A Kings Place concert series dedicated to Steve Martland is challenging assumptions created by the aesthetic his promotion leaned on when the composer was alive.
This year, Kings Place have dedicated concerts to the work of composer Steve Martland, who died in 2013. One concert this week, featuring Carice Singers, presented a selection of Martland settings alongside a premiere by Luke Lewis and music from 2009 by Julia Wolfe that created a touching tribute to a man who, for those unfamiliar with his work, was enlightening.
When Martland was in the first flush of his compositional life, amplified by publicists and celebrated by the contemporary music world, the composer was projected with a gritty edginess. On the one hand, this gave contemporary classical music some much-needed clubland legitimacy. On the other hand, for some of a certain age, it was an image that didn’t so much as empower them so much as make the coming out process more of a daunting process. To a young music student that made the prospect of Martland’s music if not challenging, then an alienating prospect.
His music undoubtedly challenged convention at the time. Yet today, Street Songs, premiered 23 years ago by Monteverdi Choir, Colin Currie and Sir John Eliot Gardiner, is a revelation. The score challenges the assumptions of the young crewcut rebel aesthetic found in the composer’s promotional material. Clips from interviews played out in the Kings Place concert go further in undercutting these assumptions – in one interview with Tom Service Martland’s energy threatens to break out of the confines of the studio. In comparison, Martland’s passionate self-assurance is missing in the classical music scene today. His unequivocal energy makes the case for his music in a way that programme notes never can or will. We don’t mourn only his untimely death so much as look on the gap he left still unfilled.
Carice Singers’ rigorous attention to detail gives Martland’s scores a freshness I like to think people heard them when they were first performed. The ensemble has a distinctive performance style. They appear unfussily normal on stage. The technique summoned by conductor George Parris is electrifying. There is remarkable precision in the placing of chords, the diction, and the articulation of phrases that is demanded by the acoustic at Hall One in Kings Place, evident in performance right from the start. Beyond Martland’s writing, in Steve Reich’s Know What Is Above You, stark textures and clashing dissonances underpinned by a relentless dry rhythmic line demonstrate the ensemble’s versatility. In contrast, Martland’s joyous Summer Rounds is far more comforting, more intimate world, with softer phrasing, warmer vowels and, when called upon, irresistibly tactile bass entries that fold the ends of phrases like the sheets of a freshly made hotel bed.
In Rent Songs, composer Luke Lewis plays to both the ensemble’s craft and Kings Place’s acoustic in inventive settings of four poems circling the theme of tenancy. The first draws on the melodic setting of a recording of Ossie Davis voicing Langston Hughes text, The Ballad of the Landlord, the resulting score leaning heavily into a jazz feel and Lewis’ pop sensibilities.
The final song seals the composer’s reputation, demonstrating his versatility in responding to events in the text rather than simply setting the text itself. In ‘Tenants’, Lewis starts with Hannah Sullivan’s elegy to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, anchoring key points in the story – the start of the fire and sunrise the morning after – in pitch centres around which the rest of the song is built. Throughout, Lewis creates a deeply resonant listening experience that treats the original material with humanity whilst avoiding pomposity or undue reverence in performance. The result is something universal and relevant, linking his work to what Martland was heard to speak about in the archive material played out.
Where the first half saw rigorous attention to detail, the second half felt comparatively underpowered and occasionally less robust in terms of precision. Nonetheless, the programme taken as a whole told a story about Martland that also served as an introduction to discover more of his catalogue.
It also underlined the burgeoning reputation of the Carice Singers. That they’re able to stage and deliver a collection of relatively unfamiliar works with such energy that it triggers further exploration of a composer’s catalogue says something about the role they already occupy. It also says that more need to experience them live. And that they likely need to record more. It seems remarkable that their last full-length album was in 2017.
Additional concerts in the Martland Composer-in-Focus series include Riot Ensemble on Thursday 11 June, and a GBSR Duo concert including more music by Luke Lewis on Thursday 12 November.
