Improvised music in the contemporary classical tradition is rarely heard on CD, perhaps because the medium’s permanence is in obvious contradiction to the very notion of improvisation. But for this recording, composer Jonathan Harvey, cellist Frances-Marie Uitti and sound engineer John Whiting met and made music for a few hours. To judge from the brief insert-notes, what is heard here was recorded pretty continuously, with minimal editing (these musicians have worked together regularly).
Harvey’s compositional interests are wide-ranging indeed, but perhaps his most telling contribution has been precisely in the kind of interaction between electroacoustic and acoustic musics exemplified in this recording. As far as I can hear, Uitti makes no use here of her trademark two-bowed technique (the notes say that the cello is ‘retuned but untreated electronically’). For his part, Harvey limits himself to two synthesizers, the Yamaha SY77 and DX7 II (both widely available and inexpensive, as such hardware goes). I mention these technical details because the variety of expression and sounds drawn from them are very impressive. Each of the album’s nine unnamed tracks focuses in the main on a specific soundscape, and varies in duration from just under a minute to nearly 13. The cello’s character is most often very lyrical, but when the interaction between the two performers changes from co-operation to confrontation the tone changes to one of outright menace (as with the col legno strokes and grumblings in track 3). Though these harder-edged moments hardly make for comfortable listening, they are just one facet of an engrossingly varied recital. A test of one’s enjoyment of improvised music must be the passage of time, and here it just flies by. A curiosity, certainly, but in the best sense of the word: there is real musical substance too.'