Excellent 4 star **** reviews for Strip Jack Naked CD
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The Kokoro players perform all this music with impressive virtuosity and clarity, and the rather dry recorded sound actually helps articulate McNeff’s complex writing, making this a fascinating exploration of his striking music. (Nick Boston)
Kokoro
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“Vicki Pepperdine wrote the comi-tragic libretto for Strip Jack Naked which charts the events after a women is given a birthday gift of ‘cosmetic surgery and sightseeing in Prague’ by her boyfriend. Lorelixenberg is the superb soloist.” (Rebecca Franks, February 2020.) BBC Music Magazine ****
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Planet Hugill ****
Some of McNeff's songs have a distinct popular whiff, but he never falls into easy pastiche and the results with McNeff's refraction of the popular style are intriguing and striking.
Robert Hugill
Read Robert Hugill’s full review here
And here is the full review from Nick Boston’s Classical Notes
During his tenure as composer in residence for the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Stephen McNeff (b.1951) wrote a number of works for the orchestra, and for Kokoro, the orchestra’s new music ensemble. He has also written music for Ensemble 10/10, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s contemporary music ensemble. A selection of these works has been recorded by Kokoro, and their disc opens with Counting (Two), scored for an ensemble of solo wind, strings, piano and percussion. The rhythms are spiky and insistent, and there is a constant sense of energy in the fragments of virtuosic material passed between instruments. The central movement has a different feel, inspired by ‘an altogether different sort of ordered counting’, following a visit by McNeff to a war cemetery in Italy, and it opens and closes with a mournful, repetitive lament. Growing intensity builds to an outburst from the horn, before the lament returns. The rushing third movement brushes the sadness aside, concluding the work with a procession of winding material and persistent percussion. The Four Van Gogh Chalks are for a smaller ensemble, and open with a thoughtful, atmospheric impression, Mademoiselle Gachet at the Piano, with high violin, tinkling percussion and rippling piano and wind. Venus in a Top Hat is a quirky, slightly frenzied scherzo, and L’Écorché is darkly atmospheric. The collection ends with Couple Dancing, although their dancing is unsettlingly off-kilter, and ultimately collapses into nothing, the couple presumably exhausted from their efforts. The four pieces form a great miniature suite, performed here with great energy and precision by the Kokoro players. Next on the disc comes Strip Jack Naked, a vehicle for mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg. McNeff has written a considerable amount for opera and music theatre, and this is described as a ‘burlesque tragedy’ and a ‘contemporary comic opera’. The story, told in a libretto by comedy actor and writer Vicki Pepperdine, basically tells of a woman waking on her birthday and realising that people don’t like the way she now looks – so she embarks on a drastic course of cosmetic surgery, which goes horribly wrong with dark consequences. Lixenberg delivers the highly challenging mix of virtuosic singing, cutting speech and ‘Sprechstimme’ with startling command. The full work was performed on stage in 2007, and McNeff has produced a Song Suite, containing most of the songs, for this recording. The small instrumental ensemble adds moments of jazzy counterpoint and percussive emphasis, with some occasional chilling sound effects too, and despite obviously being a stage piece, this works remarkably well on disc, a testament to McNeff and Lixenberg’s impressive ability to communicate the chilling story. The final work here is Lux, for octet. McNeff explores light, how it changes and shifts, through eight sections that follow without break. The music has a spooky, ephemeral feel, fleeting and hard to pin down, like shifting shafts of light, and the faster sections have a strong sense of energy, assisted once again by driving percussion rhythms. The Kokoro players perform all this music with impressive virtuosity and clarity, and the rather dry recorded sound actually helps articulate McNeff’s complex writing, making this a fascinating exploration of his striking music.
The four pieces form a great miniature suite, performed here with great energy and precision by the Kokoro players. Nick Boston
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