Isabella Gellis

Performed by Joseph Havlat (piano)

CD + Digital (48k/24bit wav) - flung003

Isabella Gellis presents a formidable debut recording, The Dissolute Society Comprised of All Sorts which cannibalises Biber’s baroque suite for strings ‘Battalia à 10’ (1673) into a 35-minute epic for solo piano. Pianist Joseph Havlat’s performance channels staggering finesse, colour, and control, where Gellis’ musical layerings are matched by Havlat’s skill at sculpting sound at multiple depths and perspectives from just one instrument; the fruits of an artist relationship spanning several years.

CD + Digital

Where Biber’s original responsed to the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648, Gellis insists her work is not a literal portrait of warfare. Instead she treats Biber’s ideas as universal forms: ‘something starts seemingly light-hearted, processed via coping mechanisms (e.g. humour, dance, drink, ignorance), but it inevitably becomes inescapable.’ She keeps Biber’s eight movement form as the basis for her own transformed suite:

1. Presto I: this is quotation, Biber without filter albeit with a few percussive liberties, and heard in modern concert pitch rather than baroque pitch: a semitone higher. Gellis instructs in the score: ‘Do your utmost to convince the audience that they are about to hear a forty minute piece based entirely on the first four notes, tastefully melodramatic’.

2. Bacchus: takes the most famous part of the Biber, originally entitled ‘Die liederliche Gesellschaft von allerley Humor’ (The Profligate Society of Common Humour), and transforms it into a work of sheer pianism, which Havlat executes deftly. This movement starts dreamily, with Havlat faintly whistling Biber’s original drinking song, then erupting into more violent and capricious spells, before sinking into hazy resonance again. Gellis’s alternative translation of this movement gives the title of her work.

3. Presto II: a dance hurled at impossible velocity. Virtuosic, violent and jagged, yet exhilarating and impressive, where intervals expand and contract at breakneck speed.

4. Mars: Another example of incredible pianism, with Havlat conjuring an entire landscape with multiple strata moving at different speeds at different intensities; lights beam through the high register while the bass and middle registers run along exchanging between middle and backgrounds. Like Biber’s Mars (literally ’the march’), the music proceeds as if a procession, in and out of view along diverging lines of perspective.

5. Presto II: a dance in which the music seems to constantly eat itself, moving forward, rewinding, turning upside down, casting the baroque source into a tumbling kaleidoscope.

6. Aria: beginning as elusive dreamwork and shattering the previous movement it, beguiles in its gentle turns that never quite settling, and then, layering like a busker with a loop pedal, it gradually transforms into something totally other: an impassioned outpouring restating the original melody in white hot tremolo. Out of the climatic cloud of resonance, Havlat tenderly reappears from underneath with incredible softness in the movement’s concluding pianissimo.

7. Battle: As hommage to Biber's pioneering use of extended techniques (e.g. paper behind strings in battalia), Gellis dives into the guts of the piano, getting Havlat to touch the bass strings while playing the keys rapidly, producing a mesmeric and powerful drone-like effect that advances in waves of resonances. The regular rhythm soon complicates into shifting triplets and other patterns before keyboard notes in the bass register emerge ominously, intoning and then puncturing the flurry of harmonics above.

8. Lament: The concluding movement presents another procession of perpetual bell song; chords that toll at first softly, then stacking harmony on harmony, sometimes slipping apart from one another in cross rhythms to reveal bright melodies that ring through different registers. The movement traces three arches that reach increasingly dense climaxes until the music eventually resolves into the original’s inescapable tonic.

TRACK LISTING

1. Presto I [01:44]

2. Bacchus [03:39]

3. Presto II [01:08]

4. Mars [03:36]

5. Presto III [03:19]

6. Aria [04:37]

7. Battle [06:08]

8. Lament [10:53]

CREDITS

Performed by Joseph Havlat

All music by Isabella Gellis (2019-2021) except Presto I

Recorded and mastered by Nicholas Moroz

Cover artwork and design by Nicholas Moroz

Photography © Matthew Johnson

Created with the support of the Vaughan Williams Foundation and the Royal Academy of Music

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