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The music contained in this album belongs to two different eras, simultaneously. Or rather, the notes that we hear in these 7 pieces could symbolically be considered as if written with four hands. Two hands belong to the late Henry Purcell, one of the leading figures of the 17th-century Baroque, considered the greatest English classical composer. On the other side are obviously the large hands of Michael Nyman, who grasp Purcell's corpse, shake it, Nyman shouts "wake up" at him, and Purcell indeed seems to wake up, observe the music of the '900 with attention, and then suggest to Nyman how to rewrite some of his brilliant Baroque pages, with the "consciousness of the after". This, after all, had already happened when the music for the funeral of Queen Mary was exhumed and used for the opening of Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange."
The result of all this is something inexplicably new and has always sounded to me as Nyman's definitive work, it's not just the soundtrack of a beautiful film by Peter Greenaway ("The Draughtsman's Contract" released in 1982, perhaps his best film), it is truly an album unto itself consisting of austere and sudden arias, essential but not minimalist, repetitive but not serial. Although, in fact, the background of the English composer comes from the avant-garde instances of composers like Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley, here the result is simply music, stripped of the conceptual component typical of minimalism, perhaps a very personal declaration of love towards Purcell and his architectures with perfect harmonic mechanisms, but with a new imaginative power, given by the strong-tinted timbres of the Michael Nyman Band and the pressing flow of the music, which seems to flee from itself, from its closed schemes, to return always, and again flee, and again return.
In all pieces, the rhythm is given by very strong basses, almost comical in their severe detachment of notes, trombone and baritone sax and double bass and when needed even electric bass, one at a time or all together, murmuring their stolen canon like ignorant instruments, which know only that cycle and repeat it with delightful pedantry. Above this obstinate base hover, even more pedantic, an array of winds (clarinets and alto saxophones in particular) and the strings whose melodies get lost, merge, provoke, in continuous motion. In the midst of all this often bursts, very willingly, a buffoonish harpsichord (played by Nyman himself), which seems to want to dictate law both to the rhythmic section and to that melodic of the ensemble. Now you will excuse me if I described the ensemble as a sort of Adams family, but this is really the perception you get from listening to it, as if Nyman had decided to stage a tragicomic comedy set in a totally fake renaissance epoch.
And so this facade amuses, often leaves a bit of unease and sometimes deeply moves, as when the rhythm calms down in "The Garden Is Becoming A Robe Room", and the strings compose a sort of aria on the fourth string, for which any description would be useless and inadequate.
"The Queen Of The Night" pierces the eardrums with a pulsating electric bass and strings that scream obscenely, while "Bravura In The Face Of Grief" seems almost to start with the instruments still out of tune, and soon reveals itself inspired by the beautiful "Dido's Lament" by Purcell, 12 minutes of musical orgasm in which this baroque staging concludes, complete with wigs, gaudy and lace dresses, fans, and masks of the nobility of whatnot.
I believe I deeply love this album, at least as much as I hate the much more famous "The Piano" by the same Nyman, I love its chamber music atmosphere, its severe and almost deliberately gaudy architecture, the noise all the instruments together raise and all orderly, the rhythmic runs under the baroque canons, the unexpected tempo changes halfway through the piece that make Nyman depart from the precepts of minimalism tout court.
THE BAND:
John Harle: soprano, alto, tenor sax
Ian Mitchell: clarinet, bass clarinet, alto sax
Michael Nyman: harpsichord, piano
Elisabeth Perry: violin
Keith Thompson: tenor sax
Tracklist and Videos
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