The 4 Elements
Brooklyn Rider
Perth Concert Hall
Perth Festival

Angelique Kidjo
Perth Concert Hall
Perth Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

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New-York-based string quartet Brooklyn Rider was founded in the early 2000s and loosely named themselves after the Munich-based Blue Rider group of early modernist painters. Comparisons with the Kronos Quartet inevitably suggest themselves: both ensembles practice cross-genre programming, focussing on contemporary and commissioned compositions from around the world in a variety of musical traditions, and juxtaposing these with more established works (mostly but not exclusively from the 20^th Century). Kronos however are arguably cooler and more cerebral in terms of playing style; Brooklyn Rider have a warmer, more emotional approach. Unlike Kronos and most other string quartets, they also play standing up (apart from the cellist), which gives their performances an added sense of energy and embodiment.

 

Perhaps most significantly, however, their programming is based on extra-musical ‘themes’. The title of their current touring program refers to the ancient doctrine of the four elements that compose the natural world: earth, water, air and fire. A more specific contemporary reference (at least in the program notes) is to the theme of climate change, insofar as this has an impact on all four elements: parched earth, rising seas, storms and wildfires.

 

The concert began with a work in the category of ‘earth’: A Short While To Be Here, an arrangement by one of the quartet’s violinists, Colin Jacobsen, of a suite of North American folksongs collected by the pioneering American modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger. The title refers to the plaintive words of one of the folksongs: ‘Little Birdie, little birdie, come and sing me your song; / I’ve short time to be here, and a long time to be gone.’ The work was an exquisite reframing of the songs, their simplicity and innocence preserved notwithstanding the addition of more contemporary harmonies and textures, and the fact that they were linked together by more improvisatory-sounding musical connective tissue.

 

The next two short works in the program were new commissions – respectively in the categories of ‘fire’ and ‘air’ – and both were more clearly ‘programmatic’ in terms of their musical language. Massachusetts-born composer Akshaya Avril Tucker’s Hollow Flame is a response to the Californian wildfires of recent years, using sustained and hushed harmonics to suggest the inhalation of oxygen and exhalation of carbon that successively precedes and follows a massive conflagration; Portuguese composer Andreia Pinto Correa’s Aere senza stelle (‘Air Without Stars’) depicted the phenomenon of dust-storms using shimmering clouds of musical particles. Though short in duration and slight in terms of musical form, both works showcased the technical brilliance and flair of the players, as well as their capacity to listen closely to each other, and in turn inspire close listening from the audience.

 

This was followed by another (and more substantial) work of ‘air’ from the 1970s, French composer Henri Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit (‘Thus The Night’), a demanding work in seven movements (played without a break). Each movement plays with different sound qualities (harmonics, pizzicatos, extreme contrasts in dynamics or pitch) and uses atonality as well as unfamiliar scales or modes and recurring themes in various stages of development to compel the listener’s attention and play with their sense of memory and anticipation. This for me was musically speaking the most rewarding work in the first half of the concert (if not the entire evening) and took the quartet to another level in terms of precision and acuity. 

 

After interval came another more substantial 20^th Century work of 'fire', Shostakovich’s 8^th String Quartet. Written in the space of three days while the composer was visiting the fire-bombed city of Dresden in 1960, and dedicated ‘to the victims of fascism and war’, the work (like much of Shostakovich’s output) also has deeply personal resonances; legend has it that he was contemplating suicide at the time, and that when the Borodin Quartet first played it to him in private, he buried his face in his hands and wept. 

 

Musically this sense of personal significance is conveyed by the use of the composer’s signature four-note motif – which in its German notation (DSCH) corresponds to the first four letters of Shostakovich’s name in its German transliteration – as the opening theme as well as in every subsequent movement. Other quotations from his oeuvre (including the 1^st Cello Concerto) are scattered throughout the work – all of which might seem to suggest that it was intended to be a kind of musical summation or epitaph.

 

It was given an appropriately fiery performance by the quartet, who rose to a new level of physical and emotional commitment. This was especially true of violinist Johnny Gandelsman (here playing 1st Violin, a role in which he and Jacobsen took turns during the concert); his heartfelt approach to the score (which often pits him as a lone voice against the combined forces of the other three) conveyed a sense of the individual crushed by totalitarianism.

 

The final work on the program – ostensibly in the element of 'water' – was Argentinian-born, US-based Romanian Jewish composer Osvaldo Golijov’s Tenebrae. As the liturgical title suggests, it’s a spiritual work of lamentation that recalls the neo-modal ‘holy minimalism’ of Gorecki’s ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ (the main theme is almost directly lifted from the second movement of that work). Golijov claims that he was inspired by two contrasting experiences in the year 2000: witnessing the violence in Israel-Palestine at the start of the Second Intifada; and seeing the Earth as if viewed from space at a planetarium in New York. 

 

The work opens and closes peacefully with the main theme repeated and developed over an oscillating drone (suggestive of the view of the Earth from space); the central section however is more fraught with pain, as if conflict becomes more evident as one approaches the Earth more closely. Musically if not thematically the work verges on sentimentality, but in the sensitive hands of the quartet – accentuating the flowing, undulating qualities of the main theme and the ostinato drone – it was a beautifully effective way to close the program. 

 

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Beninese-French singer-songwriter Angelique Kidjo is a true force of nature. Now in her early 60s, her voice is as thrilling and percussive as ever, her dancing as energetic and playful, her enthusiasm as infectious, and her message of empowerment as resounding.

 

In her concert at Perth Concert Hall last Thursday night, she was the embodiment of this year’s Festival theme of Ngaangk (the sun), a female deity in Noongar cosmology who is equally a source of warmth, light, nourishment and protection. Despite the somewhat formal ambience of the venue, by midway through the concert she had us all on our feet dancing and singing along, sometimes in Fon or Yoruba (Kidjo sings in multiple West African and other languages, including French and English).

 

Local Noongar singer-songwriter Maatakitj (alias Clint Bracknell) kicked off the evening with a half-hour set featuring his own brand of desert blues in a series of songs in Noongar language about country, animals, spirits and waterways. He was backed by fellow Noongar artists Della Rae Morrison and Kylie Bracknell (who also provided intros to the songs and encouraged the audience to clap along or click our fingers to mimic the sound of rain). Perth-based percussionist Arunachala played an impressively huge pumpkin drum and provided drive and texture to the sound.

 

After interval, Kidjo erupted onstage, accompanied by a lean but seasoned four-piece band featuring Thierry Vaton on keys, David Donatien on percussion, Gregory Louis on drums and Gregory Louis (outstanding) on bass (the latter featuring plenty of slapping and sliding as well as some chunky melody-lines). Personally, I found the overall mix a bit bland, and would have welcomed a guitar or even a flugelhorn to give things more colour, but this was more than compensated for by Kidjo’s voice, dancing and irresistible charisma.

 

They opened with a hard-driven version of the Talking Heads classic ‘Cross-Eyed And Painless’ from that band’s seminal Afro-beat-based album Remain In Light (which Kidjo recently returned to its African roots in a reimagined track-by-track cover-album of her own). Another song from that album later in the set was ‘Letting The Days Go By’, which in keeping with Kidjo’s predominantly up-beat style felt a lot more light-hearted than the darker, more neurotic and surreal David Byrne original.

 

Songs from her recent album Mother Nature included the title-track, a reggae-based call to action in response to climate change; the joyous ode to the mother continent, ‘Africa, One Of A Kind’; the stirring summons to gender-based solidarity, ‘Choose Love’ (‘Brothers, why are we fighting each other? Sisters, why do we let the men take our power? Let’s be stronger than our fathers!’); the lilting song of encouragement to African self-reliance ‘Do Yourself’; the tighter, bouncier ‘Free and Equal’, juxtaposing words from the US Declaration of Independence and the UN Declaration of Human Rights with the realities of racial injustice highlighted by Black Lives Matter; the seductive dance number ‘Take It Or Leave It’; and the universalist love song ‘Meant for Me’ (‘I don’t care if you’re rich or poor, I don’t know what’s your DNA, I don’t care if your beauty fades, all I know is you’re meant for me’), which had the audience loudly echoing the refrain.

 

Kidjo also paid tribute to the Cuban ‘Queen of Salsa’ Celia Cruz with a sizzling rendition of ‘Bemba Colora’, followed by the slower, more sultry ‘Sahara’ (both sung in Spanish), after sharing a story about being inspired when she was a schoolgirl by seeing Cruz – the first woman she had ever witnessed singing salsa – on tour in Zaire in the 1970s. Later, she delivered a high-energy version of Afro-pop classic ‘Pata Pata’ by another of her role models, the pioneering South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba. Other songs from her own back-catalogue included the rousing hymn to Mother Earth ‘Agolo’ (which brought any remaining stragglers to their feet); and the Afro-Brazilian anthem ‘Afirika’ (which once again had us singing along to the refrain: ‘Ashé é Maman, ashè é Maman Afirika!’). 

 

Encores included a further medley of earlier career hits ‘We We’, ‘Batonga’ and ‘Adouma’, followed by a final speech decrying hatred and racism, before closing with another Afro-pop anthem to solidarity ‘Flying High’ (‘One love, one world, we have to live together’). All in all, it was a night of joy and hope, pride and defiance, and perhaps even a little anger and impatience with the world.

 

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Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. 

 

After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. 

 

Professor von Flügelhorn is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is also the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations),Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.