music

PROGRAM NOTE
This extended work is a response to David Hare's 1985 movie Wetherby. Jean Travers, a Yorkshire schoolteacher, throws a dinner party. An uninvited guest, Morgan, is assumed by everyone there to have been brought along by someone else present. The next morning Morgan returns to the cottage, tells the startled Jean how he insinuated himself into her home, takes out a gun, places it in his mouth, and shoots himself. This horrifying and baffling act of violence initiates an exploration of how differently people come to terms with grief. Wetherby Nocturne is a counterpart to the film: it takes its shape directly from the screenplay, including its flashbacks and jump cuts, and presents these interconnected speeches and actions in exactly the same order as does the screenplay.


REVIEW
Andy Vores' Wetherby Nocturne is a strange but intermittently compelling piece. It is not just a meditation on the 1985 film Wetherby, responding to its oppressive atmosphere and it's subject matter of violence, grief and represslon. In this it resembles some of Ran Blake's musical evocations of film noir. Vores goes farther: The piece reproduces the form of the film, its jump cuts, flashbacks, re-examination of events and motives. Its attraction is the louring atmosphere, the individuality of Vores’ voice, and the opportunity it gives to the pianist to be all the characters in a drama, or opera (in this it's like Peter Maxwell Davies The Medium).

From the audience's point of view, at this particular recital, the piece was welcome because it let Supové display her resources of color, dynamic control and mood-painting as well as of speed, attack and volume. But not all of the materials are of equal interest—some even sound like film music. There is a great narrative tradition in piano music, so long neglected that it seems highly original of Vores to rejoin it. But after a while it didn't help to think that Liszt escorts us through the whole of Dante's Divine Comedy in less than 20 minutes, while Vores was taking nearly 40 to get us through Wetherby.
Richard Dyer • The Boston Globe