Nash Inventions - Stravinsky, Holt, Grime, Davies, Carter, Casken, Matthews, and Anderson, 18 March 2025

Wigmore Hall

Stravinsky: Concertino
Simon Holt: Acrobats on a loose wire (world premiere)
Helen Grime: Long have I lain beside the water (world premiere)
Davies: String Quintet
Carter: Mosaic
John Casken: Mantle (world premiere)
Colin Matthews: C.A.N.O.N. (world premiere)
Julian Anderson: Van Gogh Blue

Claire Booth (soprano)
Nash Ensemble
Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

Founded in October 1964 by Amelia Freedman at the Royal Academy of Music, a shortish walk away from the Wigmore Hall, the Nash Ensemble is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary season, this the culminating concert in a day’s events of ‘Nash Inventions’ that was but one part, broadly speaking the ‘new music’ part, of that season. As Harrison Birtwistle noted, quoted in the programme, the Nash is and has been unusual in ‘dedication to the old and the new’. Here, no fewer than four world premieres were heard alongside other Nash commissions, plus Stravinsky’s Concertino. 

Stravinsky’s 1920 piece for string quartet received a performance making it sound as new as the day it was born, now of course more than a century ago. Incisive, even aggressive, the Nash’s account showed that rich tone was not inimical to such qualities, quite the contrary. Quite rightly, this singular work sounded unlike anything else, although certain approaches to The Soldier’s Tale made a welcome impression.

Simon Holt’s new work, Acrobats on a Loose Wire, for flute (in the balcony above and behind) and string trio draws inspiration from a painting by Jusepe de Ribera. Its clear trajectory, the flautist moving from piercing piccolo to alto flute and finally to (standard) C flute, seemingly unaware of the string trio on stage proved engaging and brimming with melody of a kind one might almost, borrowing from Wagner, call ‘unendlich(e)’. 

Soprano Claire Booth and conductor Martyn Brabbins joined flute, clarinet, string trio, and harp for the premiere of Helen Grime’s  Long have I lain beside the water in its chamber version. Originally, it was the final song in a cycle for orchestra and solo soprano, to words by Zoe Gilbert. ‘A lament’, to quote Gilbert, ‘by a murderous sister, a tale of jealousy and love,’ it opens with a single pitch passed from woodwind to soprano, other instruments joining around them (descending). Words and music seemed to form an indissoluble union, both as work and performance, whether melismatic or syllabic. In that, they gave a taste – rather more than that – of gripping drama in which every note counted: both song and scena, it seemed. Typically vivid of timbre, it made me keen to hear the larger work from which it comes. 

Next came Peter Maxwell Davies’s 2014 String Quintet. Whether it was quite the right time and place to hear it, I have my doubts. It made for a long evening with this broad span of four movements. Still, if there were few surprises here, there was unquestionably compositional craft. The first movement in particular, entitled ‘Chacony’, might initially have sounded conventional, and the music is naturally distant from the anger of the composer’s youth; its ambiguities nonetheless suggested something more elusive the closer one listened. An oblique ‘Reel’, a broad, sometimes anguished ‘Slow Air’, and the whirlwind of a vigorous closing ‘Stamash’ brought us to the interval. 

Elliott Carter’s 2004 Mosaic, taking a further decade’s step back, proved a fine counterpart in context to the Grime piece. Once again, every note counted in a bejewelled mosaic for flute, oboe, clarinet, harp, string trio, and double bass. It evinced all the vigour of a young composer and all the wisdom of the composer’s actual years in a setting so exquisite one might reach for the word ‘Mozartian’. There was certainly no gainsaying the vibrance of the performance. If every aspect of form were not immediately to be grasped, it was certainly, like a mosaic, to be perceived as a whole. 

Returning to 2024, John Caskeen’s Mantle for piano and wind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn) offered a different sort of ‘classical’, perhaps in some ways closer to Stravinsky’s brand (though hardly to the Concertino heard on this occasion). Again, one sensed, even if one could not necessarily grasp, the music mapped out before us in another vividly present performance. As with most of the music heard this evening – excepting the Davies Quintet – there was a suggestion of it having covered such ground as might have been expected from a considerably longer piece, its span if not short, then certainly not long. It pulsed with life and clear, sonata-like direction. 

Colin Matthews’s new commission, C.A.N.O.N. for soprano and piano trio, took its leave from a 2022 setting of Christopher Reid’s poem ‘O’ for what would have been Oliver Knussen’s 70th birthday. Its first part, ‘C’ for Claire, did not actually include Claire Booth: instead, we heard a wistful, even Romantic movement for piano trio. Instant contrast was offered with an ‘A’ vocal movement (as with the rest, words by Reid) for ‘Anonymals’, ‘the numberless nameless ones’, but also for ‘Amelia’. Both singer and composer truly used the words to shape music—and, so it seemed, vice versa. ‘N’ for ‘Nightingale’ and ‘Nash’ offered the bird’s voice, I think, first in the trio, then reflected in the vocal writing. ‘O’ was clearly very much the heart of the material; that I could tell before having read the composer’s note. And ‘Narwhals’, once again for ‘Nash’, felt from the outset as a finale, its music founded on yet never merely dictated by the words it ‘set’.

Again without prejudice to any music in particular, I felt the second half might have benefited from one fewer piece. Julian Anderson’s Van Gogh Blue, for which Brabbins returned to conduct an ensemble of flute, two clarinets, harp, viola, and cello, nonetheless made for a characterful and characteristic conclusion. Sparer though also more luxuriant, perhaps more ‘Gallic’ in sensibility, it formed a beautifully crafted homage to Van Gogh’s paintings in musical images of the colour blue from dawn to midnight. The brightness of the latter made for a fitting, somewhat disturbing evocation of Starry Night in light of the painter’s suicide: clarinets again above, a quarter-tone apart.

 

Birtwistle at 80 (3) - Yan Tan Tethera, Britten Sinfonia/Brönnimann

Barbican Hall

Alan – Roderick Williams

Caleb Raven – Omar Ebrahim

Hannah – Claire Booth

Piper/Bad’Un – Daniel Norman

Jack – Ben Knight

Dick – Benjamin Clegg

Davie – Joe Gooding

Rob – Duncan Tarboton

John Lloyd Davies (director, design, lighting)

 

Britten Sinfonia Voices (director: Eamonn Dougan)

Britten Sinfonia

Baldur Brönnimann (conductor)

A month in which London, or indeed anywhere else, saw one performances of a Birtwistle drama would be something. To have two, plus three associated concerts, all at the same venue, is something very special indeed. The Barbican has certainly done the composer proud with its ‘Birtwistle at 80’ series. Would that Britain’s greatest composer since Purcell were regularly so honoured; the contrast with the absurd overkill of last year’s Britten anniversary is instructive. At any rate, Yan Tan Tethera, written in 1983-4, first performed in 1986, and very rarely heard since – might Channel 4 make available its television broadcast? – shone both on its account and for the fuller sense it offered of Birtwistle’s music0-dramatic development.  

 

To a libretto by Tony Harrison – any chance of seeing and hearing their Oresteia, someone? – this may perhaps seem more conventionally a chamber opera than Birtwistle’s earlier music-theatre pieces. And yet, listen more closely, and this tale of North and South, of shepherds counting sheep, of a malevolent piper, becomes more complex. There is a linear story, yes. Alan, the good, northern shepherd, who adheres to the old counting system, ‘yan, tan, tethera, …’ is drawn into the great hill – a precursor to Benjamin’s ‘little hill’? – by the piper and Caleb seems about to triumph, but the tables are turned. A modern, yet timeless, folk-like version of Virgil’s first Eclogue, Alan and Caleb the new Meliboeus and Tityrus, is far, however, from the whole, or perhaps better the only, story. The interaction, and at times apparent lack of it, between Harrison’s words and Birtwistle’s score are at least as much the story.


We are, as it were, in a ‘secret theatre’ once again. The ‘mechanics’ of the ‘mechanical pastoral’ tell of a story perhaps deeper than Virgil, even than Theocritus. Counting itself is both external and internal drama, which repeats, is broken, is reconstructed, yet is never the same. The choral sheep are counted and ultimately they too count. Birtwistle’s division of the ensemble into groups is part of that story, so is the journey towards unison,  but, as Paul Griffiths noted in the final line of his helpful programme synopsis: ‘Alan leads his family and flock: Everyone is counting, eventually including Caleb underground, as the musical machinery moves on, now set aright.’ Who knows, however, whether the different perspectives, different pulses, different landscapes, different soundworlds we have passed through, will reassert themselves once again? Interestingly, and tellingly, Birtwistle (quoted in Michael Hall’s book on the composer, likened the structuring of his response to the libretto to that of Stravinsky to Auden. Yan Tan Tethera

… has things I’ve never done before and I’m really quite excited about it. Did you know that it was Stravinsky who divided Auden’s text for The Rake’s Progress into recitatives and arias? Auden wrote his libretto without the divisions. Well, I’m imposing something on Tony Harrison’s libretto. Had I asked Tony to provide it for me, it wouldn’t have worked; the result would be too formal in the wrong sense, too predictable.

 

As so often with this composer, anything but a Stravinsky epigone – there have been more than enough of those – but rather a true successor, the musical drama has a good deal of inspiration, conscious or otherwise, in his great predecessor. As Jonathan Cross has noted, the very notion of the ‘mechanical pastoral’ is rooted in ‘the imaginary song of a mechanical bird,’ just like Stravinsky’s Nightingale. The opposition between North and South, country and the town that encroaches upon it, above all natural and mechanical, may perhaps prove a further kinship between the two composers.

 

If at first, then, I was a little disappointed by the necessarily basic nature of John Lloyd Davies’s ‘concert hall staging’, I realised after the event that the concentration necessity had thrown upon the music had very much its own ‘dramatic’ virtues too, enabling me to experience and indeed to conceptualise crucial oppositions in a work I had never heard before. For that, of course, a great deal of praise must be accorded the excellent performances. Baldur Brönnimann’s leadership of the equally fine Britten Sinfonia and Britten Sinfonia Voices was assured and (mechanically) expressive throughout. String glissandi – are they echoes of Tippett perhaps? – embodying, to quote David Beard, ‘both Alan’s subjective expression and the representative pastoral anecdote’ evoke both human acts and, perhaps still more so, that of the landscape, as ever with Birtwistle a potent force indeed.  Such was undoubtedly apparent even from this, my first acquaintance with the work. Likewise the distinction between the almost conventionally haunting piper’s melody – still lodged in my memory – and the dramatic mechanisms surrounding it. The scintillating brilliance of the Britten Sinfonia’s response to the score was not the least of the evening’s revelations.

 

Roderick Williams’s Alan and Omar Ebrahim’s Caleb – extraordinary to think he appeared also in the premiere – led a fine cast, all attentive to words, music, and disjuncture. William’s naïve, northern sincerity – flat vowels and all, though sometimes they came and went – contrasted just as it should with Ebrahim’s ‘southern’ malevolence. Claire Booth offered a typically fine performance as Alan’s wife, Hannah, beautiful of tone, dignified and assured of purpose. Daniel Norman’s Piper or Bad’Un, and four boys from Tiffin School, Kingston, all made their mark very well too. Above all, this was a splendid ensemble performance. Now, may we hope for a fully staged version, in which dramatic oppositions receive some degree of visualisation from an aurally alert director?  

 

Total Immersion - Oliver Knussen at 60, 4 November 2012

Music Hall, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Barbican Hall,

Masks, op.3 (1969)

Three Little Fantasias, op.6a (1970, rev.1983)
Trumpets, op.12 (1975)
Songs Without Voices, op.26 (1991-2)
Sonya’s Lullaby, op.16 (1977-8)
Océan de terre, op.10 (1972-3, rev.1976)

Martha Lloyd (flute)

Maud Millar, Olivia Robinson (sopranos)
Richard Uttley (piano)
Guildhall New Music Ensemble
Richard Baker (conductor)

Autumnal, op.14 (1976-7)

Variations, op.24 (1989)
Secret Psalm (1990, rev.2003)
Prayer Bell Sketch, op.29 (1997)
Ophelia’s Last Dance, op.32 (2009-10)

Alexandra Wood (violin)
Ryan Wigglesworth, Huw Watkins (piano)

Flourish with Fireworks, op.22 (1988, rev.1993)

Choral, op.8 (1970-72)
Whitman Settings, op.25a (1991, orch.1992)
Horn Concerto, op.28 (1994, rev.1995)
Two Organa, op.27 (1994)
Requiem – Songs for Sue, op.33 (2005-6)
Symphony no.3, op.18 (1973-9)

Claire Booth (soprano)

Martin Owen (horn)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Oliver Knussen (conductor)

The Barbican and BBC have done Oliver Knussen proud on his sixtieth birthday. Following magical performances of his two operas on the Saturday night, Sunday saw three concerts plus a typically informative, well-crafted, and enjoyable film from Barrie Gavin, made for Knussen’s fiftieth and now re-shown here. The only real disappointment was the round-table discussion following the film, which suffered from an evident lack of preparation, degenerating into, or rather never raising itself above, generalised, aimless chat. Anyway, enough of that.

 

The first concert, for which the Guildhall New Music Ensemble formed the backbone, presented various chamber works. Masks from 1969 was the earliest as well as the first. Written for solo flute with ad lib. glass chimes, it is harmless, though the flautist’s wandering around now seems very much of its time. Martha Lloyd (with George Barton on percussion) performed it ably; I fear that, unless the composer is Debussy or Berio, I am not the most responsive of listeners to the solo flute, its arabesques and so forth soon resembling each other all too readily. A step or two steps up nevertheless from the vapid conservatoire pieces one often endures from the instrument. Three Little Fantasies, for wind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn) was more interesting. For me, the first movement’s opening bars echoed in their intervals – and sonority – Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony. Soloists all had their chance thereafter to shine. (I am not sure why Bayan Northcott, in his notes, described this movement as ‘very short’; it did not seem much shorter than either of the other two.) The slow movement benefited from Stravinskian poise, though its predecessor might have benefited from greater precision at times, especially from the horn. Canonic procedures came audibly to the fore in the third movement. Trumpets, for soprano and three clarinets, sets a text by Georg Trakl. Language, vocal line and instrumentation – I immediately thought of Schoenberg’s op.29 – combined to give the piece a recognisably post-Schoenbergian air. Clarinet flourishes were expertly handled by all concerned, Millar offering a nicely variegated performance.

 

Songs without Voices is in four movements. The instrumentalist offered a much sharper response than in the wind quintet piece, suggesting that here, as in Trumpets, they benefited from Richard Baker’s presence on the podium. A string presence too was welcome, not only from the point of view of variety, but also because the Guildhall string players, the violinist and cellist in particular, played so well, the latter clearly relishing his second movement solo. Each movement was intricate and focused, both as work and performance. In Sonya’s Lullaby, for solo piano, Knussen echoes Debussy, Ravel, and Schoenberg once again. It is a finely wrought piece, the tritonal tension between B and F audibly pervasive – and I am sure it would be, even did one not have the technical language to describe it. Richard Uttley’s performance was as assured as the piano writing itself. The dark instrumental opening, de profundis, of Océan de terre registered deeply in every sense, Knussen’s material arising out of those depths, creating a ravishing sound-world, especially beautiful in terms of solo writing for violin and flute, as well as an active percussion section. Olivia Robinson’s deeply resonant, admirably detailed vocal performance deserves special praise.

 

The second of the two Guildhall-based concerts involved music for solo piano, solo violin, and violin and piano. Autumnal, the piece for violin and piano, showed, should anyone have doubted this, that audibly generative serial processes need not be opposed to freedom; indeed, they can act as its guarantor. Shades of Britten in the harmonies were brought to the fore lovingly by Alexandra Wood and Huw Watkins. Ryan Wigglesworth’s performance of the piano Variations brought us closer to Webern, as the title – and form – might imply. Again, Knussen’s developmental writing was ably brought out in performance. Secret Psalm, for solo violin, was a memorial piece for Michael Vyner, Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta. Northcott’s notes referred to the slow movement of a nineteenth-century violin concerto as the music closest to Vyner’s heart and Knussen’s point of reference; Wood’s warmly Romantic performance eventually revealed this to be the Brahms concerto. Schoenberg – op.11 and op.19 – was again evoked in the Prayer Bell Sketch, performed by Wigglesworth, Debussy too, even if mediated by Takemitsu, for whom the piece acts as a memorial. Its powerful climax is mitigated yet brought into retrospective relief by a magical falling away, tolling in the distance. Watkins performed the newest piece, Ophelia’s Last Dance with equal artistry. Knussen’s side-slipping harmonies put me in mind of Prokofiev; I even wondered whether the ‘graceful source melody’, in Northcott’s apt description, had a hint of Poulenc to it, but perhaps that was merely my fancy. Ghosts of Gaspard de la nuit certainly seemed to be fleetingly apparent – and could one ask for a better pianistic model than that? – if without Ravel’s hyper-virtuosity.

 

The final, orchestral concert opened with Flourish with Fireworks, scintillating as work and performance, debt to and difference from Stravinsky equally apparent. Choral, for wind, percussion, and double basses. It did not seem to me an especially characteristic piece, almost akin to Stockhausen’s surprisingly conventional Jubilee, which I heard Knussen conduct at the Proms in 2010. The Whitman Settings, sung by the ever-wonderful Claire Booth, served once again to remind us of Knussen’s gift for vocal composition – and his evident love of the soprano voice. Perhaps there was here a hint of Copland, injected into a world recognisable from the operas. The magical orchestral background of ‘A Noiseless Patient Spider’ reminded us, should anyone have required that reminder, of the mutually beneficial experiences of Knussen’s work as composer and as conductor. The sense of open space – quite aptly for Whitman – seemed as much metaphysical as anything else. Martin Owen joined the band for a remarkable performance of the Horn Concerto, the soloist’s delivery as flawless and as committed as the conductor’s and the orchestra’s. (It is a while since I have heard the BBC SO on such excellent form: a cause for rejoicing in itself.) Perhaps it is a matter of the solo instrument as much as anything else, but late Romantic resonances seemed to abound, turns of phrase echoing Mahler and Strauss, the latter also seemingly an inspiration (Till Eulenspiegel) for the virtuosic orchestral writing. I wonder whether he also inspired, in his Second Horn Concerto, the interplay between solo and orchestral horns. Such fantastical Romanticism also brought the Henze of, say, the Fourth Symphony or König Hirsch, to mind. (Knussen has certainly conducted the symphony. Now if only someone would schedule the opera...)

 

The white-note musical box ‘Notre Dame des Jouets’ is, orchestrated, the first of the Two Organa. Its mechanised play provides a link, despite the very different chromatic language, with the finely yet densely layered second. Both exhibited, once again, Knussen’s characteristic brand of orchestral fantasy. Knussen dedicated the performance of Requiem – Songs for Sue, written as a memorial for his wife, to the memory of Henze, not just as composer, but as Knussen reminded us, a vital part of the ecosystem of London musical life, having assisted three generations of composers in this country as well as his own. The different languages – English, Spanish, English, and German – of the four songs elicited differences in vocal style, ably projected by Booth, but the character of each song was not so much a ‘reflection’ of the language as evidence of the synergy of setting and formal progression in combination.

 

Finally, we heard the Third Symphony. A fantastical sound world once again announced itself, with all manner of possible correspondences: Henze, Stravinsky, Ravel, Dukas, et al. But that is not to say they were necessarily ‘influences’, for this is very much a coherent whole; orchestral mastery sings its own praises. Structure, on both a micro- (motivic, cellular) as well as a macro-level was always admirably clear, without any sense of abstraction or imposition; it always seemed inherent in the material, which of course it is. The use of a chorale perhaps inevitably brought Messiaen to mind, though the differences are more telling. There is none of the hieratic quality of the French master in this work; it is far too busy, a star burning bright. And, unlike Messiaen, Knussen is never tempted, at least not on the evidence of these three concerts, to overstay his welcome. He only takes as much time as is absolutely necessary: a welcome attribute indeed.

Where the Wild Things Are, Higglety Pigglety Pop! Barbican, 3 November 2012

Images: Mark Allan/Barbican

Where the Wild Things Are


Max – Claire Booth

Mama/Voice of Tzippy – Susan Bickley
Moishe – Christopher Lemmings
Emil – Graeme Broadbent
Aaron – Jonathan Gunthorpe
Bernard – Graeme Danby
Tzippy – Charlotte McDougall


Higglety Pigglety Pop!

Jane – Lucy Schaufer

The Potted Plant/Baby – Susanna Andersson
Rhoda/Voice of Baby’s Mother – Claire Booth
Cat-Milkman/High Voice of Ash Tree – Christopher Lemmings
Pig-in-Sandwich-Boards – Graeme Danby
Lion/Low Voice of Ash Tree – Graeme Broadbent

Netia Jones (director, designs)

Britten Sinfonia

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)



Max (Claire Booth)

Marking Oliver Knussen’s sixtieth birthday came a BBC Total Immersion weekend at the Barbican: a double-bill of Knussen’s two operas written in collaboration with Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are and Higgledy Piggledy Pop! on Saturday, followed by a day of two chamber concerts, a film, and an orchestral concert conducted by the composer himself on Sunday. This co-production of the two operas with the Aldeburgh Festival and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association was a delight. Netia Jones employs a cunning, loving mix of animation and live action to retain as much as humanly possible of Sendak’s celebrated drawings. Sometimes we see more of one than the other, though the principal characters – the boy Max in Where the Wild Things Are and Jennie the Sealyham Terrier in Higglety Pigglety Pop! – are ‘real’ throughout. How much lies their – or our? – imagination? What is real anyway? The use of animation for the monsters save at the beginning and end of the first opera – we see the singers go behind a screen and emerge at the end, and of course we hear the, throughout – heightens our questioning. The screen in neatly reversed in Higglety Pigglety Pop! so that we see the secondary characters both on stage and on film. Again, what is real? Are not both varieties of apparition and/or depiction? In the land of the Mother Goose World Theatre, all the world’s a stage – a tribute, surely, as much to Stravinsky and his Rake’s Progress tribute to Mozart, the latter parodied in Knussen’s final scene, as to Ravel. (Both Higglety and Don Giovanni end 'outside' their dramas, in bright if tarnished D major.) The repetitions of that gala performance, the time-honoured tradition of a play within a play, unsettle as they should. What do they mean? When will they stop? Again, what, and who, is ‘real’? That is very much the stuff of imaginary worlds, strongest for some in childhood, but for many of us just as powerful in subsequent stages of our lives.

 

 

 

Crucially, the sense of fantasy in libretto and production is at the very least equally present in Knussen’s scores, kinship with Ravel especially apparent in Where the Wild Things Are. And we all know who composed the most perfect operatic depiction of childhood... Stravinsky sometimes seems close too, for instance in the fiercer rhythmically driven music of the second scene (Mama and her hoover), the Symphony in Three Movements coming to my mind. And the musical material itself of course delightfully pays tribute both to Debussy’s La boîte à joujoux and most memorably to Boris Godunov, direct quotation reminiscing of the Tsar’s ill-fated coronation when Max is crowned King of all Wild Things.

 

Performance of the play in Higglety Pigglety Pop!

 

Ryan Wigglesworth’s direction was palpably alive to this sense of orchestral wonder and fantasy, his programme notes an exemplary tribute from one composer-conductor to another from whom he has learned a great deal. The tone of performance darkened in tandem with that of the score for Higglety Pigglety Pop! Detail was meaningful without exaggeration, for instance in the subtle pointing up of certain intervals associated with different characters. Those with ears to hear would do so, consciously or otherwise. Moreover, the orchestra’s response was as assured, as disciplined, as generous as the conductor’s direction. The Britten Sinfonia was throughout on outstanding form, thoroughly inside Knussen’s idiom, unfailingly precise without sacrifice to warmth of tone. Despite relatively chamber-like forces, at least in the string section (6.6.4.4.4), one often felt that was hearing a larger orchestra, for this was anything but a small-scale performance. Indeed, accustomed as I am to hearing the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, there were many times when I should not have been surprised to discover that I had in fact been hearing the LSO.

 

Baby (Voice of Susanna Andersson) and Jennie (Lucy Schaufer)

Claire Booth headed a fine cast for Where the Wild Things Are, her Max as quicksilver on stage as vocally. Lucy Schaufer proved every inch her equal as Jennie in Higglety Pigglety Pop! Very much the singing actress, her deeper mezzo tones were perfectly suited to the darkened tones of the score. There is something a little dangerous about Jennie and the acting world of ‘experience’ for which she forsakes her comfortable home – yet in a sense all children must at some point act similarly.  All members of the two casts, however, were richly deserving of praise, a particular favourite of mine Graeme Danby’s surreal, apparently innocent Pig-in-Sandwich-Boards. These performances came across as true company efforts, a state of affairs doubtless deepened by ‘experience’ in Aldeburgh and Los Angeles.

Nash Inventions - Turnage, Goehr, Matthews, Davies, Birtwistle and Harvey, 13 March 2012

Wigmore Hall

Turnage – Returning, for string sextet
Goehr – Clarinet Quintet
Colin Matthews – The Island, for soprano and seven instruments
Davies – The Last Island, for string sextet
Birtwistle – Fantasia upon all the notes, for flute, clarinet, string quartet, and harp (world premiere)
Harvey – Song Offerings, for soprano and eight instruments

Claire Booth (soprano)
Nash Ensemble
Lionel Friend (conductor)


Almost exactly four years ago (12 March 2012), three of the six works on this programme were performed at the Wigmore Hall as part of a ‘Nash Inventions’ programme, two of them, Colin Matthews’s The Island and Alexander Goehr’s Clarinet Quintet, as world premieres. It was interesting to welcome them back, not only to hear them again, but to hear them again in different company. Sir Harrison Birtwistle had been present in 2008, on that occasion with pieces from his Orpheus Elegies; this time, he had a world premiere, that of his Fantasia upon all the notes. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, another member of the ‘Manchester School’ – whether that school retains any meaningful identity is a question I shall leave on one side for the moment – was represented by The Last Island, for string sextet (2009), which forces also offered Mark-Anthony Turnage’s 2007 Returning, the third of the pieces in common between the two programmes. Last, but certainly not least, was Jonathan Harvey’s Song Offerings, by some distance the earliest of the works, dating as it does from 1985.

Turnage’s Returning, written for his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, made a similar impression to last time. It has an intriguing opening sound world: harmonics, shard-like writing, and a strong vein of ‘English’ nostalgia. Its sense of thawing came through powerfully in the Nash Ensemble’s performance, possessed of a wonderfully rich string tone, the impassioned central climax supported by a fine sense of line throughout. If its harmonic language tends to sound somewhat conventional in the company of these other works, this remains a work worth hearing.

Goehr’s Clarinet Quintet continues to intrigue and to delight. I cannot say that I subscribe any more than I did in 2008 to the composer’s own description of it as an austere work; at times, and perhaps especially in this performance, there is a sense of playfulness and, by contrast, almost of the ecstatic. There is an arresting – post-Bartókian – opening, whose rhythmic character as well as melodic inflection set up a number of possibilities later to be followed through, though certain melodic contours also bring to mind echoes of Brahms. (I do not think that is just a matter of the forces employed, though they doubtless make a difference.) The clarinet (Richard Hosford) acts both in a quasi-soloist role and as a member of the ensemble. Post-Schoenbergian rigour is of course present, but is in general lightly worn, though I was intrigued by the hints later on both of the First Chamber Symphony and the Suite, op.29. The work’s twelve sections are apparent but so, more clearly, is the sense of the work as a whole, for which again the performers must surely share the credit. One garners a sense of something akin to variations, though not quite the same; I thought fleetingly of Stravinsky’s Variations: Aldous Huxley in Memoriam. But above all, there is a warmth, often a richness of harmony too, which prove inviting and satisfying, and make one very keen to hear the work again soon.

For The Island, a short song cycle on Rilke’s Nordsee, in Stephen Cohn’s translation, Claire Booth joined members of the Nash Ensemble. Her performance was every bit as excellent as one might have expected, indeed more so, precision and warmth in ideal balance. Matthews’s melancholy landscape was painted evocatively by the instrumentalists, the interlude between the first and second of the three songs a fine case in point of seamless yet perceptible transformation, the process furthered in the new vistas – ‘outside the course of galaxies, of other stars or suns’ – of the third.

Davies’s The Last Island returned us to the world of the string sextet. Its title, according to the composer, refers to the further of two small islands off the coast of Orkney, the sextet attempting ‘to invoke the island’s unique atmosphere – essentially peaceful and full of the wonder of ever-changing light of sea and sky, yet strangely threatened with menace, even on the brightest of days’. That gives a pictorial impression, which is certainly part of the story, but some older Davies preoccupations, notably magic squares and plainsong – ‘an unusual plainsong version of Ave maris stella’ – are also apparent. Hints of the viol consort characterise the opening; indeed there is very much a sense of historical refraction throughout the contrasted turns the material takes. I was taken by the frankly – at least to my ears – Schoenbergian writing of one section, put in mind of Verklärte Nacht and the first two numbered quartets in particular. The fading al niente of the plainsong material on high violin harmonics proved an evocative conclusion, whether pictorially, musically, or better, both.

I had assumed that Birtwistle’s Fantasia upon all the notes would be offering some sort of Purcellian reference, but Bayan Northcott’s note to the piece disabused me: ‘Rather, Fantasia upon all the notes hints at how, each time the harpist shifts a pedal between sharp, natural, or flat, a new scale or mode is set up, and – in this work – how a shifting sequence of harp modes can interact with and guide the harmonies of a surrounding ensemble’. It came as little surprise that we should hear a dangerous, violent archaic world presented, as hieratic as anything in Stravinsky or Boulez. Symphonies of Wind Instruments, despite the very different instrumentation, loomed large, and was that a reference in the angular rhythmic treatment of material and the crucial role of the harp to the Symphony in Three Movements too? And yet, there is acerbic beguiling to be heard too, perhaps our longing for the real world of Orpheus. Lionel Friend, as in the other works he was conducting – Matthews, Davies, and Harvey – proved as sure a guide as his players. Birtwistle learned, whilst working on the score, of the death of his sometime publisher Tony Fell. The work is marked at the end: ‘for Tony Fell in sorrow and anger’. It was commissioned by the Nash Ensemble, with funds provided by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Wigmore Hall itself.

Harvey’s Song Offerings was quite a revelation. Written for soprano, flute/alto flute, clarinet, piano, string quartet, and double bass, its settings of Rabindranath Tagore in his own translation from Bengali express and further a ravishing sensual and sexual mysticism. Booth once again excelled herself, as indeed did all the performers. Sleep – ‘Ah, sleep, precious sleep – prevailed for a while in the first song, with a splendid sense of lulling, whilst the second was marked by the combination of captivating instrumental glistening and exciting vocal arabesques: playful ecstasy, perhaps. Harvey’s eroticism throughout the four songs conveys a sense of Messiaen’s spirit without ever actually sounding like him. (If I occasionally thought of Zemlinsky, I think that was more a matter of Tagore’s verse than the music.) Languor and rush were combined to highly sensuous effect in the final song, ‘Death, O Thou the last fulfilment of life’.

Jonathan Harvey, Wagner Dream, BBC SO/Brabbins, 29 January 2012

Barbican Hall

Prakriti – Claire Booth
Vairochana – Simon Bailey
Mother – Hilary Summers
Ananda – Andrew Staples
Old Brahmin – Richard Angas
Buddha – Roderick Williams

Richard Wagner – Nicholas Le Prevost
Cosima Wagner – Ruth Lass
Carrie Pringle – Julia Innocenti
Dr Keppler – Richard Jackson
Betty/Vajrayogni – Sally Brooks

Orpha Phelan (director)
Charlie Cridlan (designs)

Gilbert Nouno (IRCAM computer music designer)
Franck Rossi (IRCAM sound engineer)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

The Barbican’s biennial Present Voices series performs an invaluable service in bringing new opera to London; Jonathan Harvey’s Wagner Dream is one of three works presented this season, the others being Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. Sadly, I had been unable to attend the previous day’s Total Immersion events, but here at least was the British premiere of Wagner Dream. This came as the climax of a peculiarly concentrated and indeed varied bout of opera-going, following, on consecutive nights: Il prigioniero, courtesy of the Philharmonia, Così fan tutte at Covent Garden, and Der Rosenkavalier from ENO. I was not entirely convinced that Harvey’s third opera, despite an interesting premise, stood up so very well in such daunting company.

Briefly, it presents Wagner and Cosima in Venice, on the day of the former’s death, joined by Carrie Pringle, the Flowermaiden whose advances, such as they were, Cosima in reality saw off. Here, by contrast, they actually receive a visit from the Scottish-Hungarian soprano (though, it must be said, it would not necessarily be very clear who she was, did one not know already). This part of the cast, played by actors, is completed by a housemaid, Betty, and a physician, Dr Keppler. Wagner in his study, meanwhile, reflects upon Die Sieger, the Buddhist opera he once planned to write, and whose more productive concerns were subsumed into Parsifal, though in Harvey’s opera, it is clearly more a matter of regret to Wagner that he has failed to write the work. He – and Harvey – therefore imagine Die Sieger, which is dreamed alongside the events in Venice. Prakriti – which means ‘Nature’ in Sanskrit – is an Untouchable, who falls in love with Ananda, a young monk, cousin and disciple of Prince Siddharta, the Buddha. The attraction is mutual, and deepens as Ananda eats with Prakriti and her mother; the Buddha therefore appears, unbeknown to Ananda, and creates a Tantric vision of the young monk’s beloved as the goddess Vajrayogini, thereby persuading him to leave. Prakriti goes to the Buddha and tells him she wishes to share her life with Ananda. Sympathetic, partly on account of a story from their past lives, the Buddha tells her that there is a way: she may join the order as its first woman member (echoes of The Magic Flute perhaps?)

Sad to say, the opera is severely, I should say fatally, compromised by the banality of Jean-Claude Carrière’s libretto. Even in its less embarrassing moments, it fails to progress beyond a beginner’s guide to Buddhism; moreover, it evinces little understanding of, or even sympathy for, the Wagners (whether historically or simply as potential ‘characters’). The actors’ part of the action seems like a bad soap opera, whilst the Buddhist dream has more in common, as presented, with a school assembly story than serious, let alone Wagnerian, drama. The only mildly arresting aspect is the vision of Vajrayogini, whose scarlet hue at least provides relief from the otherwise drab production. Indeed, it was difficult to detect any greater insight from director Orla Pherlan than from Carrière, though perhaps she was hamstrung by the ritualistic element to a work that is hardly Parsifal. At least the three levels of action were clear: the Wagners at the top, the Buddhist world next down, and the orchestra beneath. (Vairochana, Wagner’s Buddhist dream guide, capably sung by Simon Bailey, is the only one to move between the two staged levels.)

Harvey’s music is, unsurprisingly, more interesting, though ears more attuned to quasi-Eastern ritualism – at its best, perhaps evoking Stockhausen, though sometimes – than mine might have responded more readily. Much, though by no means all, of the language is surprisingly tonal, and the electronics offer spectralist as well, I think, as aleatory variation. (Amplification of the singers, however, becomes wearing, at least to me.) In many ways, the most intriguing, as well as dramatic, music was that of one of the interludes, in which we were mercifully free from Carrière’s contribution. As a whole, though, I found a concert work such as Speakings, performed at the 2008 Proms, more dramatically satisfying. Moreover, I remained unconvinced that the occasional hints of Wagner – I suppose there had to be a Tristan-chord; certain sonorities and timbres suggest Parsifal – add very much other than perhaps the slight joy of recognition. For better, or worse, the Buddha tends to be surrounded by pentatonic, or at least pentatonic-inspired, harmonies.

So far as I could tell, the musical performances were excellent (despite that caveat relating to amplification). Martyn Brabbins’s leadership of the BBC Symphony Orchestra convinced, combining ritualism and a more involving labyrinthine quality to what I presume to have been the composer’s intended effect. Hilary Summers seemed a little wasted as the Mother, but Claire Booth, allotted the more obviously dramatic music, shone as brightly as one might have expected. Andrew Staples proved a sincere Ananda, his bearing and vocal delivery as involving as Carrière’s banalities would permit, and Roderick Williams a properly dignified, musically attentive Buddha. There was a nice turn from Richard Angas as the Old Brahmin, horrified at the prospect of a woman joining the order, even if ‘caricature’ would seem too generous a description for the words he was offered. Such were the ‘drama’ and direction that it is perhaps unfair to say very much of the actors, other than that they failed to draw one in. For all its faults, Tony Palmer’s Wagner film presents a Richard and Cosima of considerably greater credibility. Carrie Pringle, anything but a siren, is merely annoying. Perhaps others will have gained more than I did from the experience, but I cannot imagine hurrying to a subsequent performance. The Welsh National Opera has scheduled a staging.

Songs, Cycles, and Scenas, 1 March 2011

Purcell Room
Cornelius Cardew – Solo with Accompaniment
Howard Skempton – Gloss (world premiere)
Jonathan Harvey – Ah! Sun-flower
Colin Matthews – Out in the dark
John Woolrich – Stendhal’s Observation
Philip Cashian – The Songs few hear (world premiere)
Rolf Hind – Fire in the Head (world premiere)
George Nicholson – selection from Bagatelles (6,3,4,2), for oboe and percussion (London premiere)
Alun Hoddinott – A Contemplation upon Flowers (Myfanwy Piper) (London premiere)

Claire Booth (soprano)
Andrew Matthews-Owen (piano)
Janey Miller (oboe)
Joby Burgess (percussion)


I wanted to like this concert; I had expected to like this concert. Reader, you are doubtless expecting a ‘but’, and verily, there are several. To start with, the programme really did not hang together. I had assumed that there would be at least one work in which all of the players came together. What instead we had was alternating groups of pieces for oboe and percussion on the one hand, and soprano and piano on the other, with a small part for percussion added by the performers for the final piece (no oboe). Nor did there seem to be any connection between the music played by the two groups: that for oboe and percussion was ‘experimental’, and frankly of dubious quality, however well performed, whilst that for soprano and piano was – surprisingly, given the adventurous tastes of Claire Booth in general – pleasant enough but for the most part somewhat conservative.

I was intrigued by the prospect of hearing Cornelius Cardew’s Solo with Accompaniment. A box, I suppose, has been ticked; I cannot imagine wanting to hear its banalities again. Clearly the concept is the important thing, but an extremely simple solo – played, I assume as requested, with most unpleasing tone by Janey Miller – around which a busier percussion accompaniment weaves itself to no particular end, is not much of a tribute to Stockhausen, as John Tilbury claimed in his memorial lecture on Cardew. As for Howard Skempton’s Gloss, receiving its first performance, minimalistic simplicity would, as usual, appear to be the concept. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like. To my ears, it sounded like a cross between a GCSE project and the beginning of a score for a Channel 4 period drama. Joby Burgess’s performances throughout, however, seemed exemplary; he certainly did everything he could to try to convince one of the music’s worth. Fire in the Head, by Rolf Hind, also received its first performance. I have only previously heard Hind as an extremely fine pianist – most recently in Lachenmann’s Ausklang – and it would seem that I am far more attuned to his work in that guise. Based, we were told, upon Buddhist ideas, notably that one must live ‘for the moment’ and that the Buddha would at some point dance with the Devil, it was certainly eventful. Burgess and Miller gave it their all, including shouts of what I assume were Buddhist or mock-Buddhist chant. Pouring water from a plastic jug into a bowl was one of Burgess’s manifold tasks. Again, it seemed a bit like a school – perhaps an art school – project, but doubtless I was missing the point. George Nicholson’s Bagatelles went on for a while and ended, though they seemed more substantially composed; I think I had become rather fed up by that point, so ought to hear them again. At least they permitted us to hear the oboe d’amore in addition to English horn.

Of the songs, John Woolrich’s Stendhal’s Observation emerged at the time as a typically finely wrought example of the composer’s art, though I admit that I cannot clearly recall how or why even in what seemed to me the strongest piece on the programme. (That, I am sure, however, and without irony, is my loss.) Jonathan Harvey’s Ah! Sun-flower set words by Blake clearly, without leaving any lasting impression, whilst Colin Matthews’s Out in the dark seemed merely neo-Romantic, but at least short. Philip Cashian’s The Songs few hear from time to time seemed to evoke Britten in its vocabulary; it was idiomatically written for voice and piano, and the musicians concerned would seem to have given a good account. I am not sure that it was done any great favours by the context of its programming. Claire Booth’s clarity and quality of voice were exemplary throughout, likewise Andrew Matthews-Owen’s skilled navigation of the varied – sometimes, not so varied – piano parts. Matthews-Owen perhaps particularly came into his own in the piano reduction of Alun Hoddinott’s A Contemplation upon Flowers. Again, Britten came to mind more than once, but Hoddinott’s language here equally often sounded knowingly post-Impressionist, or at least French-influenced. There are worse influences than Britten and Debussy, of course, and the almost Romantic climaxes, surely and expressively conveyed by both musicians, betokened at least a synthesis that was Hoddinott’s own. Burgess added atmospheric tolling bells in the first and third of the cycle’s three songs.

Claire Booth - Berio and Poulenc, 25 November 2010

Hall One, Kings Place

Berio – Sequenza III, for soprano
Berio – Petite Suite*
Poulenc – La voix humaine


Claire Booth (soprano)
Christopher Glynn (piano)
Alasdair Beatson (piano)*
Netia Jones (director/video)


On the face of it, Berio and Poulenc do not have that much in common; they probably do not beneath the surface either. However, the programming here made sense in at least a couple of ways – apart, that is, from proving a showcase for the talents and versatility of the ever-impressive Claire Booth. Berio’s early (1947) Petite Suite, the piano interlude between his Sequenza III and Poulenc’s La voix humaine, proved a neo-classical surprise, its melodies and harmonies not so very far removed from Poulenc’s, albeit without the indulgent naughtiness we know and cannot help but love. Debussy, above all Children’s Corner, is surely an influence, Stravinsky too. I cannot say that it is a work I should hasten to hear again: it is ‘interesting’ as juvenilia, but presents none of the challenges and rewards of the composer’s maturity. Nevertheless, Alasdair Beatson performed its five short movements with panache and without condescension. Booth remained on stage but at least had opportunity to rest her vocal chords.

The two principal works have something in common too. La voix humaine is of course a masterly Cocteau-Poulenc collaboration depicting a woman on the telephone, attempting to survive the end of her affair. (I saw a brilliant double-bill with Pierrot Lunaire in Leipzig a couple of years ago.) Sequenza III was written for Cathy Berberian in the wake of her divorce from the composer. Netia Jones’s video imagery helped bind the works loosely together, wisely without forcing the connection. The use of recorded and real-time pictures of Booth alternated with images of greater (patterned) and lesser (1950s cityscape) abstraction. I was not sure what it meant, or indeed what it added, but it did no harm.

The Berio Sequenza is a gestural piece par excellence, a true tour de force of extended vocal technique. But there remains an almost extravagant vocalism, affectionate towards tradition, at its heart, which Booth ensured that we heard. I ought not to exaggerate; this is not the Verdian rapprochement of La vera storia, but nor is Berio’s exuberance solely of a militant avant-gardist variety either. Berio described the work as a ‘three-part invention’ of ‘text, gesture, and expression’: again, this was precisely what we heard. Only a highly-accomplished artist should even consider performing so technically and expressively demanding a work. Booth passed the test with flying colours: a coloratura display of objects found and transformed.

For La voix humaine, she was joined by pianist, Christopher Glynn. I had never heard the work with piano before; there is loss, but there is perhaps also neo-classical, Stravinskian gain too. The instrument’s relative coolness imparts a different but not entirely inappropriate quality to the work, and there could be no gainsaying Glynn’s surety of navigation when it came to the score’s twists and turns, gestural in a gentler way, no doubt, than Berio’s but nevertheless deeply felt. Those ominous Stravinksian ostinati so powerfully present in the Dialogues des Carmelites once again provide structural foundation, as Glynn proved so clearly. I should have imagined the loss from translation into English to have been greater, but in practice, the conversational quality – however much one might have hankered after the delivery of the inimitable Denise Duval – worked well. I was not sure, though, why a few passages remained in French. Just when I thought I had worked out the reasoning, my logic was found wanting. That was a bit odd: all or nothing would have been preferable. At any rate, Booth powerfully conveyed the delusion and depression, to neither of which Poulenc was a stranger. She elicited pity, knowing recognition, and black humour, even though Poulenc’s wish that the music be ‘bathed in sensuality’ was never quite fulfilled. The counterpoint between failures of the telephonic and nervous varieties was at any rate abundantly clear.

Recital I/Into the Little Hill, The Opera Group, 24 July 2010

Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Berio - Recital I

The Singer – Susan Bickley
The Accompanist – John Constable
The Dresser – Nina Kate

Benjamin - Into the Little Hill

Claire Booth (soprano)
Susan Bickley (mezzo-soprano)


John Fulljames (director)
Soutra Gilmour (designs)
Jon Clark (lighting)

London Sinfonietta
Franck Ollu (conductor)


If only all the offerings on the Royal Opera House’s main stage were of the quality of this fine double bill at the Linbury Studio Theatre. Some are first-class, of course, yet some could learn a great deal from performance, direction, and choice of repertoire here. I attended the first Covent Garden performance of George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill, last February. There it was programmed, in this same production, with Birtwistle’s music-theatre piece Down by the Greenwood Side. That received a fine performance; unfortunately, a power failure put paid to the Benjamin (ironically, given the threat rats pose to electricity supplies in the work itself), so that I only heard a few minutes of it. Some time after I had left, Into the Little Hill was eventually performed in the Linbury Bar. I wish I had experienced that, but alas it was not to be, so this was essentially my first hearing, albeit with a taster of what was to come.

On the present occasion, an equally apt coupling, albeit entirely different in nature, was Berio’s Recital I, written for Cathy Berberian, but now performed by Susan Bickley. Berio presents a singer who, having arrived on stage to give a recital, realising after she has begun to sing that her pianist is not there. The ‘accompaniment’ to her opening Monteverdi piece – an appropriate nod to the arie antiche tradition, and also a signal of Berio’s love for the composer and Berberian’s expertise in his music – therefore requires an orchestra she conjures up in her mind. We have all done it, though perhaps not in such extreme circumstances – assuming this to be ‘real’: is it, and what does that even mean? Her ‘accompanist’, the ever-dependable – except in terms of the drama – John Constable, comes and goes, but the orchestra is always there, like her neuroses, her failed loves, her attempts to construct some sense from her experience. Through the myriad of musical fragments she presents, we learn something of a relationship that has disintegrated. From folk song to Brünnhilde's Immolation Scene, from ‘Dido’s Lament’ to Pierrot Lunaire, from Meyerbeer to Benjamin, performer, director, and audience must perform complementary but doubtless divergent acts of construction. For instance, hat I had heard Dame Felicity Lott give Poulenc’s Hôtel as a recent encore would perforce make me listen differently from someone not present at that Wigmore Hall recital.

Bickley has always been a versatile artist, just as Berberian was, but this was a challenge indeed, which she surmounted with great aplomb. One could believe in her as a character, as The Singer, too, likewise in Nina Kate’s splendidly observed, wryly ‘alternative’ Dresser. Soutra Gilmour’s costumes and John Fulljames’s direction were all very much of a piece, and the London Sinfonietta’s contribution under Franck Ollu (whom I had previously heard conduct Pascal Dusapin’s Passion in Aix) was typically excellent. At various points, members of the Sinfonietta were called to come on stage, to act, even to exchange instruments. Needless to say, they remained unfazed by such a challenge. Not for nothing are they considered second to none as a new-music ensemble. The final Lied, Berio’s own, was deeply – and yet lightly – moving, just as it should be for the avant-gardist with a sense of humour.

The Sinfonietta’s sterling work, and Ollu’s, continued in Into the Little Hill. If it had taken more than a year before I was able to hear the entire work, my expectations were matched by my experience. The work Benjamin and his librettist, Martin Crimp, present is a modern, equally chilling version of the Pied-Piper of Hamelin story. Here, the Minister, threatened by the populace, gives into its demands that the rats, who, he personally believes, have a place in society, be exterminated. He gains re-election, to the ‘grateful shriek’ of the crowd, by promising the blank-faced Stranger, whom he discovers in his daughter’s bedroom ‘stooped over his sleeping child’, a large sum of money in return for ridding society of the rodent menace. When payment time comes, the Minister welches on his debt, the Stranger takes the city’s children away, the Minister’s daughter included; the Minister’s Wife hears the children sing that they are now ‘inside the Little Hill,’ which is now their new home. New Labour all over, really; if only that nightmare had been so eloquently expressed, and had been over with in just under three-quarters of an hour...

Benjamin’s sinuous score is concise yet generous, sharp-edged yet beautiful. The pain of the Stranger’s flute has a multiplicity of meanings for us, amongst which one should doubtless account contemporary obsession with ‘the paedophile’. As a parable of the disgusting corruption of modern political life, this short opera seems to me well-nigh perfectly judged. Bickley was now joined by Claire Booth. Between them, two female voices must narrate, take the part of various characters, and act as the crowd. One would have thought this the easiest thing in the world, such was the success with which they accomplished it. The abstraction of the set permitted us to concentrate upon the unfolding drama, but was much more than a blank stage; it shaped, enclosed, enabled. Booth’s Child will linger uncomfortably long in the mind, as will the final cries: ‘And the deeper we burrow the brighter his [the Stranger’s] music burns. Can’t you see? Can’t you see? Can’t you see?’ I was taken with Crimp’s description of the librettist as former of magnesium ribbon, whilst the composer must light it with pure oxygen, that it might burn with intense white light. This role, it seemed to me, he fulfilled admirably, save for a misjudged, jarring ‘by who [sic]’, in order to rhyme with ‘you’. If that, however, is the only fault I can find with the evening, and I think it is, then The Opera Group, ROH2, and all those involved in these performances are justly entitled to their laurels.

Good news: Crimp and Benjamin are writing a new opera, to receive its first performance at the 2012 Aix-en-Provence Festival.

Birtwistle 75th birthday concert (including a Carter premiere) - Nash Ensemble and friends, 24 March 2010

Wigmore Hall

Birtwistle – Five Distances for Five Instruments, for wind quintet (1992)
Birtwistle – New work for oboe quartet (premiere of work-in-progress in its present state)
Birtwistle – The Woman and the Hare, for soprano, reciter, and ensemble (Nash commission) (1999)
Birtwistle – Duets for Storab, for two flutes (1983)
Carter – Poems of Louis Zukofsky, for soprano and clarinet (British premiere) (2009)
Birtwistle – Trageodia (1965)

Claire Booth (soprano)
Julia Watson (reciter)
Philippa Davies (flute)
Ian Clarke (flute)
Gareth Hulse (oboe)
Richard Hosford (clarinet)
Ursula Leveaux (bassoon)
Marianne Thorsen (violin)
David Alberman (violin)
Lawrence Power (viola)
Paul Watkins (violoncello)
Ian Brown (celesta)
Hugh Webb (harp)
Chris Brannick (percussion)
Lionel Friend (conductor)

Britain’s greatest composer since Purcell and America’s greatest composer to date: not a bad line-up for a concert – although, quite reasonably, the birthday boy had the lion’s share of the programme devoted to him. On first sight, it might be a sobering thought to realise that Harrison Birtwistle has reached seventy-five, but given that Elliott Carter’s contribution is a work written during his second century, there is no reason that it should be. At any rate, we were treated to a wide-ranging selection of chamber and vocal works, excellently performed by long-time champions and commissioners, the Nash Ensemble, and three guests: soprano Claire Booth, actress Julia Watson, and conductor Lionel Friend.

Five Distances, for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn, made for an invigorating start to the concert. The work was performed, as Birtwistle prefers, with the performers standing. The spatial implications, including the dramatic, of the semi-circle in which the players stand, ‘as far apart as is practically possible,’ were fully realised in the space of the Wigmore Hall. Extremity, proximity, and grouping have often been preoccupations of new music, sometimes harking back to early music, as Birtwistle himself has done from time to time, though certainly not with the slightest intention of neo-something-ism, let alone pastiche. Stravinskian antecedents are also clear, perhaps above all the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, though, by the same token, this does not sound ‘like’ or ‘inspired by’ Stravinsky. A composer does not stand in tradition, Birtwistle believes, but has tradition within him. Birtwistle’s instrumental palette provides an expressive kaleidoscope, as did the Nash players, who equally ensured that the music sounded lyrical through and through. (I cannot think of a Birtwistle work that is not, though this of course remains dependent upon high standards of performance.) As arresting as anything else in the performance was Richard Hosford’s final clarinet note, fading into nothingness.

The new work for oboe quartet – it is not clear whether it is to be called an oboe quartet – is a work-in-progress. Heinz Holliger premiered the first movement and will give the first performance of the completed work. In the meantime, Birtwistle has composed two further movements. That now temporarily placed second will most likely be shifted to become an introductory movement, whilst the finale will remain final when the fourth movement is composed. I was especially taken with the sharp rhythmic, almost Bartókian profile of the outer movements; perhaps chamber strings provide an inevitable reminder of that composer’s quartets here. A highly striking section of the first movement sets stabbing violin and cello pizzicati against sinuous lyricism from violin and oboe, proving contagious to the other instruments. Bartók again comes to mind in some of the solo violin writing: the Rhapsodies for violin and piano in particular. The short movement in between at the moment provides an interlude to explore further implications of some of the material, though it will be interesting to hear how its function is transformed by introductory placing. Moments of melancholy stillness provide winning contrast with sharp rhythms during the finale. Performance was committed throughout.

Concluding the first half was one of Birtwistle’s David Harsent settings, The Woman and the Hare: a Nash Ensemble commission. Claire Booth and Julia Watson sang and recited respectively, reproducing for the composer something of the Baroque distinction between aria and recitative. Song is the music of the recitation. More than once, I was put in mind of the sound-world of Gawain and perhaps even the early music-theatre piece, Down by the Greenwood Side. Ultimately apparent is a typically Orphic triumph, that of music. Once again, there could be no gainsaying the commitment of all performers, who imparted a sharp dramatic edge, which in turn provided for necessary reflection.

Duets for Storab were initially conceived as teaching pieces for two flutes, though the musical demands – quite different from typical virtuosity, as the composer has remarked – have tended to militate against successful performance from children. The combination of two flutes has something primæval to it; we are, after all, concerned with the most ancient instrument of all. Despite the Hebridean provenance of the title, there remains something inescapably English to Birtwistle’s landscape. There is, moreover, and certainly was in performance, a haunting sense of play from a mythological past. Anti-organic constructivism can be fun.

Before concluding with another highly constructivist Birtwistle score, the performers gave the British premiere of Carter’s Poems of Louis Zukofsky, for soprano and clarinet. I dare not comment on the words, given the programme’s stern warning: ‘All Louis Zukofsky material Copyright Paul Zukofsky; the material may not be reproduced, quoted, or used in any manner whatsoever without the explicit and specific permission of the copyright holder. A fee will be charged.’ The poet’s son, Paul, may be an eminent violinist, but he does not come across in this context as a friend of art. Any comments on Carter’s response will therefore have to be non-specific with regard to word setting. Booth clearly relished the contrast with The Woman and the Hare; now she could act truly as a reciter of sung verse. I was very taken with the second song, Alba, a Carter lullaby: sweet indeed. Its successor, Finally a Valentine – I hope I may at least give the title – had for me slight echoes of Webern, albeit utterly transformed into typical late Carter musical language. (The instrumentation is doubtless a contributor towards the Webern connection, if connection there be.) A little later on, The Rains proved coruscatingly brilliant in composition and performance. Daisy evinces the composer’s delight in the sheer sound of words and its implications. The exultance of the final song’s climax belonged to Zukofsky père, Carter, Booth, and Hosford. Some things, let us give thanks, cannot be copyrighted, or indeed reproduced.

Finally, the early Birtwistle masterpiece, Tragoedia, ‘a study in symmetry followed by significant asymmetry,’ as Stephen Pruslin put it in his programme notes. And that asymmetry is perhaps already a sign of Birtwistle’s signature re-examination of narrative from varying perspectives. Construction and constructivism in his hands resist the schematic – just as in great serial music. The soundscape is very different here, though of course there are things in common. But the Mediterranean calls, albeit the savage world of archaic Greece. Stravinsky again rears his head, as echoes of The Rite of Spring resound – again, fully assimilated. The harp acts as mediator between string quartet and wind quintet, the opposing groups of the Nash Ensemble making splendid work of their dramatic encounter, for here there is truly a sense of a crucible where the master musico-dramatist comes into being, instrumental work though this may be. Lionel Friend directed proceedings with dramatic purpose. There is no false reverence for tragedy: something rawer, more elemental is being enacted. Which could serve as comment upon so much of what was to come…

Pierrot Lunaire, Transition_Projects, 11 December 2009

Hall One, Kings Place

Emma Williams (flute/piccolo)
Peter Sparks (clarinet/bass clarinet)
Tom Hankey (violin/viola)
Oliver Coates (violoncello)
Alasdair Beaton (piano)

Claire Booth (soprano)
Netia Jones (director/video design)
Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

This performance of Pierrot Lunaire was part of a Kings Place series from Transition_projects. The programming has been fascinating, for instance mixing Dowland and Stravinsky, and Bartók with his countrymen, the choreographer Rudolf Laban, and the photographer László Moholy-Nagy. Claire Booth, the soloist in this concert, had also sung in Couperin’s Leçons de Ténèbres, and would the following evening sing in Scarlatti’s Correa nel seno amato. Unifying these and other concerts was the theme of ‘Darkness and Light’: a spur to imagination, it would seem, rather than an arbitrary constriction, but most welcome if such an interesting range of music proves to be the result. I only wish that I had been able to attend more of the performances.

The present production had first been presented at Wilton’s Music Hall in October 2007. It seems that the praise garnered then was very much deserved. Most importantly, this was a performance that raised questions, rather than answered them. Booth’s excellent performance might well be considered relatively restrained, but hysterical cabaret, though it can work, is not the only way to perform what Stravinsky rightly judged an instrumental masterpiece. Sprechstimme is impossible to define, but it certainly sounded as if it were on offer here; only the occasional note was sung, but pitch was far from incidental. And the words were crystal-clear. Titles, an integral part of Netia Jones’s video design, helped, yet the German was so clear that many would have understood anyway. Moreover, though there was ample opportunity to hear Booth’s words and notes, her part also drew attention to the teeming instrumental invention of Schoenberg’s score, here flawlessly and atmospherically delivered by the players of the Transition_ensemble. Great demands are placed upon the instrumentalists, but technical issues had been thoroughly subordinated to musical demands. Ryan Wigglesworth’s direction was always sure of its direction, imparting a strong sense of unity to what, in lesser hands, can sometimes seem just a succession of poems.

Jones speaks sensibly of her role in this. Pierrot ‘is a highly theatrical work already,’ so her production concentrates upon helping ‘a listener navigate through its treacherous narrative’. One might consider that hardly necessary, but the visual scenes did no harm and heightened that sense of playfulness the director rightly sees as a crucial element to the work. Manipulated, monochrome moving images, of Booth (in ‘real time’ and pre-recorded), of architecture, the moon, the Cross, and so forth, provided a backdrop to the crucial musical events unfolding. I was less sure about the beheading: surely it is a little more than whimsical. But the music, rather than the bizarre verse, is truly the thing – and so it was here.