Prilaux Rainier "String Trio" Trio Part One скачать в хорошем качестве

Prilaux Rainier "String Trio" Trio Part One

Priaulx Rainier was born on 3 February 1903 at Howick, Natal, South Africa, of English-Huguenot parents. Her early childhood was spent in a remote part of the country near Zulu land, where the liquid language and music of the indigenous people, the sounds of wild animals and the calls of the birds were to prove a lasting influence. As a violin student, at the age of ten, she entered the South African College of Music and, under the stimulating influence of the Principal, W. H. Bell, played a great deal of chamber music. In 1920 the University of South Africa Overseas Scholarship brought her to the Royal Academy of Music where she studied violin. Subsequently she settled permanently in London. Between 1935 and 1939 Three Greek Epigrams and the String Quartet were written; a short period of study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris followed, before the outbreak of the 1939-45 War. In 1943 Priaulx Rainier was appointed a Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, a post she held until 1961. In 1952 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and Collard Fellow of the Worshipful Company of Musicians. Priaulx became acquainted with Michael Tippett at Morley college, as well as with the conductor Walter Goehr; the critic and administrator William Glock, the composer and teacher Matyas Seiber; the concert promoter Gerald Cooper; the singer Peter Pears, and many others. She was especially at home in the company of writers (David Gascoyne, Arthur Waley), artists (Lucian Freud), and dancers (Pola Nirenska). Among her many friends Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson occupied a special category. Their ideas about space-construction and geometric forms of abstract art found a receptive listener in Priaulx as she herself forged her own style; moreover Hepworth's belief in the reality of the world of ideas, and of the new vistas opened up by abstract scientific thought, struck forcibly home. There was, however, a primitivism at the heart of Rainier's music which called for particularly personal expression. A BBC Invitation Concert in 1967 presented four works, including the first performance of the String Trio and the Suite for solo cello. In 1976 the BBC recorded and broadcast the complete chamber music, including her largest chamber work The Bee Oracles. Her violin concerto, Due Canti e Finale, was commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin and performed by him at the 1977 Edinburgh Festival with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Charles Groves and subsequently at the BBC Promenade Concerts, where it was received with warmth and enthusiasm In June 1982 the University of Cape Town honoured her with a Doctorate in Music (Honoris Causa). Priaulx Rainier died in France on 10 October 1986. Rainier carried the experimentalism of Quanta one step further in the String Trio, written some four years later for the same string players as played in the London Oboe Quartet. Like Quanta, the String Trio also falls broadly into two sections, played without a break. The first contains quick-moving music, the second is slow, but there is none of the melodic continuity found in Quanta, and the phrases are even shorter; sharp little splinters of sound, just two notes for the most part. The lines vary and become more drawn out only as the work dies away to its close. The piece is an exploration of the possibilities inherent in the interval of the minor ninth (E-F), which is treated with an infinite number of permutations, Thus the characteristically dissonant sonority arises from the clash of semitones rather than whole tones. Subtle variations of harmony, rhythm and texture are built round a regular pulse, even if this is heavily disguised by the use of irregular metres, which veer between 11,12, 7 or 9 units. The tonality is anything but explicit, coming as it does from the secondary end of the tonal spectrum. The challenge for the listener, hearing such music for the first time, is to identify in the rhythm that regularity of beat without which irregular metres are ineffective, and to hear in the tonality that norm against which dissonance needs to be offset. For the directional coherence of traditional music, Rainier here substitutes a sequence of tone-clusters, built largely in semitones, with momentary flashes of sound, suggestive, variable, and tonally remote from each other; like stars in the night sky. Biography: Come and Listen to the Stars: P.R.: A Pictorial Biography (Penzance, 1988) [The recordings we are posting are obviously from an LP released in the early 1970s, and not from the CD issued briefly in the 1990s, which contained different performances.]