Pulitzer-winning composer Tyshawn Sorey's Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), subtitled "A meditation on Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel," had its European premiere at St Giles' Cripplegate in London. The work uses a similar ensemble to Feldman's 1971 tribute—percussion, keyboards, viola, choir, and solo voice—but stretches across 80 minutes, revealing only in its final bars a second vital anchoring in the African American spiritual Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.
A Demanding Listening Experience
The performance, part of a week of record-breaking temperatures, was not ideally suited to a hard pew in a hot church. Between the opening barely detectible murmur of tubular bells and the closing revelation of the bass-baritone soloist's single line of text (pieced together syllable by syllable over 50 minutes), some listeners struggled to hold on to a sense of musical architecture. Pinpricks of dissonance and slow-motion scatterings of instrumental lines occasionally felt meandering.
Luminous Details and Charismatic Performances
Other details offered more rapid gratification: elemental rumbling on bass drum and timpani using sticks with heads like candyfloss; a glistening sheen of bowed marimba on a rare, mill-pond calm octave unison from the choir; wild bass-baritone melismas plunging acrobatically across the voice. Sorey himself sat motionless on the podium for much of the work, raising his arms only to direct the choir's entries with leisurely curves. The BBC Singers produced wordless notes so pure and cleanly blended they might almost have been synthesised.
That luminous shimmer set off both the sometimes gritty, sometimes stentorian, always intensely characterful singing of bass-baritone Davóne Tines, and Ruth Gibson's equally charismatic viola playing. Gibson's densely packed tone in certain bow strokes, the harsh catch of others, and the harmonics she summoned as if with no bow at all were standout features. Positioned on either side of the performance space, George Barton (percussion) and Siwan Rhys (piano and celesta) of GBSR Duo were in constant communication, tireless in their subtle exploration of music that seems to cherish its own mysteries.
Upcoming Performance
Tyshawn Sorey's Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine is scheduled at the Barbican, London, on 20 October.
