Wigmore Hall
Rebecca Saunders: Stirrings
Julian Anderson: Mitternachtslied
Peter Eötvös: Secret Kiss (English version, world premiere)
Lisa Illean: Cantor
Harrison Birtwistle: The Woman and the Hare; …when falling asleep (London premiere)
Alice Rossi (soprano)
London visits from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group are rarer than we might hope, though doubtless many would object, quite reasonably, that visits to the capital need not be its priority. At any rate, a city seemingly ever more starved of new music was here blessed by fine Wigmore Hall performances of six works from the last twenty-five years.
‘The strokes now faint now clear as if
carried by the wind but not a breath and the cries now faint now clear,’ is one
of two quotations from Samuel Beckett Rebecca Saunders selected to accompany
her 2011 ensemble piece, Stirrings: in this case from Beckett’s late Stirrings
Still. Although the only vocal work on the programme, it seemed to set up much
of what was to come, its title and perhaps not only that coming to life in the
opening double bass solo and what it provoked. Nine players, most onstage, some
behind us, took us on a captivating journey of extraordinary sounds that were
never mere sounds, always music, ever evolving, as if this were a geological
process. As before in Saunders’s work, I could have sworn I was hearing
electronics, but I was not: simply nine musicians and their instruments who
seemed before our eyes and ears to have,
in Gurnemanz’s vision – and Wagner’s – time become space. A sense of musical
landscape already hinted at the music of Birtwistle to come, as did that of inherent
musical drama. It is probably better to leave Beckett the last words, again as
selected by Saunders, this time from Company: ‘Light infinitely
faint it is true since now no more than a mere murmur.... In dark and silence
to close as if to light the eyes and hear a sound. Some object moving from its
place to its last place. Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more.
To darkness visible to close the eyes and hear if only that. Some soft thing
stirring soon to stir no more.... By the voice a faint light is shed. Dark
lightens while it sounds. Deepens when it ebbs. Lightens with flow back to
faint full. Is whole again when it ceases.’
A recent (2023) setting by Julian Anderson of Zarathustra’s roundelay followed. Undaunted by Mahlerian precedent, composer and performers (here the Pierrot ensemble, joined by soprano Alice Rossi and conductor Geoffrey Paterson) made something new yet old, in that sense at least like Saunders and Birtwistle. It is tribute to their success that not once did I think of Mahler, save for the occasional resonance, perhaps via Schoenberg. Stravinskian inheritance seemed at least as strongly in play, not least in rhythm. It opened de profundis – how could it not? – yet soon moved on, even before Rossi’s entrance. If the pace was slow – again, how could it not be? – it seemed over too soon, like midnight or a Nietzschean aphorism. Much caught the ear. vocal and instrumental melismata seemingly inciting one another, building to a midnight climax both dark and refulgent, touching and perhaps ironic in the brevity of its evocation of eternity.
To complete the first half, we heard the premiere of the English version of the late Peter Eötvös’s Secret Kiss (2018). Another arresting opening, this time from percussion, set the scene for a typical yet typically individual melodrama, words selected by Mari Mezel from Alessandro Baricco’s novel Silk. Five players, on flutes, clarinets, percussion, violin, and cello, were joined by reciter Meg Kubota and Paterson, seemingly bringing a silken world into existence before our ears. It was an instrumental as much as a verbal drama we heard, processes recognisably rooted in central European tradition – Webern, Bartók, et al. – yet reinvented in magically pictorial terms that were entirely Eötvös’s own, Bluebeard notwithstanding. My sole reservation related to what sounded like overmiking. I wondered whether it were simply a feature, if an odd one, of the piece, yet its persistence in the two Birtwistle pieces suggested otherwise. Maybe it was nonetheless an artistic decision; if so, at least to my ears, it proved a pity, detracting not insignificantly here and later from the ultimate coherence of otherwise spellbinding performances.
Lisa Illean’s Cantor (2017) opened the second half, verse by Willa Cather separated by entirely different, yet no less exquisite, instrumental movements for somewhat augmented ensemble, more string-focused than anything heard previously (or afterwards). Whether it were simply Schoenberg on my mind, I am not sure, but I sensed his presence at a distance in noticeably un-Schoenbergian, postspectralist (?) music: a pattern from Pierrot here, a floating vocal line there. As with all pieces on the programme, rates of change, be they melodic, harmonic, or timbral, seemed just right in work and performance alike.
The Woman and the Hare (1999) brought singer, reciter, ensemble, and conductor together in exploration of a post-Gawain landscape both alluring and threatening, unmistakeably English in its melancholy and in its vocal and instrumental reinvention of Morgan Le Fay. The two voices contrasted and complemented, embellished and elucidated, music not necessarily ‘autonomous’, yet unquestionably ‘itself’. Stravinsky was an abiding, yet intangible presence, as sure as in Punch and Judy, all the way down to Birtwistle’s musical bedrock. And like Stravinsky’s Pierrot, it was above all an instrumental masterpiece—and yet…
To hear …when falling asleep immediately
after (twice, the second time as an encore) was instructive and, it seemed,
inevitable. The 2019 commission sounded less a homage to the earlier work,
despite the return to responsorial combination of singer and reciter, than its distillation
in a new yet related world. Rilke in English translation (Jochen Voigt) and words
drawn from Swinburne’s elegy for Baudelaire here sounded more strongly in
opposition, until they were not. Instrumentalists played on as as ever-changing
voice of continuity, in this world and the evening’s music as a whole.
