Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen: Flow My Tears – ‘Brilliant and inventive’
06.03.14, The Guardian
Purcell Room, London. 2nd of March 2014. London Sinfonietta and Theatre of Voices. Paul Hillier
The Danish composer's fragmentations and elaborations playfully dissect the melancholy of Dowland's lute song
4 out of 5 stars
"All titles are to be taken literally" : the refreshingly frank advice of the 81-year-old Danish composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, given in a supplement to the programme note for this London Sinfonietta concert, is also to be taken literally. The pieces in the programme all consist of one-word titles such as Run, Song and Play that, when heard, make perfect sense of their titles.
Run, for example, generates a nervous restlessness, where the motion is harassed by extraneous gestures which make one scared to look back. The momentum breaks down, dominated by dark textures, but eventually collapses over a finishing line. Sound I and Sound II, on the other hand, focus respectively on consonants and vowels as different aspects of vocal sound generation, and find themselves combined in Song.
The overall title of the programme – Flow My Tears – is also literal in the sense that all the pieces consist of fragmentations, refractions and elaborations of the Dowland lute song that, with its signature falling phrase and chains of sweet suspended dissonances, in many ways encapsulates the affect of melancholy. But Gudmundsen-Holmgreen's cycle of pieces works more as a dissection of melancholy, in which the constituent parts of its expressive language are pulled apart and investigated for their own interest. The spirit is sometimes humorous and sometimes earnest, but never melancholy, and the culmination of the programme is Company, which literally merges the two pieces Play (instrumental) and Song (vocal), resulting in a kind of exploded, slow-motion euphoria.
The programme was energetically and exactly played by members of the Sinfonietta together with the excellent Anglo-Danish Theatre of Voices under their conductor Paul Hillier, but there were moments when the spirit of play and experimentation that lies at the heart of Gudmunsen-Holmgreen's aesthetic might have been more palpable. Still, the brilliance of the musicianship and compositional invention cannot be denied.
Guy Dammann