Milton Court Concert Hall
Cantus
Iambeus (2004)
Cantata (1969)
Tragœdia (1965)
Monody
for Corpus Christi
(1959)
Fantasia
on all the Notes (2011)
Four
Poems by Jaan Kaplinski
(1991)
Silbury
Air (1977)
What a joy it is to attend an
intelligently-programmed concert of music, all of it receiving excellence in
performance! The latest of the Barbican’s ‘Birtwistle at 80’ concerts offered
music for ensemble, some with and some without soprano, from throughout the
composer’s career. Although not presented chronologically, there was method in
the ordering of Birtwistle’s mechanisms, Silbury
Air seeming to bring various strands together and certainly offering a
fitting climax. So many of Birtwistle’s preoccupations were there – both in
work and, crucially in performance. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a
more commanding performance than that given by the Birmingham Contemporary
Music Group and Oliver Knussen; it came across as just as much a ‘classic’ as Tragœdia. Landscape, ritual, processional,
mechanism, the processes of re-viewing and re-hearing from different
standpoints: all were there, all contributed to an overwhelming culmination.
Such was the variety of expression, such was the strength of the inner
trajectory, that one simply ‘knew’ one was hearing a masterwork. And beneath it
all, beneath the ‘invented logic’ of which the composer has spoken, still lay
the example of Stravinsky, above all here that of The Rite of Spring. Snatches of sound, elements of cellular
writing, and of course the generative precision of rhythm; Stravinsky demeure, as Boulez once put it.
The concert had opened with Cantus Iambeus, which, in context,
sounded very much as a curtain-raiser. We heard Birtwistle’s process, not just
for the work but perhaps for the concert as a whole, set in motion; Stravinsky,
both in rhythm and in colour, remained and inspired. Piano and harp inevitably
brought the Symphony in Three Movements
to mind, but it was not only a matter of instrumentation. There was drama
aplenty, of course, in what seemed almost akin to a miniature tone-poem. This
incisive performance enabled us then to take a step back to the 1969 Sappho-derived
Cantata, for which the excellent
Katrien Baerts joined the players. Sometimes the voice sounded instrumental,
sometimes the instruments vocal; sometimes the relationship was more of
contrast, sometimes more of affinity. The opening glissandi offered a wonderful
case in point. Knussen and his players wrung out an intensity that was
well-nigh Schoenbergian; perhaps it was no coincidence that this was a piece
written for the Pierrot Players. Birtwistle has in any case rarely sounded so
close to ‘Darmstadt’. The closing words, ‘No longer will my mouth utter sounds
nor the clapping of hands follow,’ resounded as if a mini-Liebestod, as if refracted through the word-setting of Nono. There
was heady, even drunken eroticism, precision enabling rather than detracting
from dark expression.
Tragœdia presented the composer more fully still
as dramatists – even without words. At the close, one knew one had witnessed
and indeed experienced a ritual. The opening ‘Proloue’ offered toughness,
violence, the obstinacy of the ostinato; the following ‘Parodos’ sounded again
with a more Schoenbergian language than one might necessarily have expected,
though there was certainly no denying Stravinsky’s example too. Inevitable ‘traditional’
horn resonances in the first strophe of the ‘Episodion’ – I think in particular
of certain intervals – interacted intriguingly with the material, preparing the
way for the hieraticism to follow. Birtwistle’s unsentimental melancholy found
its true voice in the central ‘Stasimon’, after which the almost Renard-like instrumental exertions of
the second ‘Episodion’ sounded as necessary, tragic continuation of the drama, likewise
the relative still of its concluding antistrophe. As the ‘Exodos’ had us hear
the opening material with new ears, varied and yet somehow the same, I sensed Punch and Judy in the making.
In the second half, Baerts,
equally precise and alluring of tone, joined the ensemble twice more, in the
early Monody for Corpus Christi and Four Poems by Jaan Kaplinski. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, the former work, not unlike Cantata,
gave obvious hints of Damstadt, not least the flute writing, here in the
excellent hands of Elizabeth May. Vocal writing and performance alike offered
an extraordinary range of accomplishment; tension and affinity between ‘old’
mediæval and new were our dramatic crucible. Four Poems by Jaan Kaplinski proved a revelation in terms of the
continuity of composition and performance, its colours cohering mosaic-like:
never too easy, but all the more tellingly for the effort involved. In between
came Fantasia on all the Notes, which
I have now had occasion to hear a few times in concert. Its myriad of colours
did not disappoint, nor did the mastery of dramatic construction, leading to
the inevitable yet still troubling winding down of the mechanism.
