THE TIMES FRIDAY MAY 5 1995

In tune with genius

Fretwork Purcell Room

Asking contemporary composers to respond to the Purcell tercentenary celebrations with new pieces for viol consort intended to be played side-by-side with the great man's extraordinary Fantazias is playing a dangerous game. But in the second of Fretwork's two contributions to the South Bank's festival, The English Genius, on Tuesday, all five new works had something to say.

Most said it engagingly, though I found Peter Sculthorpe's Djilile for five viols, unrelated to Purcell except in its instrumentation instead it adapts an Aboriginal chant - bland, while Gavin Bryars's In nomine for six viols suffered from the well-intentioned last-minute insertion of its model, Purcell's sublime In nomine a 6 immediately before.

Those were the very aspects that Simon Bainbridge explored in his clever, whimsical Henry's Mobile, for four viols, which also looked to the colouristic possibilities of viol harmonics. For most of his short piece Bainbridge ties himself to a two-note fragment of a theme from one of the Fantazias - a rising interval of a third. When the music finally gets away from its starting blocks, it finds itself going round in a little circle. All this is a quite deliberate marvelling at Purcell's ability to make his music grow even within the constrictions of a polyphonic method outdated in the late 17th century.

If this work would have won the prize for most ingenious homage, Dmitri Smirnov's setting of Blake's The Lamb, for countertenor and six viols, would have taken the laurels for expressivity and richness of melody and harmony and for emulating that uncanny sense of openness which marks Purcell's work.

This work was beautifully sung by Michael Chance, who also gave poised performances of four Purcell songs with the lutenist Nigel North and who, at the end of the evening, sang the cantus firmus line in the midst of the texture of Purcell's In nomine a 7.

Chance also took significant part in the most impressive new work of the evening, the Chinese-American composer Tan Dun's A Sinking Love, whose text is a poem (sung in Chinese) by Li Po and whose pitch material comes from Purcell's Fantazia No 8. The viols play exclusively in harmonics, and the dynamic level is often scarcely more than a whisper. But every sound, sung or played, is carefully weighted and coloured, so that one hangs on every microscoplic, poetic gesture in this moving, delicate expression of homesickness.

STEPHEN PETTITT