Musikfest Berlin (4) - Ensemble Musikfabrik/Cassidy and Poppe, 5 September 2021

Philharmonie


Ann Cleare: mire/…/veins (2013); ore (2016); Fossil Lights (2020-21, world premiere); the physics of fog, swirling (2018-19); on magnetic fields (2011-12)

Enno Poppe: Prozession (2015-20)

Hannah Weirich (violin)

Sara Cubarsi (violin)

Michele Marelli (clarinet)

Ensemble Musikfabrik

Aaron Cassidy, Enno Poppe (conductors)

Images: Astrid Ackermann

For my final visit to this year’s Musikfest Berlin: two concerts, morning and afternoon, from Ensemble Musikfabrik. The first was devoted to the music of Ann Cleare, the two ensemble pieces conducted at frighteningly short notice by Aaron Cassidy; the second, conducted by the composer, was devoted to Enno Poppe’s Prozession, begun in 2015, then set aside after eight minutes’ worth of music, to be resumed during lockdown and extended to about fifty in total.

The morning’s Ann Cleare portrait suggested a communicative interest, variety notwithstanding, in instrumental sound as sculpted material. mire/…/veins for wind quintet imparted, from its muted brass opening, a sense of masked volatility, of activity located somewhere just below a geological surface—and rising. Febrile oscillations were observed and felt, the horn seemingly adopting a central, even mediating, role between the other pairs of instruments: trombone and tuba on one side, two trumpets on the other. 

ore is written for string trio and high reed instrument, here clarinet, whose opening shrillness against glassy strings suggested a more important role for pitch than its predecessor. Different sections offered a different sense of materiality, as interested in combination as opposition. Indeed, the closeness of clarinet to string timbre was at times surprising. The first performance of Fossil Lights followed, clarinet, violin, and cello remaining, now joined by piano. It proved a haunting piece. Atmosphere may not have been the point; it nevertheless had plenty. Aural beams and slight rotations (whether of pitch, dynamics, etc.) helped me work towards a sense of bifurcation, of two aural visions, connections growing in different ways, according to vantage point: musical work or subject.

 

Two works for ensemble followed, the physics of fog, swirling commencing with an almost ‘traditional’, Romantic horn call, sound soon changing all manner of ways, both for horn and greater ensemble. Each part of the title gained importance: fog and swirling, of course, but physics too with respect to method. There is, of course, a myriad ways to swirl, but this was not a catalogue, more a quasi-scientific narrative, even an experiment, which eventually went into reverse, unravelled. Finally, on magnetic fields, for two violins and ensemble, once again offered at least a way in through its title, seemingly realised spatially too by different instrumental groups led by the soloists. It seemed to speak of and with magnetism, fields opposed but also interacting and thus engendering movement. There were moments of galvanising drama, a crackling conclusion to a fascinating programme.

 

Was Poppe’s Prozession to be a work of music theatre? No, at least not straightforwardly. The musicians stayed where they were, although the slightly unusual make-up of the ensemble had a visual element too: percussion at the back joined by two electronic organs and electric guitar. Its opening seemed almost pictorial, at least in the way a procession by Berlioz or Mahler might be, albeit in a world of spectralism. The procession seemed to be getting under way, or perhaps in preparation, coming to life from drums to solo instruments, to combinations. There was certainly a sense of movement that, however irregular its parts, resulted in something more regular. It died down, returned to its beginnings, then started up again, albeit differently—and again, all the more differently. Instruments picking up the figurative baton from one another seemed, intriguingly, to pick up characteristics too: clarinet from electric guitar, trumpets from saxophone, and so on. The process began to mesmerise, or perhaps one began to realise that it had mesmerised all along. Double bass out of the debris, with others in its penumbra: here was another different path, more shadowy, more distant. Microtonal disorientation became more intense. At some point, the procession began to head away and/or subside, depending on who or what was its subject. What had it meant? That was not really the question: it had been a rite, so it seemed, from another world.

Musikfest Berlin (4) – Ensemble Musikfabrik: Lachenmann, Hosokawa, and Eötvös, 8 September 2019

Kammermusiksaal

Helmut Lachenmann: Marche fatale (2016-17); Berliner Kirschblüten (2016-17)

Toshio Hosokawa: Birds Fragments II (1989)

Peter Eötvös: Secret Kiss (2018, German premiere)

Hosokowa: Birds Fragments III (1955)

Eötvös: Sonata per sei (2006, German premiere)

Ryoko Aoki (Noh-performer)

Mayumi Miyata (shō)

Ulrich Löffler (piano)

Helen Bledsoe (flute)

Dirk Rothbrust (percussion)

Ensemble Musikfabrik

Peter Eötvös (conductor)

Images: © Adam Janisch 

The metaphor of the journey has been so overworked, so debased, that it will often now elicit little more than a groan. Perhaps, though, there was something to be retained, lightly, even playfully, from the idea of composers and their music – and its performance – travelling in different directions here, in a splendid concert from Cologne’s Ensemble Musikfabrik.

Helmut Lachenmann might seem initially here to have travelled quite some distance indeed from the composer we know and, in many cases, love. However, as Schoenberg once remarked, ‘a Chinese poet is certainly not only someone who sounds Chinese. Rather, he says something else as well!’ Lachenmann’s Marche fatale acquired a cult following – I account myself a member – last year, when, in its new orchestral version, it heralded Stuttgart’s New Year. It was originally composed for piano, though, which is how we heard it on this occasion, from Ensemble Musikfabrik’s Ulrich Löffler. That in itself made me listen, re-listen, to material with which I had perhaps become over-familiar. (Is that not what Lachenmann bids us do all the time with the debris of German Romanticism?) Oddly, and perhaps only because I knew the orchestral version first, the piano piece sounded more akin to a piano reduction: again, an interesting challenge for my ears. But then, I started to wonder: was not the grit in the oyster here clearer; were not the dissonances harsher; was the music not more evidently fractured? Was this not, in a strong sense, the ‘original’, and what did that mean? Subversion of Liszt’s most celebrated Liebestraum seemed more pronounced. The close certainly had more of the abyss to it. And if I had my doubts about Löffler’s rubato at times, it made me listen – and rendered those fractures more pronounced. Again, surely the point.

Berliner Kirschblüten came as all the more of a surprise, since I neither knew it nor its antecedents (for instance, the 2000 Sakura-Variations on a Japanese folk song, and its 2008 expansion, Sakura mit Berliner Luft). An opening that can sound sentimental immediately has one question one’s own orientalism. Is there anything one can do about it? Perhaps not, but at least it alerted me to the problem in time for the works by Toshio Hosokawa. Then the song from Paul Lincke’s operetta, whose jazzy deconstruction was more than welcome. As with Marche fatale, this was unmistakeably Lachenmann’s mind at work. He was taking a walk on another side, perhaps, but was that not all the more Adornian? Yes, most likely, but it was enjoyable too. Here, the cavernous abyss at the close drew comparison with that of Marche fatale, but was longer and, most likely, deeper, resonance and dissolution two sides of the same coin.

Next came the second of Hosokawa’s Birds Fragments, for shō – used, most likely not coincidentally, in Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern – and percussion. An opening invocation, with strokes on bass drum and piercing cries from crotale, provided in its continuation ritualistic (I think, but am I orientalising?) backdrop for sh­ō chords that drew one in, had one listen to every pitch, to the movement of lines: not entirely unlike Marche fatale, in fact. Its form and duration seemed to me perfectly judged; nor could there be any doubting the distinction of performances from Mayumi Miyata and Dirk Rothbrust. After the interval, in the third, for shō and flute (Helen Bledsoe), the same could certainly be said of performances and form. The flute part, first alto flute, then piccolo, sounded here more akin to commentary upon shō processional, that commentary then susceptible to transformative influence; or so it seemed in terms of a drama that perhaps approached our notions of music-theatre.

Music-theatre in a more emphatic sense had been heard in between, in Peter Eötvös’s Secret Kiss, for reciter (the splendid Ryoko Aoki) and ensemble, here receiving its German premiere. An opening percussion invocation forged a connection with Hosokawa – as well as readying the audience for the world of Noh. Aoki’s recitation of the text (from Alessandro Baricco’s novel, Seta, in Oriza Hirata’s Japanese translation) moved between speech and song, the ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and percussion) inviting further, more or less inevitable, comparison with Pierrot lunaire. And indeed, it was just as much in the instrumental lines that narrative weight and content seemed to lie, all exquisitely crafted yet dramatically involving. Ominous, unsettling, beguiling, radiant: this distilled tale of a nineteenth-century Frenchman travelling to Japan to learn secrets of silk manufacture, of subsequent orientalist enchantment, and of something we might call death, duly enchanted and, moreover, duly invited us to question its and our journey.

The programme closed with Eötvös’s Sonata per sei, only now, thirteen years late, receiving its German premiere, again conducted by the composer. Written for two pianos, three percussionists, and sampler keyboard, it inevitably invites comparison with Bartók’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion, as well, perhaps, as with the wondrous spatial acrostics of Boulez’s sur Incises. Bartók certainly seemed to be echoes in the entry of the first percussionist, as well as in the pianists’ first entry. That did not, however, ultimately seem to be the point, the sampler reminding us that, certain formal correspondences notwithstanding – was that at some point a Bartók-like arch? – Eötvös’s procedures were quite different. Groups – that is, the keyboard players and percussionists – sometimes functioned more or less as one, sometimes very much as individuals. Overall form strongly echoed, without quite replicating, movements of a classical sonata and their ‘character’. As with the rest of the programme, I was left wanting more: a sign, then, of a journey well travelled.

Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, 7 June 2019

Prinzregententheater

Images: Stefanie Loos

Annesley Black: Tolerance Stacks: excerpts (2016/19)

Ann Cleare: on magnetic fields (2011/12)

Mithatcan Öcal: Ein musikalischer Spaß (2017-19): ‘Birds with Beards’ (world premiere)

Rebecca Saunders: Skin (2016)

Juliet Fraser (soprano)

Ensemble Musikfabrik

Enno Poppe (conductor)

The first woman composer to receive the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize could not have been a worthier candidate. From the first time I heard Rebecca Saunders’s music, in a 2012 Arditti Quartet concert at the Wigmore Hall, I have been intrigued, fascinated, and thrilled by it. At this ceremony and concert in Munich’s Prinzregententheater, we heard not only Saunders’s Skin (given in London this January by the same soloist, Juliet Fraser, with the Ensemble Modern and Vimbayi Kaziboni), but also music by the three winners of Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Composers’ Prizes: Annesley Black, Ann Cleare, and Mithatcan Öcal. When three out of four of the composers are women and the other a Turkish man, perhaps the tide is finally beginning to turn. In addition to prize money, the three recipients of composers’ prizes will also receive portrait CDs from the Kairos label, to be released at the end of this year – so helping others to discover their music for themselves.

First we heard excerpts from Black’s Tolerance Stacks, followed by a greeting from Peter Rusicka and a short film showing the composer at work. (Each composer received such a film, in other cases seen before her or his music was performed.) Fraser was the soprano soloist here too, excellent as ever. Piano, responded to by clarinet and percussion, in turn responded to by piano, set the scene, the pianist thereafter moving across to one of two electronic mixing desks in preparation for the vocal entry. Was it pain or pleasure being evoked? Why choose, amidst such a colourful, dramatic frenzy? Might one characterise what we heard as post-Stockhausen in a meaningful rather than merely chronological sense? I think so, but am not sure quite how much that would matter. The sense of electronic and vocal play was keen throughout. So too was an intriguing relationship – which I could not yet put my finger on to describe, let alone analyse, yet could certainly perceive – between sound and structure.

Cleare’s and Öcal’s works were both for ensemble without voice, all in the superlative care of Enno Poppe and Ensemble Musikfabrik, longstanding Saunders collaborators. Cleare’s on magnetic fields added to the ensemble what I presume was an instrument of her own, hybrid instrumental design being a particular musical interest of hers. (I do not even know what it was, or what it was called, but such is part of the fun!) At any rate, three chamber groups conversed, collaborated: made music, two violins from two separate groups coming across as first among equals in dialogue and competition. Sounds were often metallic, mechanical, industrial, creative, but they were no mere sounds: this was a true musical narrative, finely paced both in writing and performance. Likewise every note, attack, timbre, and duration seemed deeply considered and dramatically necessary.

Öcal’s ‘Birds without Beards’ was prefaced by a duly entertaining film, in which a member of his Istanbul Composer Collective remonstrated with him for having included a pitch, C-sharp, he had expressively ruled out, whether in itself or even as suggested by harmonic structure. Repeated pitches and their implications, perhaps rhythmic as well as harmonic, seemed to be one of the concerns from the outset here, wind notes jabbed and intoned, initially set against scurrying string figures. One was intended, I think, to notice just as keenly when those pitches were repeated and varied. Öcal offered on occasion an almost Mahlerian sense of echoed reminiscence of ‘found’ material, actually found or imagined. But those were just two aspects of an absorbing, colourful, witty showcase for the composer’s work, types of material coming into intriguing collaboration and conflict – just, perhaps, like the Collective itself.

‘It sounds how it’s played,’ as Robert Adlington once put it, cited in trumpeter Marco Blauuw’s oration, as intelligent as it was heartfelt, for Rebecca Saunders and her music ‘Stay stubborn, self-willed,’ Saunders advised her three predecessors on this evening, having dedicated receipt of her prize to her undoubtedly stubborn and self-willed predecessor as composer, Galina Ustolvskaya. Those and many other aperçus helped guide our appreciation of the performance of Skin; but mostly, like Samuel Beckett, another guiding spirit, this music spoke with a bleakness and humanity, the two quite indivisible, of its own. If the opening starkness, at least in the context of Saunders’s words, obliquely brought Ustolvskaya to mind, the poetry of music and silence, music as silence, distillation in instrumental combination, and that combination in distillation, bore Beckettian witness more strongly than ever. Breath and cries from voice and instruments alike, often in tandem, both formed and inhabited landscape and narrative. (Sometimes we need such metaphors to speak about music, but we should always be wary of ascribing them importance that is greater than whatever that music may be ‘itself’). As ever, properties of instruments, the voice included, indeed the voice foremost among them, were both respected and extended, testament to the composer’s searching, collaborative way with performing colleagues. No silence, though, was more pregnant, more magical than that following Fraser’s final, solo ‘skin’. It rightly proved a prelude resistant to, then part of, that warmest of applause that ensued.

Musikfest Berlin (4) – Ensemble Musikfabrik, Aperghis, Lim, Schöllhorn, Baltakas, Zorn, Saunders, and Poppe, 10 September 2017

Kammermusiksaal, Philharmonie

Georges Aperghis: Damespiel, for bass clarinet (2011)

Liza Lim: The Green Lion Eats the Sun, for double bell euphonium (2014)

Johannes Schöllhorn: grisaille, for cello (2013)

Vykintas Baltakas: Pasaka – Ein Märchen, for piano (1995-97)

Liza Lim: Axis Mundi, for bassoon (2012-13)

John Zorn: Merlin, for trumpet (2016)

Rebecca Saunders: fury, for double bass (2005)

Enno Poppe: Haare, for violin (2013-14)

Saunders: shadow, for piano (2013)

Poppe: Fell, for percussion (2016)

Saunders: Bite, for flute (2016)

Carl Rosman (clarinet)

Melvyn Poore (euphonium)

Dirk Wietheger (cello)

Alban Wesly (bassoon)

Marco Blaauw (trumpet)

Florentin Ginot (double bass)

Hannah Weirich (violin)

Ulrich Löffler and Benjamin Kobler (piano)

Dirk Rothbrust (percussion)

Helen Bledsoe (flute)

Alas, I was only able to stay for two out of the three sections of this lengthy Matinée concert from soloists of Ensemble Musikfabrik. That meant that I missed out on George Lewis’s Oraculum, Toshio Hosakawa, Three Essays, and two world premieres: Tansy Davies’s Song Horn and Enno Poppe’s Filz. Eleven out of the fifteen solo works still gave me much to experience, enjoy, and reflect upon. And if, unsurprisingly, some spoke to me more from a single hearing – each one was new to me – that does not necessarily reflect upon their ‘worth’. Indeed, it is quite likely to say more about me and my state of alertness than anything else. What probably goes without saying, yet should not, are the extraordinary virtuosity, musicality, and commitment shown by all of these soloists – not least coming on the morning immediately following a not inconsiderable concert of music by Rebecca Saunders and Harrison Birtwistle.

In the first two pieces, Georges Aperghsis’s Damespiel and Liza Lim’s The Green Lion Eats the Sun, I was struck by something at least akin to a ‘traditional’ conception of unbroken line, not least in performance, even when silence formed part of that line. The former, toccata-like, often high in pitch, with considerable, often thrilling, variation in dynamic range too, nevertheless contrasted strongly, interestingly with what seemed to me two contrasted voices, in near-consequential dialogue, in the latter, that impression not least owed to the two bells of the euphonium (one muted). Johannes Schöllhorn’s grisaille was slower, stiller, its navigation through the not quite frozen waters of cello harmonics again offering contrast with the ensuing Pasaka – Ein Märchen for piano, in which Benjamin Kobler had, in addition to an unquestionably demanding piano part, also to tell the story in words (irrespective of comprehension!) It had a beguiling innocence to it, the single(ish) piano line, shared between the hands, blossoming into something more complex, again toccata-like. (That perhaps often will go with the territory of works for instrumental solo.) Another work by Lim, Axis Mundi, again showed a keen sense (to me, at least) of dialogue, in this case between the lower range of the bassoon and something else, not quite to be straightforwardly assimilated to higher pitch. If I could not quite escape the sense of notespinning in John Zorn’s Merlin, for trumpet solo, Marco Blauuw’s performance proved quite mesmerising.

The second – and, for me, final – of the concert’s three parts alternated between Saunders and Poppe. Florentin Ginot’s double bass playing had impressed me enormously the night before, even amongst such a galaxy of instrumental talent; here it did so again in fury. Almost the entire range of the instrument seemed traversed within a few seconds, and that despite the relative leisure of the pace. That done, a dark heir to the Expressionist past revealed itself, without overt, or perhaps even covert, ‘influence’, but at the level of something deeper. I thought of Anselm Kiefer, but again that may just have been me. Poppe’s Haare for solo violin opened almost as if playing with a Bachian wedge opening, although it never quite was. One was made to listen, perhaps almost so as to ascertain what was not repetition. If that sounds quasi-minimalist, I am not sure that it was, but perhaps there was some sort of relationship there. I loved the wild excess of Hannah Weirich’s vibrato (which I presume to have been written in), suggestive almost of a theremin, not least in glissando passages. I was a little more at a loss with Poppe’s Fell for percussion, although again there was no gainsaying the quality of the performance. Either side of it fell another solo piano piece, Saunders’s shadow, and her Bite for solo bass flute. The piano piece, played by Ulrich Löffler, again had something of an intangible sense of association to ‘tradition’ – Stockhausen, perhaps? – without being determined by it. There was certainly no doubting its bold, substantial quality of utterance. The shadows of the bass flute were readily apparent, yet for shadows to have meaning, there must be light, and so there was, in a vivid creation, both compositional and performative (Helen Bledsoe) of chiaroscuro.

I think that, in the case of pretty much all of these pieces, we have probably now reached a stage at which the phrase ‘extended techniques’ has become superfluous. Composers and performers alike, perhaps audiences too, have ensured that, not least through occasions such as this.

Musikfest Berlin (3) – Michel-Dansac/Ensemble Musikfabrik/Poppe - Saunders, Birtwistle, and Dowland, 9 September 2017

Kammermusiksaal, Philharmonie

Rebecca Saunders: Yes (2016-17, world premiere)

Birtwistle: Cortege (2007)

Birtwistle: 26 Orpheus Elegies (2003-4) interspersed with:

Dowland, arr. Birtwistle: Lachrimae: seaven tears figured in seven passionate pavanes (1604/2009)

Doniatenne Michel-Dansac (soprano)

Andrew Watts (countertenor)

Peter Veale (oboe)

Mirjam Schröder (harp)

Paul Jeukendrup (sound design)

Ensemble Musikfabrik

Enno Poppe and Harrison Birtwistle (conductors) 

Other soloists:

Helen Bledsoe (flute, bass flute)

Carl Rosman (clarinet, bass clarinet)

Alban Wesly (bassoon)

Christine Chapman (horn)

Marco Blaauw, Nathan Plante (trumpet)

Jan Roskilly (trombone, bass trumpet)

Melvyn Poore (tuba)

Dirk Rothbrust, Rie Watanabe (percussion)

Ulrich Löffler, Benjamin Kobler (piano)

Krassimir Sterev (accordion)

Hannah Weirich, Yoonhee Lee (violin)

Axel Porath, Kirstin Maria Pientka, Tim-Erik Winzer (viola)

Dirk Wietheger, Andreas Müller (cello)

Florentin Ginot (double bass)

Images: Kai Bienert

Whilst London once again endured that ghastly annual farrago at the Royal Albert Hall – if, as apologists claim, it is ‘just a party’, then kindly choose a ‘theme’ other than imperialism – Berlin showed what British music, European music, or better still, just ‘music’, can and should be: bold, forward-looking, outward-facing, and above all, nourishing as well for the body as for the soul. It was almost certainly more than a mere programming coincidence that the three composers featured here were all English, but there was certainly nothing nationalistic concerning the choice, any more than there would have been had this been an all-German programme – or, for that matter, an all-nineteenth-century programme. We make connections when and where we and the material will. The crucial thing is quality; that was not lacking here.

The first part of the concert was devoted to the premiere of Rebecca Saunders’s Yes, a spatial performance for soprano (Doniatenne Michel-Dansac), nineteen soloists (Ensemble Musikfabrik), and conductor (Enno Poppe), after the final chapter of Ulysses (in particular, Molly Bloom’s monologue). Joyce famously said he wanted his book to end on the most positive word in the English language – and so it did. So too does this work of vocal and instrumental theatre, in some ways standing in the tradition of Birtwistle’s music theatre and other musical dramatic works, although certainly not merely to be assimilated to them. Beat Furrer’s FAMA also came to my mind, if only because it is not so long ago that I heard its London premiere. But the previous weekend’s Monteverdi could not also help but hover in my contextual consciousness, not least since this evening we also heard from both Ulysses and Orpheus. This, then, proved in many ways – I have only hinted at a few – ideal programming both in itself and in the context of the broader themes of this year’s Musikfest Berlin.

We hear first the voice, then double bass. And so, a new Odyssean journey is underway – albeit from Molly Bloom’s standpoint, if we care to think about it that way (and why would we not?) The Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal proved as much instrument as mere location: Monteverdian echoes again, or perhaps better, pre-echoes, hinting at the Vespers next weekend. There was arguably more ‘Mediterranean’ spirit – not in some narrow geographical way, but open as the sea itself, open as Angela Merkel’s Germany itself (at its best) – than there had been in the strangely insular world of John Eliot Gardiner’s ‘English’ Monteverdi. New members of the ensemble joined, all over the hall: a microcosm perhaps of a world outside, but also, perhaps more importantly, a created world, like that of Joyce. Art does not merely reproduce ‘reality’; if it did, we should have no need of it.

Trumpets called, duetted, almost as if this were St Mark’s. Wind surrounded us from the balconies above. This was a theatre of instruments and of instrumentalists, whether or no Michel-Dansac were singing, her contributions and those of everyone else equally impressive in virtuosity and the humanity that incited and enabled. Rarely were positions static for long; our ears and our minds moved, even if we physically stayed put. (Again, the precedent may be found in Joyce, Monteverdi, wherever one wishes…) Nothing was to be taken for granted, certainly not the sound of the soprano voice, which often might have been taken for a contralto. Indeed, that is precisely how Michel-Dansac had been listed when, earlier this year, I heard her in Le Marteau sans maître! It was not only the ‘range’ of her voice, but of all ‘voices’, that expanded. Hierarchies, spatial and musical dissolved as, say, the (wonderful) accordionist had his ‘spot’ and then moved on: or were there indeed no such hierarchies in the first place? Was that simply my need to think of them that way, and if so, what does that say about me? This was, then, in many respects, an ‘open’ world: Berio (Sinfonia) suggested itself more than once, perhaps even in the odd musical figure, although that may well just have been my imagination playing tricks. This was, I think, more drama than ritual, insofar as the distinction makes sense (on which one might perhaps consider Parsifal), not that there is anything wrong with ritual – as Birtwistle would triumphantly show. Michel-Dansac’s final stream of consciousness muttering, or more than that, proved unusually ‘audible’. Once again, what might that mean? And why might we ask that? Scale is not everything; indeed, as the Orpheus Elegies to come would show, it is perhaps nothing at all. This was nevertheless the largest-scale work by Saunders I had yet heard, and it confirmed, even enhanced, the view I have of her as one of the finest composers of her generation.

The second half opened with Birtwistle’s Cortege, a ‘ceremony’ written in memory of Michael Vyner, itself a reworking of the much older ceremony, Ritual Fragment. It is, perhaps, more familiar territory to me – although how ‘familiar’ can the strange antiquity of Birtwistle ever be? The musicians certainly played it with all the confidence, yet none of the taking for granted, of a ‘classic’ work, which it is. Different soloists again took their ‘turn’: this is an ensemble piece in all manner of ways. There remains, I think – or did in this performance – something of a post-Stravinskian ‘attitude’ to the music, The Soldier’s Tale still somehow present in the background, as it is for so much music theatre, actual or related. Perhaps even The Rite there somewhere too, in the odd instrumental line? I do not think it is anything so obvious as ‘influence’ by now, but as I said above, one makes connections when and where one will. This ritual teemed with drama, at any rate, at least as much as any work with words might have done. Whatever distinction I might have made in the first half had already been called into question, indeed dissolved.

So too was it with the interweaving of Birtwistle’s Dowland arrangements with his own Orpheus Elegies. That antique, indeed archaic (in the proper sense), ‘authenticity’ of which, in which, the elegies speak, with or without words, was immediately apparent in the very first. (Many of them have no vocal part at all, simply or not so simply alluding to the Rilke sonnets from which the work takes its name and, in part, inspiration.) The refracted sound of the old viol consort in Dowland-Birtwistle offered its own counterpart, challenge, emotional intensification, all the more so perhaps when, in the second piece, strings were joined by wind: never quite as one expects, yet never seeking attention either. Veiled rather than violent, one might say, but is that again all too easy a formulation? The world of the Orpheus Elegies: rhythms as much as melodies, and above all their clashes (occasionally in stark relief through the use of metronomes). Occasionally, I thought of Elliott Carter’s polyrhythms, although again I am not quite sure why: perhaps, again, that was just my own fancy, but why not? Webern’s celebrated Bach arrangement hovered also in the (non-electronic) penumbra of my consciousness: father, or mother, to so much in this tradition, just like his ‘own’ work. And were not Dowland’s ‘passionate pavanes’ themselves also speaking of a ‘passion’ one might conceivably associate with Bach? The dissonances were certainly as moving, likewise the grace with which they were presented, a grace that in no way precluded depth. That the final Dowland arrangement seemed truly to emerge from within the 16^th Elegy (they were not performed ‘in order’, I should add) seemed to make both more present and yet more distant. After that, after those ‘true tears’, the final (19^th) Elegy offered an instrumental conclusion unadorned in every respect.