University of York Music Press

Erica Jeal, reviewing in the Guardian, commented that: 'Nigel Osborne's new work for the City of London festival embraces the event's focus on 60 degrees north with as much wholeheartedness as if he had thought of the theme himself. But it is also something very personal. Seven Words, Seven Icons, Seven Cities is a kind of aural photo album: seven miniatures for strings and choir, drawing on memories of when Osborne worked on Baltic ships as a young man, where he would see the grimy, industrial side of the landscape as well as its mythical, natural aspects as evoked in the ancient texts he uses. The words, in all kinds of old Nordic languages as well as a smattering of English, barely register. But it doesn't matter: Osborne's impressions are just that, fleeting visions rather than specific scenes, and Angelica Kroeger and Cathie Boyd's images, projected behind the choir, were generic enough not to impose on them. St Petersburg and Tallinn evoke those cities in shifting clusters, with the barest nod to Orthodox chant; Helsinki is over in a flash of buzzing bows. London brings the noisiest episode, and the longest, but even this setting of an Anglo-Saxon riddle does not outstay its welcome.' www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/10/scottish-ensemble-tenebrae-short-review Ivan Hewett writes that: 'There was enough material for a 90-minute oratorio. What we got was a delicately suggestive 23-minute set of miniatures. Wispy textures in the strings (the excellent Scottish Ensemble) suggestive of northern mist gave way to choral stanzas of an archaic modal hue. The contrast between the clanking symbolic apparatus and the slenderness of the music was bizarre, but I enjoyed the music's intimacy and beautifully crafted understatement.' www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalconcertreviews/5788100/Osborne-Premiere-City-of-London-Festival-review.html Neil Fisher was similarly impressed: 'Thankfully, his brief but effective Seven words, seven icons, seven cities doesn't try to paint individual postcards so much as string these chilly destinations together in one cool chapter. Fragments from national texts, from Gaelic to Estonian, Finnish to Russian, are mixed up with their English translations and sung with a rapt plangency by the voices of Tenebrae. As with many of Osborne's other works, the tension — more obviously expressed in the quivering accompaniment from the string players of the Scottish Ensemble — is tradition versus modernity. The “icons” in question are mostly those of contemporary technology — radio frequencies for Oslo, a ship's engine for Kirkwall — which feed into the spikier textures of the music, as well as the sombre, striking videos produced by Cathie Boyd and Angelica Kroeger to partner the piece.' entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/classical/article6675431.ece The second premiere for the summer was for the Arditti Quartet who performed Tiree at the Edinburgh Festival. This piece takes its names from an island in the Inner Hebrides, known for its Ringing Stone, which resounds when struck. This piece continues Osborne's exploration of this phenomenon that saw him work with the London Sinfonietta earlier in 2009, and compose Rock Music. www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk/project/rock-musicrock-artThat project responded to the resonant 'rock gongs' that exist in caves on islands in Lake Victoria. It was reviewed in the Scotsman: By Susan Nickalls ARDITTI QUARTET **** QUEEN's HALL, EDINBURGH THE ringing stone of Tiree, a neolithic rock gong, proved to be a rich source of inspiration for Nigel Osborne's festival commission Tiree, evoking the magical sounds of the stone as well as that of the surrounding landscape. Ethereal harmonics and shimmering strings conjured up images of windswept beaches and noisy seabirds, underpinned by polyphonic melodies coming from the Gaelic psalm tradition. This was a finely crafted, atmospheric work that ended with a recording of the ancient stone, sparkling like a halo of cut glass crystal, played through a special metal speaker. Similar string techniques were deployed by Ligeti in his String Quartet No2, but on a more agitated scale, as if all the notes were put in a blender and spun out to produce an extraordinary array of sonorities and textures. The quartet even appeared to bend time in the frenetic pizzicato movement. When it comes to cutting-edge repertoire, the Ardittis have few rivals, demonstrated here in an illuminative reading of Berg's tense string Quartet Op3. However, their interpretation of Beethoven's String Quartet in F minor Op 95, which sees the composer knocking on the door of modernism in the second movement, lacked conviction.