Review of Timelapse 2.0, Free to stream digital concert.
Timelapse 2.0 review written by Colin Clarke at Seen and Heard International.
The Timelapse 2.0 concept enables past and present to mix and mingle with joyful abandon and to yield miraculous results. To take an example, to go from Trish Clowes’s jazz VAria (after the Goldberg excerpt) to the bracing performance of the first movement of Grieg’s Holberg Suite illuminates all three pieces; lighting, too, plays its part, the vibrant greens of the Grieg underscoring the open-air freshness of both piece and performance.
It was the Aria from the Goldberg Variations in the arrangement for string trio led by David LePage’s eloquent violin playing that actually launched the concert, with viola Rose Redgrave and cello Nick Stringfellow; and watching jazz saxophonist Trish Clowes in action subsequently was in itself worth the trip to deepest Purfleet, her VBach the ideal (jazz) complement to that ‘Aria’.
“Timelapse 2.0 enables past and present to mix and mingle with joyful abandon and to yield miraculous results.”
Transitions between pieces are effortlessly managed. Amazingly, the Orchestra of the Swan captured the spirit of Radiohead’s Pyramid Song, while gradually increasing in density and eventually landing on a low, sustained sonority before hitting the stark juxtaposition of François Couperin’s Les Barricades Mystérieuses (a piece originally for harpsichord). The shifting rhythms of the inner voices seemed not a million miles away from the dissonant, grungy textures and harmonies of Trish Clowes’s Wayne’s Waltz, an innocuous title for a complex, brilliant piece that at times deconstructs – dissolves, even – the idea, or memory, of a waltz. Clowes led the members of the OOTS who were around her in a circle; David Gordon, the OOTS’s resident pianist, was once again excellent.
Bach acted as a marker in this concert: at the mid-point we have his Goldberg Variations, the Variation XV before returning to the Aria at the close (just as the Goldbergs do).
“Fascinating to hear how jazz and Rameau resonate so closely in one of Gordon’s transitions, both segueing between Baroque panels and interacting with them.”
David LePage’s A Scanner Darkly is stompingly rhythmic yet – as the title implies – darkly shaded; again, the grittiness of the 14th-century Italian La Rotta, its origins lost in the mists of time, seemed a mere step away. And the outgoing La Rotta now feels very much of today, as does the sequence of Rameau movements arranged by LePage under the title Triptych. Fascinating to hear how jazz and Rameau resonate so closely in one of Gordon’s transitions, both segueing between Baroque panels and interacting with them. The madcap finale of the Rameau runs headfirst into the reprise of the Aria – giving the latter something of the purity that Bach achieves in the original score (although here it doubles as outro with the credits rolled over it).
Colin Clarke
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