In his inviting and personable manner, well-matched to the relaxed mood of the Hugh Lane, viola player and former member of the Arditti String Quartet Garth Knox announced a simple plan and, partnered by cellist Agnès Vesterman, turned it into a most satisfying concert.
The plan required the two players to introduce themselves separately with short solo pieces from the late renaissance.
Knox’s was the lonely-sounding Pavins for viola d’amore by teh English soldier-composer Tobias Hume. Vesterman who teaches chamber music at the Conservatoire de Paris gave an italian foreshadowing of Bach’s solo suites with a Ricercare be Giovanni Gabrielli.
The two then joined forces for Folies, 16 increasingly frenetic variations over a simple ground bass by Marin Marais.The remainder of the concert was devoted to a selection of short, utterly engaging compositions by Knox himself.
Viola Spaces comprises three two minute pieces “Nine Fingers” all rapid pizzicato, Ravel-like over pulsating cello; “Ghosts”, its delicate breathy spookiness acheived by bowing over teh fingerboard and on the wood; and “Harmonic Horizon”, eerie harmonics and eastern-scaled, but growing reckless and wierd with a hint of Gaelic ancestry (Knox, though raised in Scotland, was born here, in the Rotunda)
Having played the solo Hume piece to introduce the 14 stringed viola d’amore with seven extra strings unplayed but adding rich resonance Knox then used the instrument in the more contemporary setting of his own “Malor me bat”. This sometimes almost orchestral-sounding expansion on a renaissance song alternates special effects with beautiful melodic playing all the while preserving the original’s dark fatalism.
MICHAEL DUNGAN
source : The Irish Time