Bryars Cello Concerto

Gramophone Good CD Guide

Cello Concerto “FAREWELL TO PHILOSOPSHY”. ONE LAST BAR, THEN JOE CAN SING. BY THE VAAR

Julian Lloyd Webber vc, Charlie Haden db, Nexus

(Bob Becket Bill Cahn, Robin Engelman, Russell Hartenberget John Wyre perc)English Chamber Orchestra / James Judd

Point Music 454 126 2PTH (75 minutes: DDD)

Recorded 1995

Rather like Sibelius’s Swan of Tuonela, Gavin Bryars’s 1995 Cello Concerto (or Farewell to Philosophy, to quote its Haydn-inspired subtitle) emerges from among shadows, its solo line climbing sadly and patiently until the long first section takes its leave among Parsgial-style string figurations. Section two is more animated, at least initially, until the mood darkens again; the fifth recalls the orchestration of Haydn’s Philosopher Symphony (‘pairs of English and French horns playing alternating legato phrases, muted violins and unmuted lower strings accompanying with staccato quavers’), and the sixth, blurring dissonances and a softly chiming bell. The Farewell connection, again after Haydn, greets the tender final section with its progressive reduction of forces, a haunting 20th-century parallel to the various fin de siècle swan-songs of Franz Liszt. Lloyd Webber’s tone seems perfectly suited to the job, being full-bodied and expressive but relaxed enough to blend with the components of a predominantly dark accompaniment.

The Strad April 1997

Bryars: Cello Concerto ‘Farewell to Philosophy’; One Last Bar, Then Joe Can Sing; By the Vaar

Julian Lloyd Webber (cello) Charlie Haden (double bass) Nexus Ensemble English Chamber Orchestra James Judd (conductor)

POINT 454 126-2

The meditative or reflective forms a key part of Gavin Bryars’ musical vocabulary. Each is in evidence here. So too is Bryars the nostalgic – hence the title which matches the serene mood he evokes in this extended, unorthodox, seven-movement Cello Concerto.

Despite Bryars’ intriguing, pointillist orchestral background, the Concerto’s harmonic language is simple, if not quite to the point of the exquisite stasis one finds in Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet and his other chamber works. The pace of all seven movements is predominantly Lento, though here and there a soaring, lyrical, high passage for solo cello creates some impression of activity.

The chief delight is Julian Lloyd Webber’s intelligent reading of the solo line – beautifully judged and sustained, gorgeous in tone, subtle in nuance and utterly disarming in the final Farewell, which really does feel like a culmination. Lloyd Webber also underlines how within Bryars there lies both a refreshing honesty and an unashamed English Romantic.

In the similarly reflective, part-improvised, jazz-inspired By the Vaar, composed for Bryars’ own instrument, the double bass, Charlie Haden’s pizzicato, with its luscious vibrato, reveals a similarly beautiful tone. But although welcome enough to the discerning jazz enthusiast, it feels less absorbing than the magical One Last Bar; Then Joe Can Sing, with its shimmering, mysterious percussion, played here by the outstanding group, Nexus.

RODERIC DUNNETT

Le Monde de la Musique November 1996

CONCERTO POUR VIOWNCELLE “FAREWELL TO PHILOSOPSHY” – ONE LAST BAR, THEN JOE CAN SING – BY THE VAAR

Julian Lloyd Webber (violoncelle), Charlie Haden (contrebasse)

Ensemble Nexus (percussions), English Chamber Orchestra, James Judd (direction)

Auteur inspiré de The Sinking of ihe Titanic, Jasu’s Blood never failed me yet, d’une Médée (mise en scène par Bob Wilson) et de plusieurs partitions de chambre, dont Four Elements et une série d’Hommages, le compositeur anglais est un original, dont le style s cette particularité d’être à la frontière dis jazz et de la musique contemporaine. Ancien contrebassiste au sein du groupe de froc jazz Cockney Wagner Bryars cultive les atmosphères étranges et flavorise, lorsqu’il compose, l’esprit dada à la manière de Marcel Duchamp. Son Concerto pour violoncelle «Adieu à la philosophie » (une commande de Philips Classics pour Webber) multiplie les allusions à Haydn (Symphonies « les Adieux » et « le Philosophe »). La direction de James Judd est un modèle de raffinement. D’un seul tenant, malgré les modifications du tempo et de l’expression, cet Adieu à la philosophie, d’une profondeur souveraine, privilégie les sonorités graves — l’une des caractéristiques de la manière du compositeur, liée à son attachement à la contrebasse. La rencontre au sommet entre Bryars et Charlie Haden, l’un des plus grands contrebassistes de jazz, trouve un aboutissement magnifique dans By the Vaar, composé à l’initiative du Festival de Camden en 1987. Le jeu réfléchi et pénétré de Haden habite littéralement cette pièce, l’orchestre apportant une résonance infinie aux accorda envoûtants du soliste, comme dans les deux premiers mouvements d’Arbour Zena de Keith Jarrett. Bien servi par L’ensemble canadien Nexus le quintette de percussions One Last Bar… dérive d’un matériau emprunté à l’opéra Médée. Sur le rythme ondoyant des marimbas et des xylophones auréolé du son cristallin des crotales et des cloches, Bryars façonne une musique arachnéenne et haletante.

Franck Mallet

The Evening Standard 7th November 1996

Bryars: Cello Concerto ‘Farewell to Philosophy’; One Last Bar, Then Joe Can Sing; By the Vaar.

Julian Lloyd Webber (cello) Charlie Haden (double bass) Nexus Ensemble English Chamber Orchestra James Judd (conductor)

POINT 454 126-2

Bald icon Bryars is already a cult figure in certain circles. His music represents the intelligent man’s New Age minimalism. His Cello Concerto ‘Farewell to Philsophy’ is a beautiful woven and gently elated idyll. Cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, to whom the work was dedicated, sings its long lines with the same plaintive intensity that marked his extraodinary recording of the Delius Cello Concerto over a decade ago. It is a gently haunting work which reveals abundant new secrets each time you hear it. The other pieces on his disc – ‘One Last Bar’, ‘Then Joe Can Sing’ and ‘By the Vaar’, an intoxicating semi-improvisation for strings and jazz double bass soloist – are contrasting but equally appealing. The sort of minimalism which once can be described as delightful.

Alexander Waugh

Gramophone November 1996 Editor’s choice

Bryars Farewell to Philosophy, etc

Lloyd Webber; Haden; Nexus; ECO / Judd

Were our Editor to commission a “What next?” sequence after Sibelius’s Swan of Tuonela, Gavin Bryars’s 1995 Cello Concerto (or Farewell to Philosophy; to quote its Haydn-inspired subtitle) could quite easily head the list. Both pieces emerge from among shadows, the Bryars including harp and low percussion, its solo line climbing sadly and patiently until the long first section (there are seven sections in all that play without a break) takes its leave among Parsifal-style string figurations. Section two is more animated, at least initially (timpani set the scene), until the mood darkens again (at around 4’21 “); the third prompts violins, solo cello arpeggios and a tar-black bass clarinet; the fourth features especially intense solo work; the fifth recalls the orchestration of Haydn’s Philosopher Symphony (“pairs of English and French horns playing alternating legato phrases, muted violins and unmuted lower strings accompanying with staccato quavers”) and the sixth, blurring dissonances and a softly chiming bell (echoes of Hovhaness?). The Farewell connection, again after Haydn, greets the tender final section with its progressive reduction of forces. This, for me, is the loveliest moment in the work, a haunting twentieth-century parallel to the various fin de siecle swansongs of Franz Liszt (I’m thinking in particular of the Wagner memorials and other late pieces).

The booklet tells us that the Farewell 10 Philosophy was “commissioned by Philips Classics for Julian Lloyd Webber and is dedicated to him”. Lloyd Webber’s tone seems to be perfectly suited to the job, being full-bodied and expressive but relaxed enough to blend with the components of a predominantly dark accompaniment.

Robert Cowan

The Independent 29th November 1995

Music, English Chamber Orchestra, Barbican, London

If names are the consequences of things – as Gavin Bryars, courtesy of Dante, so luminously states in his cantata Incipit Vita Nova – then what can we make of minimalism? As a term for an art that makes its effects of fullness from the sense that fullness itself is an illusion, it’s a useful hold-all for process music by Reich, Cage and Feldman. Yet it’s a trick all art must play for coherence within the limits of personal style. Like neo-classicism, another name that was once a manifesto and can now apply to anything from Strauss to Saint-Saens, the word’s suffered death by dilution – often, out of context, a polite way of saying there’s not much there at all.

A commentary of this kind was probably not uppermost in the minds of the English Chamber Orchestra at their Barbican concert last Friday. With Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Ravel’s Mother Goose suite placed after the interval, their apparent theme was childhood. Yet minimalism was also on the agenda. After all, Ravel’s “Laideronelle, Imperatrice des Pagodes” and “Le Jardin feerique”, beautifully conducted by James Judd, are little miracles of sublime economy. But in the first half, there was the Dumbarton Oaks concerto (less well played) by that most daring spokesman for the M word, Stravinsky, plus a new Cello Concerto by Bryars himself, who, in early works like The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus’s Blood Never Failed Me Yet, made templates of minimalism in its purest form.

Though there was still a trace of their rigid disciplines in the way a unitary design of unbroken music was doggedly pursued, the dominant impression of the new work was richness; closer, indeed, to the hypnotic patterns of more recent ensemble scores like Four Elements.

Commissioned by Philips Classics Productions for that champion of British cello music, Julian Lloyd Webber, it seemed well fitted out to match the particular strengths of his playing, his warm legato in particular. If repeated chords plus flowing lines of darkly romantic yearning implied a minimalism channelled to new ends, then virtuosity, too, was redefined, with a complete absence of the circus. Above telling changes of harmony, the soloist unwound a thread of melody that time and again returned to a basic shape: a phrase that began somewhere in the darkest part of the cello’s register and slowly rose to soar above the textures. And what textures they were. Bryars, a bass player, writes skilfully for the strings, and knows how to colour their sound with discrete shades of woodwind tone. Colour, indeed, defined the work’s extremes: brooding and shadowy at either end, but in the middle, a frenzy of cello arpeggios amid dancing solo violins like a blaze of sunshine. There were also mysteries. For personal reasons the concerto was subtitled “Farewell to Philosophy”, an idea given musical substance through allusions to Haydn symphonies. He’s another composer with a skill for making much out of little, multum in paivo, like Bryars. Haydn the minimalist? We seem to be back where we started.

NICHOLAS WILLIAMS

The Guardian 27th November 1995

Gavin Bryars premiere

Barbican

GAVIN BRYARS’ cello concerto was commissioned by Philips Classics for Julian Lloyd Webber. While it is wholly commendable that a major recording company should be commissioning major new work, I was left with an uneasy feeling that Friday night’s premiere formed only an appendage to a series of recording sessions that had taken place earlier in the week. The concerto is both elusive and allusive, and demands repeated hearings. It has a contemplative intimacy that in some respects requires solitude and a sound system, rather than the vast space of a concert hall with its coughing and fidgeting.

Bryars teases his audience with a programme note claiming the piece derives its title, Farewell To Philosophy, from the nicknames of two Haydn symphonies alluded to in the orchestration. In fact, few works soundless like Haydn. Bryars produces a long, post-Romantic, one-movement noctume, redolent of Mahler and Strauss. A glockenspiel tinkles a quote from the Farewell section of Das Lied Von Der Erde. At one point, the soloist is drawn into a chamber ensemble which alternates with a clanging bell a semitone adrift from the work’s key structure, an allusion to Strauss’s Zarathustra and its inspiration in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Lloyd Webber plays with great fervour and remarkable variety of expression, given there is little to demand virtuosity. James Judd drew playing of great sensuality and beauty from the ECO.

Tim Ashley