CHRISTOPHER REDGATE - Oboe; IAN PACE - Piano; JULIAN WARBURTON - Percussion

Great Hall, King's College, The Strand , London 7.30 p.m. 1st November 2004

Horatiu Radulescu -  Animae moret carent for oboe and spectrally tuned piano[UK Premiere]
Michael Finnissy -  Dilok
Salvatore Sciarrino -  5th Piano Sonata
Stefan Wolpe -   Oboe sonata
Robert Keeley -   Florentine Fanfares: Vocalise
Ian Moore - Adieu [World Premiere]
Nikos Skalkottas -   Concertino

Ian Pace's marathon concerts at King's are a feature of London's contemporary music life which are followed and appreciated by followers of extreme modernism, albeit a small group of loyalists.

Usually they begin at 6.30, and this would better have been one such, because the evening was skewed by the need to prepare the Bösendorfer for Horatiu Radulescu's Animae moret carent for oboe and 'spectrally tuned' piano (how? why?) and to restore the instrument to normality afterwards during the concert interval.

Those processes - without a piano tuner on hand - took much longer than anticipated. The audience was invited to wait outside the while 'in the fresh air' but, with no refreshments available nor programme notes to study, tolerance was stretched. The work is long and hermetic, and I found it impossible to hear the special tuning without a demonstration, engage with the music or think how to discuss it - there was a crying need for an illustrated introduction to give us a way in. (Click on the link above for more about Radulescu and Ian Pace's championship of this perplexing composer.)

Finnissy's Diluk for oboe (Christopher Redgate) and percussion (Julian Warburton) was a welcome revival, and the two short pieces by Robert Keeley were engaging; the uncommon conjunction of oboe and vibraphone especially successful. Skalkottas's oboe concertino (in his now familiar style, thanks to BIS) is concise but very demanding; maybe there is scope for a little more wit and variety in texture and dynamics once the notes are mastered (it is included on a CD of Skalkottas chamber music BIS 1244).

What made the long evening worth-while was Stefan Wolpe's oboe sonata. A memoir by Josef Marx is illuminating:
Twentieth-century changes in oboe technique and therefore in oboe literature began with the pieces that Wolpe wrote for me.
- - the Oboe Sonata was begun in 1937 and finished in 1941. When I got it in 1939 it was three movements, and the last movement was yet to come. Wolpe very frequently stopped composing before the last movement and then had great difficulty finishing the work - - he said that in the course of working on a piece he advances so much with the material that by the time he gets to the last movement he doesn't have the technique yet to compose the ideas he has generated. Then there is a time lag of several years. The time lag in the case of the Oboe Sonata brings about a great discrepancy in style between the first two movements and the last movement - - another Oboe Sonata of which I have a pencil manuscript - - gets so complicated and so embroiled in trickiness that he couldn't go on and started all over again....

In this sonata the movements begin with a deceptive simplicity, but gradually elaborations multiply, demanding virtuosity from both players to encompass the music with verve and lucidity. There is in Wolpe the excitement of contact with an original mind at full stretch, the music conveying energy which is hard to contain. This is a work that cannot be fully absorbed in one hearing, and perhaps these artists may consider recording it for CD?

With Paula Radcliffe come-back in New York reviving thoughts about marathons, I do wonder if Ian Pace might do better to aim at normal length concerts, allowing him time for introductions to help us into the worlds of the least known of the composers who enthuse him?

You can access a live performance of Wolpe's violin sonata on a Tate Gallery webcast via http://www.musicalpointers.co.uk/articles/generaltopics/Wolpe%20.htm