THE STRAD:
I hadn't come across composer Paul Whitty, but the booklet note informs that he is director of Sonic Art Research at Oxford Brookes University, and, more startlingly, that his work has found its way into spaces and contexts including the freezer compartment of a fridge in Romford and the traffic gyratory at Vauxhall Cross.

In thirty-nine pages he explains that he has ‘filtered and reorganised' each page of the Henle Urtext Edition of Franck's violin Sonata in A major, and ads that the resulting 38 movements can be played in any order.

Violinist Darragh Morgan and pianist Mary Dullea go to work on this intriguing material with panache. Both are veterans of new music, and Morgan has led the Ensemble Modern and London Sinfonietta, among other contemporary music outfits. The work is beautifully performed and spaciously recorded. Morgan's eloquent tone giving subtle nuances to the simplest of details, and the players shape Whitty's mix of fragmentary phrases and mechanistic gestures with the care of uncovering precious artefacts millimetre by millimetre.

Glimmers of Franck's original surface in this delicately put together and intricate set of movements, but Morgan and Dullea capture the sorrow at its heart of something always hiding beneath the surface, forever just out of reach.
Catherine Nelson

MUSICAL POINTERS:
For thirty-nine pages Paul Whitty has treated each individual page of the Henle Urtext edition of Franck's A major Violin Sonata, arranging them into 38 short movements (two treat two pages each, and one treats all 39 pages together). Some of his interventions are more oblique than others (there are very few exact quotations) but, even if it's rarely possible to hear the original source material, it is often possible to infer traces of nineteenth-century rhetoric through Whitty's bleached re-readings.

A large number of the movements consist of simple figures, looped over and over. Some are exact repetitions, some are varied through changes in pitch order, register or shifts of rhythm. It's not possible, on hearing alone, to be certain that the apparently exact loops haven't themselves been tweaked ever so slightly in dynamics or rhythmic inflection. At the least, the tiniest variations in tone are foregrounded. In spite of its extreme sparseness – some movements simply rotate loops of single pitches in different octaves – this music doesn't feel rarefied and inconsequential: one is made aware of the weight of fingers on keys, the pressure of the bow, the tension of notes landing precisely into their slots in the metric grid, the slow, inevitable descent of a chromatic scale. Despite distilling Franck to the faintest of vapours, Whitty still derives something with presence and palpable mass.

The 38 movements may be played in any order: Whitty is not concerned with developing a particular formal arc. Instead, we are presented the objective results of pre-compositional activity, laid out one after another in free sequence. In one dimension, the music is not active at all: all the usual verbs of development and motion that one usually considers apply only to the piece's gestation, Whitty's re-workings of his source materials, not its material existence.

Yet things do happen in listening to this piece: an accumulation of information – to do with Franck, to do with Whitty, to do with one's relationship to the other. This sedimentation sets in motion chains of reinterpretation of what came before, piecing together enigmatic fragments so slight as to leave only the faintest, most untrustworthy trace on memory. The moment-by-moment design of the piece, with its focus on slightest distortions to repeating patterns, focuses attention on the present. The larger structure, however, works backwards, reconstructing memories, organising certainties and familiarities, rather than forwards, towards cadences, resolutions and so on. We aren't dealing with expectation or movement towards a goal. Morgan and Dullea's ice-cool playing is absolutely perfect here, retaining an essential objectivity.
Tim Rutherford-Johnson

MIDWEST RECORD:
Certainly music for those who like their classical music sitting down, Whitty disassembles Franck's “Sonata for Violin & Piano” and rearranges it in a way that makes sense to him as he asks you to follow along for the ride.  Contemporary classical intervention that finds risk taking quite the norm, this is certainly where you want to turn if you never want to hear another cover of “1812 Overture”.  Certainly a good bet for the musically adventurous.
Chris Spector

MUSICWEB:
Paul Whitty was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland in 1970. He has achieved an impressive amount of performances and his work has been taken up by a host of leading ensembles and featured at many contemporary music festivals. 

Whitty has written, “Recently I have been engaged in a series of interventions in pre-existing contexts - re-reading, re-organising, re-categorising, re-distributing and re-sounding the materials that I have found there. These contexts can be scores, actual physical sites or instruments. In the violin and piano duo thirty-nine pages (2005-2007) I re-organised each page of the Henle Urtext Edition of Cesar Franck's Sonata for violin and piano in A Major ”.

I have no problem with this kind of de–construction, perhaps Whitty might prefer the word ‘re–evaluation', of already existing material and what we have here is a fascinating look at an old friend. That we can barely recognize the old friend is neither here nor there for the Franck Sonata is only the stepping off point for Whitty's work – I hesitate to call it a composition. 

Thirty–nine pages consists of 39 (or is it 38?) pages, which can be performed in any order, the longest playing for a little over 5 minutes, the shortest being 10 seconds. It's an oddly engaging work and whilst there's very little for the listener to latch on to – such as melody, harmony or counterpoint – there is sufficient material to keep one wanting to hear more. I should also point out that if you're hoping to hear any part of the Franck Sonata that work is well hidden except for the very occasional fleeting glance. 

What we have here is, in general, a kind of meditation, with minimal movement. Think of an even more static Morton Feldman but without the forward motion of the American, and you've got some idea of what to expect. But it's not without its moments of humour, which are obviously intentional. 

This is not any easy listen, however, for the source material is so well hidden that the various sections, or pages, have little, or no, relationship to each other except the sparseness of notes, and, as each page is separated by a silence, there's little continuity in the classical sense. Despite this, the music is compelling in a strangely hypnotic and disturbing way. Even more disturbing is that in the brief notes the composer writes, “the thirty–eight pages (of a piece called thirty–nine pages) can be played in any combination and in any order”, which is odd in itself. What is truly worrying is that the final track (no.38) contains pages five to forty three. How's that for screwing up your perceptions of what you're listening to? 

This isn't a work to be listened to for pleasure alone for the whole layout of the piece leaves much to the listener's imagination, and much work must be done by the listener. One can have hours of fun re–arranging the order of the tracks to get a different perspective on the music and I am sure that this is what the composer would want you to do. 

In the long run, I don't think that it matters in what way you listen to this piece as long as you listen to it and give the music time to get inside you. The performances are very fine, both musicians sustaining brief lines which seem to hang in the air as if suspended in nothingness. I am not sure how often I will return to this work for it is a hard listen but it will, once one becomes familiar with it, be worth the work you have to put into the experience.
Bob Briggs

THE WIRE:
This music poses as many questions as it answers. British composer Paul Whitty has, as he explains, “re-read, re-organised, re-categorised, re-distributed and re-sounded” each page of the Violin Sonata In A Major by 19 th century Belgian composer César Franck. Franck's goal-driven rhetoric has been atomized, and what's left is a skeleton of inchoate melodic fragments knocked out of alignment, and once familiar harmonic patterns and scalar figures that are left to roam through a suddenly alienated soundscape. Untreated Franck occasionally meanders by, and violinist Darragh Morgan and pianist Mary Dullea's emotionally flat, rigidly objective playing heightens the existential atmosphere. Whitty is playing games with our memories – both our assumptions about what we think 19 th century music might sound like, and about how his music restructures the debris. Buy why he should choose Franck – a ‘one hit wonder' composer – is anyone's guess.
Philip Clark