Keith Tippett's Rare Music Club
Contemporary Classical Free Improvisation Roots Music

Keith Tippett’s Rare Music Club at the Wiltshire Music Centre, Bradford-on-Avon, Friday 9 May 2003

Amongst his many notable accomplishments, Keith Tippett’s pioneering cross-genre concert programming should not be neglected. The Rare Music Club returned for a second time to the Wiltshire Music Centre, the adventurous programming and superb acoustics meeting again like old friends. Indeed, Keith Tippett was greeting the audience as old friends and by the interval hoped that we were having “a purifying night”. We certainly were. The first half of the concert contained two solo performances; both a distillation of lightly worn virtuosity and focussed intent.

The pipa is a four stringed-fretted lute from China, its name describes the down and up strokes that the player uses to play it. Cheng Yu, renowned pipa soloist, left us in no doubt as to how this was done in a brief programme that brought the full range of this expressive instrument to an unfamiliar audience. The two dominant styles of the pipa’s repertoire were based on a detailed narrative; the delicate chiming harmonics of the civil style contrasted with the frenetic drama of the martial pieces.

The episodic structure of the pipa music provided an appropriate frame for David Le Page’s performance of Berio’s Sequenza for violin. With the score spread across four music stands the audience were literally able to follow Le Page’s progress through this broad sweep of music as he moved from stage left to stage right. The tense sustained scordatura fragmented into the linear passages that pointed to the homage to Bach’s great Chaconne from the Partita in D.

In turn, the Berio set the scene for the breathless energy of Linuckea, Keith Tippett’s 40-minute piano quintet which filled the second half of the concert. The title is an anagram of the names of his two children. This was a firework of a performance that cracked into life as breakneck unison passages twisted into a quirky waltz tune. Tippett can be a dominating musical presence but he merged with the quartet to form an ensemble that colluded in the breathless contrasts of style as the musicians raced from composition to improvisation and back again.

This piece, originally commissioned by the Kreutzer Quartet, is achieving something of a classic status and it is not hard to see why. Leaving many of the dubious fusions of the third stream far behind, Linuckea flows with a unified sense of purpose. All five musicians demonstrated a passion and ownership of the music that was particularly evident in the thick, rich cello cadenza from Philip Sheppard.

At one point Keith Tippett could be seen characteristically hovering over the inside of the piano as he reached out to open the lid of a small music box. The sounds released from the Rare Music Club tonight brought rapturous applause from a spellbound audience.

Nick Sorensen
nick@improvisingschool.com

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RMC has received financial support from the Performing Right Society Foundation and South West Arts.

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