It's an admirable project: to recast the interiors of stately homes as immersive artworks, a musical recital combined with sound installations designed to make the viewer look anew at their surroundings. Certainly as I entered the hallway of Hertford House in Marylebone, where the Wallace Collection is housed, the rich, shifting tones of Simon Fisher Turner's electronic sound manipulations filled the air like perfume, amplifying the opulence of the surroundings and making me – and others – linger on the grand staircase.
This was ambient music in the truest sense, deep subliminal bass notes seeming to come from everywhere at once, and crackles and washes of distant, dreamlike musical phrases becoming a part of the space. Though not designed to be listened to in the traditional sense, it nonetheless had the effect of making people stop and take in that space, with as many looking up and around at the corners of the room as at the paintings hung on the walls.
The rest of the installation was not quite as conducive to thoughtful absorption. At the top of the stairs the audience queued for the single glass of wine included in the ticket, the act of queueing instantly dragging them from their reverie, re-instilling them with a sense of time and sending them scurrying off around the Collection's exhibition space to dutifully avoid missing anything. The galleries were dotted with loudspeakers, playing Matthew Fairclough's soundscapes which included actors' voices reading Jeanette Winterson's words, which for brief seconds could be quite magical but never quite achieved the subtle mysteries of Fisher Turner's soundtrack.
The fact we were in the earlier of the night's two sessions, with daylight still flooding in, didn't help: in the cold light of day, there was no real strangeness to what we were seeing, just a gallery and some sounds. But Winterson, though her quasi-spiritual leanings can be a little knit-your-own-yoghurt at times, is nonetheless capable of turning some gorgeous phrases, and it was easy to see how the recurring themes of doors, moments in time, rooms and space in her words could awaken the potential of the rooms much further given a more relaxed and conducive atmosphere, or maybe even a second glass of wine.
But after queueing, there was barely 30 minutes to take all this in and find our way to the seated gallery for the performance to began. This began with more of Winterson's recorded words, this time about the connections between people hearing music in rooms and in dreams through history “like strings of light stretching across space”; really quite haunting and evocative, although rather distracted from by the arrayed paintings, most of which seemed to be of massive heaps of dead game or Arcadian scenes of country estates, all speaking of acquisitiveness and ostentation somewhat removed from Winterson's metaphysics.
The recital itself was fine. Although unfortunately marketed in standard “classical babe” mode (the pictures above are by far the most tasteful available), Natalie Clein doesn't play up to this in person and displayed far more genuine charm and obvious delight in music than unnecessary coquettishness. Her playing was extraordinarily fluid, with an impressive affinity for the minutiae of her instrument's harmonics, but she did err on the side of expressiveness – great for the William Walton Passacaglia, and particularly for the Pablo Casals piece with which she encored, but less so for the JS Bach suites which topped and tailed the body of her short performance, where I found myself wishing she'd tone down the dynamics and let the perfect geometries of the work speak for themselves.
It was a little hard to judge the composition "Poco and the Cage" by Fyfe Dangerfield (pictured left) – most famous as singer/songwriter of rock band the Guillemots, but known also as a composer in his own right. Sandwiched between Bach and Walton it seemed slight, more an episodic series of explorations of how many different ways a note can be bent with some "Lark Ascending" vamps thrown in for good measure than something with a coherent logic of its own. But it had its charms, and perhaps it was overwhelmed by the surrounding grandiosity and not given space to shine.
And therein was the problem: like the Fairclough/Winterson sound art, it merely felt like something modern slightly out of place and out-dazzled by the density of money and history around it. But perhaps if the whole experience were not quite so rushed, perhaps if the audience were a little better briefed, it might not be this way. This was the first of several sessions of “Resonances” in four different venues, and it may well be that even just a later night or slightly extended experience of the programme might make the whole thing as absorbing and transformative of the surroundings as those initial moments being wafted up the stairs by Simon Fisher Turner's sublimely subtle tones.
The rest of the installation was not quite as conducive to thoughtful absorption. At the top of the stairs the audience queued for the single glass of wine included in the ticket, the act of queueing instantly dragging them from their reverie, re-instilling them with a sense of time and sending them scurrying off around the Collection's exhibition space to dutifully avoid missing anything. The galleries were dotted with loudspeakers, playing Matthew Fairclough's soundscapes which included actors' voices reading Jeanette Winterson's words, which for brief seconds could be quite magical but never quite achieved the subtle mysteries of Fisher Turner's soundtrack.
The fact we were in the earlier of the night's two sessions, with daylight still flooding in, didn't help: in the cold light of day, there was no real strangeness to what we were seeing, just a gallery and some sounds. But Winterson, though her quasi-spiritual leanings can be a little knit-your-own-yoghurt at times, is nonetheless capable of turning some gorgeous phrases, and it was easy to see how the recurring themes of doors, moments in time, rooms and space in her words could awaken the potential of the rooms much further given a more relaxed and conducive atmosphere, or maybe even a second glass of wine.But after queueing, there was barely 30 minutes to take all this in and find our way to the seated gallery for the performance to began. This began with more of Winterson's recorded words, this time about the connections between people hearing music in rooms and in dreams through history “like strings of light stretching across space”; really quite haunting and evocative, although rather distracted from by the arrayed paintings, most of which seemed to be of massive heaps of dead game or Arcadian scenes of country estates, all speaking of acquisitiveness and ostentation somewhat removed from Winterson's metaphysics.
The recital itself was fine. Although unfortunately marketed in standard “classical babe” mode (the pictures above are by far the most tasteful available), Natalie Clein doesn't play up to this in person and displayed far more genuine charm and obvious delight in music than unnecessary coquettishness. Her playing was extraordinarily fluid, with an impressive affinity for the minutiae of her instrument's harmonics, but she did err on the side of expressiveness – great for the William Walton Passacaglia, and particularly for the Pablo Casals piece with which she encored, but less so for the JS Bach suites which topped and tailed the body of her short performance, where I found myself wishing she'd tone down the dynamics and let the perfect geometries of the work speak for themselves.
It was a little hard to judge the composition "Poco and the Cage" by Fyfe Dangerfield (pictured left) – most famous as singer/songwriter of rock band the Guillemots, but known also as a composer in his own right. Sandwiched between Bach and Walton it seemed slight, more an episodic series of explorations of how many different ways a note can be bent with some "Lark Ascending" vamps thrown in for good measure than something with a coherent logic of its own. But it had its charms, and perhaps it was overwhelmed by the surrounding grandiosity and not given space to shine.And therein was the problem: like the Fairclough/Winterson sound art, it merely felt like something modern slightly out of place and out-dazzled by the density of money and history around it. But perhaps if the whole experience were not quite so rushed, perhaps if the audience were a little better briefed, it might not be this way. This was the first of several sessions of “Resonances” in four different venues, and it may well be that even just a later night or slightly extended experience of the programme might make the whole thing as absorbing and transformative of the surroundings as those initial moments being wafted up the stairs by Simon Fisher Turner's sublimely subtle tones.
- Resonances continues throughout May at Coughton Court, Nunnington Hall and Ickworth House
