Press reviews: Fall of the House of Usher
London Evening Standard 30 March 2010
Nick Kimberley
Today, “melodrama” suggests overheated emotion but the word originally denoted something cool and measured: in effect, spoken opera, with speech delivered over music. The ensemble Counterpoise has boldly revived the idiom, challenging composers to strike the tricky balance that allows neither speech nor music to dominate.
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Melodrama’s natural home is the cinema, and the premiere of Jean Hasse’s The Fall of the House of Usher made the connection explicit, Hasse’s music serving as the soundtrack for an extraordinary 1928 film of Poe’s story. Hasse wasn’t afraid to sound, precisely, like a silent movie score, with the piano providing the sound of falling rain or clanging bells, but there was clearly an original musical colourist at work.
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www.classicalsource.com 30 March 2010
Peter Reed
I doubt whether the melodrama genre is likely to catch on again, more’s the pity. It was hugely popular in the 19th-century, the frisson of passionate speech delivered over music often just as overheated, and it seemed inevitable that it should flip over into sprechgesang in the 20th-century, that weird and wonderful device, half-speech, half-song, all hyper-emotion, worked to great effect by Schoenberg in “Pierrot Lunaire” and “Gurrelieder”.
There were two such melodramas in this gripping, off-beat programme devised (or, as we must say these days, “curated”) by Barry Millington, the Wagner scholar and chief music critic of the Evening Standard.
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Jean Hasse’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” uses the 1928 silent short film by James Watson and Melville Webber – an expressionist/surreal masterpiece, with some astonishing camera effects bringing Poe’s lurid fantasy of incest, death and decay to juddering life – for some very powerful mood music, finely played by Counterpoise.
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This is the sort of evening you can imagine going down a storm at a summer festival. It manages to be familiar while at the same time being really out of the ordinary.
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www.MusicalCritisicm.com 31 March 2010
Stephen Graham
Counterpoise — a violin, piano, trumpet and saxophone quartet dedicated to the cultivation of a reinvigorated and mixed-media-infused genre of melodrama — this evening attracted the largest audience I've yet seen to Hall Two of King's Place. The inclusion of world and London premieres amidst a macabre themed programme of spoken word, film music, and music theatre seems to have paid off; the crowd was replete and rapt.
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Narrator Johanna Lonsky effortlessly engaged in her prelude to the group's confident performance of Jean Hasse's music to accompany the mesmerising cinematic expressionism of Watson and Webber's 1928 short The Fall of the House of Usher, the visual superimpositions and glissades of which Hasse matched with suitably inventive, kaleidoscopic sonic expressionism of her own.
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A fine concert enriched by a tightly woven contrast of extra-musical media and poetry.
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The Guardian 1 April 2010
George Hall
This unusual programme by an unconventional ensemble of violin, trumpet, saxophone and piano brought together film, music and speech and featured two world premieres.
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Jean Hasse's new score for Watson and Webber's 1928 avant-garde short The Fall of the House of Usher took a more interventionist approach, aligning its spiky poetry neatly with dreamlike imagery.
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A fine concert enriched by a tightly woven contrast of extra-musical media and poetry.
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The Independent on Sunday 4 April 2010
Anna Picard
Gothic horror was the main course in Counterpoise's Kings Place recital, with a side-dish of tongue-in-cheek. Loved to Death contrasted two treatments of Edgar Allen Poe: Ross Lorraine's bone-china setting of "The Oval Portrait" for narrator, violin, saxophone, piano and trumpet, and Jean Hasse's shivery, brushed-metal accompaniment to Watson and Webber's 1928 surrealist film, The Fall of the House of Usher.
