DREAMS
AND MIRAGES
ROBERTO
ALVAREZ, Flute et al
Esplanade
Recital Studio
Tuesday
(8 March 2016)
This review was published in The Straits Times on 10 March 2016 with the title "Shimmering echoes on the flute".
In the nine years Spanish flautist
Roberto Alvarez has lived in Singapore, he has garnered a reputation of being
the keenest advocate of new flute music. Responsible for innumerable
commissions and premieres, his outsized talent and modest personality has won
many friends among composers, performers and listeners.
Alvarez's latest concert was typical of
his catholic tastes and wide-ranging repertoire. Singaporean Zechariah Goh Toh
Chai's Images My Dream Saw were three studies in merging disparate
timbres of flute and piano. The opening Alone In A Bamboo Forest was an
elaborate solo played against the grand piano's open strings.
Reflected sounds and shimmering echoes
provided a haunting effect, contrasted with stark piano chords from Shane Thio
in Rustling In The Pine Trees, over which the flute provided a more
flowing narrative. Portamentos (sliding tones) simulated the style of the
bamboo flute, and in Phoenix's Dance. Falling Petals, the imaginary
birdsong took swift flight before closing in sedate piano chords.
German composer Gisbert Nather's Joke
was more light-hearted, with Yang Tien's harpsichord providing a comedic edge with
clattery chatter and treadmill-exercise accompaniments. A slow pastoral opening
soon gave way to fast cheerful music resembling that of cartoon chases, with
percussive outbursts from Alvarez's sputtering flute.
Also with harpsichord was Canadian R.Murray
Schafer's neo-baroque Sonatina, with Bachian counterpoint and astringent
themes reminiscent of Hindemith and other modernists. There was a manic edge to
the music, which saw keyboard note-clusters and flutter tonguing among the
effects that lit up the score to its schizophrenic end.
The first of three world premieres was
Spaniard Jose Nieto's Angelasia, composed for his niece Angela who had
moved to Asia (Singapore to be precise). A tour de force of solo playing, it
obliged Alvarez to intermittently tap out flamenco rhythms on his right foot
while maintaining legato lines on the flute. The flute had its percussive
movements, with tones spat out vehemently. To cap it all, passages of bitonal
playing were produced by humming and low groaning, the flautist's version of
throat singing.
More traditional was the world premiere
of Luis Serrano Alarcon's La Flute De La Lune (The Flute Of The Moon),
a straight-forward romantic nocturne, a dreamy melody with spots of passion and
agitation (and more flutter-tonguing) at its centre.
Singaporean Daniel Lim's Fata Morgana
was a most ambitious work, scored for alto flute, piccolo, piano and
harpsichord. Its title has to do with visual and aural mirages, a kind of
perceptional deception with themes heard on the reeds and mimicked by
keyboards, as if heard through a musical distorting mirror.
The piano and harpsichord initially
coalesced like water and oil in its slow introduction, but as the tempo picked
up in the fast minimalist development, their respective timbres merged in a
strangely harmonious way, enlivened by the flutes' darting interjections. A
fascinating world premiere, delivered by
the most sympathetic of performers, was met with the warmest of receptions.
 |
| And here is the Angela who inspired Jose Nieto's Angelasia! |
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