Wigmore Hall
Birtwistle – Fantasia upon all the notes (2012)
Carter – Enchanted Preludes (1988)
Esprit
rude/Esprit doux (1985)
John Adams – Shaker Loops (1978)
Carter – Mosaic (2004)
Birtwistle – The Moth Requiem (2012)
Nash Ensemble
BBC Singers
Nicholas Kok (conductor)
A funny programme this: not
the combination of Harrison Birtwistle and Elliott Carter, for they provided
refreshing, invigorating contrast, but the presence of John Adams’s Shaker Loops, which really did not seem
to have anything to do with either, and whose poverty of invention sounded all
the more glaring in such august company. I am not sure how long it lasted, but
it seemed interminable; waiting for the music to start proved a futile
experience. Doubtless whatever objections one may level will be countered with
an all too easy ‘but that is the point’. ‘Process music’ is all well and good –
well, perhaps – in theory, but this does not even have the courage to be truly
unbearable, in the ‘Yes, I’ll confess, just please let me out’ mode of Philip
Glass. It seems more soft-centred, more pandering, and yet ultimately there
seems at that centre to be nothing but a vacuum. The seven string players – two
violins, two violas, two cellos, and double bass – of the Nash Ensemble could
not be faulted in the incisive commitment of their response under Nicholas Kok.
How on earth one keeps one’s concentration in such conditions I do not know.
Still, at least it was good to be reminded of the æsthetic nullity of music too
insubstantial even for a Michael Nyman soundtrack.
Enough of that! Birtwistle’s
2012 Fantasia upon all the notes, for
flute, clarinet, harp, and string quartet, was given its world premiere by the Nash Ensemble, also at the Wigmore Hall. Its title does not
refer, as one might have expected, to Purcell, but rather, in Bayan Northcott’s
words, ‘hints at how, each time the harpist shifts a pedal between sharp,
natural, or flat, a new scale is set up, and … how a shifting sequence of harp
modes can interact with and guide the harmonies of a surrounding ensemble’. That
said, there remains a typical, if somewhat intangible, evocation of an older
England: real, not sepia-tinted, all the more moving for it. And beyond that,
there is a still more typical sense of the archaic, Birtwistle’s sound world –
the phrase may be clichéd, but here seems unavoidable – announcing itself
unmistakeably at the very opening. Ghosts haunt the machine: is that a hint of
Ravel’s Daphnis? (The work was
commissioned by the Nash Ensemble and the Wigmore Hall, to fulfil Amelia
Freedman’s desire for a companion piece to Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro.) There
certainly seem to be points of contact with, though not necessarily derivation
from, Birtwistle’s own Punch and Judy
and, of course, Stravinsky. But the ecstatic climate sounded here, again in an exemplary
performance, as very much part of a post-Minotaur
world. The final unwinding returns us ambiguously to a world of earlier
mechanisation: almost like a parody of Webern.
Carter’s Enchanted Preludes for flute and cello followed, thereby sounding
more mercurial, even flighty, though certainly substantial. It emerged as a true
duet (not unlike Bach’s fascinating, strange BWV 802-5 pieces). Shifting of
mood, for instance to slower material, adorned with cello harmonics, was highly
accomplished. And the composer’s own genius in transformation of material shone
through throughout – redolent, perhaps surprisingly, of Liszt. Esprit rude/esprit doux, for flute and
clarinet, was written for Boulez’s sixtieth birthday. It sounds closer to
Boulez – not just in the instrumentation, but also in the clarinet’s apparent
announcement of reconciliation between Stravinsky and Schoenberg: Pierrot and Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Again, it proved a real duet, in a
truly haunting performance.
Following Adams’s piece and
the interval, Carter returned with Mosaic,
for flute, oboe, clarinet, harp, string trio, and double bass, another Nash Ensemble
commission. Perhaps the presence of the harp could not fail to evoke the
Stravinsky of Symphony in Three Movements,
yet that haunting was again not simply a matter of instrumentation, but also of
musical mechanisms. Soon, however, the material and its development takes a
very different path. One sensed, even without necessarily knowing precisely
what they were, the guiding presence of the ‘unusual developments in harp
technique … too infrequently explored in recent times’ by Carlos Salzedo, whom
Carter cited as an inspiration. Bursting with invention in more than one sense,
Bach and Haydn did not seem so very far away either. Full of magical twists and
turns, new vistas, there might also perhaps be sensed a distant kinship with
the world of Romanticism. And, even if less overtly than Birtwistle, Carter
also imparts – again, keenly realised in this excellent performance – a sense
of unfolding drama. Instruments may sometimes be imagined almost to be
characters, sometimes as narrators, sometimes as expression of character and
narration. And yes, in the panoply of tesserae-like sounds, a mosaic was
constructed – whether entirely or no – before our ears. Wonderful!
Birtwistle’s The Moth Requiem, for twelve female singers,
three harps, and alto flute, was premiered in Amsterdam, coming to the Proms
last year. I must have been away, for I cannot imagine that I should otherwise
have missed it. At any rate, it received a highly accomplished performance. Interested in the mysterious beauty of moths from his teenager years Birtwistle
offers a magical lament, which appears both to summon up childhood and yet also
to touch upon death. A list of moth names – Scopula immorata, Depressaria discipunctella, Leucodonta bicolaria … – coexists with, is confronted by The Moth Poem (2006) by Robin Blaser, librettist for The Last Supper. (John Fallas, in his programme note, made a
telling connection with the a cappella
interludes from that work.) The nocturnal ‘moth in the piano’ makes itself
felt, yet we are haunted by a melancholy induced by knowledge of the deaths of
a number of those species. The alto flute, here played by the excellent Philippa
Davies, seems almost to echo – whether intentionally or otherwise – the fairy
world of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s
Dream. Yet, whatever the fantastical element, the hieratic, incantatory,
perhaps surprisingly homophonic choral writing is at least equally important,
once again expressing an archaic sense of loss. It is – and, in performance,
was – one of the most striking acts of remembrance I have heard in quite a
while: not, perhaps, entirely removed from the world of Stockhausen, or at
least our memories thereof. Moreover, in its once-again-undefinable sense of ‘Englishness’,
spirits one might have thought less than kindred – Britten, Vaughan Williams –
seem also intangibly to incorporated into backstory and present. At the end, we
had experienced both the sadness of loss and the exhilaration of experience.
