Arcane musical instruments feature prominently in Mary Bellamy’s music, and none are stranger than those required for the piece that gives the title to this collection. Ten years ago at the Ruhrtriennale, Heiner Goebbels mounted a staging of Delusion of the Fury, the only completed “opera” by the American Harry Partch. Using a scale of 43 intervals, his work is scored for the exotically named instruments that Partch himself made to perform his music, and for the Ruhr performances Ensemble Musikfabrik commissioned a new set of those instruments to be made.
In Behind the Transparent Surface, which she composed for Ensemble Musikfabrik in 2020, Bellamy uses four of those inventions – harmonic canon, spoils of war, bass marimba and adapted viola – alongside more familiar sounds, for music that commutes between dense, frantic activity and “transparent” stasis, and between orthodox tuning and Partch’s microtones. There’s another exotic instrument, a new design of bass oboe called the lupophon, in Unfurling, written for the oboist Roger Redgate in 2019, which with its multiphonics and explosive outbursts sometimes seems to create a fusion of an oboe and something very like a saxophone, while the pianist (Philip Thomas) confines himself to playing directly on the piano strings.
The three other works here are scored for more everyday forces, though typically Bellamy creates strikingly original textures with them. In Rift for percussion, harp and double bass, also from 2019 and played by members of Elision Ensemble, it’s the mysterious muted harp and the furious bass glissandi that conjure up a sense of crumbling instability, while in the solo pieces – an earlier exploration of wind multiphonics in the bass flute Semblance (2011), and the close-miked percussion of Dual Impulse (2021), there’s the same aural imagination, and an intent to extract the maximum intensity from the sounds that Bellamy imagines.
This week’s other pick
A major orchestral work by Liza Lim, another composer with Huddersfield connections, features on a new release from Kairos. Lim’s Annunciation Triptych consists of three movements invoking Sappho, Mary the mother of Jesus, and Fatimah, the daughter of the prophet Muhammad, as “icons of women’s spirituality”, exploring “themes of revelation and ritual as the connecting tissue between very different cultural worlds”. Each of the movements is accompanied by quite a lot of extra-musical baggage – the last includes a soprano setting of a poem by Etel Adnan – but in this performance by the WDR Sinfonieorchester, conducted by Cristian Măcelaru, the orchestral writing comes across powerfully and vividly enough to stand easily on its own musical feet.
