Hall One, Kings Place
Saraband:
The King’s Farewell
(2001)
Ostinato
with Melody (2000)
Orpheus
Elegies (2003-4):
Elegies 1, 3, 4, 14, 6, 10, 15, 13, 12, 21, 22, 25, 9, 16, 20, 19
Gigue
Machine (2011)
The
Axe Manual (2000)
Nicolas Hodges (piano)
Christian Dierstein (percussion)
Andrew Watts (counter-tenor)
Melinda Maxwell (oboe)
Helen Tunstall (harp)
Kings Place is at the moment
showing portraits
by Adam Birtwistle. His father, meanwhile, was the focus of an excellent
concert downstairs in Hall One. First up were two solo piano pieces, Saraband: The King’s Farewell, and Ostinato with Melody. The performances
by Nicolas Hodges revealed a good deal that they had in common, of which the
perhaps surprisingly post-Schoenbergian harmony was certainly not least. Onward
tread and audible musical process were equally to the fore. The latter piece,
written for Boulez’s seventy-fifth birthday – I remember the 2000 concert very
well – seemed to present a dialectic between certainty and uncertainty, both
principles simultaneously immanent. Birtwistle’s stopping and starting proved
mechanical in the very best, highly characteristic sense.
Sixteen of the twenty-six Orpheus Elegies, for voice, oboe, and
harp, followed. The composer says that they may be performed in any order,
provided that number one be performed first, and number nineteen last. What I
think of as Birtwistle’s realised archaism – both more real and more archaic
than any ‘reconstruction’ – was hauntingly present from the outset. The
adjective ‘elegiac’, if verging on the tautological here, really did seem the mot juste, though there is great
variation between the elegies, each of which takes a line or sometimes an
entire sonnet from Rilke’s Sonnets to
Orpheus. (How many fine musical works that poet has inspired!) For
instance, the opening of no.4 offered a hint of the scherzando following its
two predecessors, without disruption to the overarching sound- and dramatical
world. Some elegies employ voice; some are merely identified by a line printed
in the score. All three musicians, Andrew Watts, Melinda Maxwell, and Helen
Tunstall, communicated their parts and the whole with hieratic vividness, the ‘reine
Übersteigung’ (not ‘Übersteibing’, as
the programme had it), the pure transcendence of Rilke’s first sonnet approached
and verging upon instantiation. Watts also had to operate a couple of
metronomes in two of the purely instrumental movements, adding after a fashion
to Birtwistle’s ritual. The composer’s exploration of expressive capabilities
of all three instruments, counter-tenor included, proved as searching and as successful as anyone might expect.
Gigue
Machine for solo piano
sounded every bit the gigue, every bit the machine. Again, it was Schoenberg –
as well, of course as Birtwistle – who sprang to mind, the Baroque reimaginings
of the op.25 Suite reinvented, consciously or otherwise. Mechanical intricacy
was the order of the day, both in work and Hodges’s fine performance. Joined by
percussionist Christian Dierstein, the pianist proved just as much at home, as
did his partner, in an exhilarating account of The Axe Manual. Changing roles and weighting intrigued, percussion
seemingly first ‘shadowing’ piano, and then vice
versa, though of course it was never quite so straightforward as that;
there were always ghosts, and ever-changing ghosts at that, in this machine and
its manual. Drums offered a different relationship with piano from that
explored with tuned percussion. The piano as an instrument showed itself both
invariant and infinitely varied, echoing the certain/uncertain dialectic we had
heard in the contemporaneous Ostinato
with Melody. Instruments likewise merged and yet remained distinct. Rhythm
of course was very much a guiding principle, both to work and performance, but
far from the only one; Birtwistle’s melodic gift is every inch as remarkable,
every inch as obstinately, bloody-mindedly ‘English’. Yet there has never been
anything remotely insular about this country’s greatest composer since Purcell;
shades of Stravinsky (Les Noces) and
Boulez (Le Marteau and, I think, sur Incises) just as apparent and yet
just as transformed as ‘Englishness’ or the distant yet present ‘archaic’.
A post-concert discussion was
notable primarily for the ease with which, once again, Birtwistle demolished
the uncertain, meandering questioning of a certain, well-nigh ubiquitous
journalist. The Minotaur now beckons
at Covent Garden.
