Brighton Fringe 2026
Paul Silverthorne MOOT Concert Unitarian Brighton
Music Of Our Time: Paul Silverthorne
Genre: Live Music, Music
Venue: Unitarian, New Road Brighton
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
The sadness of this final Music Of Our Time concert is both a celebration and a memorial. With the death of co-founder Jonathan Powell last December, Norman Jacobs has decided after 15 years the titanic, heroic series shuld end on a high.
Accordingly violist Paul Silverthorne and pianist Roderick Chadwick performed a concert of bittersweet lyrical modernism.
Review
The sadness of this final Music Of Our Time concert is both a celebration and a memorial. With the death of co-founder Jonathan Powell last December, Norman Jacobs has decided after 15 years the titanic, heroic series should end on a high.
Accordingly the outstanding violist Paul Silverthorne and exceptional pianist (new to me) Roderick Chadwick performed a concert of bittersweet lyrical modernism. They start with Acequia Madre from 2012. A UK premiere surprisingly.
Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg (b.1958) has moved a long way from his early postmodem days with his group Toymi, whom I encountered at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 1992. Shards of what would become his mature style were present. But the most memorable moment was the group imitating the sound of an old 78 whilst playing Sibelius’ Valse Triste. It sounded more like the Michael Innes Book of Records. Rather charming but lacking the substance of the great Kaiha Saariaho or even Kalevi Aho.
But Lindberg developed rapidly around the millennium. A muscular and lyrical modernism – more mainstream perhaps than Kaija Saariaho and stretching back to Aulis Sallinen and to a far lesser degree Einojuhani Rautavaara – became apparent. Big boned concertos and orchestral pieces like Aura and Engine emerged.
Yet by 2012 Lindberg was describing himself modest as an adolescent. Acequia Madre is a burnished torso almost romantic in time. It rises to a slow ruminant climax out of themes that coalesce like strata and yet fuse to a rather romantic magma glow.
Thomas Ades’ Three Berceuses from 2018 are outtakes or developments from his 2016 opera The Exterminating Angel.
They remind one of both Ades’ miniaturist gifts, with for instance his early delicate ravishments of Couperin; even the dances from Ades’ also early (1995) Powder Her Face. These pieces are though as their title suggests quiet and sweet nightmares. The swaying first piece gets progressively slower and comes to a hypnotic stop.
The second enjoys a more lyrical through line in the vila with a chiming almost Ligeti-Etude chime on the piano. That is, slowed down. Then it seems pure Messiaen. The viola indeed is the more rapid instrument. And this is where Ades shows his uniqueness: the confluence of two little worlds made cunningly. Suddenly the piano explodes in grand chords, and you remember the opera with a strange scurrying sound from the viola.
The third is the most lyrical. We might be back with the Cheltenham School of the early 1950s. Something Bernard Stevens night have composed, or Ronald Stevenson. It is starkly beautiful.
Lloyd Moore is a composer new to me but luckily introduced his Canzona for solo viola himself, written in 2025. It’s designed to exploit the viola’s singing voice. Yet with the viola double-stopping it’s not ordinary song. With a churchy slightly archaic feel it was written in memory of composer and critic Bayan Northcott who had dedicated his own final piece to Moore.
It’s a very fine addition to the repertoire. I’m reminded of Ligeti’s solo Viola Sonata. The language though modernist and flecked with pizzicato is straightforward; and in the line of solo viola elegies that stretch back to Britten and Stravinsky (in that order).
There is though a fast middle section and a pressing urgency that yet wisps off into a world of fierce tears and very quiet. Then defiant desolation. A trancing very fine addition to the solo viola repertory.
Danish composer Poul Rouders (b.1949) burst into international fame in the late 1980s though the UK still know him for his opera The Handmaid’s Tale. Though there has been a flirting with spectral music, Rouders seems overall casts les near Gérard Grisey, and nearer the world of some Finnish composers like Aho and Lindberg. His muscular big-boned post-Romanticism was very much in vogue in the 1990s. His 2008 Romances is a dark gritty piece where the piano often takes the lead in quieter passages after a big bones outburst from the viola which constitutes the first Romance – you quickly realize this is a series run together.
Rouders can always surprise and the second section is as delicate. And counterpoints in its slow hypnotic way as the outburst seemed post-Romantic. The next os a sassy outburst but brief. The net a pure romantic piece some earlier Danish composer like Vagn Holmboe might have written. Though not Per Norgard. It’s followed by a pointillistic adagio that touches on the sonority of his other spare, certainly quieter passages. At times we’re drifting to Morton Feldman territory here. The next uses the highest viola register at first against muscular piano chords, a superb mismatch. And that’s it.
The concert resumed after the interval with just two pieces. Composer Sally Beamish (b.1956) was a violist in the London Sinfonietta where she met Silverthorne. She turned to serious composing after her viola was stolen. Recently her daughter a luthier presented her with a new viola
Beamish introduced the next piece That Recent Earth in 2003 in anticipation of the looming Iraq war. Inspired by Alcanta and her poem on her brother: “weep weep weep” and “he is dead” in pizzicato and his own quote “life is a buzz of cornets about a lance point”. It’s where the piece also derives its title. Beamish is perhaps the viola’s dream composer. And they seem to dream
The piece itself is a series of broken lyrical starts, as befits its theme. It’s high-placed tessitura weeps down and using both high and low registers in a muted way also speeds up the sense of desolation. The sonance alternates between both registers like a high keening wail and low sobbing.
But this is too graphic and simplistic to frame Beamish’s subtle shifts of tempo and thematic memorability. She has made of the first theme a kind of cantus firmus to which the work not so much returns as never escapes from. It ends on a question mark.
Australian Brett Dean (b.1961) is equally prolific and also a viola player. And like Ades these are outtakes from an opera. Rather a familiar theme too. “Imagine the care of Elsinore in ruins with each castle room” he said to Silverthorne. His 2008 Rooms of Elsinore is effectively a programme Viola Sonata.
A three-note motif from the piano launches the tenebrous viola on a kind of funerary search amongst the desolation. It’s quite theatrical. The piano’s theme becomes close to an ostinato almost in a grand guignol manner. There’s drama in this music and though the language certainly isn’t film music you can imagine it as a film score of a particularly irradiated dark.
The piece builds to a languorous arrival, the viola certainly more Allegro, even Presto, the piano reined in with its chiming octaves. It’s big, gestural and makes no apologies for its bravura and scene-painting. It rises to a stop.
Then the shadowy second movement introduced glissandi on the piano from the underworld as the viola sings Orpheus-like overhead. For a moment. To frame this as a Hamlet story would be fatuous, even we’re the rooms and narrative jumbled. What Dean evokes so particularly is the weird and the eerie aspect of the viola. He invokes it’s interiority and rounded tone almost against itself.
The following scherzo is like something out of Shostakovich in tempo and sonance, though not quite musical material. The scurrying figures predominate for a lengthy development. Then it vanished in a, wisp.
The slow movement of what increasingly falls into sonata form again invokes it’s duties with a drone note over the viola to a series of quiet outbursts from the piano in a master faster tempo. It’s a singular contrast of the slow pulse and viola and the scurrying piano. The fastest slow music for one instrument ever written one might think.
The broken images of the finale finds the viola twittering in a very high register and the piano interjecting. The two instruments converge as the viola whispers and the piano habits itself in a series of rapid passages. It ends on a note of questionings, and a ruminant search of dying falls.
Both Silverthorne and Chadwick are beyond praise; and perform the works with a bravura, passion yet elegance and at the same time selflessness; that means we simply concentrated on the music.
MOOT was concluded by a valedictory glowing speech by Norman Jacobs who has heroically presided these past 15 years; and who praised fellow trustees workers and loyal audience. It’s the end of a wonderful chapter of music making. There’s only New Music Brighton left in the South now to champion new music. Requiescat? Not quite. The legacy and drive are tremendous, the germination of new music ongoing. And a dedicated YouTube channel to recordings made, of which there are many. Above all thanks to Norman Jacobs for bringing world class new music to Brighton for so long. And not just in this series.
