Keith Tippett's Rare Music Club
Triple bills of rare music performed live for YOU!
Contemporary Classical Free Improvisation Roots Music

Cheng Yu pipa (four-stringed lute)
An internationally renowned pipa soloist from Beijing, China, Cheng Yu has won several top prizes for pipa performance, including the China Youth competition for Traditional Instruments and the Excellent Performer award at the 1985 China Traditional Instruments Competition. After studying the Pudong School of pipa music under her father Cheng Junming and Lin Shicheng, Cheng Yu spent seven years at the Xi'an Conservatory of Music where she mastered the Pinghu style of pipa. After graduating with distinction in 1987, she became a pipa soloist in the Central Orchestra of National Music in Beijing. Since 1990 she has been based in London and has performed throughout Europe, Asia, Canada and the USA, working with organisations including WOMAD, Grand Union, the London Sinfonietta and the Lyon Ensemble Orchestre Contemporain. In 1996 she completed an MMus in Ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London, and is currently completing a PhD in Chinese music. Cheng Yu has been actively involved in contemporary music projects. She will be playing the contemporary symphony – “Wei al Bab”, for the pipa with the Avignon Orchestra in Avignon in May 2003. She has just won a Women in Music Commissioning Fund 2002 for her new project to create a 5-stringed pipa and new music for it.

Tonight's programme:

White Snow in Sunny Spring (suite style)
This short suite is a seamless series of melodies, each section in the 68-measure form. It portrays the scenery in spring, when all of nature is fresh and vibrant. The subtitles are: Standing Above the Rest; The Breeze Through the Lotus Flowers; The Crescent Moon; Contemplating Life’s Mysteries from a Jade Pedestal; The Iron Policy of the Gong; Music Escaping from the Daoist Temple; Sound of an Eastern Crane.

Flute and Drum at Sunset (civil style)
First seen in the Ju Shilin (1736–1820) pipa score. The music depicts an enchanting spring river scene in southern China: the changing colours of the setting sun accompany the gradual disappearance of the fishermen’s boats. Section titles: Sound of Bells from the Riverside Tower; Moon above the Eastern Hills; Breeze over the Stream; Shadows of Flowers; Distant Clouds and Water Merge into One; Fisherman's Evening Song; Waves Lapping at the Shore; Homeward Boat.

Ambushed on Ten Sides (martial style)
The best known classical martial piece for the pipa; the score first appeared in 1818. It portrays the epic battle between rival armies in 202 B.C., which led to the founding of the Han dynasty. It graphically depicts both the sound of battle and the moods of heroism and despair. The subtitles are: Setting up Camp; Beating Drums; Sounding Horns; Firing Cannon; Calling the Rosters. Maneuvering troops; Laying Ambush; The Skirmish; The Major Battle; Farewell to Concubine Yu; The Suicide; The Rout.

Dance of the Yi People
This popular composition by Wang Huiran (1965) depicts a joyous gathering of young people dancing on the mountainside during a festival. Its inspiration, like that of many modern Chinese pieces, is a romantic view of the 'minority' tribes of Southwest China.

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David Le Page solo violin
Stop press!! Extra act!! David Le Page is an exceptionally talented young chamber musician who has played and recorded with the Kreutzer, Tippett and Caractacus Quartets, the gogmagogs and the Composers Ensemble. He is the duo partner of pianists Charles Owen, Andrew Zolinsky, Catherine Edwards and Tom Ades. He has also led the London Festival Orchestra, the Brunel Ensemble and Continuum as well as being soloist/director with English Mozart Ensemble, the London Baroque Ensemble and Vivaldi Camerata. In his 'spare time' he leads the electro-acoustic ensemble Subway Piranhas, Orchestra of the Swan and the chamber ensemble Camera Obscura. For tonight's solo set Dave has promised Luciano Berio's Sequenza VIII, sure to help set the scene for the breathless energy of Linuckea in the second set.

Berio's Sequenza VIII for violin
for you I have multiplied my voices, my words, my vowels
and now I cry out that you are my vocative

'Composing Sequenza VIII was for me like paying a personal debt to the violin, which I see as one of the most enduring and complex instruments in existence. If almost all my other Sequenzas develop a very restricted choice of instrumental possibilities and of soloistic behaviour as far as they will go, Sequenza VIII presents a broader and more historical image of the instrument.

Sequenza VIII leans constantly upon two notes (A and B) which, as in a chaconne, provide a compass for the work's rather diversified and elaborate progress, in which polyphony is no longer virtual, as in other Sequenzas, but real. And it's through this that Sequenza VIII also becomes, inevitably, a homage to that high-point of music, the Chaconne of the Partita in D by Johann Sebastian Bach, in which violin techniques of the past, present and future coexist.

Sequenza VIII was written in 1976 for Carlo Chiarappa.'

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Keith Tippett's piano quintet Linuckea
Keith Tippett piano, David Le Page violin, Patrick Savage violin, Malcolm Allison viola, Philip Sheppard cello
"…Linuckea, Tippett's 40-minute piano quintet, already feels like a classic - a new benchmark for the collusion of improvisation and composition. Tippett is an intense and prolific pianist, whatever the context, but the great pleasure of Linuckea is hearing the strings play with the same passion. Whether playing the parts or improvising, violinists David Le Page and Christopher George, substitute viola player Ian Rathbone and cellist Philip Sheppard play the piece from the inside. They own every note they play: breakneck unisons with the piano; grinding chords over which Tippett ad libs; delicate waltz themes that self-destruct; short outbursts of brittle improvisation.

Although the structure of the quintet is fixed, Tippett finds new ways to surprise himself and the audience within his piano part. He invades his instrument, plucking, scraping and preparing the strings to transform its role within the quintet. At one moment he is creating a sound effect that rumbles way below the written quartet lines. But before you know it, the strings are providing the accompaniment to his solos. A powerful performance of a great piece."—John L. Walters, The Guardian, review of concert at the QEH, London

…Tippett is a master of contrast: rugged free-jazzy episodes will be abruptly replaced by clattering loops of sound, or lightly insistent figures like running footsteps will be set against dancing string themes, Hungarian cafe music at warp speed. It was something to witness the Jazz Cafe hushed by this.—John Fordham, concert review at Jazz Cafe, London

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