QUILLS, HAMMERS AND NAILS
15th July 2006 7.30pm Rook Lane Chapel Code: 1514 Author: Alan Burgess
The Frome Instrument Makers' concert has become an annual feature of the Festival, an opportunity to jointly celebrate instruments and their makers alongside music and its performers.
Helen Coombs, making a welcome return to Frome, is a highly intelligent and talented musician and her performances on Chris Barlow's 1989 harpsichord, based on English instruments of the late 1700s, were stylish and executed to a very high level. While others took some liberties with the theme of ‘English music', all of Helen's music was quintessentially so. The performances of pieces by Byrd and Dowland were typical: expressive, carefully shaped and clearly understood. The three Purcell pieces were similarly exquisite, including a ground which unfolded as though it were spontaneously improvised and a perky hornpipe. A set of Handel variations were supremely well controlled and the pairing of a short, simple siciliano and buoyant allegro from a sonata by Arne was excellent programming.
It has been a refreshing element in this year's Festival that so much new music has appeared and, encouragingly, has been warmly welcomed by audiences around the town. The centre piece of this concert was the premiere of ‘A Suite of Somerset Apples' for harpsichord, composed by Helen Ottaway, the Festival's composer in residence. The music had been composed specifically for Chris Barlow's harpsichord.
The Suite has five short pieces. Three of them, Hoary morning, Black Vallis and the final purposeful Tom Putt's Dompe were in clear traditional structures while Nine Square was an exciting rustic dance, with rhythms reminiscent of Bartok and the fourth piece, Dove, was a gentle melodic interlude. The suite's chief success for me was the way in which the music so perfectly exploited the colours of the instrument and gave us a contemporary piece which is such a welcome addition to the harpsichord repertoire.
Tim Manning's dulcimer music which opened both halves of the evening revealed a wide range of styles and colours from the hypnotic repeating patterns of his first piece to the delicate imagery of Thousand Petalled Lotus. These elements were combined in the final piece, In Sea, though each performance generated an aura of its own, partly though the quality of the performances and partly because of the enchanting tone quality of the instrument.
A good deal of Laurie Parnell's guitar and vocal music was retrospective, starting with some fingerstyle arrangements of hymn tunes. His programme also included a medley of three pieces by Will Kempe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, and a ballad about the Battle of the Somme with a remarkably easy going regimental march. The tour de force, however, was an enchanting new piece he had composed to a backdrop of two recorded notes, blown on two organ pipes which were returning home, originals from the organ which had once stood in Rook Lane Chapel itself.
Alan Burgess
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