A mellowing with age still springs surprises
The Strad Issue: November 2024
Description: A mellowing with age still springs surprises
Musicians: Sacconi Quartet; Simon Haram (saxophone) Graham Fitkin (organ) Joby Burgess (percussion) Clare Hammond (piano) Ruth Wall (harp, organ)
Works: Fitkin: Loosening; Slow; Distil; Touch; Recur
Catalogue number: SIGNUM SIGCD792 (2 CDs)
Slow overlapping glissandos raise the curtain on Loosening: a musical dawn over which Simon Haram’s saxophone enters to float in the air like a bird on a thermal. It’s one of many striking sound-images within this quintet of quintets. The material and form of each one seems to emerge from the identity and personality of the ‘hero’ instrument, though the Sacconi Quartet takes an active role as partner rather than accompanist throughout the discourse. Pizzicatos and spiccatos dance around Joby Burgess’s crotales and vibraphone in Distil. Plucked strings recur in Recur, weaving in and around Ruth Wall’s harp.
Fitkin came to attention with mostly funky, high-impact pieces such as Hook and Mesh. Age appears to have mellowed him, though Touch, a restless piano quintet, comes closest to the Fitkin of old, a restlessly intricate handover of cross-rhythms from piano to strings demanding fiendish agility of coordination from Clare Hammond and the Sacconi.
Slow is a kind of quintet+, for quartet and ‘organ’ (two organs, in this case, though I couldn’t tell), using the organ’s pedal bass and sustaining possibilities to evolve open-sky harmonies. Having previously recorded Fitkin’s quartets proper, the Sacconi knows the idiom inside out, and invests these scores with as much variety of tone and feeling as they demand.
PETER QUANTRILL
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