CD Reviews
Sullen earth
Riverrun Records RVRCD80 (2009)
Gordana Matijevic-Nedeljkovic, violin, Hugh Tinney, piano and The Belgrade Strings, conducted by the composer, perform Sullen earth for violin and strings (2005), Limena for piano and strings (1998) and The Capsizing Man and other stories for string orchestra (1994/97).
“Blistered and bent into quartertones, the buckling solo line in Ian Wilson's 2005 violin concerto "Sullen Earth" picks obsessively at fragile, folklike figures before bursting into lyricism against the wheezing, accordion-like harmonies of the string orchestra. It's a bold work, and a bold performance from Gordana Matijevic-Nedeljkovic and the Belgrade Strings, who also accompany pianist Hugh Tinney in Wilson's subdued "Limena" (1998). Disturbing and cute, "The Capsizing Man" sees Wilson at his most accessible.”
The Independent (Anna Picard), 16th August 2009.
“Commissioned by the Serbian musical forces in ardent evidence here, Ian Wilson's 2005 Sullen Earth is an archetype of a more recent compositional process that focuses on "stand-alone" building blocks of musical thought. The result is a distillation of conventional narrative or technical development into raw cells of emotion. Here combined with ['Limena' for] piano and strings, a more melodically florid affair, and the suite, 'The Capsizing Man', itself a juxtaposition of five concisely contemplated ideas, the disc is a well-balanced recital in itself. The added bonus is the presence of the composer as conductor.” (5/5)
Sunday Tribune, 23rd August 2009.
“Two years ago, Riverrun released a disc of Ian Wilson's string quartets - four of them - and has now brought together three of his works involving string orchestra. Wilson's style has changed since 1999, when he was forced by Nato bombing to leave Belgrade and return to Ireland. The later music seems rougher hewn: less concerned with making formal patterns and more with expressing what it wants to say directly, often by boldly juxtaposing contrasting kinds of music material. That technique is seen in Sullen Earth for violin and strings, from 2005, in which everything is pared down to its emotional core, allowing the highly wrought textures to relax just once for an archaic-sounding lyrical interlude. Limena, from 1998, expands a solo piano by surrounding it with muted string textures, while the five taut miniatures that make up The Capsizing Man and Other Stories are all inspired by Giacometti sculptures.”
The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 21st August 2009.
“The three string orchestra works recorded here traverse more than 10 years. Limena, “for piano and muted strings” (1998), makes the greatest impression. It begins in media res, with solo piano (Hugh Tinney) and orchestra appearing to drift in different musical worlds, the piano dribbling in a kind of melancholy rumination, the strings engaged in a distant commentary, independent-seeming yet related. It’s like something forever feeding fascination to the corner of your eye.”
The Irish Times, 28th August 2009.
Double Trio
Diatribe Records DIACD006 (2009)
Cathal Roche, saxophones, Mia Cooper, violin, Stu Ritchie, drums, Cliona Doris, harp, Richard O'Donnell, vibraphone, Daniel Bodwell, double bass
Double Trio (2008)
“The worlds of jazz and "classical" collide in this newly state-commissioned composition. The words of various interviewed residents of the Glencullen area are central to Wilson's composition, and it is from whence that the rhythms and melodies of the score are often directly derived. Also calling on jazz musicians to frequently improvise, the breadth of the work, for obvious reasons, is ambitiously vast. Its natural rhythm is its lifeblood, one which sustains joyous chaos and rustic beauty.”
Sunday Tribune, May 3rd 2009.
“Double Trio is the product of Ian Wilson’s year-long residency in the Glencullen electoral area south of Dublin. Commissioned by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council as part of its Place and Identity programme, it is based on interviews with local residents conducted by the composer and offers eight portraits of an area Wilson describes as ‘one of the least spoiled parts of the country and, paradoxically, one of the areas which has seen most development’.
Wilson explores the effects of the unprecedented changes felt during the now long-gone period when the Celtic Tiger economy was roaring its loudest. Each work begins with a snatch of speech drawn from Wilson’s fieldwork to prompt and punctuate a series of loose-limbed, lightly textured, jazz-accented pieces that strive to mimic the rhythms and patterns of everyday life and speech in Glencullen.
Double Trio’s title alludes to the instrumental forces assembled and picks up where 2007’s re:play, which brought together an improvising saxophone and a classical sextet, left off. Here, improvisation is discernibly to the fore, with three instruments more usually associated with jazz – saxophone, double bass and drums – allowed comparatively free room to ad lib than their score-centred, classically inclined trio of violin, harp and vibraphone.
While Wilson provides beginning, end and clear pointers of direction in between, much of the energy of the work comes from the variants and flights of fancy of the jazz trio. There’s an enchanting playfulness to ‘The Kids’, where individual instrumental voices weave around each other in flowing ribbons of energy and exploration. With onomatopoeic percussion, ‘The Stonemason’ boasts its own industriously alert moments. I would have liked a few more hard facts about ‘Catherine’, not least for the sheer vivacity of the music that describes her, skipping and dancing with a gleeful scattiness that calls Neal Hefti to mind.
There’s something altogether more cautious and circumspect about instrumental relationships in the bebop-peppered ‘The Reverend’, while ‘Residents’ is populated by a number of precisely characterised musical portraits. If ‘The Hostelry Manager’ seems to stray towards period pastiche in its depiction of ‘a place that has hardly changed at all’, its not clear whether this is by design or default, the vibraphone (Richard O’Donnell) becoming the fourth partner in a jazz ensemble given its head. Either way, it translates into moments of frozen nostalgia that is curiously affecting.
Low-register pulses on vibraphone and double bass (Dan Bodwell) anchor Cathal Roche’s boozy, lachrymose saxophone and Stu Richie’s slurred percussion in ‘The Forest Manager’ to evocative effect and in austere contrast to the busy messiness of ‘The Convenience Store Owner’ in which harpist Clíona Doris adds her own delightfully minimalist commentary.
An interesting experiment with interesting results, Double Trio points to council money having been well spent.”
The Journal of Music, August/September 2009.
TUNDRA
Limb from Limb Records LFL 001 (2008)
Mark O’Keeffe, trumpet, plays
TUNDRA for trumpet and electronics (2008)
Electronics in collaboration with Jürgen Simpson
“Recently realised in its full multimedia and dance performance context at the Dublin Fringe Festival, Ian Wilson's work for what is essentially solo trumpet, performed with a searing brilliance by Mark O'Keefe, enjoys a life of its own here. Infused with all varieties of sound manipulation and electronics, it weaves sonic threads of intrigue and drama. The result is not always detailed enough in the electronic elements to skirt repetitiveness but dark, shadowy timbres and interrogative melodic narrative still create a compelling experience.” (4/5)
Sunday Tribune, September 21st 2008.
“Ian Wilson is surely one of the busiest of Irish composers at the moment – and one of the most diverse and wide-ranging. This latest offering is the score for a multi-media dance performance that will be seen for the first time on 7th September at The Empty Space in Dublin’s Smock Alley as part of this year’s Fringe Festival.
An electro-acoustic work for trumpet and tape, Tundra follows, on disc at least, recordings of works for string quartet (reviewed in the July–August 2007 issue of JMI) and two expressive miniatures for alto saxophone and guitar (JMI, March–April 2007). It has already had its broadcast premiere on RTÉ lyric fm in a concert that included works by Seóirse Bodley and Raymond Deane, useful musical bookends to momentarily frame so omnivorous a composer as Wilson.
Inspired by the performer Anne Gilpin, Tundra takes two very different art works as its starting point: Wordsworth’s wistfully nostalgic poem ‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, and pioneering American photographer Laura Gilpin’s compelling frontiers landscape from 1917, The Prairie, in which a lone female figure stands dwarfed by a vast cloud-filled sky as the sparse conjoined terrain of the Colorado landscape stretches flat and featureless to the horizon and out of the edges of the image. (Curiously, this is not the image featured on the CD sleeve.)
Featuring one-time RTÉ Musician of the Future and now BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra principal, Mark O’Keeffe, on trumpet, and engineered and co-produced by Jürgen Simpson, the project also announces a new label, Limb from Limb Records.
Tundra is structured in ten parts, including a prologue, ‘pre prologue’ and three short interludes. It begins in a protean wash of dirty-grey noise within which seems locked a blurred yet palpable pulse, cyclical but uneven – breath, perhaps, or a heartbeat, or the unmediated depositing over time, like erratic glacial moraines, of memories of now half-remembered places.
A flourish of double- (or triple-?) tonguing on the trumpet heralds a series of dark-hued interactions between it and Wilson’s formless but appropriately gritty and granulated soundscape that are terse, tentative and tremulous before gradually acquiring an equilibrium that enables them to come briefly, if always approximately, into focus.
The blanching effects of the interludes are followed by more animated interplay between electronics and, occasionally, multi-tracked trumpet, the first dialogue between the two hinting at the possibility of a common language. Throughout Tundra’s 42-minute playing time, the improvisational quality of the trumpet is provoked and paralleled by the coarsely delineated accompaniment, alluding, perhaps, to Wordsworth’s vicarious ‘gleams of half-extinguished thoughts’ and conjuring the elemental immensity of Gilpin’s photograph to intriguing effect. A densely conceived work, then, that demands determined and sustained excavation by the listener, a requirement that might have been facilitated by the inclusion of commentary or notes.”
The JMI, September/October 2008
Veer
Riverrun Records RVRCD77 (2007)
The Callino Quartet
Veer - quartet no. 4; …wander, darkling - quartet no. 5; In fretta, in vento - quartet no. 6; Lyric Suite - Seven Elegiac Pieces for string quartet
“[The quartets] are all imposing, highly wrought structures. [The 5th and 6th] are both extended single musical spans, and both wonderfully vivid in these performances by the Callino Quartet.”
The Guardian (Andrew Clements), June 22nd 2007.
“This CD received its launch two weeks ago in Bantry at the Callino festival and a remarkable contribution to the contemporary Irish repertoire it is. Wilson’s 4th, 5th and 6th quartets, all written within an 18-month period shortly after he was forced to relocate from Belgrade due to the NATO bombing in 1999, are presented here alongside his 2004 “Seven Elegiac Pieces” (Lyric Suite). The stark coldness of the 4th, 5th and 6th is achieved with some extraordinary extended string techniques whilst the Lyric Suite allows the Callino Quartet exploration more specific to their own honeyed sound.” (Four stars).
The Sunday Tribune, April 22nd 2007.
“Ian Wilson is the Irish composer who seems most ready to engage with the string quartet. This new disc includes his Fourth (Veer), Fifth (…wander, darkling), and Sixth (In fretta, in vento), as well as the later Lyric Suite of “Seven Elegiac Pieces”. The most impressive work here, and the one with the longest unbroken span, is the 18-minute Fifth, a piece that is often sonically pinched and emotionally anguished - it was written during one of the most difficult times in the composer’s life. The lashing first movement of the Edvard Munch-inspired Fourth is like its expressive inversion. The Sixth and the elegies are more diffuse and seem by comparison rather less effective, even in the Callino Quartet’s excellent performances.” (Four stars).
The Irish Times, May 18th 2007.
“With a playing time of just one hour, this concentrated clutch of three string quartets and a suite of ‘elegiac pieces’ offers itself up as a clenched fist of a programme that the listener must attempt to prise open with each listen, one or more of its fingers always remaining clamped shut, as if clasping something valuable and vulnerable to itself. The white-knuckle intensity of the experience obliges you to keep returning to these emotionally charged, tautly coruscating and fiercely realised works in an effort to understand and then appreciate. And indeed, vice versa.
The quartets - Numbers 4 (Veer), 5 (…wander, darkling) and 6 (In fretta, in vento) - are the products of an intense 18-month period around the turn of the millenium when Wilson was forced to flee from a NATO bombing campaign in his adopted Belgrade to reluctant repatriation in Ireland. The Sixth is coralled between Wilson’s reflections on the terrorist atrocities of the 9/11 attacks and the death shortly afterwards of the composer’s grandmother. In the collision between public tribute and private grief, these works of outrage and protest vehemently strain against the implacable provocations of brute violence and, occasionally fruitfully, go steadfastly in search of spiritual solace.
Such an instance occurs in the dying moments of the Sixth, when Wilson movingly quotes the Bach chorale O Traurigkeit, O Herzeleid! (’Oh sadness, o sorrow!”). It is the most bittersweet of moments, at once fragile and defiant and wholly typical of the compassion that informs every note that Wilson sets on a stave.
The Fifth Quartet burns with the darkest of flames, communicating with a peppery, Berg-like rush of repulsion and razor-sharp horror, its sharp, slicing, shivering string textures tumbling over each other in tumult and turmoil. Nearing the end of their first decade together, the Callino Quartet play with a controlled and incisive dexterity that emphasises clarity of expression and suggests the maturity of a considerably older ensemble.
Veer, Wilson’s Fourth Quartet, differs from its two companions in length - at under 10 minutes it is half as long as the Fifth and four minutes shorter than the Sixth - and structure, conceived as it is in two compact movements. To know that they draw their inspiration from Edvard Munch’s paintings The Scream and Melancholy tells you something about them, but not everything. Veer is more concerned with an unspecified quest than the obvious quarrels the Fifth and Sixth pursue and is somewhat more gnomic as a result.By comparison, and in stark relief - in both senses of the word - the most recent work, 2004’s wistful seven-part Lyric Suite (the title is a nod to RTE Lyric FM, who commissioned the work), communicates with meditative moderation and offers necessary balm after what has gone before.”
The JMI, July/August 2007.
pluckblow
Meridian Records CDE84546 (2007) “Ian Wilson's brittle miniatures Tern and Icarus (both from 2004) are 'two short songs without words [that follow] the rhythmic and emotional contours' of two poems by John Burnside. Where Tern takes quiet delight in quotidian detail, Icarus offers a sun-dappled portrait of over-reaching vanity.” The JMI, vol. 7 no. 2, March/April 2007.
Gerard McChrystal, alto saxophone, Craig Ogden, guitar
Includes Tern/Icarus (2004)from the Book of Longing
Riverrun Records RVRCD65 (2004)
Hugh Tinney, piano, Catherine Leonard, violin
from the Book of Longing for violin and piano; BIG for piano; Drive for violin and piano; Verschwindend for piano; Spilliaert’s Beach for violin and piano; For Eileen, after rain for piano; Lim for piano; A Haunted Heart for piano
Rewarding fare from one of Ireland ’s leading young composers.
“Ten years span the eight works on this disc, which reveals Ian Wilson (40 this year) as a composer of integrity, resourcefulness and (crucially) genuine communicative gifts.
You can hear all of those qualities in the two earliest works here, the piano piece BIG (1991) and the following year’s Drive for violin and piano (originally for soprano saxophone). Even more striking are Lim (a beautifully proportioned 18-minute piano work adapted from the solo part of Wilson ’s 1998 concerto for piano and strings, Limena) and Verschwindend (a virtuoso test piece commissioned by the 2001 Dublin International Piano Competition). I was also particularly taken with from the Book of Longing for violin and piano. Written in 1996 for Catherine Leonard, it derives its inspiration from the Biblical account of Christ’s Temptation in the desert by Satan. Described by the composer as ‘part showpiece and part mini tone poem’, the music strikes a deliciously subtle balance between the spiritual and sensual.
These are exemplary performances from Hugh Tinney and Catherine Leonard, vividly recorded in the composer’s presence at the Concert Hall of Limerick University. Well worth hunting down – as, for that matter, are two comparably rewarding anthologies of Wilson ’s string quartets and piano trios on Black Box and Timbre respectively.”
Gramophone Magazine, November 2004.
“Familiar for his String Quartets and Proms commission Man O’War, Irish composer Ian Wilson has been a name to watch almost from the moment he finished his studies. Now pianist Hugh Tinney and violinist Catherine Leonard present a fascinating retrospective of Wilson ’s changing voice…The tension between cool clarity and an almost Ravelian sensuality links the works, played with admirable transparency by Leonard and Tinney. Excellent.” (Four stars)
The Independent, May 23rd 2004.
“In spite of the varied surface finishes, what stands out on this CD is the underlying romanticism and also the consistent sensitivity and polish of both performers.” (Four stars)
The Irish Times, August 20th 2004.
Straight Lines
Erasmus Music 269 (2002)
Amstel Saxophone Quartet
Includes … so softly (1992)
“… sets the mood for the whole CD. Hauntingly beautiful.”
Clarinet and Saxophone, v n 2002.
British Fantasies American Dreams
Guild Music GMCD 7230 (2001)
Nancy Ruffer, flute and Helen Crayford, piano
Includes Spilliaert’s Beach for alto flute and piano (1999)
“Inspired by Leon Spilliaert’s 1908 painting Moonlit Beach Wilson… explores that work’s almost abstract quality in a most involving way...An impressive study in black-and-yellow contrasts… highly effective…”
Music Web, December 2001.
towards the Far Country
Black Box Music BBM 1031 (2000)
Vanbrugh Quartet: Winter’s Edge - string quartet no. 1; The Capsizing Man and other stories - string quartet no. 2; towards the Far Country - string quartet no. 3
“I had not heard of the young Belfast-born composer Ian Wilson before, and was grateful to Richard Whitehouse [Gramophone, Feb. 2001] for drawing my attention to him: ‘a composer of imaginative resource and a sure formal sense’ indeed…he has the gift of making even the barest ideas interesting, and they often flower into impressively sustained lyrical lines. I was especially struck by the Third Quartet, which encompasses considerable variety of dramatic incident – it was inspired by seven strongly contrasted paintings by Paul Klee – but could readily be heard as an ingenious fusion of sonata and rondo. The ‘grinding chords’ that RW noted at the outset are particularly fertile, not so much opposing the lyrical ‘second subject’ but generating other sorts of lyricism, including the quite haunting tranquil close.”
Gramophone Magazine (Michael Oliver), June 2001.
“Well crafted, resourceful quartets given performances by the Vanbrugh Quartet to match, in fine recorded sound.
As the disc of his Second and Third Piano Trios (Timbre) indicated, Ian Wilson is a composer of imaginative resource and a sure formal sense, his music lacking little in personality.
The viola melody near the beginning of the compact First Quartet (a work inspired by the life of Saint Paul) denotes the oblique lyricism and deceptive forward motion typical of Wilson’s music as a whole. A halting, Stravinskian rhythmic motion provides necessary contrast, while the opening discord comes into dramatic focus at several points during this ruminative, even melancholic work.
Quartet No. 2 draws on work by the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti for its five short movements, which are strongly contrasted in character. The emotional range expands to take account of this, taking in the Schnittke-like anguish of ‘The Capsizing Man’, the nocturnal unease of ‘The Forest’, the distantly Sibelian impetus of ‘The Chariot’, and, after the Feldman-like reticence of ‘Seated Woman’, a whimsical finale in ‘The Cat’.
Grinding chords launch the ambitious (28 minute) Third Quartet. Here the inspiration, seven paintings by Paul Klee, is integrated into the ongoing formal evolution, with several well-defined ideas developed in an eloquent discourse which periodically recalls the quartet writing of Robert Simpson. The ingenuity with which Wilson maintains the dramatic tension ensures that the tranquil close casts a powerful spell in context.
Perceptive performances by the Vanbrughs and a well-nigh perfect quartet balance makes this disc well worth the attention of open-minded quartets and listeners alike.”
Gramophone Magazine, February 2001.
“Though for so long the medium par excellence of abstract musical discourse, the string quartet functions no less effectively than other genres as the vehicle for responses to external stimuli. Twentieth-century painting and sculpture act in this way in three quartets of the Irish composer Ian Wilson - intentionally so, as part of a dedicated artistic programme. In his First Quartet (1992), which he considers his first complete work, he moved consciously from an ‘abstract plane to a place where I could begin to musically explore the world and my own place in it’. Paradoxically, however, though entitled Winter’s Edge with reference to ideas of redemption as exemplified in the life of St Paul, its lack of overtly religious of autobiographical sensibility is fully amended by a firm basis in dedicated musical argument.
And this is no less true of the First Quartet’s successors, inspired by Giacometti and Klee respectively. Whatever its visual origins, Wilson’s invention translates into satisfying musical structures, broadly mosaic, and incidentally recalling Feldman in the Second (1994) and Tippett in the Third, Towards the Far Country (1996). More importantly, however, there is also here and outline of the third persona, still developing, and clearly bearing promise for the future.”
BBC Music Magazine, February 2001.
“… definitely a genuine imagination at work here.”
International Record Review, January 2001.
Seven Last Words
Timbre DMHCD4 (1997)
Kammerspiel: The Seven Last Words - piano trio no. 2 (1995); Catalan Tales - piano trio no. 3 (1996); Six Days at Jericho - for cello and piano (1995)
“I was most impressed by ‘The Seven Last Words’ (1995) which, like James MacMillan’s recent work of the same title, draws the listener into a personal sound-world of great conviction. Wilson’s music is often very graphic, the desiccation of ‘I thirst’ is palpable, the strident dissonant chords scourging. The music rises to a dense harmonic climax above which cello and violin sing out passionately. Thereafter the textures become sparser and the violin and cello often play a third apart. Gradually the music is transmuted, becoming more and more ethereal.
Besides this powerful experience…the more fantastic nature of ‘Catalan Tales’, inspired by the paintings of Miro, brought welcome relief. The ‘Jericho’ music is, again, very dark and brooding, rich with ominous intensity.
In Kammerspiel, Ian Wilson has been fortunate to have performers of the very highest standard who have projected his music with exemplary skill and commitment”.
TEMPO Magazine, April 1998.
Ceathrar: Contemporary String Quartets from Ireland
Chandos CHAN 9295 (1994)
Vanbrugh Quartet. Includes Winter’s Edge - string quartet no. 1 (1992)
“… [a] dramatic and highly effective piece.” CD Review, October 1994.
“… [an] impeccably crafted and imaginative piece.” BBC Music Magazine, September 1994.
