Fertile music – Mercury News Thursday, April 28, 2005
Bay Area Quartet, Icelandic Clarinetist Team To Deliver New Work By Peter Maxwell Davies
By Richard Scheinin
Five musicians are sitting in a sunny Palo Alto back yard, lunching on fresh strawberries and spinach pie while discussing the new piece they are about to premiere in America, by the esteemed British composer Peter Maxwell Davies. It’s a big deal — Sir Peter was appointed Master of the Queen’s Music a year ago — and this piece is not only absurdly hard to play but also intriguing in its derivation.
Titled “Hymn to Artemis Locheia,” after the ancient Greek fertility goddess, it was inspired by Maxwell Davies’ visit last year to a fertility clinic in London. There, he observed embryo implantations and talked to prospective parents about the frustrations and elations of in vitro fertilization. Not surprisingly, the musicians are amused by the back story to this composition, which they must bring to life and deliver in performances this weekend.
“The jokes are running rampant,” says Robin Sharp, first violinist of the Ives Quartet, the Santa Clara County-based ensemble that will perform the work three times — in San Jose, Palo Alto and San Francisco — with clarinetist Dimitri Ashkenazy, an Icelander who has flown in from his home in Switzerland.
Ashkenazy, a waif-like 35-year-old virtuoso whose father is the famous pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, says he has grown fond of “a heartbeat kind of place” somewhere in the middle of Maxwell Davies’ opus. The passage has a quiet, pulsing feel to it, he says, trying to describe exactly when in the 30-minute journey through “Artemis” the “heartbeat” appears.
“It’s about 24 weeks into the piece,” says violist Scott Woolweaver.
A few minutes later, they clear their plates and move into the living room to rehearse, setting up in a tight semicircle. The house belongs to cellist Stephen Harrison and second violinist Susan Freier; married, the parents of three children, they played for years in the old Stanford String Quartet, out of which the Ives evolved. As the group prepares to play, the dryer in an adjoining room hums away: the sounds of everyday life as backdrop to fertility music.
“All right, kids,” says Harrison, who grew up in the Haight in the ’60s and believes classical music should be a bit subversive, music for the gut. “Let’s give it a try.”
The music starts with quiet strings and ghostly, growling clarinet from Ashkenazy, who plays barefoot, a cashmere scarf tossed around his neck. Little by little, all sorts of transformations happen: Textures thicken and dissolve as instruments whistle and pop, then climb to piercing unisons layered with overtones that indeed do create a beating sensation. Odd groupings of notes rise out of strange, shifting time signatures: The score at one point dictates a tempo of 7/8 (2/4 + 6/16).
The resulting sounds are eerie: thick clusters of notes, out of which escape traces of murmuring melody; the hymn of the title, perhaps? Maxwell Davies seems to have conjured the sounds of internal processes: mysterious growth, cell division.
Coaxing those sounds from the score so that they actually coalesce as music — this also is a creative and mysterious act, requiring persistence and close listening by the players. Harrison remembers seeing the music for the first time: “I went, `Oh, my God,’ ” he says, calling it an “incredibly virtuosic piece, especially for clarinet. . . . But Dimka” — Ashkenazy’s nickname — “is a uniquely musical musician.”
The collaboration between Ashkenazy and the Ives Quartet (named after maverick composer Charles Ives, one of the group’s heroes) began in 2001 when Sharp met the clarinetist at a German music festival. They performed together and sensed a chemistry. Ashkenazy later visited Sharp, who lives in San Francisco, and attended an Ives performance. That led to the collaborations: performances two years ago of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet (a DVD is upcoming) and, now, “Artemis.”
For more than a decade, Ashkenazy has performed music by Maxwell Davies — known as “Max,” especially in England where he enjoys a semi-pop-star status — and has become a friend of the composer’s. He often has performed Sir Peter’s Strathclyde Concerto No. 4, a clarinet concerto with a “diabolically difficult” solo part, Ashkenazy says.
In August, when “Artemis” received its world premiere at Switzerland’s Lucerne Festival, it was Ashkenazy who played it with the high-profile Brodsky Quartet. When he and Maxwell Davies discussed the possibility of a U.S. premiere, Ashkenazy suggested bringing in the Ives: Its members are musical collaborators in the truest sense, he says, giving him “a feeling that no matter what happens in a performance, you’ve got people listening.”
In London, where a two-week festival of Maxwell Davies’ music is under way, the 70 year-old composer — who is intensely prolific — is curious to hear how things are going with “Artemis.” Speaking by phone, he cackles at Ashkenazy’s observation of a heartbeat section: “He’s quite right,” Sir Peter says. “When you’re in the clinic, watching these procedures, there’s a lot of blood pumping.”
He describes his visit to the clinic, which is operated by a geneticist named Ian Craft, a music lover who commissioned the piece from Maxwell Davies, asking the composer to write something along a fertility theme.
“I put on the scrubs that you wear when you go into a medical operating theater,” the composer says, “and I saw the women having eggs implanted and some were actually donating eggs for other women who couldn’t have children. I just watched these procedures. I talked to a couple of the ladies who were going through this treatment, and one lady in particular who had a boy a few years ago and said this procedure had changed her life. I found it to be quite amazing and wonderful, and I came out with a notebook full of notes.”
This is when Maxwell Davies’ classical education reared its head: “I remembered there was this cult in ancient Greece, around 500 or 600 BC,” he says, “and I thought, `Well, this was a fertility cult for women who were barren and they would meet the goddess at the shrine and some as a result bore children.’ And so I thought, `Why not do something for Artemis Locheia?’ ”
The piece isn’t meant as a programmatic depiction of his clinic tour: “No, I abstracted from the experience and condensed it and wrote what I think of as an upbeat piece. I set a seed at the beginning, if you like, and the idea just grows and grows. There’s a continuous musical argument, developing that little seed which is implanted, transforming it with various procedures — operative, putting on more phrases and sentences, so it expands.”
And challenges: “Artemis” includes the highest note that Ashkenazy has ever seen: a stratospheric E, four octaves above middle C, “a note,” he says, “that really shouldn’t exist. When he first received the score last year, he consulted Web sites and finger charts, trying to figure out how to play it. Finally, he concocted his own fingering method which worked “some of the time,” he says, joking.
Now, back in the Palo Alto living room, “Artemis” moves along. The musicians talk to one another while playing; they exchange quiet apologies for small miscues, along with bits of encouragement as the music starts to flow. Now they are actually swaying in their seats as they decode Maxwell Davies’ cell divisions. The five players merge, separate, and merge some more, and somewhere along the line, barely noticeably, Ashkenazy climbs up and grabs that screaming E, then moves ahead. It’s just one moment in this growing, expanding creation, this new body of music being born.
And what does that impossible note represent? The pain of childbirth, perhaps, or maybe the elation? Or both.
The Ives Quartet with guest artist Dimitri Ashkenazy, clarinet
The program: U.S. premiere of “Hymn to Artemis Locheia” by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies; String Quartet, Op. 13, by Mendelssohn; String Quartet, Op. 135, by Beethoven
Friday: 8 p.m. at Old First Church, 1751 Sacramento St., San Francisco; $15, $12 seniors and students, free for 12 and under; call (415) 474-1608 or go to www.oldfirstconcerts.org
Saturday: 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 600 Colorado Ave., Palo Alto; $25, $20 seniors, $15 students, free for 12 and under; call (650) 328-0990
Sunday: 7 p.m. at Le Petit Trianon, 72 N. Fifth St., San Jose; $25, $20 seniors, $15 students; free for ages 12 and under; call (650) 328-0990