The opening note of Schubert’s 'Death And The Maiden' string quartet leapt into your ears like a palpable shudder. Nevertheless, the Stoller Hall is also a rare transformative venue. I think it is fantastic that they perform in a wide variety of places – the last concert I heard them play was in The White Hotel in Salford which isn’t a hotel but a night club which looks like a mechanic’s garage with a few big speakers and a DJ booth! The use of such performance spaces for 20th and 21st century art music is not completely incongruent and while a primary intention may be to widen access to an audience that might not typically go to a venue like the Stoller Hall, there is also a transformation of the music. Their current programme will be performed in Leeds, Hull, Liverpool, Newcastle as well as Manchester and Salford.ĭirector Adam Szabo expressed his pleasure to have this evening’s performance in the Stoller Hall after a few performances already in non-traditional performance spaces. It’s sort of reborn for this moment because of all the associations it had originally.Manchester Collective recently celebrated two years of existence and what a two years they have been! Their first programme, February 2017, was performed in Liverpool and Manchester. People have come up to me also and have expressed the same opinion that this work seems to speak again to the times right now, the present time. We can’t seem to avoid that every so often in our history. We get ourselves into these awful, abysmal messes. I heard the piece played several times just in the last year and a half and I kind of shudder that things move in cycles. It’s surprisingly reminiscent of so many things that worried us about the Vietnam time. We’re heading right into a very dark period for America. I think that when I hear this piece played in very recent times, I’m struck with the haunting sense that here we go again. By the time I finished writing the whole piece, in token of this recognition of its character and identifying with that very dark time, I inscribed the work “In Time of War” using the model of Joseph Haydn‘s Mass In Time of War. And there were dark currents operating and those things were somehow finding their way into the conception of the string quartet. But very soon after I got into the sketching process, I became aware that the musical ideas were picking up vibrations from the surrounding world, which was the world of the Vietnam time. At the outset, I wasn’t planning anything like a political statement I was just writing a piece of music. I had not worked in that medium since my student days. The project started with a simple commission from the University of Michigan for the Stanley Quartet, so I was first of all faced with the task of coming up with a string quartet. LISTEN to an excerpt from Crumb’s Black Angels It’s not uniformly black, but the prevailing sense is probably very much that. As black as things are, there is a progression from the dark to the light over the course of the work, even though the final page again has a flashback to the hysterical music of the opening page.
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I think that Black Angels should inspire a sense of terror although, toward the end, I introduce a note of optimism.