Search - R. Barrett :: Vanity

Barrett's Vanity - Absurdity is necessity

lee.dunleavy@hertford.ox.ac.uk | Oxford, United Kingdom | 01/23/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Richard Barrett is a 40 year old composer. Few of his works are for such a large ensemble as these are. His inclusion in Richard Toop's 'Four Facets of the 'New Complexity'' was not just based on the quality of the music. His aesthetic project that each work inhabits is unique, focusing on relating the piece to the society we inhabit.'Vanity' reminds me of a highway through the Amazon. If one looks from high enough, the complexities of the landscape become whole and the trace (Derrida) becomes managable. Conversely, it is only through attentive and disciplined listening (focusing) that this pure stratum becomes apparant. A huge work in a short frame, like the energy of a brushstroke blasting through the perceptual frame which governs it, and yet, using that as a Saussurian grid, locking it in to focus.Music-making as a struggle in which disparate elements (see the gulf of difference between flutes and marimbas - see the gulf of difference between violin with the bow and violin with the finger (pizzicato)), timbral elements, attempt to articulate musical ideas.This disc contains an unacknowledged masterpiece of British 20th Century Orchestral writing. Grab it fast..."

Trenchant, talismanic, pseudo-mastodonic

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 09/29/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"ab initio Barrett locates a useable metaphorical reality which transmogrifies into deep penumbral timbral canvas here. "Vanitas"a means of the contemplation of time, refers to the 17th century still-life paintings, where one would find encysted great lacuni of visual import,combinatorials of stimuli which finds its way into timbre, enigmatic images which have double-entendre- meanings and associations,as a dry skull,or the meat of fruit to be broken seductive apertures.
Roland Barthes essay on Cy Twombly refers to the dramatic incidence within the high abstracted product as we find here in Barrett.

The orchestral effects are marvelous, impacted penumbral sonrities inhabited by a brooding darkness similar in shape and gesture to Birtwistle's "earth dances". Barrett's music reproduces itself admirable within the graphic acerbic world.
No new ground is however broken(perhaps contextual) simply within the context of adamantine conceptual premises which create new and newer orchestral cornocopias of sound; the import for instance found in the late Luigi Nono, his various hommages to the Russian acerbic Andrei Tarkovski,the Egyptian Jew,Edmund Jabes or conservative architect, Carlo Scarpa.

There is some redistributive wonders as in 'Sensorium', the first movement where groups are deployed 25,14,10,7,19 and 5 instruments. Each inhabiting a self-contained timbral definitions. There is also a sixth group coterie of 2 bass guitars,piano,percussion. This simply leads to more palpatating density.
The exciting aspect here is Barrett's music emanates from a somatic(bodily) quality more the sensual , what our bodies reveal to us more than the intellect. For this reason alone, you may find this work, overwhelmingly compelling, a peregrination,pallid at times,phantasmagoric,phlogistonic all tightly controlled with a sheer love for orchestral timbre.
Barrett holds a close 'cordon sanitaire' with orchestral music one finds within the European sensibility. It is almost as circumlocution exists that is faithfully adhered to, a centripetal force which renders works particularly for orchestral epigoni rendered as cut from the same sheaths of cloth.Conductor Tamayo,is a wonderful plenipotentiary/agent for this music and leads the committed BBC players to wonderful magical byways and pathways."