CD Lucifer  (Poole, Sackman, Burrell)   NMCD 099

Performance  *****

Sound            *****

Lucifer …. a musical theatre bristling with everything from a portentiously Messiaenic Ezekiel to the louche landscapes of New Babylon, from a coruscating  deconstructed tango for Adam and Eve to the plainsong Dies Irae.  This is uncomfortable music, sometimes squirming in its own skin,  its dark comedy capable of laughing  with as well as at.  It’s the perfect foil to the glistering metallic sheen (concealing  a delicate contemplative undertow) of Diana Burrell’s Gold, and the vivid, twitchy, discursive circularities of Nicholas Sackman’s  Meld.  The performances, under James Gourlay’s alert direction, are exemplary – the RNCM Brass Ensemble at the top of its game.

Paul Riley  BBC Music Magazine  May 2005

Geoffrey Poole’s Lucifer  …  often opposes some jazzy or popular accents to more stringent writing with a refreshing lack of inhibition.  This is to be heard quite clearly in the final movement New Babylon, actually some sort of urban Toccata in which such jazzy episodes brutally clash with more violent, energetic episodes.  On the whole, Poole’s music may be somewhat more eclectic than that of Sackman and Burrell;  but it is – in this piece anyway – colourful and full of energy.

Philip Mead, who initiated this very worthwhile and interesting project, plays superby throughout, and the RNCM Brass Ensemble joins in most heartily.  Excellent  recording and production, up to NMC’s best standards.  Well worth trying, and quite rewarding.

Hubert Culot  musicweb.uk.net   May 2005

NB To order Lucifer on Amazon,  look for the pianist, Philip Mead

CD Septembral     Metier MSV 92061 CD

All-Poole feature disc comprising

The Impersonal Touch, Septembral, String Quartet No.3, Firefinch.

British composer Poole, in his 50s, now gets the first CD devoted entirely to his music. Its high quality shows how arbitrary recording  exposure can be.

Poole often likes to think of the piano as a set of drums, as on The Impersonal Touch for two pianos, where one pianist explores minimalist processes while the other rhapsodises.  Septembral for the Gemini ensemble is turbulently expressive.  But the highlight is String Quartet No.3 in a live recording by The Lindsay Quartet, who - the composer claims - regard him as an "instrumental sadist".   They'll also know that such sadism is necessary to obtain the remarkable sounds and textures with which this quartet is suffused.  Its aim was to capture an imaginary "Old English" soundworld and despite the fact that it can't do so by purely musical references and contains no Anglo-Saxon lyrics, it miraculously convinces.  The air of magic and mystery is sustained by a totally original use of form and sonority - menacing  rustlings, pizzicato whisperings and col legno clicks.

An extraordinary disc.

The Wire, April 2001

This release is most welcome; Poole is a very interesting composer whose music has a strong power of communication in spite (or because) of its huge stylistic variety: a maverick perhaps, but a rewarding, intriguing one.

Hubert Culot, musicweb.uk.net

Geoffrey Poole, for the uninitiated, is an English composer of excellence with a varied list of works demonstrating his ideas and ways of creating music that is fruitful to the ear, and a professional challenge for performers of the right calibre. With a record that fulfils such a promise, Poole ought to prosper (at least musically) and find growing interest from a larger sector of the market.

I like his precision in detail that builds to an identifiable 'sound' as the record progresses through four works. This is one of Poole's stylistic traits, but others of no less significance are persistent and mould themselves into the soundscape. The strength of this music lies in the cohesion of each work, present because an artist knows how to balance and blend the elements.

Basil Ramsey, Music & Vision 2001 (www.mvdaily.com)

This is an impressive showcase for a British composer whose interests range from African drumming to old English folk dance

The Sunday Times 11.3.2001

CD Wymondham Chants re-issued 2005 on

The King’s Singers: Sermons and Devotions

CATALYST/BMG CLASSICS 8287664299 2

This disc is rightly in the RCA Red Seal/BMG Classics catalog, as it is among the better albums that this group has ever produced.

 ….  The most intriguing work on the album is Geoffrey Poole’s Wymondham Chants. It is a four movement modernization and reinterpretation of fifteenth-century English carols. The prologue "Ave, rex angelorum" is melodic, though not particularly soothing or regressive. The scherzo "Tutivillus" certainly shows modern influences such as Stravinsky or Benjamin Britten. It is rhythmic, yet ametrical, and certainly not melodic in any traditional sense. The voices are largely utilized as percussion instruments. Truly this may be the most distinctive point on the album, as the group is clearly stepping beyond the traditional realm of vocal music. This is a brief exploration of non-traditional vocal technique though. The third movement is a prayer, "Mary modyr", which returns to the melodic and introspective sense that one would expect. This is the point at which the piece is at its most familiar. It is the movement which sounds the most medieval. Finally the epilogue, "Blessed Jesu" is a harmonically rich ensemble piece that sounds in turns reminiscent of French impressionism, with all of the planning and chordal complexity that implies, and medieval plainchant with its open octaves and perfect fifths providing the extent of the harmonic vocabulary.

After the Wymondham Chants the King’s Singers return to familiar pieces with two selections from the book of John Tavener. …….   In summation, this album represents solid work by an often masterful group. If the listener thinks that the King’s Singers best work is Good Vibrations then this album is probably not one that would be particularly interesting. Although certainly approachable and never avant-garde, these works are of a more serious and challenging  nature. For a fan of choral or religious music, however, the excellence  of the music and the enthusiasm of the performances make for an album that I feel I must recommend.

    Patrick Gary  Music-web March 2005

* * * * *

The critics on some live performances over the years –

Second String Quartet

Geoffrey Poole’s Quartet No.2... a product of that rare thing, a composer in his mid-forties with questing instincts still intact. Africa was his stimulus, not for “exotic” superficial colour, more as a means of extending scope and technical range

Robert Maycock, The Independent 7.10.1993

More immediately engrossing [than Tippett’s fifth] was the second quartet by Geoffrey Poole, receiving a belated London premiere. Complicated though some of the textures are, the work spoke straight, in this brilliant performance, to the heart.

Paul Driver, The Sunday Times 8.10.1993

The Magnification of the Virgin

... an exuberant celebration of impending motherhood, as fresh and detailed as a Botticelli painting.

Christopher Morley,  The Birmingham Post 11.2.1992

Septembral  at Boston USA

The equivalent of a gorgeous set of Whistler nocturnes – the bass clarinet’s key clicks seemed to come at you out of a misty purplish dark.  Elsewhere it could be tense, dense, bleusy, darkly tending to riot and dissolution, or Messiaen-like.  Episodic it was not; effective it definitely was, but not just that.  And good to hear.

Richard Buell,  The Boston Globe, 27 Oct 1999

Two Way Talking (Concerto for Ghanean drummer)

Geoffrey Poole’s music has taken Gothic abbeys, the zodiac and the seasons as its inspiration. Yet, as Sunday’s ICA portrait-concert showed, the matrix of his work remains stubbornly classical: music as dialectic, true to itself.

Poole’s way lies in finding common cause in the unfamiliar ... done with a skill and originality that reinforced the point .. At times breathtaking in its synthesis, and all done quite un-touristico

Nicholas Williams, The Independent 2.11.1993

Because it’s spring

Music of such imaginative poise and wit, so constantly surprising yet so constantly right, is rare indeed.

David Fanning The Independent 24.2.1994

Crossing Ohashi Bridge

…  memorable for its precisely judged sonorities, with the moment when David Adam’s solo violin dissolved into a rainbow of high string sounds simply magical.

Rian Evans,  The Guardian  9 February 2004

Best of all was Geoffrey Poole’s Crossing Ohashi Bridge.  He may be head of composition at Bristol University but the applause was far from partisan!  For a piece based on the fractals and Mandelbrot sets it was reassuringly ‘from the heart’, its gestures authentic, its narrative of the page-turning variety.

Paul Riley,  Bristol Venue 13 Feb 2004

Visions for Orchestra  (Symphony No.1, 1975)

In the fierceness of his gestures and his disinclination to develop and connect he might suggest comparison with the young Penderecki, though with the vital difference that his work is altogether more human and personal in tone: it offers a rare experience of direct encounter with a living sensibility.

… Visions reminded one of the similarly titled paintings by Schoenberg:  technical skill may be manifestly lacking , but the work needs that lack in order to communicate as it does, with brutal frankness…..

The RLPO, and the Melos Trust, are to be congratulated for bringing  to light a piece so thoroughly unfashionable in its vivid intentions, yet so strikingly true to its age.  It is so individual a work that it held its own alongside Delius’s Brigg Fair and even the Walton (Belshazzar’s Feast)

Paul Griffiths,  The Sunday Times  April 1986

Algol of Perseus

One of the most striking works to come my way for a long time  … the writing contains several virtuoso passages for each of the three players, as well as some well integrated trio scoring in which sensitivity and persuasion are as telling as drama and excitement

Denby Richards  Musical Opinion April 1975

Ten

A very complex and difficult work.  But within its elaborate formality …. Peter Lawson discovered all kinds of emotional and imaginative interest.

Gerald Larner,  The Guardian 1982

Slow Music

The Cretan inspiration of the work is evident in its decorative writing and in a kind of folksong refrain which gives it a kind of shape without inhibiting its very deliberate development.

It is to be hoped that, given as interesting a present as Geoffrey Poole’s Slow Music, the Endymions will not put it away and forget it.

Gerald Larner,  The Guardian July 1982

String Quartet No.1

The Poole, dating from 1983, draws on microtones, harmonics and radical bowing techniques in a highly imaginative approach to the medium.  For all the novelty of the sounds produced, this never seemed like gratuitous innovation.  Poole’s string quartet is a valuable addition to the repertory.

Barry Millington,  The Musical Times, March 1985

A work which draws one into a bewitching and labyrinthine soundworld where ideas swim uneasily in and out of one’s grasp……

The final chord is rich and affirmative, a striking conclusion to a remarkable work.

Peter Hill,  Tempo March 1985

Blackbird

No one could accuse Geoffrey Poole of lacking creative ambition.  His subject in this major choral-orchestral work is nothing less than the meaning of death – a mission to find spiritual significance in mortality, for a material and disenchanted world.

[We cannot reproduce the full-page article in full here, but it is highly perceptive]

Yet if Poole does not entirely pull off this attempt to realise the unrealisable, he nevertheless provides things along the way that are memorable and impressive, and Blackbird certainly deserves further hearings.

David Clarke,  The Musical Times, August 1994

The I Ching Series for piano -

K’un  creating music of a strange and coherent beauty

The Times, 9.1.2003

The Last Straw “careers towards catastrophe at the end”. It did, but the fearless audience chuckled with delight.

The Times, 14.1.2003

Contrived twiddling climaxed  in the big chords and cascading scales of Tung Jen, which should really have been called (apologies to Mussorgsky) The Great Gate of Chicken Kiev. Poole is head of composition at a reputed university, but this was not really student-level writing.

John Allison, The Times, 11.1.2003

Ho ho ho    .........So  much depends on the capacity of the listener! 

Finally:

Geoffrey Poole is a composer of startling originality.

Hugh Wood,  The Times Higher 30.6.2000