ECLIPSE
Concordia Mandolin & Guitar Ensemble
Move Records MCD 612
The latest product by this well-known Melbourne group comprises works by well-known guitar/plucked instrument expert Michelle Nelson who was first guitar with the Melbourne Mandolin Orchestra across this century’s first decade, taking up the same position with Concordia in 2013. In fact, Nelson has been conducting a healthy professional life for 40 years now and has produced several additions to the Concordia repertoire – all of them, as far as one can judge from this CD, traditional in language and instrumental use.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. This composer is given to wondering how modern music composition (20th century) strayed so far from popular taste of the time. Yeah: it’s the same sort of thing I self-divert with when listening to the Gabrielis and Bach, Gesualdo and Chopin. Funnily enough, I tend to come down on the side of the benighted composer who finds little stimulating in the simple-minded. But, if you want to continue finding your inspiration in the folksy and the English bucolic, be my guest; just don’t wait around for praise on your originality.
This small CD (40′ 45″ long) contains four compositions: Bishops Spell, which is a musical portrait of musicians Ida (recorder) and Frank (mandola) Bishop; the title work Eclipse: Concerto for Mandola and Plucked Strings with soloist Darryl Barron; After the Fire, a rearrangement of an earlier construct expanded into two movements; and Jim Greer’s Jig. This recording was due for release in 2020 but universal infections got in the way; hence, its arrival now. So the family portrait was recorded at Move Studios in 2019, the concerto at the same venue in 2018, the two-movement new construct probably put down in 2022, and the jig recorded live during Concordia’s first post-lockdown concert at Christmas, 2021.
The Bishops’ family portrait begins with a jovial, folk-like tune (British Isles). Will Hardy‘s recorder answering the orchestra’s statements with variations, the whole featuring some extensions that seem to work against the four-bar phrase pattern that matters start off with. Still, the trend is to the non-adventurous, although the atmosphere is jaunty. That’s Ida dispatched. Frank begins more soberly – a slow 3/4 rather than Ida’s brisk 6/8, and the more meditative male enjoys a calm depiction from Darryl Barron’s mandola, even though it has to be observed that Ida is well-represented in this movement, having a definite melodic and descant function in turns. Furthermore, Ida has the last word.
The Family Life third movement has a percussive element as underpinning – just your normal hand-beaten drums (bongos?) supporting the two soloists as they work together through a four-square melody and its small-scale elaborations, It all sounds slightly medieval/Renaissance in character, as though the Bishops were early music enthusiasts; and, as I know from bitter experience, the interest in such complexes generally falls to the solitary woodwind line. Things move from the four-square 4/4 a little after the half-way point to a more meditative triple-beat interlude, before the drums return and we come together for a rousing estampie conclusion. As you’d assume Nelson’s language is eminently assimilable with nothing much to astonish anyone born before 1700.
The composer’s Eclipse concerto has three movements: Eclipse: Approach, Eclipse, and Eclipse: Release. I can’t argue for the shape of the first of these. It takes a firm stand at the start with some block chords, a strong melody based on an upward-rising arpeggio; the composer allows both soloist and orchestra to deal with both elements, then stops before moving into more lyrical territory. Nelson has an occasional habit of curtailing or extending her regular phrases but the working out of material is orthodox with a lot of pattern-work where the development section would be. A return to the opening second-inversion chord/arpeggio melody and we’re not long before the home stretch is in sight.
[As a completely oblique observation, I have to report that the strongest impression I have from what I’ve heard so far on this disc recalls nothing so much as Debbie Wiseman’s theme music to the BBC One production Shakespeare & Hathaway. It might be the suggestion of massed lutes that is produced by the Concordias, or the definite if unadventurous bass line, or the optimistic bent of both Wiseman and Nelson. But the aura is reminiscent of Stratford at its cleanest, as we see it in the series, despite the mandolin’s necessity to play tremolando much of the time.]
The middle slow movement starts out in the same key as its predecessor, the threnody melody articulated over a fixed bass note for the opening strophes. The soloist occupies a semi-prominent role before everything halts for a cadenza where the harmony stays pretty constant, apart from a chromatic frisson about the four-minute mark. The slow march recommences, working on three layers (eventually four when a sustained bass note is added) as the rhythmic level sees people playing with Beethoven’s ‘Fate’ motive. This leads to a climactic point, from which apogee the music dies out to an ambiguous conclusion – which is actually an imaginative depiction of the state in which an eclipse’s maturation leaves us.
The Release is very abrupt: we’re immediately back in clear skies with a slightly threatening march that, for much of its initial statement, follows an iambic metrical pattern. The first antistrophe appears to recapitulate a memory from the first movement, before we slow down for a more melancholy stretch that ends interrogatively before we revert to the march/strut. Another cadenza appears which owes something to Rodrigo although lacking that master’s quirkiness and timbral curiosity. Back to the iambic rhythm and a final reference to the first movement’s chord inversion, and this mainly-minor mode concerto ends with a unison/octave emphasis.
A minor quibble: Nelson entitles her first movement to After the Fire – Incinerat – as ‘burnt to ashes’. It’s a bit more specific than that as it means ‘he/she/it had burnt it (to ashes)’, the pluperfect of incinero. Not that it means anything to most people except those of us who sweated through six years of the language in secondary school, back in the days when they taught it. In fact, the afore-mentioned tremolando effect is atmospherically suggestive here, especially at the start where a free-standing flickering comes across very well. I’m not as enamoured of the guitar and bass solos that follow because they bring a touch of interruption, of unexpected voices in a bleak aural landscape.
Harmony Returns, the second movement, begins with a reversion to the expected. The ambience is TV soap comfort with a series of rising adjacent chords spreading the benignity until a tune arrives after a minute of preparation: an amiably swinging 6/8 melody which is well-established before a subsidiary figure enters for some more mercilessly predictable repetitions. Then it’s heigh-ho for the original lightly syncopated melody that has suggestions of something that could have been produced by/for Captain Corelli – a nostalgic Mediterranean travelogue, perhaps. As with much of Nelson’s output, it’s not so much a question of harmony returning but more an iteration of the fact that harmony never left.
It’s probable that the composer’s fire is one of the bush infernos that have swept across the country, but the post-crisis ambience that she has constructed is free from any signs of PTSD or shivers of reminiscence – at least, as far as I can tell. As for the CD’s finale, the jig in memory of Concordia member Jim Greer, it’s a pretty rough affair, compared to the preceding tracks. Attack is not as split-second as the group is capable of and the rhythm is heavy-handed; everyone sounds as though they’re not at ease with the work which, for some reason, ends on a chord inversion. Yes, it’s a live performance after a long epidemic-controlled cessation of activities, but the players’ assurance of address does not satisfy as much as in the three preceding scores.
O'Connell the Music 