Landscapes, whether real or imagined have been a recurring theme in the music of Judith Bingham, performed here by the internationally renowned Chamber Domaine and the supremely talented Korean soprano Yeree Suh. Bingham's writing is filled with an image-inspired sentimentality that permeates throughout this varied programme of chamber music. Suh's performance is stunning throughout and her virtuosic skills are highlighted in her solo performance of The Cathedral of Trees, a haunting and delicate song about nature. Together, Suh and the Chamber Domaine present a fantastic recording full of contemplation.
'A generous and varied showcase for this most communicative of composers. [...] Copious, user-friendly presentation sets the seal on an exemplary issue. Do investigate!' Gramophone
Recording Information:
Recorded in Angel Studios, London, UK on the 2 & 3 December 2010.
Producer: Adam Binks
Engineer: Gary Thomas
Yeree Suh soprano
Chamber Domaine
Thomas Kemp violin
James Boyd viola
Adrian Bradbury cello
Stephen de Pledge piano
Booklet Notes:
Landscapes, real and imagined
Landscapes, whether real or imagined have been a recurring theme in my music. Sometimes I have been inspired by actually visiting somewhere, but often it has been by imagining them via old maps, old photographs and out of date guide books. In fact I would much rather imagine somewhere than visit it. I have quite a collection of old Baedekers and the Ward Lock guides to Britain, as I have of old Ordnance Survey maps. Old maps are a strange and unsettling kind of time travel, they show the hidden secrets of the landscape in the same way that a piece of music reveals the subconscious of the composer. And music is itself presented in a one-dimensional set of directions in the same way as a map guides the walker: in both cases, a certain amount of interpretation is required.
Sometimes even the photos are imaginary - in Shelley Dreams, I tried to imagine some old black and white shots that someone might have taken of Shelley - each of the tiny movements captures just one moment. In The Shadow Side of Joy Finzi I was asked to set poems that I wasn't initially attracted to - poems written by Joy Finzi in grief after Gerald Finzi's death. A friend showed me a description of a seventeenth-century snow in one of those icily cold winters - a real snowstorm but described by R. D. Blackmore in Lorna Doone - this landscape to me perfectly captured Joy's frozen and slightly unhinged emotional state and proved a great backdrop for her poems. I find it interesting to place real people in fictional landscapes, or to imagine myself in an imaginary landscape or a landscape no longer there. In Fifty Shades of Green, the music wanders through Henri Rousseau's painting ‘Jungle with setting sun' in which a black central figure (or shadow!) is attacked by a jaguar. Rousseau (himself an accomplished conman) was easily able to convince nineteenth-century audiences that he had visited these jungles whereas he had only ever been as far as the Jardin des Plantes in Paris - desert, jungle and forest plants
all sit side by side and are unnervingly out
of scale. The landscape is surely Rousseau's
subconscious - indeed he said that he had
to have the window open when he painted
the jungle pictures.
For me, landscape pieces are always initially
a symbol of my own subconscious world,
and surely this is their real attraction to the introspective English composer? It isn't hard
to recognise the symbolism of mountains, forests, and above all the sea, for me always a symbol of death.
Chapman's Pool was written throughout the decline and death
of my mother: it is ostensibly a description of The Isle of Purbeck, but as if sailed around, or flown over, as if in a dream. The sea bookends the piece and at the end seems to suggest a melancholy final journey. No piece more aptly sums up my always complex and dark relationship with my mother and the despair that comes with the end of such a relationship.
A photographer that I have come back to repeatedly is Don McCullin, who famously photographed some of the most harrowing wars and disasters. When I wrote My Father's Arms, I asked Martin Shaw to write me some poems about the way violence and war can define a child's character. I wanted to do this rather than write a mawkish piece about the death of children. The adult proponents of conflict so often have been presented with war as a defining moment of their childhood, even a bonding moment with their family. I had a McCullin photograph in front of me when I was writing of a bombed Beirut street: a group of children are dancing round the body of a little girl - one is even playing an oud. We turn our faces away, but McCullin walks towards such scenes.
I have not visited most of these landscapes. I did however visit Boranup, a huge forest in Western Australia. The predominant tree is the Karri Tree with its white bark and lace
canopy. The trees stretch as far as the eye can see and seem to form a single organism. Occasionally you see a kangaroo or an emu, often stationary. The Mystery of Boranup was written to be playable by grade three standard players, and tries to imitate the sound of a didgeridoo with only the occasional bounding movement entering the music. I like the idea of trying to capture the essence of such a vast living entity in a tiny simple piece - ‘to see the world in a grain of sand.'
© 2011 Judith Bingham
