Dip Your Ears, No. 237 (A Stickler for Clapping Along - Steve Reich)

Steve Reich, Sextet, Music for Pieces of Wood, Clapping Music London Symphony Orchestra Percussion Ensemble (hands) (LSO Live)

Typical contemporary music recital: Only two or three people in the crowd, but before the chaps with wooden blocks even begin to bang them together (twelve rhythmically shifting minutes long), they applaud the performers for another three or four minutes. Oh, wait, it’s just Steve Reich’s Clapping Music preceding Music for Pieces of Wood. Mhwak-mhwak: My apologies. Minimalism is such a ripe target for gentle mocking that any attempt to do so will automatically trigger a trope-alert. It’s especially unwarranted with Steve Reich, who, miraculously, manages to be—to my ears at least—the purest of the famous minimalists but also the one least prone to becoming his own cliché. The LSO Percussion Ensemble does a splendid job with this music—which may not be very obvious in isolation but becomes notable when this recording turns out catchier and more incisive than master-percussionist’s Colin Currie recent Reich album (“Live at Foundation Louis Vuitton”) which has Music for Pieces of Wood and Clapping Music in common with this one. Especially Clapping Music is telling: Although both accounts are live, one sounds like a perfectionist recording of a composer’s point (LSO) – the other like a get-together of hippies indulging in a musico-intellectual fancy. Also available on Vinyl.

Follow @ClassicalCritic

Briefly Noted: Music for 18 Musicians

S. Reich, Music for 18 Musicians, Ensemble Signal, B. Lubman (released on May 12, 2015) HMU 907608 | 59'17"

A few major works come to mind as defining the outline of "minimalism" (the term that everyone loves to hate) in music: Terry Riley's In C, Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach, and Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. The last piece, premiered just a few months before Einstein in 1976, is the yin to Einstein's yang in some ways: concision rather than sprawl, precision rather than sloppy excess. Steve Reich, who is approaching his 80th birthday, has recorded the work twice: a visceral live recording with ECM, and a less ordered and longer version on Nonesuch (not because of tempo but because of the choices on number of repetitions). Reich's recordings complicate the field for any other competitors, but there have been a few nonetheless.

This new recording by Ensemble Signal is the second to appear under the leadership of Brad Lubman, who helped supervise the recording by Ensemble Modern in the 90s. With four players loaned from Third Coast Percussion, Lubman here conducts a group of twenty, which helps ease some of the doubling issues, and he even takes the third marimba part in Section VII. (Vocalist and Pulitzer-winner Caroline Shaw is heard on Voice 2.) The otherwise excellent recording by the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, from 2008, appealed for its excellent sound and for a slightly slower, more easy-going feel to it. Here the piece has more of the not rushed but impelled feel of Reich's first recording, hitting a timing that is just a minute longer than the Ensemble Modern disc. The audio engineering is also top-notch, revealing every articulation, crescendo, and nuance in vivid sonic detail. Put it on the shelf with the other recordings, along with the recordings we wish would be made, like the performance by the Ensemble Intercontemporain embedded below.

Reich, Trading on the WTC

S. Reich, WTC 9/11 / Mallet Quartet / Dance Patterns, Kronos Quartet, Sō Percussion, et al. (released on September 20, 2011) Nonesuch 528236-2 | 36'32"

Yesterday was obviously a day of reflection, not only about the terrorist attacks ten years ago, but also about the role of music in commemorating them. For some more thoughts, there is this review, which was first published at The Classical Review on September 12, 2011.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York of September 11, 2001, to which the release of this recording of Steve Reich’s WTC 9/11, a new piece for three string quartets -- two pre-recorded and one live -- is shrewdly timed. The original artwork announced for this disc by Nonesuch showed smoke billowing from one of the World Trade Center towers and the second plane yards away from striking the other tower, with the color palette modified to a historical sepia. Many who saw that photograph complained that the image was too searing, that it may even have implied an attempt to profit from the horror of the attack. The composer and Nonesuch eventually agreed to replace it with something less shocking (illustrated above). The controversy over an image of something that actually happened and was the subject of a work on the disc indicates just how divisive the mere memory of September 11 remains.

Beginning in the days after the attacks, musicians and the public yearned for a grand musical expression of the shock, horror, pain, and grief experienced by those who lived through those events, as well as a lamentation for those who died. We are still searching for it. Perhaps the leading contender, On the Transmigration of Souls by John Adams, moved audiences when it was first performed in 2003, winning a Pulitzer and Grammy shortly afterwards, but it has since begun to stale and seem too direct a reaction.

Reich’s WTC 9/11 was composed more recently but follows a rather similar process, transforming recorded voices into musical motifs, a technique he has used many times, most famously in Different Trains, also for string quartet and pre-recorded accompaniment. The only new technique is that Reich can now extend the final syllable of each statement as a held note, so that the voice fragments -- of air traffic controllers, fire and ambulance crews, WTC workers and New York residents -- provide not only melodic and rhythmic motifs but harmonic clusters as they are layered on top of one another.

The piece is not that elusive grand statement of grief, which apparently remains to be composed. Its power -- a short wallop of intense experience culled from that day in lower Manhattan -- comes principally from the words of the survivors and other noises, with the music providing some ancillary color in the background. A beeping eighth-note motif -- the repeated F a landline telephone chants when left off the hook, also imitated by the strings -- paces the first movement, a pulse technique familiar from Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood and countless other minimalist works, not least Terry Riley’s In C.

The Kronos Quartet play these jagged motifs with their customary edge, beauty of tone and intonation often subjugated to an overall sense of energy. It is the sort of incisive performance the piece requires, because, especially in the first two movements, it is largely about the visceral terror of the day. A more dirge-like mood prevails in the last movement, where Reich turns again to the Hebrew texts of the Psalms, as he did in Tehillim, another gesture toward the Jewish faith of his youth.

Little is different, musically speaking, in the other two pieces here, except that they are purely instrumental and thus lack any specific context. Four members of Sō Percussion, on vibraphone and marimba, give a sprightly rendition of the Mallet Quartet (2009), a work suffused with dance-like syncopation. (A bonus DVD shows the group playing the piece, recorded in the Sō Percussion Studio in Brooklyn, which looks strikingly like someone’s basement, with stuff piled all over the place.)

The same basic contrasting structure of fast and slow is compressed into a single movement in Dance Patterns (2002), for two vibraphones, two xylophones, and two pianos. Recorded back in 2004, this performance is not as crisp and unified as that of the Mallet Quartet. None of the three pieces, not even reaching 40 minutes of music together, is memorable enough to warrant an unqualified recommendation.

Ionarts at Large: American Night at Munich’s Musica Viva

American contemporary music is supposed to be difficult to program in Europe. It’s still too modern for the traditional concert clientele, but too bourgeois for the avant-garde-happy audience reared on—and expecting—the heavyly intellectual fare of Boulez, Stockhausen, or Ferneyhough. The listenable, downright popular (shudder!) American contemporary music of Glass, Reich, Adams, Del Tredici, Argento, Corigliano et al. is too “middle brow” an attendee sympathetic to these composers suggested, “and European culture just doesn’t do ‘middle brow’. Only extremes.”

But perhaps times are changing and the ears are regaining primacy over the mind when it comes to music, because the Herkulessaal in Munich was not only very well filled, but the response was also wholly positive after what amounted to “Easy Listening Night” at the 7^th Musica Viva concert in 2009. Steve Reich’s Three Movements for Orchestra (1986), the oldest work on the program, was the curtain raiser. Full of the pleasing predictability of Reich’s propulsive beat it was just the work to warm up the ears for Elliott Carter’s 2001 Cello Concerto. The searching and confused solo cello opening—courtesy Jan Vogler—is pierced by orchestra stabs that are as short as they are vigorous, which then mellow considerably as they travel through the orchestral sections one by one. The orchestra has one surprising moment approximating lyricism, the cello part is often barely played, timidly screeching like cats at night with broken hearts. Atypical for Carter, the meandering work makes it difficult to perceive any musical purpose or goal, though the end has a coy smile that gives Carter, even when at his most modern, a human touch that many of his modernist colleagues lack.

The dashing, ever-suave Kristjan Järvi led the Bavarian State Orchestra through all works with panache, his looks, self-consciously sexy stance, and debonair movements conveying the air of a young, classical Jon Bon Jovi on the rostrum. John Adams’ Doctor Atomic Symphony (2007) was more notable for the incredibly well played solo trumpet part and the finale’s bracing build-up than for the music itself. While it’s easy to get a bad suite out of a great opera (Rosenkavalier!), it’s rather difficult to get a good suite out of a modest opera. A competent botch job that benefits from the omission of vocal parts, the Doctor Atomic Symphony nearly manages that feat, though.

The surprise of the evening was Udo Zimmermann’s Cello Concerto “Songs from an Island” which received its world premiere performance. Zimmermann is in charge of the Musica Viva series, so seeing a composition of his—the first in over a decade—wasn’t terribly surprising. The work itself, its quality and listenability, was, though. It starts with lengthy, fragmented quotes from Schumann’s “Ich hab im Traum geweinet” (Dichterliebe, op.48) which allow the cello to do what it can do best: sing. While the cello is almost incidental to Carter’s concerto (any instrument—a dulcimer, for example—might have served equally well), here it is stipulated by Zimmermann’s music. Purpose, the little cousin of Truth, is established and the mind can begin to grasp and the ears can go on a journey with the composer.

Zimmermann seems to feel naughty for throwing this tonal bone to the listener. The liner notes spend considerable time justifying the daring occurrence of harmony. As a truly modern European composer one would not want to be considered a reactionary, after all. Perhaps Zimmermann is right about being worried. (“Is that allowed? Is this an Anti-Concerto” the notes disingenuously question and eagerly postulate. ) After all, this ‘taking the listener by the ear’, gently, and harmonically pulling him his way… this acknowledgment of purpose (in instrumentation and structure) is the very negation of Zimmermann’s (and the whole avant-garde music scene’s) underlying and often trumpeted notion of the “paradigm shift” that had allegedly occurred in our listening habits.

The concerto is gorgeous, even when it gets busy, noisy, and tangled. The heartfelt reception and genuine applause must have been quite different than the usual, cool admiration. Via perceptible ideas and motifs, through recognizability and musical craftsmanship Udo Zimmermann has arrived, if not at truth, so at least in reality. A warm “welcome back”.

eighth blackbird: Waiting for This Moment to Arrive

eighth blackbird

The Fortas Chamber Music series brought eighth blackbird's newest program to the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater on Thursday night. The innovative modern music ensemble has been taking this concert of two new works, The Only Moving Thing, on the road since its premiere in Richmond this past March. The group won a 2008 Grammy Award for their fabulous album Strange Imaginary Animals, which it must be said, is a much more varied and interesting program than this relentless combination of classic minimalism and the Bang on a Can ethos. Not that there was not much to enjoy in this concert, presented with a winning combination of cheeky and earnest qualities, but by evening's end my nerves were worn thin.

The group commissioned Double Sextet from Steve Reich for their specific combination of instruments (piano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and vibraphone). A second set of parts for the same forces can be played live by different players or, as heard here, can be prerecorded by the same players for playback during performance. The more or less continuous background pulse, a feature of so many minimalist works since Terry Riley's In C, is provided by the piano and vibraphone, first on the recording and then intersected in similar patterns by the live performers.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Eighth Blackbird's 'Only Moving Thing': Gaining Altitude (Washington Post, May 15) ---, Intensely Innovative (Washington Post, March 28) Kelly Jane Torrance, Blackbird remains new (Washington Times, May 9) Allan Kozinn, A Night of Collaboration and Energetic Activity (New York Times, April 19) Mark Swed, 'Blackbird,' by the numbers (Los Angeles Times, April 17) Paul Bodine, Reich's pulsing pleasures sung by blackbird (Orange County Register, April 16)

The other four instruments mostly play homophonic chords that float above the pulse, bristling with dissonance. Only in the climactic ending did the pulse seem to take over the music, as the other instruments joined it and drove the work to its conclusion. By comparison to other Reich works, however, Double Sextet felt a little unvaried, working pretty much one large idea for each of the three sections, but in a disappointingly uniform way.

The second half was devoted to another work created for eighth blackbird, a suite of pieces by David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe of Bang on a Can fame called Singing in the Dead of Night. Its five movements evoke scenes of darkness and night activity, and it suffered from the opposite affliction as the Reich. The piece overflowed with ideas, from its treble-dominated first movement, vaguely reminiscent of ragtime at points, to its conclusion fifty-five minutes later. The players, directed by Susan Marshall, moved about, switched instruments, and generally pushed the boundaries of concertizing. Although it is revolutionary, of course, the Bang on a Can thing runs the risk of becoming a sort of shtick -- dropping pans on an amplified pad, followed by the repeated spreading of pots of grain (replacing the sand used in earlier performances) on an amplified table. The playing was all excellent, but for all its appeal, Singing in the Dead of Night felt undisciplined, over-burgeoning with ideas, and it is hard not to think that it could benefit from significant cuts.

Mobtown Mobtown Mobtown Mobtown

Mobtown Modern
Washington Post, May 12, 2008

Mobtown Modern Music series, Contemporary Museum (Baltimore, Md.)

Terry Riley, In C (1964)
(performed by 124 musicians, Los Angeles)
Philip Glass, Music in Similar Motion (Crash Ensemble)
Part 1 | Part 2

Nico Muhly, Honest Music (Lisa Liu, Nico Muhly)

Michael Gordon, The Low Quartet

Steve Reich, Vermont Counterpoint

Steve Reich's Great Noise

On Tuesday, American composer Steve Reich turned 70. New Yorkers are enjoying a month-long festival of performances of Reich's music, Steve Reich @ 70, much of which will be commented on by Alex Ross and others. Here in Washington, there was only one opportunity, a concert last night by the recently formed Great Noise Ensemble at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Silver Spring.

The program began with a favorite of mine, Music for Pieces of Wood, for five claves players. The piece, from 1973, uses pure rhythm as a way to reduce Reich's phasic layering to its most basic level. It is a good example of how, even with the simplest musical materials, Reich composes music that is extraordinarily complex and difficult to realize. This was a good performance, with a minimum of glitches, a few uneven rhythms. The only truly noticeable concern was the stray beat that marred the piece's sudden ending. Concluding the first half was a landmark piece in Reich's phasic style, Electric Counterpoint (1987), for electric guitar and recorded tape. Not unlike Violin Phase and New York Counterpoint, the performer records himself in several tracks and then plays the final part live against himself on the recording. Guitarist D. J. Sparr could be seen counting silently, his lips moving, as he navigated the live part's entrances, but the performance was generally solid, especially in the third movement, where the jagged theme makes much sharper, shorter phases. Later this month, at an October 21 concert at Carnegie Hall as part of Steve Reich @ 70, Pat Metheny will play Electric Counterpoint, nearly 20 years after he premiered this piece composed for and in consultation with him.

Reich on Ionarts: Charles T. Downey, Steve Reich at 70 (October 3, 2006) Charles T. Downey, Music for Pieces of Wood (November 7, 2005) Jens F. Laurson, City Life / New York Counterpoint (August 6, 2005)

The Psalms are words that are written on the bones of everyone in the Judeo-Christian world, whether they know it or not. They are durable texts that have been sung and continue to be sung in every conceivable form, as Latin chant, as Renaissance polyphony, and in every modern language. It was probably inevitable that Steve Reich should confront the Psalms in his music and that, having been born into the Jewish faith, he do so in the original Hebrew. Inevitable perhaps, but not habit-forming, since Tehillim is one of only two Reich settings of the Psalms. It is frenzied, with combinations of four treble voices overlapping in often ecstatic and incomprehensible exclamations. The instrumentation is suggested more or less by the text of the work's last movement, Psalm 150: "Praise him with timbrel and dancing, praise him with strings and winds, praise him with clanging cymbals." While Reich appears to have ignored the third verse -- "Praise Him with the blast of the horn; praise Him with the psaltery and harp" -- he uses a favorite percussive sound, clapping hands, as if drawn from other psalms: Psalm 47 ("O clap your hands, o you peoples") and Psalm 98 ("Let the floods clap their hands").

I appreciate the piece, which I actually heard for the first time, and it has a lot of pretty effects, especially the crotales sounds in the last movement and the vibraphone and marimba sounds in the third movement (Psalm 18). For me, the piece falls flat, as it is kind of monochromatic in terms of tempo and color. The combination of texts could mean a lot of things (the other movements are based on Psalm 19 and Psalm 34), but Reich has not said much about it, except that the musical content is not at all based on Jewish themes. It is perhaps uncharitable to criticize the performers, who did such a service by bringing us Reich's music this week, but the music's construction makes rhythmic coordination very difficult. Instruments on sustained parts, especially the strings, did not always line up with the active parts, and tuning when the writing went into the stratosphere was sometimes sour. It was a valiant performance, whose imperfections did not mar the audience's general enjoyment of Steve Reich's birthday celebration.

The next concert by the Great Noise Ensemble will be on November 17 at 8 pm at the Sumner School (1201 17th Street NW), featuring music by the group's music director, Armando Bayolo, Heather Figi, Blair Goins, and the group's guitarist, D. J. Sparr.

Steve Reich at 70

Available at Amazon: Steve Reich, Different Trains and other works, Orchestre National de Lyon, David Robertson (released on November 16, 2004) Nonesuch Retrospective (released on September 26, 2006)

Today, American composer Steve Reich turns 70 years old. There is no avoiding it: the one-time bad boy of the New York contemporary music scene in the 1960s and 70s is now a member of the AARP. Nonesuch has released a retrospective album of recorded highlights, but these past several days, I have been listening to a 2004 disc of works for orchestra by Reich, recorded by the Orchestre National de Lyon and their music director, American conductor David Robertson (at the helm of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra since 2005).

Different Trains dates originally from 1988, when Reich combined a tape he recorded of people talking about trains with music played by a string quartet. In 2000, David Robertson asked him to revise the work, expanding the live musical component to a score for string orchestra, a version that Robertson premiered with the Philadelphia Orchestra in October 2001 (when its performance was perhaps overlooked because of the recent terrorist attacks). The musical motifs -- both rhythmic patterns and melodic content -- are derived largely from the words of the speakers on the tape: Reich's governess, Virginia; a retired Pullman employee; and three Holocaust survivors. In this expanded version, Reich preserved the original tape intact, with its recorded train sounds and musical sounds from a recorded string quartet.

The live part of the performance takes the instrumental transcriptions of vocal fragments and repeats them with slight variations, the hallmark of the minimalist style, although Reich has indicated his dissatisfaction with that term being applied to his music. Part of the live music in the orchestral version comes from what was originally played on the tape. The work slips imperceptibly from movement to movement, taking us from the hopeful sounds of American train travel leading up to World War II into the more sinister second movement, recounting how trains were used in Germany to transport prisoners to concentration camps during the war. The piece was inspired, according to Reich, by his memories of taking trains when he was a child in the 1940s, traveling between his mother's house in Los Angeles and his father's in New York.

The middle work on the recording is the agitated, lush Triple Quartet (1999), in its reworking for 36 strings. The piece is derived largely from the interval of a minor third, which is often situated actually as an augmented second (it moves hypnotically through four minor chords, all separated by the interval of a minor third or augmented second, beginning with E minor and cycling back to E minor), giving the work the flavor of an Arabian scale. It is one of the more dissonant works in the minimalist style, with Reich allowing the different phases to work their way through several striking clashes.

Reich on Ionarts: Jens F. Laurson, City Life / New York Counterpoint (August 6, 2005) Charles T. Downey, Music for Pieces of Wood (November 7, 2005)

By comparison, the last work, The Four Sections (1986), has more orchestral color (the only piece on the disc that uses instruments besides strings) but is more consonant. There is an incremental layering technique, as the jutting wave motifs are built up into sustained chords that swell and then recede. The second movement, with its metallic clatter of piano and vibraphone, may have been in the back of Thomas Adès' mind when he wrote the banquet music in his opera The Tempest. This disc contains 65 minutes of intensely pleasurable listening, for all the same reasons that music in this style is so ideal for film scores. The rhythmic interaction and mathematical proportions can occupy the mind of an attentive listener, but the relative melodic and harmonic stasis can also make the music slip easily into the background.

If you want to celebrate the septuagenarian composer, I know of only one opportunity in the Washington area this week. On Saturday (October 7, 8 pm) the Great Noise Ensemble will give a concert of Reich's music, including Electric Counterpoint, Tehillim, and the marvelous Music for Pieces of Wood at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Silver Spring. Tickets: $20 (students, $10).

naïve MO 782167

UPDATE:
Other tributes:

• Steven V Funk (Blogcritics.org, October 4)
  
• The Standing Room (October 3)
  
• Alex Ross (October 3)
  
• Tom Huizenga (NPR, October 3)
  
• Jay Nordlinger (New York Sun, October 3)
  
• Steve @ 70 Festival
  
• Mike Barnes (The New Statesman, October 2)
  
• NPR (October 1)
  
• The Guardian (September 30)
  
• Anne Midgette (New York Times, September 29)
  
• The Independent (September 24)

Left Bank Concert Society

On Saturday night, the Left Bank Concert Society gave an interesting and very good performance at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in College Park. Now in its second season, the LBCS was formed by members of the Theater Chamber Players and champions music by contemporary composers, a cause that is sure to receive sympathy here at Ionarts. The members of the Left Bank Quartet opened the program with the youthful op. 3 string quartet of Alban Berg. They gave a performance full of appealing effects -- croaking staccato notes and odd scraped harmonics -- that put the first movement (Langsam) on the macabre side, at points like a dance for dusty skeletons. The quartet continued with a good sense of rhythmic élan in the second movement (Mäßig Viertel), where the music is much more explosive, with metallic tremolos and a rather memorable ending.

The LBCS mission to perform the most current music possible led violinist Sally McLain toward Axon, a piece by Cuban-born American composer Tania León for violin and interactive computer, from 2002. The original form of the piece called for the live violin part to influence the sonic output of a listening computer. Ms. McLain explained before her performance that "technical difficulties" had scuttled that plan. She chose instead to give us one of the other two arrangements advanced by the composer, with violin accompanied by a tape of prerecorded electronics. The major appeal of the piece appears to have been the possibility of a computer actually interacting with a live musician. Without that element, the work struck me as a collection of interesting motifs -- arpeggiated figures, rasping belchs, runs -- and a soundtrack of world musicish percussion and chanting, all of which didn't add up to much, in spite of Ms. McLain's excellent playing.

Also on Ionarts: Left Bank Ligeti (May 9, 2005) New Sounds over the Potomac: The Left Bank Concert Society is Here! (October 20, 2004) Tōru Takemitsu Concert at the Library of Congress (October 9, 2005)

The LCBS then presented as guests artists a group of percussion students of John Tafoya (principal timpanist for the NSO and director of percussion studies at the University of Maryland), who performed two pieces by "minimalist" composer Steve Reich (he apparently chafes, understandably, at the stylistic term). All five young men first presented Music for Pieces of Wood (1973), on five pairs of claves. This is a hypnotic piece that I was thrilled to get to hear live, with one central player on a constant, driving pulse as the others present shifting rhythmic patterns in the wave-like phase relationships that so fascinated Reich and other minimalists. Two of the students then also gave us Reich's Clapping Hands (1972). Like so much music in the minimalist style, it appears simple on the surface but, because of the unceasing repetition, it requires its own kind of virtuosic concentration. Just clapping constant rhythms for five minutes must be tiring, but in spite of a few phasic slips, this was an enjoyable performance.

The best piece on the program, in my opinion, was the selection of pieces -- only those that featured solos or combinations of violin, viola, and cello -- from György Kurtág's Jelek, játékok és üzenetek (Signs, Games, and Messages, 1989-1997). The bagatelle sort of piece was a recurring theme in Kurtág's career, dating from his early commission of simple pieces for children. We heard all three players amusing themselves, according to the composer's instructions, with a sotto voce Lydian scale fragment, tone bends, Doppler crescendi and decrescendi, pizzicato effects, and folksong evocations, all very effective. For the second half, two string colleagues -- violist Doris Lederer and cellist Clyde T. Shaw -- joined the quartet for a tribute to early music, that is, Johannes Brahms's op. 36 string sextet in G major, from eons ago, back in 1865.

Frankly, I have never cared much for this sextet's first movement (Allegro non troppo), which contains the very uncharacteristic -- for Brahms -- use of a motif spelling out the first name of Agathe von Seibold, a woman with whom Brahms broke off his engagement to marry. In this performance, too, I was much more taken with the second movement (Scherzo, allegro non troppo), with its folkish but contrapuntal scherzo and particularly raucous waltz trio. The six players sometimes clashed in minor ways in terms of intonation, and there was an omnipresent percussive noise from one or two players' feet tapping. This was a fine end to a very good concert, with the 9/8 last movement (Poco allegro), which in its Gigue-like qualities, seems to be a tribute to the suites of Bach in some way.