Marius Neset
Geyser

“Geyser is a piece in eight movements that takes us on an elementally exciting journey in its 65 minutes, with sounds and virtuosities of truly volcanic energy and intensity, and also moments of breath-taking stillness and lyricism.” That was how BBC Radio 3 presenter Tom Service prepared the radio audience for the broadcast of the premiere of “Geyser”, transmitted on live radio from the impressively cavernous spaces of the Royal Albert Hall. The BBC Proms, widely known as “the world's greatest classical music festival”, had commis-sioned Marius Neset to compose the piece and to give its world premiere performance of the new piece for his quintet and nineteen players of the London Sinfonietta during the 2022 Proms season. To receive a commission from the Proms is a tremendous accolade in itself, and the epic scale of “Geyser” suits the unique grandeur and scale of the famous London venue.

The title, Neset says, is “a metaphor for the music’s underlying rhythmic energy, unleashed intermittently in ecstatic outbursts – like explosions of water and steam from a pressurised geothermal spring.” Tension boiling under the surface is a recurrent theme in his work, he says. And that energy is something very special. As cellist Zoe Martlew, who performed at the premiere remembers: “the shamelessly raw lyricism and emotion packed into the big themes are offset by brain-crunchingly complex rhythms layered on top of each other, and it requires 100% focus and energy throughout to keep everyone on board.” That edge-of the seat excitement is exactly what one can hear on this new album, a live recording of the concert. “Marius is a softly spoken, impossibly good looking, gentle man to meet, clearly completely obsessed by music, with a deep seriousness that suddenly lifts with a kind of boyish delight when something sud-denly comes together. His own playing is truly inspirational: packed with a fierce intensity and fire which is reflected in the extraordinary group of musicians in his own band. All of us were blown away by the driving force that is crazy genius Anton Eger on drums (by his own admission he has a slightly “whack brain” when it comes to combining irrational rhythms), the refinement of Ivo Neame's beautifully modulated pianism, and Conor Chaplin’s rock solid bass.”

“Geyser” marks an important step in Neset’s development as a composer, something well expressed by violinist Thomas Gould, the leader of the London Sinfonietta for the premiere performance of “Geyser”. He says: “With this piece Neset is cementing his reputation as one of the most original and important compositional voices of his own time, in any genre. Geyser is fiendishly virtuosic for every single player on stage. But despite the enormous complexity of the music, Geyser is immediately comprehensible to the symmetry drawn from classical music that makes both listener and performer somehow feel an understanding of the arc of the piece.” And Geoffrey Patterson, who conducted, notes that the way in which Neset writes for the Sinfonietta has always shown a deep understanding of the orchestra’s strengths, and one which has improved as the relationship has developed : “I was so happy that we never felt like a backing band, and certainly the fearsome difficulty of Marius’ writing justified the involvement of an ensemble renowned for its virtuosity.”

The story of the composition of the work speaks of Neset's honesty and authenticity as a man and as a musician. He had embarked on an optimistic work, but then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine: "I had already written much of the piece but I found that I couldn’t finish it. When I did eventually begin composing again it was impossible to pick up from where I’d left off. As someone who writes with a lot of emotion, such events will always affect the music." Neset says he "dismantled" much of what he had written and brought "darker edges" into the sequence. The final release of the geyser in the last movement "Outbreak" is ecstatic, but the route by which we get there has altered completely from Neset's first thoughts.

Whereas Neset is most widely known as a prodigiously gifted saxophonist, his emergence and development as a composer during the past decade has been truly remarkable. “Geyser” is Neset’s third work involving the London Sinfonietta, after “Arches of Nature” and “Snowmelt” (2016), described as “majestic” by Downbeat, and “Viaduct” (2018) commissioned by the Kongsberg Jazz Festival. But they are just one of the many groups who have commissioned him, and his catalogue of works has been steadily growing. The first major work was “Lion”, written for the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra in 2012, first performed at the Molde Jazz Festival, and released as his ACT debut CD in 2014. Subsequent commissions have come from Big Bands in both Bergen and Copenhagen, from the Rosendal Chamber Music Festival, where artistic director Leif Ove Andsnes, one of the leading classical pianists in the world, is a close musical colleague and friend, and also major commissions for full orchestra from the Bergen Philharmonic: a saxophone concerto, “Manmade” (2020) and also “Every Little Step” (2021), a 20-minute piece for full orchestra without saxophone.

“Geyser” was described in the concert programme as “a story in sound”. The coherence and flow of the story-telling in Neset’s composition are nothing short of miraculous. The whole venture, as John Fordham of the Guardian has previously written of the Neset/ London Sinfonietta combination, is “grippingly coherent as well as instrumentally dazzling.”