MUSICAL POINTERS:
Here is a CD which exemplifies Metier's unique flair for presenting contemporary British music to best advantage, a wide ranging programme conceived as a whole by composer Julia Usher, who has been in the forefront of composer-publishing for many years, and her 'mentor' and performer, John Turner.

The vocal texts are of the highest quality, selected from Shakespeare (Pericles & King Lear) and William Blake (Four Zoas). Julia Usher is a versatile composer of wide and varied experience, whose work as a musical therapist has informed her selection of passages from Pericles for her 'mini-opera' Sacred Physic about the meeting of King Pericles with Marina, his lost daughter, supposedly drowned at sea as a baby, and their dawning understanding of their relationship. The timbres of cello and harpsichord, with recorder and oboe/harpsichord, provide evocative support for Lesley-Jane Rogers. What is the Price of Experience? is an extraordinarily powerful and sombre Blake poem, a 'bleak yet compassionate outcry', and Poor Naked Wretches from King Lear was specially set by Julia Usher to complete the CD. These vocal items are interpreted by two fine singers who both give exemplary performances, soprano Lesley-Jane Rogers negotiating difficult lines with ease, clear diction and attractive timbre; Nikki Bloomfield a formidable, versatile musician, who doubles as virtuoso innovative instrumentalist and alto singer, an unusual combination.

A Reed in the Wind is a valuable contribution to the limited repertoire for unaccompanied oboe (and cor anglais), dispatched with flair by Nikki Bloomfield, and John Turner encouraged Julia Usher to explore 'dextrous flying fingerwork and unusual timbres' for her pieces inspired by visits to the Venetian Lagoon, which are accompanied by Peter Lawson, who also has a solo piece for piano.

This is an excellent, highly desirable portrait CD of an interesting composer, who studied at York with Robert Sherlaw-Johnson and has preserved an ever open, enquiring attitude to music and its performance.
Peter Grahame Woolf

MUSICWEB :
This is pretty rarefied stuff. Six pieces, half of them vocal, all created in sparse, chamber textures. The majority were written in the last two or three years although overall the style has a distinct feeling of 1970s mainstream English avant-garde about it. That is not a criticism but an observation. All are inspired by musically extraneous ideas: literary (Shakespeare and Blake), locational (the islands of the Venetian lagoon), a work in six movements named after winds of the world and a solo piano memorial for Usher's composition teacher at York, Robert Sherlaw Johnson.

Julia Usher, now in her late fifties, is not a name widely known to the music-loving public although her "winds" piece did win an award and found its way onto a syllabus of the British examining body, the Associated Board. Metier Sound and Vision, a small, bold organisation dedicated to the proselytising of British contemporary music, is to be congratulated on producing the first commercial CD of Usher's music. On the strength of the disc she certainly deserves to be better known and I hope it does well.

The name of the disc, Sacred Physic, is taken from the first and most substantial work. It is a dramatic monologue for soprano and three solo instruments (cello and two musicians playing recorders, oboe and cor anglais) and harpsichord based on the moving dénouement of Shakespeare's Pericles where Marina, supposedly drowned as a baby, discovers Pericles as her father. The subtitle is "a dramatic madrigal" although Usher, in her own notes, calls it, more appropriately, "a miniature, solo opera".

I found this an admirable piece. Written two years ago it seems to me to be part of that fine tradition of dramatic arioso-type English word setting that goes back to Purcell's "Blessed Virgin's Expostulation" and comes to the 21st Century via the Church Parables of Benjamin Britten. Throughout the ten sections, Usher achieves an extraordinary range of mood, supporting the highly flexible vocal line with imaginative textures wrought from the most skeletal of means. For example, take the fourth section "Arioso", where Marina calls upon her musical skills with which to get through to Pericles. This starts by evoking "the still and woeful music that we have" with subdued voice and cello, then presses onward in mounting tension as the other instruments enter in dialogue with the voice, the harpsichord increasingly providing atmosphere and jagged rhythm. What particularly impressed me was how this pacing in one small section is replicated in the sweep of the work as a whole. Part of this success is due to the extraordinary skill with which Usher has adapted the Shakespeare text and created this powerful, free-standing scenario. Lesley-Jane Rogers sings with great conviction.

The next piece listeners may find the most uncompromising. A Reed in the Wind is about as far away as you could go from Elton John's Candle in the Wind in the accessibility stakes. An unaccompanied oboe, changing places with cor anglais, describes six winds beginning with the two most well known, the Mistral and Sirocco. I remember from school geography that the first was a northerly cold blast that funnelled down the Rhône valley into the Mediterranean while the second was a sort of hot, dry, southern adversary that blew off North Africa into the same area of the Med, sometimes carrying grains of Sahara right across it and dumping them on the poor inhabitants of France who had already suffered the Mistral. Well somehow I just could not connect these dramatic meteorological events with the music I was hearing in spite of the oboe's rhapsodising, perky figurations and the way the instrument is stretched to its limit. But I must accept that this may be me just not tuning in to the right wavelength. The music is in a style very much in vogue when I was a student. I was a founder member of a small composers' club (with little collective talent I may say) and we probably talked more than composed about the Second Viennese School, Darmstadt, Messiaen, Cage and so on, not to mention the up-and-comers like Maxwell Davies. If you wrote for an instrument it was important to make it do things it was not designed to do. Funnily enough I wrote an oboe piece and I tried very hard to make sure it never accidentally sounded tonal. It had piano accompaniment though, and that was my downfall because it had conventional, easy-to-listen-to rhythms. Not the thing at all in those days.
Just as Nikki Bloomfield wonderfully negotiates the oboe and cor anglais difficulties and special effects in A Reed in the Wind, so the veteran virtuoso recorder player, John Turner, does with his instruments in the "Island Contemplations" of Le Isole della Laguna. Accompanied by piano (in an equally difficult part), the combined, contrasting effects I found convincingly atmospheric in this impressionistic piece.

The last two pieces are vocal and recently composed, William Blake's powerful text in What is the Price of Experience? is given suitable treatment with piano accompaniment while Poor Naked Wretches is taken from the aftermath of the storm in King Lear. The latter is for small ensemble and the alto vocal part is sung by Nikki Bloomfield who lays down her oboe to show what a talented and versatile musician she is. This piece was specially written for this recording and is the shortest on the disc. I enjoyed it the most, together with the longest piece, Sacred Physic. Together, they show the sensitivity Julia Usher has for the English language and what talent she has for the dramatic situation. In these recent works she has broken from some of the straight-jacketing rigours of those 1970s conventions, showing genuine flexibility with a voice more her own. On the strength of these two pieces I only wish she would write a full scale opera, well at least a chamber one. Go on Julia, you can do it. If I were a rich man I would commission it myself.
John Leeman

TEMPO:
British composer Julia Usher has made a name for herself around the regional music festivals in Britain, as well as running a publishing company in partnership with Enid Luff. Usher is also a music therapist, and the theme behind the principal work on Metier's new issue is the healing power of music. Sacred Physic (2001), styled 'a dramatic monologue' but described in the composer's notes as a 'miniature solo opera', derives its title and premise from Shakespeare's Pericles . The role of the playwright's 'King' Pericles is taken by the cello - strongly played by Jonathan Price - who opens the ten-movement piece with an impassioned threnody for his daughter Marina, whom he believes is dead. What follows in this sequence of laments, histories and arias is a narrative of how Marine, taking with deliberation the role of sacred physician, is found and re-introduced to her father. After a 'Dramatic quartet' - involving also the oboist Nikki Bloomfield and recorderist John Turner - in which the moment of revelation comes, the final 'Trio and Close' closes out in that bittersweet way that so many of Shakespeare's expressions of joy often do ('Put me to present pain, lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me o'erbear the shores of my mortality...'). Lesley-Jane Rogers sings the complex role very effectively, with a feel for the inherent drama of the work, though this is true no less of the instrumental roles as well. While it is a nicely balanced chamber piece, I did feel that scoring Sacred Physic as an often sparely textured quintet perhaps undersold the drama a little, particularly in the final measures where larger forces might have amplified the work's resolution.

No such quibbles affect the remaining items on the disc. The six-span 1981 suite for unaccompanied oboe (doubling cor anglais) A Reed in the Wind has received many performances since winning the Wangford Music Prize and is now a frequently used test piece. A set of variations (or, rather, miniature movements) based on the ancient tune The Western Wynde , each derives its character from a famous Mediterranean wind: Mistral, Scirocco, Zephyr, Bora, Khamsin and Harmattan. Usher has used multiphonics, however, not to set traps for would-be virtuosi but 'to suggest the eerie freedom of the blowing winds', most tellingly perhaps in the opening of the depiction of the Scirocco, or of the Bora.

...there is some excellent music-making to be found, not least in the piano piece Before Light Ends dedicated to the memory of her former teacher, the much-overlooked Robert Sherlaw Johnson. Composed in 2001 for his memorial service in Oxford, this is, I think, the most moving and brilliant items of the disc, one that clearly reflects the great affection of its composer as well as evoking the style of its subject's own all too-neglected compositions.

The ever-reliable Peter Lawson turns in a wonderful account, and is heard in all the remaining pieces on the disc, the major one being the suite for recorders and piano Le Isole della Laguna (1984), depicting the islands of the Venetian lagoon, Three atmospheric tone poems constitute this suite, depicting the Byzantine church at Torcello as well as the monastery of San Francesco and - it sounds to me - the birds that fly about them... What is the Price of Experience? Is an arrangement made in 2001 of a selection - 'the central focus' - of Usher's 1987 oratorio A Grain of Sand in Lambeth. ...it captures the essence of Blake's verses very finely indeed, reminding me forcibly of the music of Elizabeth Maconchy. The closing Invocation: Poor Naked Wretches' (2001) was written to make use of the performers brought together for this disc and sets another text by Shakespeare(a long-standing obsession on Usher's), this time from the blasted heath of King Lear. Here she makes a virtue of the disparate textures (also singer - the oboist Nikki Bloomfield - recorder, piano and a rainstick wielded by Usher herself)that so elude her at the close of Sacred Physic. The performances throughout are excellent, as is Metier's sound, clear and crystal like the Mediterranean.
Unknown reviewer