Stephen Montague

“This selection of new works for percussion ensemble offers a myriad different directions, several more refined and delicate than you'd expect from music made by bashing. Howard Skempton's "Slip-stream", for instance, is the most restrained of percussive duets, with vibes and glockenspiel twinkling delicately over shimmering cymbal” The Independent, 8th September 2012 ****

“Their crisp precision and commitment to each work is abetted by vividly close-up and detailed engineering plus rapid DJ-like segues between selection that create a seamless, sustained programme.” Gramophone Magazine, January 2013

“…anyone listening to these discs will find many things to savour… It is, inevitably an eclectic mix, but, as in any well-planned song recital, the progressions and juxtapositions are continually stimulating,” BBC Music Magazine, May 2009 *****

“Unpredictable, audacious, exhilarating and continually fascinating the Songbook is an outstanding project” International Record Review

“The performances are uniformly superb...The more one listens, the more one gains from this set.” The Guardian, 17th April 2009 ***

“Composer Bayan Northcott gives an invaluable overview of British music in a programme essay. Recorded in London's Kings Place and beautifully sung and played by more than two dozen top performers.” The Observer, 12th April 2009

“NMC's 20th anniversary celebrations may or may not 'kick-start a new interest in the genre' (Bayan Northcott) but the initiative gives us a useful snapshot of British Music now, even if certain tendencies are better represented than others.
There are full texts and the imaginative design concept reflects the disparity of the idiomatic options available. Whether tonal, atonal or pseudo-tonal, some of these are found as if by chance and loosely worn, others carefully nurtured and obsessively worked. Britten remains in some ways the key figure in that his example persuades many contributors to stick with conventionally accompanied solo voice(s).
That said, his intuitive response to a text is less easily imitated than the externals of his style.
Martin Butler's Blake setting upholds the tradition in its best and purest form. Other examples might lead you to conclude that dislocated consonance, high voicing and a certain infuriating feyness constitute the defining features of British song.
There's room for the provocateurs as well. Luke Stoneham gets away with an electronic soundscape while Gerald Barry turns in a gleefully graceless recitation of Oscar Wilde. Jonathan Cole has Roderick Williams perform a sequence of phonemes while guesting on balloon.
Is a song a song at all if its text is merely a jumping-off point, a colour without a context? Morgan Hayes's Dickensian passages, ideally chosen for such a project, are quickly sidelined amid dizzying virtuosity. Chris Dench is still sufficiently hard–core to represent what was once a New Complexity. Few others appear capable of writing fast music even in short bursts, hence perhaps Colin Matthews's decision to break up the sequence with instrumental interludes. In the tradition of Stanford's pseudonymous Karel Drofnatzki he may also be behind the modest haiku setting with its allusions to NMC marketing strategy. Call me old–fashioned but my own favourite items are those in which both the original text and the passion of a composer's response are intelligible in the finished product. In Hugh Wood's George Herbert setting, careful workmanship does not preclude a Tippettian sense of exaltation.
There's a similar sense of engagement in Simon Holt's unaccompanied declamation (evoking a real-life incident in rural India) and Brian Elias's more subdued John Clare solo.
The way in which the items are juxtaposed can be crucial too; the cooler limpidity of Howard Skempton and Gavin Bryars is doubly welcome in context.
The performers range from good to excellent.
The recordings were almost all made in Hall One, Kings Place, an acclaimed venue where instrumental voices are unfailingly well projected.
Human ones, less comfortable with its zingy resonance, can become a little hectoring.
But then only a critic or a fool would listen to the entire collection at a sitting. Much better to study at leisure what should prove to be an important cultural document.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“The 1962 Harrison & Harrison in Coventry Cathedral certainly lives up to expectation in this exhilarating new disc from Joseph Nolan. All the works are challenging both technically and for the listener…The première recording of Stephen Montague’s Toccare Incandescent is thrilling in its impact and matches the wild fury of Jean Guillou’s Toccata.” The Organ

“The Smith Quartet's razor-sharp intensity is particularly suited to the evocation of macabre soundscapes, and there is plenty of it here, from the edgy agoraphobia opening Tim Souster's Hambledon Hill - where even the birdsong sounds bewitched - to Stephen Montague's purposeful and powerful String Quartet No 1.” Gramophone Magazine, October 2007

“As versatile as the Kronos Quartet, and smoother than the Brodskys, The Smith Quartet have edged ahead of their competitors in contemporary chamber music” The Independent on Sunday

“…what hits you time and again in this disc is Stephen Montague's reverence for sound (in a Cageian sense), and his reverence for a truthfulness that treads an adroitly-negotiated path between visceral immediacy and intellectual ingenuity.” BBC Music Magazine, April 2006 ****

“Stephen Montague is an American composerperformer who has lived in the UK for more than 30 years, during which time he has developed an enterprising international career. He honestly admits his sources in Ives, Cowell, Cage and minimalism, and the CD ends with four of his Studies 'after Ives'. That wonderful hymn tune 'What a friend we have in Jesus' (compare Montague's treatment with the third movement of Ives's Piano Sonata No 1) shows the unabated power of diatonic harmony, although there are surprises, and 'Forever JPS' is a spectacular which brings in the voice of Sousa himself as well as the London Sousa Band in Stars and Stripes.
Montague points out that when he borrows melodies, unlike Ives he usually quotes them complete. There's plenty of that with the varied settings of the tunes in Southern Lament. Then there are several short occasional pieces showing variety and ingenuity, but Haiku with live electronics and computer tape is more substantial.
This is a subtle, oriental-influenced piece with the live piano gracefully repetitive and the electronics sustaining this mood. When Montague uses electronics the sound is always beguiling; if he's minimalist he gets somewhere rather than being stuck in a groove; and he even manages to use tone-clusters with a light touch.
This is a consistently enjoyable portrait of a composer who knows how to focus his appeal.
Terrific performances from Philip Mead, all well recorded.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

A wonderful snapshot of music being written in Britain now. Better still, these pieces have been written for us all to play. - The Observer 1999

For pioneering enterprise, the laurels ... go to an album from NMC called 'In Sunlight: Pieces for Madeleine Mitchell', a whole host of works written for this remarkable one-time leader of Peter Maxwell Davies's performing group The Fires of London. ... Andrew Ball is the excellent pianist. - The Independent, 2005