Elizabeth Knatt & Rachel Barnes recorders
KAIROS 0022034KAI
The two electronic pieces on this fascinating disc might be described as mood music of the kind that is regularly encountered on Radio 3’s Night Tracks. I found the shortest, Burmese Memory, to be the weakest, being essentially a drone varied by waveforms alone, and the CD would have been undiminished with its loss. The longest track, Burmese Dreams, comprising manipulated samples of the larger recorders, is much pleasanter: a dreamy and totally undemanding soporific background.
The rest of the disc I found quite gripping, and even those who might baulk at over half an hour of solo recorder should find much to intrigue them, since the two protagonists are virtuosi of a high order. They display smooth tone, flawless articulation, and rock-steady intonation throughout, while surmounting some extremely testing demands with great aplomb.
Berio’s groundbreaking Gesti (1966) for unaccompanied recorder memorably separated tonguing and fingering. In Inglis’s Études, played by Elizabeth Knatt, different advanced techniques are explored in each study: not as soulless independent exercises but as reworkings of traditional musical forms.
Hurdles include multiphonics, microtones, vocalisations, glissandi, and even the illusion of polyphony in a Fuga. An electronic drone is occasionally (thankfully, not continually) deployed, usually to evoke bagpipes, and this is sometimes echoed in a vocal drone, although this is the least of the player’s challenges. Inspirations are drawn from folk music, including a Scottish lament, and early music, notably a chant by Hildegard of Bingen.
The finely-structured main work, Sailing to Byzantium, is a meditation on time and transcendence, performed with equal brilliance by Rachel Barnes. She is required to move rapidly and effortlessly through the extremes of five sizes of instrument, from garklein to tenor.
There are clear references to Tibetan chant, a minimal use of percussive effects, and further examples of stylised imitative birdsong that are regularly employed with this most suitable of instruments. Inglis displays much ingenuity in finding aural equivalents from his slender resources to mirror the literary stimuli of Yeats and Eliot that prompted his investigations, and a useful essay gives detailed information on his compositional structures. I would have also welcomed extracts from the scores, since the notation of such intriguing soundscapes is always an absorbing issue.
The disc is probably not to be taken all at once but is heartily recommended to those with open ears who are interested in learning what this frequently maligned instrument can do in the hands of two dazzling players.
Review by Andrew Plant