, often played faster than in this arrangement. The lively
Michael Church writes about classical music, and is also an ethnomusicologist; his field recordings of the traditional music of Kazakhstan, Chechnya, and Georgia are available on the Topic label. He is currently editing a book about the world’s great musical cultures.
The Manchester-based Fell Clarinet Quartet is named after the late Sidney Fell, a renowned soloist, orchestral clarinettist, and teacher of great repute at the Royal Northern College of Music. Formed at the RNCM in 1999, the Fell Clarinet Quartet has proved itself to be one of the most innovative and engaging chamber groups to emerge in recent years, giving recitals and workshops throughout the UK, and helping to raise the profile of this relatively uncommon chamber ensemble.
Recent festival appearances include Conwy, Harrogate, Ryedale and the Belfast Festival at Queen’s. Collaborations have included touring a new live score for I Was Born But ..., a Japanese silent film from the 1930s, and a partnership with The Imperial War Museum North where the Quartet was featured as part of the In the Mood Exhibition.
The ever-increasing clarinet quartet repertoire is unique in that, due to the versatile nature of the instrument, it is able to draw from a wide range of influences including folk, jazz, klezmer and contemporary classical music. New music is something to which the Fell Clarinet Quartet is very committed, and the group enjoys a close relationship with the North West Composers’ Association. The Quartet has commissioned several new works and premiered scores by composers such as Colin Bayliss, David Beck, Marcus Blunt, David Ellis, David Golightly, Edward Dudley Hughes, Graham Marshall, Nicholas Simpson and David Solomons.
Past engagements include highly successful recitals at the Purcell Room and Kings Place in London and the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, as well as performances at both the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and the Royal Northern College of Music. The Quartet has also performed live on BBC Radio.
Since winning a Tunnell Trust Award in 2003/4, the Quartet has been fortunate enough to tour Scotland on numerous occasions. Closer to home, the Quartet continues to enjoy the role of Woodwind Ensemble in Residence at the University of Salford, Greater Manchester, where it gives regular recitals and workshops.
The Quartet’s debut CD Knotwork (Delphian DCD34065) was released in April 2008, and met with much critical acclaim, including the accolade of MusicWeb CD of the Month in August 2008.
The Fell Clarinet Quartet records exclusively for Delphian Records.
www.fellclarinetquartet.com
Fell Clarinet Quartet
Also available on Delphian
Knotwork
Fell Clarinet Quartet (DCD34065)
From the vigour of Graham Fitkin’s Vent and the flamboyance of Piazzolla to the refinement of Eddie McGuire’s offerings, the Fell Quartet have created an inspired programme of superbly realised works from both the history and present of this still-young medium. Features four world premiere recordings.
‘Their style is electrifyingly unanimous ... ice-cool virtuosity and moody whispers that colour in equal measure’
– The Scotsman, April 2008
‘The young musicians of the Fell Clarinet Quartet mightily impress with their recital of 20th- and 21st-century works’
– Sunday Herald, May 2008
Miracles: the music of Edward Harper
Scottish Chamber Orchestra & Chorus / Garry Walker
David Wilson-Johnson baritone; Edinburgh Quartet (DCD34069)
Delphian’s first orchestral recording presents a richly imagined new choral symphony by Edward Harper, setting it alongside chamber works by this inventive and limpidly expressive composer. Harper’s music takes its place firmly within the British symphonic tradition, yet ranges wider still in its deeply felt response to human experience, from the nineteenth-century Dorset of William Barnes to a message of hope and reconciliation from the present-day Middle East.
‘A stunningly powerful performance [of Symphony No 2]’
– Sunday Herald, May 2008
‘The Three Folk Settings for string quartet are quite masterly in the way their allusions to familiar folk materials are framed’
– Gramophone, July 2008
The Red Red Rose: songs and tunes from 18th-century Scotland
Concerto Caledonia / David McGuinness; David Greenberg violin (DCD34014)
Concerto Caledonia bring their exuberant flair for early Scottish music to love songs from the time of Robert Burns, and baroque/Cape Breton virtuoso David Greenberg brings along some wild fiddling from the golden age of the Scots violin. The original version of Robert Burns’ most famous song The Red Red Rose appears here in its first ever recording.
‘The funkiest album of Burns songs I’ve ever heard’
– CD Review, BBC Radio 3, January 2005
Birds & Beasts: music by Martyn Bennett and Fraser Fifield
Mr McFall’s Chamber (DCD34085)
Martyn Bennett was one of Scotland’s most innovative musicians, combining the traditional and modern, the local and the international. A long-planned collaboration with Mr McFall’s Chamber was never realised during his tragically short lifetime. For the group’s second disc with Delphian, Robert McFall has put together a programme of his own sympathetic arrangements of Martyn’s music alongside original works by Fraser Fifield, another of Scotland’s virtuosic musical innovators. The premiere recording of Bennett’s Piece for string quartet, percussion and Scottish smallpipes epitomises his sophisticated mastery of fusion.
‘[Bennett] caused a sensation – and much controversy – in British folk music ... Scottish bagpipe and fiddle music with techno beats’
– Guardian, February 2005
