ClassikON reviewer Luke Iredale reviewed the Hammerings CD:
Take my advice – buy Hammerings, take it home and grab a good set of headphones. Alan Holley’s music, while often theatrical, also exists in the realm of pure sound (‘pure music’, Alan calls it in the excellent liner notes) and the beautifully captured recordings on this disc are deserving of the listener’s undivided attention. Listen closely and you’ll hear the musicians’ fingers clacking across their instruments’ keys and strings.
Hammerings is a collection of Alan’s compositions for solo instruments (and one duo), taking its name from a suite of three Berio-inspired pieces written over the course of nearly ten years, Hammerings I, II and III – for solo flute, oboe and soprano saxophone respectively. These three intense but deceptively tuneful works are the disc’s centrepieces, and they push the three musicians playing them (Snjezana Pavicevic, flute; Shefali Pryor, oboe; James Nightingale, soprano sax) to exhaustion in the best way possible. Displaying nothing less than miraculous control over their instruments, the performers hammer away at their keys and at certain accented notes, many of which lie at the upper limit of their ranges. Pavicevic’s bell-like flute blasts are crystal clear but so intense that her flute sounds as though it may melt at any moment from the sheer speed of the air hurtling through it. Pryor’s oboe tone veers from velvety to crisp and chirrupy, and she brings a consummate sense of melodic line to Alan’s buoyant writing. James Nightingale, meanwhile, puts the full tonal range of the soprano sax on display in Hammerings III, culminating one of the highest tones this reviewer has ever heard a woodwind instrument produce.
Other highlights on the disc include the programmatic King St for solo alto sax, inspired by Newtown’s famously Bohemian main strip, performed with baroque panache by James Nightingale. In Alan’s thrilling Water Pieces, for solo piano, Tamara Jurkic Sviben pummels the instrument with such ferocity it’s a wonder strings weren’t broken mid-take. Take Flight is the set’s most recently-composed work and its only duo. Violinist Stan Kornel and cellist Christopher Pidcock engage in flurries of heated discussion and land softly on rich minor sixth chords in this composition, which I was lucky enough to see performed at Alan’s sixtieth birthday celebration last year.
This is truly music to lose yourself in. Close your eyes and you can almost see the musicians playing their hearts out.
You can buy the CD on Kookaburra Music Website >>>
Reprinted with kind permission of classikON: see full review here
Alan Holley 60th birthday concert review by Luke Iredale from classikON:
Music and musicians representing Alan’s 40 years of composing
On a gorgeous spring afternoon, fifty music lovers settled into an art gallery on leafy Riley Street to celebrate the 60th birthday of composer Alan Holley, one of Sydney’s best-loved music figures.
A delightful concert program of Alan’s work was the main event, drawn from music and musicians representing his 40 years at the forefront of the Australian music scene. Almost all the selections were for solo instruments and were written with these particular performers in mind, playing to each musician’s unique skills and revealing in their favourite sound-worlds. It made for a wonderfully close bond between the composer, performer and audience at this concert, as these ordinarily clearly demarcated boundaries were dissolved. This music was for the musicians, for us, and for Alan himself.
Works unified by birdsong
The unifying theme of the seven programmed compositions was birdsong, just one element of the natural beauty of the Australia landscape which suffuses Alan’s music. Flautist Christine Draeger’s performance of ‘Summer Bird‘ (1995) was sprightly and summery, with crystalline birdcalls and subtle melodiousness draped over an elegant rhythmic framework. Draeger’s earthy hues made fine use of the Gallery’s resonant acoustic, and in the stormy, bucolic ‘August‘ (2002) she evoked chattering birds and sighing winter winds in her syrupy phrasing, subtle dynamic contrasts and liquid tremolo.
Clarinettist Richard Rourke demonstrated captivating phrase control and lightness of touch in ‘Zoastra‘ (1991, inspired by a ceramic sculpture), and brought an articulate personality to ‘The birds will sing them off‘ (2012), playing with a shimmering tone that was at turns desolate and distinct, beautifully illustrating the lapping of waves on a ship in Sydney harbour circa 1788.
‘Concorno‘ (2010) for solo horn, was for this reviewer the concert’s highlight, being as it was in the hands of the incomparable Rob Johnson. Johnson gently teased out languid melodic possibilities from the diminished intervals of Holley’s writing with a virtuosity that was never short of stunning, producing a sound that was so three-dimensional you could almost touch it.
The evening’s only new work, ‘Take Flight‘, written for violinist Stan Kornel and cellist Christopher Pidcock, was, in the words of the musicians, a ‘scary piece’, consisting of 14 unbound pages of Rubik’s Cube-like music which they’d received only nine days previously. Any concerns were put to bed immediately; the composition was hugely satisfying and beautifully performed, crafted from a melange of rich major-7th chords and flurries of circular chromatic gestures.
The dazzling trumpet-work of Paul Goodchild in ‘Ornothologia‘ (2010) summed up this short and sweet birthday concert with a breathtaking display of musicianship. Crisp birdsong pealed brightly across the gallery floor, with Goodchild’s intensity and playfulness never masking the melodicism at the heart of Alan Holley’s music.
Watters Gallery, East Sydney
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Reprinted with kind permission of classikON: see full review at classikON