Simon Jenner August 1st 2024
The quartet that makes up Sussex Flutes formed in 2009. Nicole Leclerq (piccolo), Victoria Hancox and Sue Gregg (alto flute), Anne Hodgson (bass flute) and guest Katrin Heymann also alto flute lined up for some newly-composed and recent work and several arrangements by Sussex-based composers.
First came Tobias Helmer’s Uppras from 2023, a mysterious new two-part work. There’s a haunted revisiting of old forms but something spectral and enchanting about ‘Outside’ then Allemande’ invoking baroque dance-forms. I need to hear this again.
Barry Mills (b. 1949) needs little introduction these days. Many of his works are available on CD and his Europe-wide presence has blossomed recently. His 2015 ‘Raindrops-Ripples-Rainfall’ for flute quintet might be said to inhabit a soundworld between Takemitsu and Messiaen. The ullulations and circular ripple swept up are hypnotic and hover around the tonal extremes. In this space, with the church’s almost cathedral-like acoustic, the strands of the players expand like a bloom, an acoustic where the penumbra of flutedness hangs like a light spray.
‘Slieve Gallion Braes’ owns a sharper folk-profile, here as if remembered from and through another planet. No ordinary quotation this is instead an invocation of place and state. It works as a compliment to the numinous circularity of its predecessor. To enter Mills’ world is like stepping through a waterfall at the moment of its iridescence. Musically it’s extremely economic: Mills pares down then lets what’s left bloom.
Hancox herself has engagingly arranged ‘Shepherd’s Hey’, made famous by Percy Grainger. This time the quartet play it and in this arrangement it takes on a hue of something just over the edge of the next horizon, less earthbound but more part of the landscape paradoxically.
Ian Clarke (b. 1964) is famed throughout the flute-playing world, and he might be termed the doyen of flute composition. His piece Maya from 2000, also invoking earth, is also lilting and tonal, less experimental than some pieces and here in its flute quintet form. Running figurations play over a central piccolo melody, plangent and wistful over four and a half minutes.
Dutch Herman Beeftink now based in the US offers an enchanting trio of pieces for smaller forces. His First Dew for two flutes is a delight of airborne melody, whereas Highlands for two flutes and alto flute is wittier and earthier. Finally ‘Aye, Aye Rascal’ features simply piccolo solo (LeClerq) and is a stand-out of delicate virtuosity. All tonal and folk-inflected, these pieces are also msemorable distillations going far beyond arrangements.
Debussy’s ‘Le Vent dans la Pleine’ the third piece from Book One of his Preludes of 1909-10 and arranged by Eric Heymann (father of Katrin) is extraordinary. The sonance that lifts the flutes way up to the top of the church here breathes, expands and blends in quite remarkable ways. The wind invoked certainly lifts with the flutes, but it’s also an abstraction of wind, a thematic distillation of how flutes evoke such sounds and yet maintain a flute’s other-worldly ambience.
Finally Two Sussex Folktunes by the renowned Peter Copley (b. 1962, and who features on the contemporary music NMC label) are interesting again. ‘Robin Hood and the Pedlar’ isn’t anything roistering but a plangent, wistful meditation. Harmonically tenebrous, probing the melancholy of medieval poverty indeed destitution Robin Hood’s myth fought against, it invokes medieval modes at a distance but in Copley’s language.
The following ‘Not Rolling in the Dew’ is an upbeat and more virtuosic final piece and great fun, though the first piece is beguiling indeed.
First-class and compelling, both compositions and performers. A gem.
All Saints Sussex Flutes
First-class and compelling, both compositions and performers. A gem.
Sussex Flutes
All Saints, Hove
The quartet that makes up Sussex Flutes formed in 2009. Nicole Leclerq (piccolo), Victoria Hancox and Sue Gregg (alto flute), Anne Hodgson (bass flute) and guest Katrin Heymann also alto flute lined up for some newly-composed and recent work and several arrangements by Sussex-based composers.