Dench Fest

This year is Chris Dench’s fiftieth, and in celebration Kathleen Gallagher offered a performance of his complete works for solo flute.
I was glad that the Professor Platt Auditorium (Old Darlington School) was chosen as the venue for this concert for it possesses an intimacy well suited to the Dench’s solo flute repertoire. Its acoustic always rewards players with the finesse of Kathleen Gallagher.
The concert was divided into two halves, before each of which Richard Toop introduced the works. His insights ensured that the concert lived up to its title: ‘Dench Fest’. Drawing from his extensive correspondence with the composer, Toop gave the audience an intriguing glimpse of both the workings of the music, and of the mind that created it. For some, Dench’s music has been synonymous with inaccessibility – the performance of his music necessitates the highest levels of technical agility, matched only by the attention required from the audience. However, Toop’s anecdotes exposed Dench’s approachability.
Gallagher’s performance avoided all the traps associated with so-called ‘difficult’ music. Her playing was melodious and overtly physical. The second work on the programme, Venezia, was written for the flute virtuoso Laura Chislett (later to become Dench’s wife) shortly after their first meeting in Venice. The work is highly sensual and Gallagher succeeded in bringing forth its latent eroticism.
From Dench’s earliest work for solo flute, Caught Breath of Time, one cannot help but be aware of the lack of silence. Indeed, the work’s title refers (at least in one sense) to the act of breathing. Each of Dench’s pieces is a single utterance, internally coherent, as if played in a single breath. One must again turn to contemplation of the sensual nature of his music, especially in the light of his comment that the lack of silence where a performer can take a breath represents ‘the breathless excitement of intense experience’.
Closing Lemma (1986–91) requires the performer to sing whilst playing the instrument. A technique used extensively in much recent flute repertory, here it affords the work an additional layer of physical expressivity – the sounds are sourced from inside the performer’s body.
In the preface to dé/ployé, Dench suggests that the performer adopt a ‘Puccini‑esque manner’, and it is in works such as Closing Lemma that this kind of lyricism is overt. Gallagher’s triumph was in successfully incorporating that kind of expressivity into Dench’s works. With such playing in one’s ears, the more austere passages become equally evocative. Gallgher’s alto flute tone is particularly impressive. Breathy and seductive, its sound is perhaps closest to that of the voice.
That is not to say that Dench sounds even remotely Puccini‑esque! His piccolo work dé/ployé is dedicated ‘To the swallows and the nightingales – and bats – of La Pieve a Bozzone’. The nightingales and bats of dé/ployé are creatures of the night; the former seductively singing with swallow‑like agility, and the latter grotesque and demonic with their supersonic song. Gallagher captured the detail in this work accurately clearly defining the subtlest of rhythmic fluctuations. Throughout the concert her articulations were precisely controlled, allowing Dench’s rigorous structures to resonate.
The event concluded with mem(e) for bass flute and piano. An Australia première, this was the most recently composed work on the programme (1994). (May none of his future works have to wait nine long years for an Australian première!) Like many of the other works in the programme, mem(e) is intensely physical. However, here this is achieved less through seduction than through force.
On this occasion the piano was played by Sydney pianist Katarina Kroslakova. To conclude with this work was inevitable (the works were presented in chronological order), but after such detailed flute playing, the timbral range of the piano was always destined to sound relatively lifeless and one‑dimensional. The work’s alternation of bass flute and piano with solo bass flute compounded the problem. After each piano interjection the flute’s versatility was accentuated. Kroslakova played the difficult part admirably, but could have compensated for its position in the programme with greater differentiation in rhythms, dynamics and articulations.
As well as celebrating Dench’s fiftieth birthday, this was Gallagher’s final concert before she moves to the US. After such an extraordinary concert one can only say: ‘May she return soon!’

© Michael Hooper 2003

Published in RealTime, issue 57, October-November, 2003.