The last time I heard the excellent Carice Singers was last year as they marked the 90th birthday of Arvo Pärt. But Pärt’s meditative and inward musical language could not be further from the jagged and confrontational world of Steve Martland, the focus of last Thursday’s Kings Place recital. The seamless switch from one to the other shows the versatility of the choir, made of up some of the finest young choral singers in London, led by the presiding intelligence of conductor George Parris.
Martland, who died at just 58 in 2013, was best known for the post-minimalist instrumental pieces he wrote in the 1980s and 90s for his eponymous band, characterised by amplification, pounding rhythms and an uncompromisingly steely aesthetic. I wasn’t even aware of him as a choral composer till this concert, but was won over by music that goes against the grain of much contemporary choral music in being less interested in gorgeous sonority than in rhythmic play and propulsive energy.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the bookends to the concert, two movements from Sea Songs, Martland’s last major piece, exploring traditional shanties as found material. Both were a delight, fresh and springy, sung with complete clarity and a joyfulness that was palpable. “Dance to your daddy” was deconstructed, made into canons, fragmented and overlapped phrases repeated obsessively: it was all the essence of Martland but with a welcoming smile in the music.
There was something similar at play in Summer Rounds, which used the medieval canon "Sumer is icumen in" as its starting point for songs about the seasons, and Street Songs, a 2003 collaboration with the King’s Singers. This latter piece, featuring George Barton on marimba, was a virtuoso spectacular, Martland subverting the usual vocal refinery of the King’s Singers’ polished sound in vocal lines that are almost instrumental, syncopated, strident and in-yer-face. The choir, light on vibrato but big on punch and attack, tackled this challenging music with such éclat that at the end of one movement I heard a spontaneous “wow” from the person sitting behind me.
The other pieces were well selected to offer spotlights on aspects of Martland’s work, but were on the whole less satisfying. Steve Reich’s Know what is above you, a nod to his influence on Martland, is a touching celebration of Reich Jewish heritage for upper voices and drums, while Louis Andriessen, Martland’s teacher, was represented by the exquisite, but completely atypical, Un beau baiser. The new commission Rent Songs, by Martland’s one time student Luke Lewis was harder to love, feeling bitty and something of a harmonic grab bag – and it really suffered from the absence of any sung texts in the programme, making it hard to follow. Julia Wolfe’s Guard my tongue, sustained and clustered like a slowed-down hymn, was perhaps the pick of these other pieces.
But the evening belonged to Martland, whose voice was heard in between pieces, offering glimpses of the man behind the music. Since his instrumental work was mostly for his own group, with its unique scoring, it is unlikely to be revived by other ensembles, so the best chance for Martland’s music to survive in the repertoire is perhaps through his choral music. And thanks to the ever-excellent Carice Singers going where other choirs don’t, we heard a number of pieces that could offer variety and vim to an adventurous choir’s programming.
