Sean Shibe (guitar) + Júlia Pusker (violin) + Mathis Stier (bassoon) + Faye MacCalman solo + Jess Gillam and Royal Northern Sinfonia with director Maria Włoszczowska
Each year a small cohort of outstanding classical musicians is selected by the member venues of the European Concert Hall Organisation (ECHO) and named their ECHO Rising Stars for support and development. What a treat it was to enjoy three of them each performing a concert and a mini-concert each over a full day’s programme in the Northern Rock Foundation Hall, Sage Two and concourse of the Glasshouse International Centre for Music (formerly Sage Gateshead).
All three are outstanding, dazzlingly technical, intellectually inquisitive and sensitive to delicate micro-shifts in nuance and feeling. Hungarian violinist Júlia Pusker, German bassoonist Mathis Stier, and Scottish-born Anglo-Japanese guitarist Sean Shibe may be nominated Rising Stars but their stars have already risen to some giddy heights. Each is an arbiter of taste and range, radical inclusivity in repertoire, and blurring boundaries. Each concert was a self-portrait of the player, expressing their taste and personality through eclectic selections from established and even conservative repertoire, and newer more challenging directions including pieces commissioned especially for them as ECHO Rising Stars.
Some of the leaps could be disorienting: in Munich-born Mathis Stier’s concert, it’s quite a leap from Philipp Friedrich Böddecker’s Sonata Sopra ‘La Monica’ from 1651, the first piece ever written for the Baroque bassoon (and harpsichord!), to the newest, the harrowing bassoon and tape soundscape of Maria Sigfúsdóttir’s ECHO commission Remembering. Following that the relative conservatism of Camille Saint-Saens’s 1921 Sonata was palate cleansing. Heinz Holliger’s “Klaus-Ur” from 2002 is possibly the most demanding piece in bassoon repertoire, written as a competition piece, with “billions of notes” and the gamut of extended techniques: flurrying arpeggios as if someone had transcribed an Evan Parker sax wig-out, and actually involving improvisation in the combination of two systems in the composition. It’s quite full-on, but good-humoured. Stier’s full-bodied tone on the bassoon and dextrous handling of its range and demands makes him a stunningly impressive player who reveals under-regarded versatilities of the bassoon.
Another challengingly versatile musician, guitarist Sean Shibe is notorious for a 2020 Wigmore Hall concert when his “painfully loud” electric guitar of Georges Lentz’s Ingwe brought unprecedented walkouts. The massive open space of the Glasshouse’s concourse can be distracting for concert music but it was the ideal venue for the expansive minimalist structures of Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, performed as twelve pre-recorded simultaneous guitar parts and thirteenth performed live. Born of its own diverse influences of jazz, Bach and West African drumming it’s most familiar from Pat Metheny recording back in 1987, and in Shibe’s new transcription it has never sounded more exciting and euphoric. His main concert in Sage Two was a more intimate affair with guitar works by hector Villa-Lobos, Agustin Barrios Mangoré and transcriptions of Bach, and Thomas Ades’s ECHO Commission Forgotten Dances, a substantial work that looks back to influences from the overtures of Berlioz, back to Purcell and forward to Satie and the visual art of Max Ernst. Through connected but disconnected individual pieces synthesise a unique musical language, perfectly suited to Shibe’s intense dynamic detail of almost psychedelic coloration from moment to moment.
While bassoon and electric guitar might benefit from a bit of good PR, the expressive qualities of the violin are known to all, and Júlia Pusker has her own exquisite sensitivity with the catgut (playing a beautiful Matteo Gofriller violin from 1690, as it happens). The prize-winning Hungarian’s concert resisted the postmodern disorientations of Stier and Shibe in favour of some superior chamber music pieces, sonatas and dances from Lili Boulanger, Debussy, Brahms, Jeno Hubay’s fantasia on Carmen, and Eric Tanguy’s ECHO Commission Trois Pièces. La Libre called her a true “artistocrat” of the violin, possibly a reference to her birth into a musical family in Hungary, but she’s certainly a class act.
Former ECHO Rising Star saxophonist Jess Gillam performed among the concerts last year, and this year introduced each concert, and conducted a panel with the musicians that further rounded out our portraits of each player. The panel was completed by Glasshouse artist-in-residence Faye MacCalman, familiar to jazzbos as one third of Archipelago, a key soloist in John Pope’s Quintet, and more recently a solo multimedia artist working at intersections between electronic installations and song forms. She is currently reconvening her moving performance installation Invisible Real, exploring our difficulty in acknowledging mental health issues using the responses from an anonymous survey. It’s important and worth looking forward to. I enjoyed these installation performances in Cheltenham in 2022, but this weekend’s headline solo concert in Sage Two felt a little self-limiting after a day of the classical soloists. Electronic looping is ubiquitous and fine, but it narrows the scope for melodic writing and expressive improvisation.
Jess Gillam returned on the following afternoon, this time with soprano and alto saxes, and the Royal Northern Sinfonia standing rather than seated on the floor of the ten-sided auditorium of Sage Two with director Maria Włoszczowska, who matches Gillam for flamboyant bodily expressivity in performance. This concluding concert On The Nature of Daylight expanded on the postmodern approach of the day before with an equally eclectic programme of works ranging through Britten, CPE Bach, Max Richter, more Saint-Saens, Kurt Weill, David Heath, Elgar, Telemann, Boulanger, Bowie Ysaye, Dvorak and John Harle’s carnivalesque fantasia on Cumberland reels and jigs, RANT! requiring some dextrous playing. The concert really had something for everyone, and outstanding virtuosity from Jess Gillam herself who, like the other Rising Stars, can seemingly play anything and make it sound fresh and vital.
The European Concert Hall Organisation (ECHO) includes twenty-two European concert halls (including the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Concerthes Stockholm, Vienna Concerthaus, Cologne Philharmonie, El Philharmonic Hamburg, and the Glasshouse) so it’s a great opportunity for them as touring musicians to bring something special to a wide audience.
AJ Dehany writes independently about music, art and stuff.
