September 2021 – O'Connell the Music

Easy atmospheres

September 30, 2021September 30, 2021 cliveoconnell

SHADES OF IVORY

I can’t honestly admit to knowing anything about Bill Canty; not unexpected, that, as the composer has carved out his career in more popular fields than those I frequent. This CD is a suite of 12 pieces for piano, performed by the composer and using no orthodox piano but rather altered, piano-simulating sounds by means of digital/electronic interference and manipulation. It turns out that the performer/composer is true to his promise and lives up to his descriptors and extract titles. I don’t think there’s much to the whole exercise beyond a satisfaction in arranging sounds into appealing formats. The question is: appealing to whom?

A further problem with this CD pressing is that the tracks that come up on my system are completely unrelated to Canty’s efforts but are entered under the name of Phil Broikos and one of his chef d’oeuvres, A Day in Music. I know what I’m hearing isn’t Broikos because I listened to some of A Day; the things you do for certainty. Anyway, Canty begins with a Fantasia which is a meandering piece of mood music – very euphonious and playing pretty games with arpeggios rolling across the keyboard. It’s all very pleasant and diatonic with bass pedals and a spoonful of upper register tinkling, and it leads straight into Glissade that has a metrically regular Alberti treble with some portamenti between notes, as well as an assortment of downward-heading scales. It starts in the minor and moves to a relieving major about half-way through, but doesn’t stay there long. Dollops of notes are sprinkled across the constant Alberti figure with accompanying bands of sustained bass before we revert to the glissandi/portamenti of the opening and a slowing down.

Immediatelt we are in Rubato land where the continuous quaver figure sustains the forward propulsion but with lots of the promised slowing down and make-up acceleration; a constellation of overheard notes almost meld into a melody, the texture suggestive of extra-terrestrial illustrative music such as you get in programs from NASA or organizations determined to sell you the idea that outer space is benevolent rather than the horrifying chaos we know it to be. But the emphasis is on atmosphere and the one-word titles leave interpretation very open, as you can see in the following Sanctuary. Canty makes reference to the bellbirds in Kew’s Studley Park and you hear plenty of bird-suggestive sounds; not the multi-coloured flourishes of Messiaen but little two-note oscillations piercing a brooding multi-layered backdrop. And that, unfortunately, brings to my mind suggestions of the Picnic at Hanging Rock soundtrack without the interference of Beethoven or pan-pipes.

Then there’s a change of pace as we enter Thirteens which Canty has based on the odd time-signature that opens Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells; all credit to Oldfield for creating a lasting album on his lonesome and all that nonsense but, as I read it, his initial track is in 7/8 which may have some mathematical relationship to 13 but I can’t compute it. As things turn out, a ‘straight’ piano plays the underpinning pattern throughout with superimposed dribbling until about the 3’30” mark where the unusual tempo dissipates and we are left with upward scales and growling bass sound bands. The pattern returns just prior to the turn into Droplets which has a fine imitation of that phenomenon in its treble, something like a cross between a finely-tuned marimba and a glockenspiel tinkling away above the (by now) inevitable bass layers that slowly shift. Here, Canty refers to his ‘fascination with controlled randomness’ – which suggests that he is employing some sort of program. But I found the actual musical progress loaded with extraneous gestures like downward-moving rapid portamenti, again suggestive of documentary soundtracks for visions of the moons of Saturn.

Statement begins with a sort of motive comprising a segmented scale that initially moves up, then down, while around it are shadows, delayed repetitions that offer a nimbus of distortions that have immediate reference to the base material. A sort of mental oasis follows in which nothing solid happens but the atmosphere is packed with soft gamelan-type patterns and fragments of what has been secondary in importance so far. The segmented scale returns, now at a higher pitch but with the same nimbus surrounding it. Trance opens with a repeated note – in stereo – being surrounded by accretions and attempted distractions like a heavy counter-rhythm in open 5ths. The repeated note falls in pitch step-wise, this motion setting the activity level for the surrounding matter; the jazzy 5ths continue to interrupt but most of the piece’s colour comes from swathes of texture that offer continuity of effect rather than variety.

In Rebound, we have a reaction to the bouncing of a ping-pong ball which is aurally depicted in the middle of the customary swathes. Once more, the electronic transformations suggest both the Orient and the extra-terrestrial, although I liked the overlapping bouncing lines. But it passes and we are called into the soundscape of Immersion, where gentle descending scales close down into a subterranean sound-wall with isolated piano notes setting off those various downward slides into the depths. Some upper register washes provide a counter-balance in this slow-moving celebration of stasis that comes to a halt before Lucid comes into view with a reversion to middle-layer Alberti pattern-making. The difference here is that Canty offers a tune in the forefront of his texture. This is unexpected and, while he gives it two or three airings, eventually it is abandoned for arpeggios and atmospherics. However, this ternary piece brings back its continuous quaver underpinning and another version of the melody which is not so striking this time around.

Finally, Canty offers a Toccata which is headed by a ‘straight’ piano line but one surrounded by plenty of echoing effects. Soon enough, a ponderous bass layer emerges before the piano and its overlays and mimicries takes off on a pretty predictable set of excursions that wear out their welcome because of an absence of rhythmic variety, something you won’t find in pretty much every toccata from Buxtehude onward. After some grandiose crescendo work, Canty arrives at an affirmative major key conclusion.

Each of the suite’s movements lasts about 5 minutes but, as indicated, most of them run into each other and sometimes you are hard pressed to find a delimiting point, The same can be said about the internal material of many of the pieces. Canty has a definite idea for each one of them, developing or simply stating and restating an idea to give aural sense to his particular title. Yet you come back to the over-arching question of: what is achieved by this exercise? Much of it is harmonically trite and melodically bereft; apart from Thirteens, you look in vain for rhythmic imagination or challenge. While the composer rings changes on his keyboard with transformations of a piano’s normal sounds, little of what we hear has the distinctive feature of novelty. At the end, it strikes me that this is a music that is not to be subjected to analysis but enjoyed as background to one’s own mental ramblings, or as support for rather trippy visual stimulation. Rather than falling in with the CD’s generation process, I’ve unfortunately taken on the cast of Shakespeare’s Cassius – and I don’t mean lean and hungry.

En ce bordeau ou tenons notre etat

September 26, 2021September 26, 2021 cliveoconnell

FRENCH TRIPTYCH

Natsuko Yoshimoto & Alex Raineri

Melbourne Digital Concert Hall

Thursday September 23, 2021

Not the best week for a French/Australian entente that has become quite a bit less cordiale. While the Prime Minister writhes and wriggles his way round the truth, hoping that aimless meetings will eclipse his bad faith and ineptness, the world – well, the small part of it that’s interested – looks at the sabotaged submarine deal with a mix of surprise and contempt. Not that Francophiles have always been easy to find in the immediate environment. I remember a parish stalwart in Kew coming up after a Sunday service and asking for more Bach for voluntaries, but certainly ‘none of that French stuff’. And teaching the language (badly) for about ten years didn’t make it any more attractive – to me or the students. Of course, it’s a useful tongue to know, as I found out at the Vienna Opera, the market in Monte Carlo, and the back blocks of Melbourne’s Southbank.

But its main use has been to do with French music, of which I’ve heard and played more than is consistent with the bounds of propriety. Knowing something of the exclusivist culture that produced Perotin and Yves Prin helps in both knowing what to expect and learning to exercise tolerance. So this all-French (well, actual and adopted) hour of great violin/piano sonatas served as a refresher course in marvellous achievement and in witnessing two excellent local musicians at work. Mind you, ‘local’ is a loaded term in Yoshimoto’s case; she has been playing with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra for the last ten years before coming to Brisbane as the Queensland Symphony Orchestra’s co-concertmaster. Her fellow artist Raineri has been a local resident for some time (forever?), running the peripatetic year-long Brisbane Music Festival since 2018 to fine effect.

On Thursday, working from Opera Queensland’s Studio, these artists opened their innings with the Debussy sonata of 1917 which begins with deceptive simplicity even though wheels are turning at a great rate beneath the placid surface. The work sprang into high relief at a splendid burst of energy with the Appassionato 8 bars before Number 2 in the Durand edition, the executants working with fine collaboration across the piece’s ebbs and flows. Yoshimoto exercised a supple rubato throughout, nowhere better applied than when specified five bars after Number 3, but the partnership rose to an attack both crisp and fierce over the last rhetoric-rich final page. Debussy’s Intermede proved to be packed with high jinks and jerks in an individualistic reading that took some liberties, like the violin’s employment of rubato well before it was called for at Number 3, and again before Number 4; perhaps it’s a personal reading of Meno mosso. As a counterweight, the duo’s pliability from the final au Mouvement direction to the violin’s fading flashes was excellently achieved.

A reversion to the opening movement’s whirling crispness shone out in the hectic Finale, Yoshimoto glancing off her top notes in passage-work with an easy grace. Still, the most impressive facet of the partnership came in their rhythmic congruency across pages that sound effervescent, a cycle of explosions and oases, even though the movement is packed with difficulties in shape-moulding and dynamic harnessing, e.g. Raineri’s active underpinning from Number 3 to the shift at Expressif et soutenu, the whole reaching an exhilarating high point in the final 12 clamorous bars.

Where the violinist tended to push hard in this opening work, coming close to vehement scraping in G-string forte moments, she worked for more purity of output in the following reading of Ravel No. 2, initially during the high melodic outline 6 bars before Number 2. But then, the opening Allegretto holds long passages of lean activity, best exemplified by the placidity obtaining around Number 4. Still, the work also erupts in bursts of excitement, like the long series of shuddering violin demi-semiquavers from Number 9 to Number 11, and the multi-level piano activity that surges in at Number 13 and sets the emotional basis for this movement’s luminous, magical ending.

Yoshimoto made us aware of every note in her pizzicato chords during the Blues, as well as producing some hefty glissandi when she eventually went arco. Raineri impressed for his pointillist polish at the key signature change to F sharp, gradually increasing his heftiness until the movement’s first biting explosion at Number 7. I’m not sure the Gs in both instruments came together at Number 12, but the sul tasto slide of a 7th rounded off the experience with just the right dose of soft salt. A few notes dropped out in the piano’s assault on the Perpetuum mobile, notably when the octave work stopped after Number 5, but this movement is hard-going for both players; even when Ravel pits them against each other in canonic activity, the pace for both remains relentless Yoshimoto demonstrated skill and understatement in her pianissimo low-string mutterings at Number 12 and beyond, and the conclusion was a model combination of discipline and excitement.

When it comes to the Franck sonata, you enter a big league of sorts. The emotional canvas is splayed out in the best Romantic tradition, the form exceptionally satisfying, the virtuosity required highly demanding. Both Yoshimoto and Raineri went for big strokes, even when the dynamic level dropped to minimal, although matters seemed a bit shaky at the opening to the initial Allegretto with a thin-sounding D from the violin in bar 6. But as an early illustration of the expansive style of attack, you only had to wait for Raineri’s largamente solo starting at bar 31 to experience the noble breadth of this reading. Of course, the piano has much of the attention in these pages and this executant made a feast of his three exposed points, at the same time making allowance for Yoshimoto’s smoothness of line, as at bar 71’s dolcissimo.

Both musicians took to the D minor Allegro with obvious relish after the lilting restraint of the sonata’s opening gambit. Raineri tended to treat his energetic main theme flurries beginning at bar 4 in an unexpectedly four-square manner, the rhythm too regular for the material, which might have been a question of beat-emphasis. Speaking of stressing the point, the working from both back to stage 1 that begins at Bar 94 came across with unexpected determination at bar 94; not enough build-up but straight into the dynamic required for bars 96 and 100. At the same time, this urging resulted in several splendid passages, as in the soaring arch from Yoshimoto at bar 172 where also I became aware of the boomingly rich bass notes of Raineri’s Kawai, both executants hurling themselves into the devil-take-the-hindmost presto build-up to the jubilant D Major ending.

Yoshimoto let Franck’s recitatives speak unvarnished in the Recitativo-Fantasia, verging on overkill with some forceful bowing in exposed passages. But this meandering movement enjoyed a voluble airing, particularly in that long build-up from bar 71 to a dramatic climax at bar 105, replicated in the last movement. Many commentators regard this set of pages as the sonata’s high-water mark but the first canon of the final Allegretto still strikes me, after many years, as a musical blessing for the simplicity of its opening and the open-endedness of its resolution. Raineri set a brisk tempo, which I prefer to ladling on the sugar right from the start, even if Yoshimoto showed that she can do just that with a splendid leaning-in entry at bar 52. The stretto that the piano kicked off at bar 87 gave notice of what was coming up but without stealing too much thunder. One of the few errors I encountered in this hothouse maelstrom came in a piano solo at bar 127 when Raineri was involved with the composer’s false-canons on the way to a resolution (of sorts) into that blinding C Major cascade at bar 169.

If anything more needed to be demonstrated, this finale gave illustration after instance of how well these players fed off each other equally effectively in moments of stress and calm. Yes, this sonata lends itself to slathering around the point with lashings of ad lib, real and potential, but here was an interpretation that worked brilliantly in passages of mutual dependence, right up to the jubilant last 21 bars, complete with the minute pause on Yoshimoto’s high E beginning bar 232. This completed a memorable recital – almost ideally secure, insightful, emotionally consistent and a testament to the enduring excellence of French serious musical art which will doubtless endure, no matter what else takes place – like contemporary external boorishness.

Elegant but insubstantial

September 20, 2021 cliveoconnell

TWO

The Marais Project

Move Records MCD 617

This brief CD (less than 40 minutes long) sprang out of the pandemic. Planning for 2020, the Marais Project intended to tour Tommie Andersson playing theorbo, guitar and gallichon and Jennifer Eriksson (the organization’s founder) on her trusty viola da gamba. Each would play a set of solos, then come together for a suite by the ensemble’s namesake. Sadly but predictably, the musicians encountered difficulties in getting around the country but, rather than seeing their efforts go to waste, determined to immortalise their labours through the graces of the ever-cooperative Move Records.

So here we are. Andersson’s contributions include Handel’s Sonata for a Musical Clock, arranged for the gallichon (bass lute), three guitar pieces by Jan Antonin Losy, Mozart’s Adagio for Glass Harmonica K. 536 (also re-shaped for gallichon), and participation in selections from Marais’ Books II and IV for gamba and continuo. Eriksson matches this with a D minor suite by Jacques Lambert du Buisson, the outer movements of a G Major sonata by Abel, a condensing of Paul Cutlan‘s Sarabande from the composer’s Spinning Forth suite, and the lead role in those Marais selections.

As a bonus, the CD’s final track is an anonymous love-song published in 1703: J’avais cru qu’en vous aymant. This begins with Andersson playing through the plaint solo (I think, on theorbo); Susie Bishop comes out of nowhere to add to the complex, eventually taking up her violin for a rehash of the by-now well-thumbed melody. I don’t know why the Rule of Two was broken but it’s always a pleasure to hear Bishop’s clear vocal timbre brought into play.

The Handel sonata seems to have been a two-movement affair; here, you find an Air and Minuet interposed. The pieces are slight and, despite plenty of repetitions, soon over. None of the writing goes beyond two parts, although the opening Allegro boasts a final full C Major chord. If I report that there’s little to say about any of the four parts, I’m overstating the case. Not even the timbre of Andersson’s gallichon brings a ruffle of interest to the surface.

Not much changes when Eriksson launches into the Lambert du Boisson suite. Some double-stops raise the listener’s eyebrow in the first Prelude, while the following Allemande variation follows a familiar path of one line with some cadential multi-string chords. A sarabande shows more emotional depth and the multi-string writing becomes more pronounced in the second half; the concluding courante is complex in this ambience. But the movements pass very quickly and you have only time enough to experience the movements’ shape; the gamba’s texture is finely spun – but that’s the only impression left, even after a few hearings,

Andersson plays the three guitar pieces expertly enough. The opening Prelude is another single line journey; its successor, an aria, has two independent lines – for a while; the concluding Gavote has a similar format, if quicker in tempo. As with the Handel sonata, these are flimsy constructs, and they would probably have been even more ephemeral if the repeats had been omitted. By contrast, Eriksson engages with only a few repeats and omits the central Allegro in my edition of Abel’s sonata. The performance follows a staid path with the frissons coming through some three- and four-part chords punctuating the concluding Minuet‘s progress.

Cutlan wrote his 2014 Spinning Forth suite in four movements for gamba and harpsichord, one of the commissioners being Eriksson. Its third movement, Slow and Sustained – quasi Sarabande, has been rewritten as plain Sarabande. This is one of the recording’s longer tracks – the 2nd most substantial, in fact – and I’m not sure how much rewriting has taken place. The first page of the original is the same as this new version, but I assume matters take a more radical turn at that point where the harpsichord enters in the first version. It’s a stately enough progress, very much in keeping with the other gamba content offered here, with the added charm of discordant intervals. Oddly enough, the piece doesn’t strike me as much of a sarabande but more a slow minuet, chiefly (I suppose) because the second beat gets no emphasis, large or small. Nevertheless, Eriksson’s account is full-bodied and sharply etched.

Mozart’s one-page Adagio serves an amiable purpose for its original instrument and Andersson makes a fair case for its movement to the gallichon, although this arrangement means that some of the secondary notes (lines?) go missing and most of the glass harmonica’s fragility of timbre flies out the window. The first repeat is observed; the longer second part of the piece gets a once through..

When it comes to the Marais compendium, the listener is invited into a world of some gravity; at least, at the start with a Prelude of intense grace and eloquence. A sprightly allemande follows; yes, perhaps that’s to oversell it as Eriksson lumbers through it with hefty support from Andersson. The following Air en Vaudeville/MesmeAir double begins with a downward-moving tune that has an irresistible resemblance to Joy to the world! The double is, it seems, a short variation. A sarabande is treated with high distinction, Eriksson’s melody-shaping a pleasure to experience for its supple breadth. But both players treat this brevity with respect and a keen eye for its shape.

Most of the gigues I’ve heard from Marais suites come across as fairly sober affairs, but this one is more buoyant and perky (at moments) than you’d expect. It’s still more of a tramp than a pieds-en-l’air exercise but its heftiness beguiles even to the very definite final chord. A pair of minuets proved more animated than expected, possibly because of the strength of the performers’ downbeats, but both flow past with an excellent demonstration of Eriksson’s talent at dynamic contouring. To finish, a Branle de Village is over very quickly, having just enough time to impress with its sophisticated rugosity.

The last track, that love-song, brings the Marais Project together – sort of. Bishop’s account of the first verse is accompanied only by Andersson; Eriksson then enters for her go at the tune; then all three combine for Verse 2. Bishop contributes her violin for a last instrumental recap – and that’s it. Certainly, this is a delectably melancholy conclusion to the disc and is in itself an argument for more of the same to offer a change of timbre in a collection of brief vignettes, amiable though they may be.

Filling Festival fare

September 12, 2021 cliveoconnell

THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS

Camerata Chamber Orchestra

Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre

Friday September 10, 2021

Part of the current Brisbane Festival, this remarkable program demonstrated once again how fortune slips and slides around this continent with irresponsible abandon. Most of us have given up trying to keep a mental grip on which performers are where and what the prospects are of scheduled events going ahead; you just take what you can get and are grateful. Thanks to the premier of Queensland’s desire to keep her state out of lockdown as long as possible (even with the delta virus knocking at our south-eastern portal), much of what is promised here comes to fruition. Unlike what is going on in the southern states where compromise and replacements/deferrals are the new order, Brisbane regularly gets to go to the theatre big-time; for instance, on this Camerata night, a musical was playing in the Lyric Theatre and something else was happening in the Playhouse (I know, because the code-inspectors were on duty at the foot of the staircase). Mind you, at Southbank on Friday evening, everyone inside or out was masked, whether they needed to be or not – such a biddable population.

Brendan Joyce and his 17 string players – 4 firsts, 4 seconds, 4 violas, 3 cellos, 2 double basses – warmed up with Mendelssohn’s Sinfonia in B minor which enjoyed an enthusiastic run-through, its Allegro exposition repeated and enough energy in the communal tank for a hefty accelerando at the piu presto from bar 352 to the end. Mind you, the actual sound definition proved not as crisp as you get in recorded readings of this work, but Camerata has to cope with the acoustic boom in QPAC’s large hall. Nevertheless, you found a pleasing attention to phrasing in a score that plays its Sturm-und-Drang cards with a tight fist, the energy contained if not constrained.

Joyce then took the solo line in Vaughan Williams‘ The Lark Ascending. He brought in the accepted number for a chamber performance – single woodwind and a horn, with one of the front desk violins doing the triangle tinkles that start four bars before Letter M and last just a few bars after Letter P in the old OUP score (actually, this instrument’s pitch was questionable [aren’t they all?]: the composer notates it as a treble clef B but overtones cruelled that likelihood). More importantly, we heard only part of the piece; Joyce and his forces stopped just before the Allegretto molto tranquillo at Letter R; at least, I think so. At all events, the piece took up from this break at the end of the night to round out a large-scale avian experience.

This was Lembit Beecher‘s composition that gave this particular event its title. Based on a lengthy poem by the Sufi Attar of Nishapur, the work concerns a quest by the world’s birds for their leader, who turns out to be themselves but, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, the covey has to overcome tests in the form of seven valleys before their self-apotheosis. American illustrator Peter Sis contributed the visual element to support this occasion – pictures of various birds, the valleys, and the climactic confrontation with the Mountain of Kaf and self-awareness. As well, he also provided the translation articulated by Brisbane actor and singer Liz Buchanan which introduced the music and followed Movement 1, but then split up the other two movements (which are to be played without a pause, if the composer is any guide). As well, I didn’t have access to a full program but it looked to me as if the first violins were down by a member, according to Beecher’s original requirements.

I’ve nothing to offer about the poetry reading by Buchanan. It was obviously a selection from the original which is packed with allegorical stories and sidelines to illustrate various morals that the central character, the hoopoe bird, inflicts on his swiftly diminishing flock. Beecher starts his score with bird imitations: high brief glissandi and whips of sound, all seemingly individual and as aleatoric in effect as you’d like. The narrative itself probably begins with low pedal notes/chords although the bird imitations last for a considerable time – long enough to convince you that you’re in mid-conference. Just when you wonder if there are any more strings to these bows, the movement becomes concerted and people tend to move in blocks before we are returned to the original chirps.

A poetic interlude as Buchanan outlined the progress across the seven valleys, and we are on to Movement 2 Part A. This has a far more savage ambience. You can still find traces of avian activity but the journey has turned grim; well, it would with so many travellers dying off or leaving the caravan. Beecher inserts fraught unison onslaughts and insistent rhythmic motives that suggest a sort of homophony, albeit a discordant one. You had to admire the Cameratas’ industriousness, particularly in sustaining clouds of fabric with ideal ensemble. But all intensity has to end somewhere and this section concluded with many of the players using sandpaper to generate a gentle stridulating effect as the notated material ceased for the final recitation.

Buchanan gave Sis’s conclusion to the quest for Simorgh and we came to Movement 2 Part B – or what I assume was Movement 3. This proved memorable for a plangent segment involving three violins and one cello, swerving into a series of slow chords in a high register and a final chord that wasn’t quite as uniform as expected; but then, that could have been what the composer wanted. It brought to an end a work which left little in the memory, possibly because of the visual distraction although, after the bird drawings, nothing else in Sis’s pictorial catalogue struck me as mildly interesting. Further, Buchanan’s introduction and interpolations tended to reduce the poet’s remarkable verses to a tale redolent of the nursery, undercutting the sophistication to be gleaned from even a superficial reading of the original.

Then we were back with Vaughan Williams with Joyce continuing an interpretation that, even split as it was, I found most impressive, with only a slight waver early in the piece’s first cadenza. While the solo line delighted for its lack of affectation and its fidelity, the supporting forces also deserved credit, coping well without a conductor, in particular the wind quintet who made only one scatter-gun block entry, possibly at the a tempo after the soloist’s first flight of double-stops after Letter S. As well, the Camerata strings showed an admirable sympathy with the piece, excellent in pursuing the ebb and flow of the longer bursts of tutti and pitching their responses to congruent effect in the colla parte bars.

Would we have enjoyed Beecher’s work more if we’d experienced it in isolation – without interpolated text and without the paintings? Hard to say. Would the audience have reacted with such enthusiasm if the score had not been bookended by the great English composer’s evocative gem, Joyce’s concluding solo a model of restraint and faultless pitching, right to that last splendidly elongated falling-third interval? Maybe; having listened to a ‘straight’ reading from the work’s commissioners, A Far Cry, I have to wonder.

Finally, the new Camerata pre-performance explanatory process is to hand out a sheet with basic performance details, referring patrons to a QR code at the bottom for access to the full program. Which is, of course, a sign of the times, reminiscent of having to scan yourself into every public building you enter. I’ve tried to access the document but something is lacking in both phones I employed, let alone the myriad QR ingress platforms that now sit in my apps stores. I assume that more specific information is to be found at this online repository; as the Gershwin brothers sang, but not for me.