The Strad, March 2005

SPNM concert, The Spitz, 7th December 2004

“...the Elysian Quartet, which took on a challenging assignment in a Society for the Promotion of New Music concert on 7 December. The players responded with outstanding coolness and flexibility to miniatures by eight relatively unknown British composers. Styles? We had ‘em: Bartokian alla barbaro (Nick Casswell’s Kinesis); folk song-like whimsy (Mark Argent’s Floyen in the Rain); Hildegard-goes-clubbing (Roger Goula’s Node). The Elysians’ quicksilver tonal variety made a decent case for them all under some potentially trying circumstances: the comfortable fug of the Spitz Club is one thing, winking Christmas lights and uneven amplification quite another. Howard Skempton’s Catch suffered from some awkward moments but the Elysians saved the best till last, with Brian Wilshere’s Eno-like Dreamtimer and the witty Voices, by David Breeze, in which the quartet plays along - literally - to a pre-recorded domestic tiff. Performed with the Elysians’ sharp musical and technical reflexes, it had the audience in stiches. This young British quartet has specialised in working on cross-over, contemporary projects but I’d like to hear the players’ mettle tested on old father Haydn. He still has a few tricks up his sleeve.”

- Peter Quantrill



METRO (London), Monday July 18th 2005

FEATURE: GIG OF THE WEEK
PowerPlant @ Purcell Room

“The South Bank’s Rhythm Sticks festival always offers some pleasingly odd musical evenings. Tonight’s multimedia performance from PowerPlant is one such treat: a genre-bending collision between classically trained musicians and the music of Kraftwerk. First up, percussionist Joby Burgess, whose innovative musical experiments find an outlet through his membership of the New Noise duo and Ensemblebash quartet, has an unusual set of percussion instruments for his renditions of Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Tansy Davies pieces. Then, feisty boundary-pushers The Elysian Quartet (pictured) join him for Kraftwerk classics set to stunning visuals. These four supremely talented classical musicians have performed everything from avant-garde George Crumb in Ronnie Scotts to Shostakovich in a Soho bar. They’ve collaborated with Gabriel Prokofiev (noted dance music producer and grandson of the Russian composer) and are currently working with British hip hop leading light Killa Kela. No strangers to the weirder reaches of electronica, the steely Teutonic shimmies of Kraftwerk at their best should take on a whole new dimension in such capable hands.”


The Times, January 12, 2005

First Night reviews

PLG Young Artists
Hilary Finch at Purcell Room
 
“THERE’S no better antidote to a surfeit of musical figgy pudding than a week on the Park Lane Group diet: high-fibre new music, served up by the freshest of young professional talent. It deserves and demands from its audience both discriminating taste-buds and rigorous digestion — and this year it tones the muscle splendidly for all that James MacMillan and Michael Tippett to come.

Tippett, perhaps inevitably, is one of this year’s PLG featured composers — an eminence grise to complement the raw cutting edges of the 27-year-old Osaka-born Dai Fujikura. A mere three minutes of the latter was on offer on the first night: a tiny piece called Midnight all Day played, with its tearing trills and insect-like reverberations, by the Elysian String Quartet. Their early evening concert, featuring an impressive London premiere of Phillip Neil Martin’s An Outburst of Time, revealed the versatility and enterprise of an ensemble who enjoy the company of electronics, and who have touted Shostakovich round the bars of Soho....”


Classicalsource.com
Reviewed by: Colin Anderson

Contemporary music played by Park Lane Group Young Artists - Purcell Room, London
Monday, January 10, 2005

“A year short of its half-century, the Park Lane Group’s week-long, 10-concert series of young musicians and contemporary music is with us again. The first night brought some outstanding talent, the early-evening slot (6 p.m.) taken by the Elysian String Quartet (from Trinity College of Music). Aurelio Tello’s Dansaq II (UK premiere) proved pretty inconsequential in its Peruvian folklore-isms but introduced four musicians of verve and confidence, cellist Laura Moody suggesting that she is the rock of the group (compare Bernard Gregor-Smith of The Lindsays). Phillip Neil Martin explored some acerbic musical processes in An Outburst of Time (London premiere) and Dai Fujikura (one of the featured composers this year) went for some grating timbres that added nothing to very little – but at least Midnight All Day only lasted three minutes before escaping into the ether.

The highpoint of the Elysian’s recital was Stephen Montague’s String Quartet No.1: In Memoriam. For
‘amplified string quartet, live electronics and CD’, this 25-minute piece held the attention with some imaginative interaction between the forces and grew from an almost sound-less beginning to the closing disembodied elegy via an accelerating train impression (could it be anything else?) and textural activity that brought seemingly disparate elements to integral synchronicity. Tom Gisbey was in charge of what seemed perfectly co-ordinated electronics.'

New sounds and ideas

MALCOLM MILLER attends the first concert in the
Park Lane Group's New Year Series 2005
 
“If anyone had any concerns about the relevance of the string quartet as a contemporary medium, the range of new sounds and ideas in the concert by the young Elysian Quartet offered a powerful antidote. The group's sheer range of colour and new sonorities, the energetic and finely coordinated performances of highly complex and imaginative new works for the medium impressed a large audience at London's Purcell Room on Monday 10 January 2005, the first of the annual Park Lane Group New Year Series for outstanding young artists. Trained at Trinity College of Music, and recipients of the TCM Bulldog scholarship, the four young players, Emma Smith, JennyMay Logan violins, Vincent Sipprell, viola, and Laura Moody, cello, brought precision and conviction to the four varied works, including two premières.

The most substantial, and the earliest composed, was the final piece, Stephen Montague's String Quartet No
1 : 'In memoriam' which in some ways was also, paradoxically, the most avant-garde, in its use of live and pre-recorded electronics to evoke a poetic, post-modern soundworld of moving and dramatic intensity. Montague composed this prize-winning quartet in 1992 as a personal tribute to two composer friends who had just died whilst in their prime, Barry Andersen and Thomas Sikorski, and motifs and stylistic allusions to their music occur throughout the piece.

It begins with the faintest sense of breath, bowed and electronically transformed by each instrument in turn, expanded into a howling wind. Soon the music wells into a sensuous patterning that covers the whole tessitura, climaxing in the uppermost reaches where glistening ostinati by the ensemble are captured, looped and repeated as an extra textural layer. The pace picks up with a jazzy riff which begins as a series of scales, and fills the texture in minimalist overlapping phasings, building to a powerful climax that seems to augur a closing gesture. Yet it is a moving threnody that concludes the piece, sustained slow gestures interspersed by low, glowing electronic sounds, heart beat pulses, until the upper string players rise and turn their backs on the audience, their muffled harmonics giving way once again the pure breath and silence. The composer was present to receive deserved applause along with the sound engineer, Tom Gibsey, for what is a most original electro-acoustic sound sculpture with an exhilarating sense of drive and passion.

This formidable climax to the concert followed three shorter no less challenging works by younger composers
which the Elysian interpreted with conviction and enjoyment. A short modal motive from Peruvian Inca music was the inspiration for Dansaq II, a set of six variations by the Mexico-based Peruvian composer Aurelio Tello. With each variation set into relief by pauses, the piece is a kind of group of miniatures, in which a limited harmonic palette is offset by the inventive contrasts in sonorities and textures. The idea of interaction explored in each variation led to translucence in the improvisational first variation sharply contrasted by an almost jazzy variation in which the second violin and viola are strummed like guitars. Another evocation of Latin American music occurs in the third variation with pizzicato and percussive gestures that trace delicate patterns, leading to the eerie overtones of the fourth with a frenetic cello tremolando, and more thickly scored concluding sections.

I f the fragmentariness suggested a kind of study for quartet, An Outburst of Time by Phillip Neil Martin seemed, on the other extreme, almost classical in its organic unity, and somewhat tradition-bound. The piece used similar, contemporary tremolo and trilling gestures within a far more logical structure based on sonata principle, creating a three movement, fast-slow-fast design. Martin has an impressive array of awards, including the 2003 RPO Prize and a piano work selected for the 2005 ISCM festival. Yet while
his piece is admirably technically accomplished and full of clever textural complexities and contrasts, I found the material too limited and predictably developed, lacking an inner motivation, as if the quartet were four greyhounds running around a race track with no hare in sight.

Though far shorter and less complex, Midnight All Day by the Japanese Dai Fujikura, the PLG's 'Featured Composer', evinced a more compelling imagination, transforming recurrent grating, umcomfortable sounds of scraping bows into an expressive, even beautiful effect, as also the intervening tremolo textures and final spiralling gesture in the first violin. The PLG series, as ever, offers a valuable platform for outstanding talent, and this concert was no exception: the Elysian Quartet has a promising career ahead and
one hopes to see its release of contemporary music recordings, and more concert appearances, in the near future.”
Copyright © 13 January 2005 Malcolm Miller, London UK
www.m-v-daily.com


The Gramophone, April 2006

The Most Exciting Age Ever for String Quartets
Feature by Richard Wigmore

“.... Another of the London String Quartet Competition’s Panellists, Dartington Summer School director Gavin Henderson, shares Messenger’s optimism. ‘Maybe the traditional music-club audience is dwindling. But the quartet is such a perfect form, and the literature so rich, that its survives social changes, and in turn leads changes in the context in which music is made. The string quartet can go into so many different spheres, though Viennese classics will remain the bedrock - you’re never going to make it without that foundation. A young group like the Elysian Quartet are experimenting even further than Kronos with new artforms, using digital imagery and visual patchwork - the string quartet as a kind of post-rock band...”

The Daily Telegraph, March 2nd, 2004

Prokofiev goes clubbing

The grandson of composer Sergei Prokofiev is already one of Britain's hottest producers of garage music. Now he's written a string quartet to be premiered in a nightclub. He talks to Russ Coffey:

Outside the window, through the fog, you can make out a gas tower. Sitting at the desk of the tiny Bethnal Green recording studio is a man once described as London's hottest new producer of garage music. Packed like sardines in the room are the Elysian String Quartet and myself. The man at the desk is Gabriel Prokofiev, grandson of Sergei. The quartet is recording the third movement of his first string quartet. The Soviet feel of the music seems apt for the half-derelict former factory we are in. With only an hour left of studio time, there is conspicuous tension in the room.

The recording is to have its official launch later this month at an unusual night at an East End nightclub. Prokofiev intends to persuade 300 or so clubbers to listen to the Elysians play a set of contemporary and classical music, building up to his own piece, which he admits people might find "quite challenging". More familiar listening will come in the form of a DJ playing dance remixes of the piece, also included on the record.
"I guess it's really going to be an evening of chamber music," Prokofiev later tells me in his local greasy spoon, "but I'm not sure I am happy with calling it that. It sounds alienating. I think all sorts of people want to experience all sorts of music. The problem is in how it is packaged." The belief that any good music of any genre can and should be enjoyed by anyone unites composer and quartet.

Prokofiev, 29, tall and blond, has looks reminiscent of a Russian aristocrat. His father Oleg, an artist, was a Soviet defector. Although not a musician, he filled his house in Greenwich with music, particularly that of his father. Gabriel Prokofiev says growing up in this environment must have had its effect. As we sip mugs of tea, a hip-looking girl approaches and asks Prokofiev about club nights. He explains to me that for the past five years he has been producing and performing assorted dance, "sonic art", and African music - all under various aliases.

The business of his pseudonyms dates to a bad experience he had when he was 13. "I'd started a pop band with some friends," he says, "and was extremely proud of the songs I'd written. The local paper heard about it and wrote a piece, the gist being 'classical grandson goes pop'. "Now, I prefer my music to stand up on its own without the name getting in the way. This piece, however, is different in that it's a more ostensibly classical piece."

Although he was always praised for his musical talent, it wasn't until his teachers began to be as interested in his composition as his instruments that he realised music was going to be his life. Before university, however, he travelled to Tanzania, learning to speak fluent Swahili and making perhaps the most comprehensive recording of Masai music in existence.

It was while studying for his MA at York that he met Laura Moody, now cellist in the Elysian Quartet. A year ago, he received a call from her asking him to write a piece for this "amazing quartet" she had just joined.
Based at the Trinity College of Music in Blackheath, the Elysian Quartet are recipients of the Bulldog scholarship, which gives financial support during the first year of a quartet's professional career. The Elysians, all in their early twenties, have embraced this opportunity in the most extraordinary way. Their relentless pursuit of the finest repertoire has taken them on a journey from baroque, through Classical and contemporary, to new commissions and collaborations. They have played with folk, jazz and hip hop stars, and recently appeared on Radio 1 Extra with Killa Kela, the so-called "human beatbox". The quartet consists of Emma Smith (first violin), Jennymay Logan (second violin), Vincent Sipprell (viola) and Laura Moody (cello). All were gifted players as children. Smith, for instance, claims to have been playing since she "was practically an egg". She was trained in the Suzuki method, where children are encouraged to play as soon as they can hold the instrument, and entirely by ear. The emphasis on improvisation she attributes to her later jazz leanings.

Moody was given a cello to curb her hyperactivity. She was immediately transfixed. At the age of 13, she won the Yamaha national rock and pop awards for her song, Patterns on my Mind. Sipprell's first love was for the jazz that his mother used to sing in a Greek nightclub. Then his stepfather introduced him to the piano and to classical music. Soon he was Grade 8 at violin, viola and cello, and had taught himself guitar. Outside the quartet he plays in jazz and rock bands. Logan's talent was discovered at primary school in Essex when teachers noticed her astonishing aptitude for the recorder. Soon put on to violin and piano, at 11 she won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music junior department.

With their diversity of interests and refusal to allow music to be pigeonholed, it was perhaps inevitable that they should want to expand the possibilities of what and where they play. Over the past six months they have played Shostakovich in a Soho bar, Stravinsky in the Tate, and George Crumb's experimental masterpiece on the Vietnam War, Black Angels, at Ronnie Scott's. They also play the Crumb piece, sometimes said to be the bleakest music ever written, in their outreach work in local primary schools. Logan delights in telling people that "one little girl thought it was most probably about a badger".

Superficially, the works of American avant-gardists such as Crumb or John Cage seem to provide a context in which to see Prokofiev's quartet. One is initially struck, for instance, by the use of a range of bowing techniques, adventurous dissonances and complex rhythms. Close listening, however, reveals that it largely defies comparison. Prokofiev says he hadn't got round to refamiliarising himself with contemporary quartet music when he started, and soon decided not to bother. He thought it would be more interesting for the music just to be the product of his life experience. Much of it came to him as he cycled down the towpath from home to his studio. Since it was written, it has evolved organically through the quartet's interpretation.

The first movement is short and mournful, with the violins playing a cascading theme leading into a sad viola melody. The second has a busy, flowing, gypsy-like tune, which is passed between the instruments, set against syncopated staccato rhythms. The third is heavy, with a distinct Eastern Bloc feel, and the last is the favourite of both Prokofiev and the quartet. With its complex broken rhythms and repeated motif, it is clearly inspired by some of the dance music that Prokofiev has worked on over the years.

The remixes by Max de Wardener, David Schweitzer, Boxsaga and Ed Laliq may respectively be described as mellow, groove, chill, and art-punk. Perhaps most interesting is Prokofiev's own remix, where he uses the spiralling theme from the first movement and speeds it up over a bass line sampled from the cello.
An e-mail has just appeared in my inbox. It is from Prokofiev. It contains an attachment that is going to be the flyer for his and the quartet's launch party. It says: "You are invited to an evening of Chamber Music."
Maybe he has decided that it isn't too alienating, after all.