Milton Court Concert Hall
Vaughan Williams – Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis
Holst – Eight Canons: ‘If you love songs,’ ‘Lovely Venus,’ ‘David’s Lament
for Jonathan,’ ‘The Fields of Sorrow’Birtwistle – The Fields of Sorrow
Birtwistle – Melancolia I
Vaughan Williams – Flos Campi
Joy Farrall (clarinet)
Helen Tunstall (harp)Clare Finnimore (viola)
Britten Sinfonia Voices (director: Eamonn Doughan)
Students from the Royal Academy of Music
Britten Sinfonia
Baldur Brönnimann (conductor)
This final concert in the
Barbican Centre’s ‘Birtwistle at 80’ series – I managed to attend all but one –
presented some of the composer’s music in a more general English context. Whilst there are doubtless correspondences to
be drawn here, I could not help but wonder whether something a little more
international might have been preferable. There are strands of pastoralism –
albeit of rather different nature – and melancholy in common, but might it not
have been more revealing to hear either some music from the more distant past or
music from Birtwistle’s contemporaries? The Britten Sinfonia nevertheless
offered fine performances under Baldur Brönnimann, joined by students from the
Royal Academy of Music for Melancolia I.
Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
received an excellent, very ‘different’ performance: perhaps in part, though
this is too easy an answer by itself, the result of having a conductor
unburdened by a host of ‘traditional English’ associations? The score sounded
febrile, almost Baroque (in a positive sense); but Ravel was present too, and,
despite the small forces, so was lushness of sound. Structure was admirably
clear – and meaningful, developmental in spite of the tendencies to stasis.
Novelty of interpretation notwithstanding, the aforementioned vein of
melancholy remained.
The interest Holst seems to
have held for Birtwistle is understandable. Birtwistle is quoted in the
programme as having described his predecessor as ‘a strange, shadowy figure’,
who ‘didn’t really ever find himself and suffered from the English label’. No
one could accuse Birtwistle of having failed to find himself, but the blurred
line between ‘English’ and ‘continental’ music may suggest something in common.
One can also imagine Birtwistle having set some of the same texts, especially
in the case of the Eight Canons from
1932. I wondered whether the performances from Britten Sinfonia Voices were
sometimes a little too bright in character for the texts, imbued as they are
with loss. Words were not always as distinctly communicated as they might have
been. That said, one had due sense of the musical processes at work, as one did
with Birtwistle’s own Ausonius piece, The
Fields of Sorrow, which followed on immediately from Holst’s (seemingly
unknown to Birtwistle at the time of composition) From the piano opening and
English horn response, to the very close, this was a melancholy, but never
maudlin, experience, its symmetries seemingly both reflective of and helping to
construct an imaginary – ‘mechanical pastoral’? – landscape. ‘Old flowers that
were once bewailed names of kings’ came to life – and, perhaps, to death in the
final antiphonal exchanges.
Melancholia
I came in 1976, five
years after The Fields of Sorrow. The
composer’s tool of ‘stasis in progress’ was audibly present not only in work
but also potent, well-shaped performance. Joy Farrell’s performance on clarinets
and Helen Tunstall’s on harp were irreproachable, the former perhaps inevitably
bringing to mind ghosts of Pierrot,
however different the material and its working. Swarming strings, the Royal
Academy players significantly augmenting their ranks, offered spatial as well
as dramatic distinctions. A return to Vaughan Williams for the final Flos campi brought an apparent echo of
the English horn from The Fields of
Sorrow. The performance was purposeful, with excellent singing and playing
from all concerned; Clare Finnimore made a fine last-minute replacement for the
indisposed Maxim Rysanov. Vaughan Williams’s sensual, wordless delight may be
very different from Birtwistle’s landscapes, but there is virtue in contrast as
well as in correspondence, and in practice one is likely to find, as here,
something of both.
