Brighton Year-Round 2024
St Nicholas Ellie Blackshaw Solo Violin Recital
Ellie Blackshaw
Genre: Live Music, Music
Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
Ellie Blackshaw’s a vital, rapt performer and composer on the Brighton and south east scene. She plays Bach’s Sonata No 2 in A minor BWV 1003, and two works by fellow NMC composers: Barry Mills’ 4 Pieces for solo violin, and John Hawkins’ Bobop.
Review
There’s nothing like an exposed solitary violin or as soaring. Violinist Ellie Blackshaw places herself in the church’s space almost as an inspired celebrant.
She plays Bach’s Sonata No 2 in A minor BWV 1003, and two works by fellow New Music Brighton (NMB) composers: Barry Mills’ 4 Pieces for solo violin, and John Hawkins’ Bobop.
She begins with the Sonata No. 2 in A minor BWV1003. And taking on one of Bach’s solo violin sonatas (he wrote three each of these and the Partitas around 1717 whilst at Kothen) is an Everest. The A minor is a particularly austere work, full of the kind of contemplative who’s of the D minor Partitia No. 2, long construed as an instrumental requiem for Bach’s first wife.
The opening movement ‘Grave’ is full of tricky ascension and Blackshaw negotiates this with an unfailingly engaged dark tone. She’s not one to shy from dark or even ugly tones on occasion, and like Isabelle Faust goes for expression above all.
A few rough moments aside early on in the ‘Fuga’, and Blackshaw relaxes – if that’s not too flippant a word into that ‘Fuga’ and becomes a supple witness in the more stark ‘Andante’.
Blackshaw wholly comes into her own with a memorable performance if the last, great movement and elicits more intense feeling than I can remember. Without forcing tone or expression she lets the natural mortality of this work – enveloped in its immortality – shine
So the memorable ‘Allegro’ skidders and Blackshaw plays with a tragic intensity. It never lets up till its wintry resolve. The melody could almost prefigure one of Bach’s Easter Cantatas or Passions.
Barry Mills’ haunting 4 Pieces for Solo Violin emerged as one of his finest solo pieces.
It starts with ‘Calm’ which is truly adagio but also infused with an element of keening. It’s as desolate as a beach in winter. There’s several effects of tremolos and exposed and exquisitely wrought violin lines. Milks goes for purity of time here. There’s a challenging simplicity to much that he writes.
”Agitation” is far more lively as you’d expect. More angular and using microtonal slides and sudden releases of microscales it’s a fascinating scherzo-like work, full of dark puckish humour ending with a surprise pizzicato.
The following movement is a ‘Fantasia’ on a traditional Cornish Song I Love my love where it freewheels. Holst set this too though more directly.
Unlike Britten’s Lachrimaye though you don’t feel you have to wait too long for a strong hint of the melody. It’s not though an obvious theme and variations. Hence the title. It ends like Britten with a full quote of the hauntingly beautiful folk song
The last movement is ‘In Memory of violinist Eleanor Spon’, a jazz improviser too. Again the elements involved here make for a strange serendipity. It’s as if this had to be the natural finale.
Again the work starts in elegy – though here it’s like the Bach Partita (not the Sonata we heard of course) a formal one, if more overtly declared. Blackshaw Keens over the notes like a line watcher, even one with a bird’s Eyre view of tragedy or untimely dying. The notes are spare and exposed. Nothing contrapuntal or complex. The nearest is a drone. Effect of self-accompaniment, though even that’s sparingly done as the work fades into silence.
John Hawkins (like Mills born in 1949) is another composer associated with New Music Brighton, as is Blackshaw herself. His Bobop is close to ‘Bebop’ in homophony and invokes ‘Bowbop’ or bow-boppiness, tongue in horsehair: so you wonder what it will bring.
Hawkins to write the piece for Eleanor Pringle and tailored the piece around her particular musical tastes including jazz.
It’s a piece flirting with jazz tropes and syncopated melodies. Blackshaw in fact taka the work out on her feet as she plays, her own percussion accompaniment.
Hawkins is full of broken chords and false starts scaling up vertiginously and just occasionally enjoying the summit before breaking into pizzicato as a kind of sly wit. It ends in a wild skirl of plucked laughter.
It’s good to hear Ellie Blackshaw pioneering new work. She’s a vital, rapt performer and composer on the Brighton and south east scene.
