"The small performance space downstairs at Schott's is becoming an essential site to catch chamber works from the interesting fringes of the British new music establishment; it's a shame that the concerts aren't more widely advertised.
It was certainly a pleasure to hear Whitty's piece ( previously reviewed on CD ) in this context, performed alongside the Franck that provided its raw materials, and up close to the performers. Thirty-nine pages takes each page of Franck's score, subjecting them to different processes of deconstruction (such as rearranging each note on the page in the order highest to lowest, or just playing all the As). The result is like a bed after the sleeper has awoken and left: a partial imprint, a scent, perhaps a hair on the pillow. It's not enough to reconstruct the person, but you can tell that someone has been there.
But Whitty's piece also has a reciprocal influence on how we hear the Franck, atomising it, remapping its material units, highlighting new aspects (registral strata, degrees of resonance, etc) while suppressing others (phrase structure, harmonic progressions, etc). In the small, tinny space of the Schott basement one became even more aware of tiny disturbance of tone than on the recording: the ring of an occasional open string in thirty-nine pages projected far out of the music, suggesting a whole new layer of material qualities within the Franck. Whitty not only seeks the essence of his Romantic material, but finds in that discovered essence things one may not expect, casting an interesting perspective on how we hear the nineteenth-century today." - Tim Rutherford-Johnson (Classical Pointers)