MARTIN SUCKLING THE TUNING principal players of
Aurora Orchestra Marta Fontanals-Simmons mezzo-soprano
Christopher Glynn piano
with poetry by Frances Leviston
MARTIN SUCKLING (b. 1981) THE TUNING Marta Fontanals-Simmons
Christopher Glynn
mezzo-soprano
piano
The Tuning (2019) for mezzo-soprano and piano
String Quintet ‘Emily’s Electrical Absence’ (2017, rev. 2018)
1
The Present
[4:16]
7
Emily’s Electrical Absence
[1:37]
2
The River in Spate
[2:54]
8
I
[3:33]
3
Tears
[2:13]
9
White Box
[0:49]
4
The Tuning
[5:58]
10
II
[4:01]
5
Two Spells for Sleeping
[3:22]
6
Nocturne (2013) for violin and cello
[8:52]
principal players of
Aurora Orchestra Jamie Campbell violin 1 (String Quintet) / violin (Nocturne) Alessandro Ruisi violin 2 Hélène Clément viola Sébastien van Kuijk cello 1 (String Quintet) / cello (Nocturne, Her Lullaby) Alexander Holladay cello 2 Frances Leviston spoken poetry (tracks 7, 9, 11, 13, 15)
Martin Suckling’s music is published by Faber Music, London
11
I see thee better
[1:53]
12
III (after Emily Dickinson)
[1:58]
13
In an Alabaster Chamber
14
IV
15
The Pursuit of Universal Harmony
16
Her Lullaby (2019 / 2020) for solo cello
[16:10]
Total playing time
[75:39]
[2:12] [13:24] [2:21]
premiere recordings This recording was made possible by grants from the Leverhulme Trust’s Philip Leverhulme Prize, The RVW Trust and the University of York.
Recorded on 6-8 April 2021 in the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter Piano technician: John Tordoff
Cover image © Desmond Clarke Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com Design: Eliot Garcia Booklet editor: John Fallas Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com
@ delphianrecords @ delphianrecords @ delphian_records
Notes on the music ‘Much of my music has been written in the hours of darkness.’ The Romantic image of the composer burning the candle at both ends has been milked for all it is worth in every fictionalised depiction of the tortured artist. There is something intrinsically brooding, mysterious, sexy about an artist at work during the night: averse to sociable hours, unable to resist the call of the Muse. Refreshingly, Martin Suckling’s reasons for composing at night are based on something much more practical – the desire for a worklife balance in which creativity does not distract from, nor is distracted by, family. ‘It’s good to write before the household has woken … It’s good to write after the household is asleep.’ Yet despite the pragmatic nature of this timetabling, Suckling is aware of the way time feels different, and passes differently, at night; and this heightened awareness of nighttime can be sensed, both stylistically and thematically, in the chamber works collected here. The Tuning, to texts by Michael Donaghy, is nocturnal, moonlit, otherworldly; Suckling has written of the ‘magic’ these poems possess, and which possesses him as he reads them. Donaghy was an Irish–
American poet who moved to London in 1985. Alongside his writing he performed as a folk musician, and his musicality permeates his poetry – its ebb and sway and its carefully weighted words, picked up like pebbles on a beach and chosen for their colour and light. As Suckling points out, this is ‘more than just pervasive lyricism’; Donaghy’s treatment of language exhibits a ‘precision of gesture and cadence and a delight in the union of formal elegance with expressive heft’. Suckling has resisted binding these songs together tightly – this is not a cycle in the strictly unified sense of the term – but rather creates a looser, more fluid set of connections between songs that are independent yet share certain poetic themes and structures. Water flows through each twilit text. We begin, after an introduction of aqueous piano textures, with ‘The Present’: For the present there is just one moon, though every level pond gives back another. The text concludes with a delicious exhortation to seize the day: Make me this present then: your hand in mine, and we’ll live out our lives in it.
Echoing the poem’s construction in couplets, Suckling fashions the vocal phrases – which sit deep in the mezzo-soprano’s register – in pairs, with the piano’s descending lines expanding over the course of the song. ‘The River in Spate’ and ‘Tears’ are found side by side in Donaghy’s third collection, Conjure, and are typical of Donaghy’s wordmusic; we hear of ‘soft rain gentling the level of the lake’ and, in ‘Tears’, of how ordinary stories pour, furl, crash, and spill downhill – as water will – not orient, nor sparkling, but still. Stillness characterises both these songs. For ‘The River in Spate’ Suckling writes almost motionless, sustained piano chords that throw into relief the shape of the vocal phrases. In ‘Tears’ the piano part is to be played ‘like a cascade of water captured on a high-speed camera viewed in super slow motion’, over which the vocal line gradually reveals itself. ‘The Tuning’ is a devastating poem contemplating death, ‘on the quietest night of summer’, through haunting, ultimately violent, imagery. The arioso’s unfettered rhythms are punctuated with gruff gestures from the piano, which slowly takes over and mummifies the melody in a shroud of overlapping lines. But the voice is left alone at the end, isolated and then
gone, ‘forever’. ‘Two Spells for Sleeping’, which starts ‘in a moonlit garden’, channels the magical quality of Donaghy’s words, the piano spinning a gossamer web (‘like a silvery ribbon’) as the voice unfolds its ethereal incantation. Nocturne is a direct response to Suckling’s after-hours stints of creativity. He describes it as an ‘anti-duo’ because the violin and cello act and move as one; joined at the hip, they articulate an insistent, microtonal lullaby interspersed with looped, dancing figures. The music shifts imperceptibly as the violin’s curlicues waft skywards like smoke, floating free of the cello – a subtle change which reflects Suckling’s own experience of the slow arrival of dawn, signalling the composer to down tools and relish the moment ‘when the stillness starts to ripple with birdsong’. Franz Schubert was no stranger to writing at this early hour, although he was usually starting rather than finishing work. The priorities were similar: fit composing around the rest of life. In 1820 Anselm Hüttenbrenner recorded that Schubert ‘used to sit down at his writing desk every morning at 6 o’clock and compose straight through until 1 o’clock in the afternoon’, after which he would have a long, smoke-filled lunch at a coffee house, often deteriorating into drunken nights out. Schubert’s String Quintet in C major, D 956
Notes on the music – written in 1828, towards the end of his short life – forms part of the fabric of Emily’s Electrical Absence, Suckling’s collaboration with the poet Frances Leviston. Schubert’s piece has been lauded as one of the finest achievements in chamber music, and as such has become inextricably bound up with our collective Western musical consciousness. The pianist Arthur Rubinstein, the cellist Alfred Piatti and the writer Thomas Mann all chose it as the work they would wish to hear on their deathbeds. Suckling acknowledges the power of this precedent, this ‘shared cultural memory’, in Emily’s Electrical Absence, and it colours his music in the same way the influence of Emily Dickinson does Leviston’s texts. The ‘electrical’ part comes from a very different source of inspiration. Suckling’s and Leviston’s commission was initiated by a group of physicists developing the PETMEM (Piezoelectronic Transduction Memory Device), a low-voltage transistor with the potential to make computer processors run up to 100 times faster. Suckling was particularly interested by the physical basis of this acceleration: the piezoresistive material is compressed until its electrical properties are altered. ‘Material under pressure: there’s a great deal of musical potential in this idea.’ The fact that this mechanism is called a ‘memory device’ links back to the
deeply embedded personal and cultural memories referred to both by Suckling, via Schubert, and by Leviston, via Dickinson. As Oliver Sacks puts it in his book Musicophilia: ‘Perception is never purely in the present – it has to draw on experience of the past.’ Suckling’s quintet started life as a single movement (now the fourth), to which he added three predecessors: ‘its memories have been rewritten’. As with the Schubert predecessor, the configuration is two violins, one viola and two cellos (rather than two violas and one cello, the combination favoured by Mozart). We begin with the eponymous poem, after which Leviston’s texts alternate with Suckling’s music. The poems draw not only on Dickinson and her world but on memories of Venice and of meeting PETMEM scientists. As for the music, Suckling marks the first movement ‘Driven’ and divides his forces into two clear groups, each sticking to the same rhythms – the upper instruments (violins and viola) pitted against growling cellos. This dialogue builds and overlaps until all five instruments join forces, leading to pithy, multiple-stopped chords (‘Punched’, is the performance marking here). The movement culminates in sustained chords, over which a violin soliloquy eventually rises as the other instruments absent themselves one by one.
All five instruments are closely knit in the hypnotic second movement, their ghostly chords, overlayed with harmonics, interspersed with silences. The third chimes with Leviston’s poetry as a response to that of Emily Dickinson; Suckling describes it as a ‘reading’ of the Dickinson poem ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’. The first cello is to the fore, its rhythms speaking the words of a text in which memory’s mercurial nature is again a theme: The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’ And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before?’ In the fourth movement, Suckling uses an array of techniques to create frangible, eerie sonorities of specific colours: tremolo harmonics, glissandi, ricochets and polyrhythms, each to be approached in a particular way. The movement is marked ‘Delicate, fragile, hushed. As though heard from a great distance’, and the result sounds like a memory, or the memory of a dream – fleeting, intangible, elusive, until at last it slips away altogether and fades into nothingness. Her Lullaby (which exists in three versions, for solo violin, viola or cello) is an exquisitely tender, very personal work, both celebrating and grieving the now past stage of parenthood when Suckling would sing lullabies,
sometimes for hours, to his young children. Whereas a piece on a similar theme such as Oliver Knussen’s Sonya’s Lullaby was composed while its subject was still a baby, Suckling’s work looks back. ‘I miss that calm timeless space of song gentling the night.’ This is an aspect of parenthood too rarely acknowledged: that the joy of each new stage in a child’s development brings also loss, as they move on from certain rituals and routines, each time growing a fraction further away from the parent. In Her Lullaby, Suckling requires of the soloist an acute ear for duration and intonation as they pitch pure, viol-like, justly tuned intervals – like the alert hearing of a parent listening for a child’s changing breathing. The improvisatory melody is extended with each phrase in a way that recalls, for Suckling, ‘those special times I spent with my children when they were very young, singing them across the border from wakefulness to sleep’. © 2022 Joanna Wyld Joanna Wyld is a writer on music whose work embraces a wide range of eras and styles. She has won awards for her creative writing, her poetry was longlisted for the Live Canon Poetry Prize in 2019, and she wrote the libretto for Robert Hugill’s chamber opera The Gardeners.
Texts The Tuning 1
2
sweeps us both down its cold grey current. Grey now as your father was when I met you, I wake even now on that shore where once, sweat slick and still, we breathed together – in – soft rain gentling the level of the lake, out – bright mist rising from the lake at dawn. How long before we gave each other to sleep, to air – drawing the mist up, exhaling the rain? Though we fight now for breath and weaken in the torrent’s surge to the dark of its mouth, you are still asleep in my arms by its source, small waves lapping the gravel shore, and I am still awake and watching you, in wonder, without sadness, like a child.
The Present For the present there is just one moon, though every level pond gives back another. But the bright disc shining in the black lagoon, perceived by astrophysicist and lover, is milliseconds old. And even that light’s seven minutes older than its source. And the stars we think we see on moonless nights are long extinguished. And, of course, this very moment, as you read this line, is literally gone before you know it. Forget the here-and-now. We have no time but this device of wantonness and wit. Make me this present then: your hand in mine, and we’ll live out our lives in it.
The River in Spate
3
Tears are shed, and every day workers recover the bloated cadavers of lovers or lover who drown in cars this way. And they crowbar the door and ordinary stories pour, furl, crash, and spill downhill – as water will – not orient, nor sparkling, but still.
4
The Tuning If anyone asks you how I died, say this: The angel of death came in the form of a moth And landed on the lute I was repairing. I closed up shop And left the village on the quietest night of summer, The summer of my thirtieth year, And went with her up through the thorn forest. Tell them I heard yarrow stalks snapping beneath my feet And heard a dog bark far off, far off. That’s all I saw or heard, Apart from the angel at ankle level leading me, Until we got above the treeline and I turned To look for the last time on the lights of home. That’s when she started singing. It’s written that the voice of the god of Israel Was the voice of many waters. But this was the sound of trees growing, The noise of a pond thrown into a stone.
When I turned from the lights below to watch her sing, I found the angel changed from moth to woman, Singing inhuman intervals through her human throat, The notes at impossible angles justified. If you understand, friend, explain to them So they pray for me. How could I go back? How could I bear to hear the heart’s old triads – Clatter of hooves, the closed gate clanging, A match scratched toward a pipe – How could I bear to hear my children cry? I found a rock that had the kind of heft We weigh the world against And brought it down fast against my forehead Again, again, until blood drenched my chest And I was safe and real forever.
Texts 5
Two Spells for Sleeping Eight white stones in a moonlit garden, to carry her safe across the bracken on a gravel path like a silvery ribbon seven eels in the urge of water a necklace in rhyme to help her remember a river to carry her unheard laughter to light about her weary mirror six candles for a king’s daughter five sighs for a drooping head a prayer to be whispered a book to be read four ghosts to gentle her bed three owls in the dusk falling what is that name you hear them calling? In the soft dark welling, two tales to be telling, one spell for sleeping, one for kissing, for leaving. Michael Donaghy (1954–2004) Poems copyright © 1988, 1993, 2000, 2005, 2014 Printed by permission of Faber Music, London
Emily’s Electrical Absence 7
Emily’s Electrical Absence ‘I hope you may have an electrical absence, as life
never loses its startlingness, however assailed.’ — Emily Dickinson, letter to Prof. J. K. Chickering, autumn 1882
III Had Angels Bones – they would of Quartz Be slenderly compiled – And none would know what Minerals Musculature concealed – What cloudy Pins – what lambent Plates Moved them to and fro And gave them – Heartless – energy To Trees with Feathers plough –
I Technologies – are not abrupt – Though Pole-vaults may appear – The lever bends a longer spell Than Morals – in a Fire
But if you took an Angel’s Hand And pressed in Friendship’s Name – Catastrophe! – a Lightning Strike Would Crystallise your Arm
And clatters off the Bar before It ever clears the way – And makes the Mass – astonished – cheer A bruised inverted Thigh II Inwards all things pressured go – Sponges – drop their Tents – The Mirandising Brain retreats From risk to precedent – Blades by Hammers flattened out Swell around the Blows Like proving Bread – but if they’re stopped All Forces pass for Screws
a Santa’s grotto Jagged milk quartz crusts constitute every surface – a mouth all teeth self-sharpening like sea urchins’ – ‘Uncomfortably beautiful’ toughened glass spikes in the doorways of award-
9
winning offices – rough
White Box 'Of Tribulation – these are They, Denoted by the white’ — Emily Dickinson
sleepers from the womb condemned
Pained, permanent wakefulness
to make of anything succulent rock
Exposed in the split geode
of porticoes iron maidens
Texts 11
I see thee better
For Helen at the NPL
Behind her now the National History Museum Pocket Microscope she always screwed down to its farthest extension of nested rings, straining to focus the peacock feather stolen from the dining room’s display of stiff dried flowers and fed forwards on to the stage, a blurred blue petrol and purple fronding of fine barbules and barbicels netting white light, broken out of straightness and scattering green and bronze before the eyes appeared, optical illusions blinking between the rachides like faces half-hidden behind wooden masks half-hidden in the trees; behind her now
that closer meant clearer, learning to pull back and let the light do its work, revealing the lion’s ruff on a scalloped oak moth, canyons in a cone; then wising up, withdrawing into augmentedness: I see thee better – in the Dark – I do not need a Light; firing electrons at a stage one thousandth the width of a human hair, without an audience, the only way of telling what’s happening there between the grains, the photons’ murmurations: not to see it but to send the beam out and watch for what comes back – shots in the net, renderings, a dream that splits the night.
13
In an Alabaster Chamber after Tiepolo’s Nuptial Allegory Room and Marzia Migliora’s ‘Velme’
All the frescoes are peering down at these interlopers: Raw untutored chunks of marble, A pedigree of sorts but absolutely unrefined, Each one set on a stoneworker’s desk as if it’s a pedestal. The dull lions of Venice disapprove. This specimen sitting on a cloud observing crosswise The marriage chariot glide across a scumbled Firmament, but never thank goodness getting there, Wishes they could send it back from whence it came – And the marble too, restored to the palace it’s part of, The negative palace in the hills above Carrara, For which a score of quarriers will have sacrificed hands. The sugarcube grittiness, the horsehair impasto And faint glitter of alien minerals adhering To the motherstone matrix the marble provides Make the lion slump with apprehension.
Grey sediment spidering through it reminds him Of original sin, the clogged lung and clay bedded down Under the soul’s claws, Tiepolo’s fingernails When the nuptial allegory was brought into generous being; And all the little tools exposed in the stoneworkers’ desks Like stationery sets for vicious schoolboys Clattering with chisels and picks and hammers Remind the lion how easily he might be scratched Or his flatness scrubbed out of existence Were someone determined to strip the walls Right back to the underlying stone, the polished blocks Those carbuncles are only cousins to. Everything should stay where it belongs, he could groan From his patted cloud on plaster clinging upside down To the ceiling of a dazzling palazzo propped On wooden stilts sunk in the middle of a silty lagoon.
Texts 15
The Pursuit of Universal Harmony 'Excuse / Emily and / her Atoms’ — Emily Dickinson, envelope interior A 636 /636a
What slow terror would accompany the sudden loss of the prototype kilogram kept under triple lock beneath a triple bell jar in the Parc de Saint-Cloud in the suburbs of Paris?
What becomes of a holy relic of Victorian-era co-operation between European nations, a polyglot ingot ferried back and forth between London and Paris for polishing, steam-cleaned like a pale carpet? One sequin in a drag queen’s wardrobe One tip in a betting career One wingbeat in a hummingbird’s courtship One word in a therapist’s ear
One second in the age of the universe One spore in a European map of mould Not so conspicuous One yard at the speed of a racing yacht as to be missed by a great many people One degree Kelvin to the cold at first, would it pass unremarked for weeks, months, years, What eulogy for this last remaining base unit before measured against an artefact, a particular the loss of its absolute steadiness lump in the world, registered underfoot? rather than gauged against the unchanging principles physics derives from any lumps or beams it likes? One microbead in a bottom-feeder’s belly One chip of gravel in a grave on San Michele One zero in a tower block of binary One penny in the hard sell
One smalto in St Mark’s Basilica One hair in a lion’s outstanding mane One tick of an orbital atomic clock One neuron in a dreaming brain Frances Leviston (b. 1982) Poems copyright © 2018 Frances Leviston
Biographies Praised for her ‘velvet voice’ (Daily Telegraph), British–Spanish mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons is a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where she was awarded the prestigious Gold Medal, and was a Jerwood Young Artist at Glyndebourne for the 2015–16 season. Now an established recitalist and concert soloist, she collaborates with orchestras, conductors and pianists of the highest calibre, including Stéphane Denève, Alan Gilbert, Sakari Oramo, Roger Vignoles and Bengt Forsberg. She has performed at many of the most prestigious venues in Europe, including Wigmore Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, Stuttgart Liederhalle, St Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, Oslo Opera House, Opéra de Lille and the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, and is an associate member of the Quantum Ensemble at the Auditorio de Tenerife. Recent operatic engagements include Siébel Faust (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, directed by David McVicar), Eurydice the Woman The Mask of Orpheus (English National Opera), and creating the role of Hel in Gavin Higgins’ The Monstrous Child (Linbury Theatre). Other operatic highlights include performances at Opéra de MonteCarlo, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Garsington Opera, Teatro Real, Madrid and the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. For the 2021–22 season she joins the ensemble at the Grand Théâtre de Genève.
Christopher Glynn is an award-winning pianist and accompanist, praised for his ‘breathtaking sensitivity’ (Gramophone), ‘irrepressible energy, wit and finesse’ (The Guardian) and as ‘an inspired programmer’ (The Times). Chris read music at New College, Oxford and studied piano with John Streets in France and Malcolm Martineau at the Royal Academy of Music, where he now teaches. He has made many CD recordings and is regularly heard on BBC Radio 3. He is also Artistic Director of the Ryedale Festival, programming around sixty events each year in beautiful and historic venues across North Yorkshire. An interest in bringing classical song to a wider audience recently led Chris to commission Jeremy Sams to create new English translations of Schubert’s song-cycles, which have been recorded for Signum Records. Future plans include recitals with Roderick Williams and Ian Bostridge, further collaborations with Jeremy Sams (on songs by Schumann and Wolf), CD recordings with Nicky Spence, Kathryn Rudge, Claire Booth, Roderick Williams and The Sixteen, performances at the Spitalfields, Lammermuir and Bath festivals, masterclasses for the Britten-Pears School, a tour of Wolf’s Italian Songbook, and embarking on a project with Rachel Podger to perform and record Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas, as well as many appearances at Wigmore Hall, London and the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam.
With its signature creative ethos, Aurora Orchestra combines world-class performance with adventurous programming and presentation. Founded in 2005 under Principal Conductor Nicholas Collon, it has quickly established a reputation as one of Europe’s leading chamber orchestras, garnering several major awards including three Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards, a German ECHO Klassik Award and a Classical:NEXT Innovation Award. Collaborating widely across art forms and musical genres, Aurora has worked with an exceptional breadth of artists, ranging from Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Sarah Connolly, Ian Bostridge and Leonidas Kavakos to Wayne McGregor, Edmund de Waal and Björk. A champion of new music, it has premiered works by composers including Julian Anderson, Benedict Mason, Anna Meredith, Nico Muhly and Judith Weir. In recent years, it has pioneered memorised performance (without the use of printed sheet music), and is thought to be the first orchestra worldwide to perform whole symphonies in this way. Since 2016, Aurora has been creating ‘orchestral theatre’ productions spanning diverse musical genres and art forms. These orchestral adventures rethink the concert format and offer bold new ways to engage with orchestral music for old and new concertgoers alike.
Based in London, Aurora is Resident Orchestra at Kings Place and Associate Orchestra at Southbank Centre. Its busy touring schedule has seen it appear in most of the UK’s major concert halls as well as in leading international venues including the Royal Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Kölner Philharmonie, Victoria Concert Hall Singapore and Shanghai Concert Hall. Aurora’s award-winning creative learning programme brings music to thousands of schoolchildren and families annually, including many whose access to the concert hall is limited. Visit www.auroraorchestra.com for more information about Aurora and to watch highlights from the orchestra’s live performance archive. Frances Leviston is a poet, critic and fiction writer. Her most recent collection of poems is Disinformation (Picador, 2015). She lives in Northumberland.
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