Wigmore Hall
Francesco Antonioni – Ballata (2008)
David Sawer – Rumpelstiltskin Suite (2011, world
premiere)
George Benjamin – Into the Little Hill (2006)
Susanna Andersson (soprano)
Hilary Summers
(contralto)
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
George Benjamin (conductor)
This concert was the final
event in the Wigmore Hall’s George Benjamin Day. A morning concert, which I had
been unable to attend, had offered various chamber works, from Carolin Widmann
(violin), Adam Walker (flute), and Marino Formenti (piano). There had also been
a pre-concert interview between Benjamin and Wigmore Hall director, John
Gilhooly, the interview reminding one just what a difficult business
composition is, especially for someone so self-critical and exquisite in
craftsmanship as Benjamin.
Francesco Antonioni’s Ballata was a Birmingham Contemporary
Music Group commission, first performed
in 2009. Its material is derived from a
lullaby, sung by an unidentified female singer, recorded in the 1950s by the
ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, and a fourteenth-century ballade, Ecco la primavera – might we dare hope for
that at long last? – by Francesco Landini. Written for strings (three violins,
two violas, two cellos, and one double bass), it inevitably elicits sonorities
that put one in mind of otherwise quite dissimilar pieces for string ensemble
or orchestra. That the odd chord-spacing reminded me of, say, Strauss’s Metamorphosen or Honegger’s Second
Symphony probably has no further relevance than that. One was perhaps a little
closer to the mark in hearing hints of post-Ligeti swarming, albeit with a
post-Romantic sensibility that remained at least as strong. Certainly a lyrical
impulse, unsurprising given the inspiration, persistently manifested itself.
There were some beautiful ‘frozen’ or, perhaps better, ‘freezing’ moments too.
Sections were sharply characterised without sounding ‘sectional’. The BCMG musicians
appeared to give a fine account under Benjamin; commitment was certainly
palpable.
David Sawer’s Rumpelstiltskin Suite, co-commissioned
by the BCMG and the Wigmore Hall, received its world premiere. I was struck by
the balletic quality to much of this often very pictorial music. Prokofiev’s
sense of fantasy never seemed far away, likewise Stravinsky in various
respects: sonority (at times Symphonies
of Wind Instruments, despite the mixed nature of the ensemble), rhythms,
and a sense of music theatre that inescapably brought impressions of The Soldier’s Tale. There was woodwind
rejoicing, mixed with foreboding, during the section I assume to have been depicting
the wedding of the miller’s daughter to the king and her coronation; there was
spinning from the strings and harp. And it was difficult not to hear some sort
of homage to The Rite of Spring in ‘Rumpelstiltskin’s
Last Dance’. It was colourful, full of character; an excellent choice, I should
imagine, to introduced children to ‘contemporary music’.
Benjamin’s masterly chamber
opera, Into the Litte Hill, followed
the interval, Susanna Anderson and Hilary Summers the soloists. It is
extraordinary, though gratifying, to think that, although it was only first
performed in 2006, this wonderful opera has already, quite rightly, attained ‘classic’
status. Martin Crimp’s libretto helps, offering the conjunction of a timeless
morality of politicians and broken promises, with the opportunity for particular
resonances at particular times, as well of course as being finely judged in the
potential it allows for music. ‘All music – smiles the minister – is incidental.’
To which the man, Benjamin, and we, reply that nothing could be further from
the truth. ‘This is our home. Our home is under the earth./With the angel under
the earth./And the deeper we burrow the brighter his music burns.’ This country
may be less obsessed with Jimmy Savile than it was a few months ago, but issues
concerning child abduction and paedophilia insinuate themselves nevertheless.
Hearing Into the Little Hill again, so soon after the Royal Opera’s performances of Written on Skin,
one appreciates that the path is not straightforwardly linear from the former
to the latter. Some of the sounds, and indeed the ideas, are arguably more
dramatically rebarbative than anything in the Pelléas-soaked world of Benjamin’s – and Crimp’s – second opera. For
me, the furious crowd interventions, voiced though they may be by two singers
alone, evoke the viciousness of the turba
choruses in Bach’s Passions. ‘Kill them they bite/kill them they steal/kill
them they take bread take rice...’ The rats in our present-day climate could be
‘benefit claimants’ at the mercy of the mob. Benjamin’s score is, as one would
expect, beautifully crafted in its entirety, always revealing more, the short
Interlude between the fourth and fifth scenes, for instance, offering a disturbingly
exquisite hesitant journey somewhere between pointillism and arabesque. The
hieratic quality at the beginning of Part Two perhaps brought echoes – at least
in this listener’s head, on this occasion – of Messiaen and Boulez. And the
sense of a breakdown of musical mechanisms at the end sounded both utterly
characteristic of Benjamin and evocative of earlier examples from Prokofiev
(the close of the Fifth Symphony) to Knussen. Once again the BCMG did the music
proud, as did Benjamin’s own focused direction. Andersson proved an intrepid,
seemingly fearless soprano, as beautiful of voice as precise of pitch. High
notes thereby registered with full expressive attention rather than mere
technical achievement. Summers’s extraordinary contralto remains quite unlike
any other voice I have heard. It sometimes seems to possess an almost primæval, ‘untrained’
quality, musicianship worn lightly, and offered not only excellently judged
contrast with the soprano but also winning alchemy with Karen Jones’s bass
flute. A masterpiece confirmed, then, and given a new lease of performing life.
