Rossi/Kubota/BCMG/Paterson: Saunders, Anderson, Eötvös, Illean, and Birtwistle, 26 November 2024

Wigmore Hall

Rebecca Saunders: Stirrings
Julian Anderson: Mitternachtslied
Peter Eötvös: Secret Kiss (English version, world premiere)
Lisa Illean: Cantor
Harrison Birtwistle: The Woman and the Hare; …when falling asleep (London premiere)

Alice Rossi (soprano)

Meg Kubota (reciter)

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group

Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)

London visits from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group are rarer than we might hope, though doubtless many would object, quite reasonably, that visits to the capital need not be its priority. At any rate, a city seemingly ever more starved of new music was here blessed by fine Wigmore Hall performances of six works from the last twenty-five years. 

‘The strokes now faint now clear as if carried by the wind but not a breath and the cries now faint now clear,’ is one of two quotations from Samuel Beckett Rebecca Saunders selected to accompany her 2011 ensemble piece, Stirrings: in this case from Beckett’s late Stirrings Still. Although the only vocal work on the programme, it seemed to set up much of what was to come, its title and perhaps not only that coming to life in the opening double bass solo and what it provoked. Nine players, most onstage, some behind us, took us on a captivating journey of extraordinary sounds that were never mere sounds, always music, ever evolving, as if this were a geological process. As before in Saunders’s work, I could have sworn I was hearing electronics, but I was not: simply nine musicians and their instruments who seemed  before our eyes and ears to have, in Gurnemanz’s vision – and Wagner’s – time become space. A sense of musical landscape already hinted at the music of Birtwistle to come, as did that of inherent musical drama. It is probably better to leave Beckett the last words, again as selected by Saunders, this time from Company: ‘Light infinitely faint it is true since now no more than a mere murmur.... In dark and silence to close as if to light the eyes and hear a sound. Some object moving from its place to its last place. Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more. To darkness visible to close the eyes and hear if only that. Some soft thing stirring soon to stir no more.... By the voice a faint light is shed. Dark lightens while it sounds. Deepens when it ebbs. Lightens with flow back to faint full. Is whole again when it ceases.’

A recent (2023) setting by Julian Anderson of Zarathustra’s roundelay followed. Undaunted by Mahlerian precedent, composer and performers (here the Pierrot ensemble, joined by soprano Alice Rossi and conductor Geoffrey Paterson) made something new yet old, in that sense at least like Saunders and Birtwistle. It is tribute to their success that not once did I think of Mahler, save for the occasional resonance, perhaps via Schoenberg. Stravinskian inheritance seemed at least as strongly in play, not least in rhythm. It opened de profundis – how could it not? – yet soon moved on, even before Rossi’s entrance. If the pace was slow – again, how could it not be? – it seemed over too soon, like midnight or a Nietzschean aphorism. Much caught the ear. vocal and instrumental melismata seemingly inciting one another, building to a midnight climax both dark and refulgent, touching and perhaps ironic in the brevity of its evocation of eternity. 

To complete the first half, we heard the premiere of the English version of the late Peter Eötvös’s Secret Kiss (2018). Another arresting opening, this time from percussion, set the scene for a typical yet typically individual melodrama, words selected by Mari Mezel from Alessandro Baricco’s novel Silk. Five players, on flutes, clarinets, percussion, violin, and cello, were joined by reciter Meg Kubota and Paterson, seemingly bringing a silken world into existence before our ears. It was an instrumental as much as a verbal drama we heard, processes recognisably rooted in central European tradition – Webern, Bartók, et al. – yet reinvented in magically pictorial terms that were entirely Eötvös’s own, Bluebeard notwithstanding. My sole reservation related to what sounded like overmiking. I wondered whether it were simply a feature, if an odd one, of the piece, yet its persistence in the two Birtwistle pieces suggested otherwise. Maybe it was nonetheless an artistic decision; if so, at least to my ears, it proved a pity, detracting not insignificantly here and later from the ultimate coherence of otherwise spellbinding performances. 

Lisa Illean’s Cantor (2017) opened the second half, verse by Willa Cather separated by entirely different, yet no less exquisite, instrumental movements for somewhat augmented ensemble, more string-focused than anything heard previously (or afterwards). Whether it were simply Schoenberg on my mind, I am not sure, but I sensed his presence at a distance in noticeably un-Schoenbergian, postspectralist (?) music: a pattern from Pierrot here, a floating vocal line there. As with all pieces on the programme, rates of change, be they melodic, harmonic, or timbral, seemed just right in work and performance alike. 

The Woman and the Hare (1999) brought singer, reciter, ensemble, and conductor together in exploration of a post-Gawain landscape both alluring and threatening, unmistakeably English in its melancholy and in its vocal and instrumental reinvention of Morgan Le Fay. The two voices contrasted and complemented, embellished and elucidated, music not necessarily ‘autonomous’, yet unquestionably ‘itself’. Stravinsky was an abiding, yet intangible presence, as sure as in Punch and Judy, all the way down to Birtwistle’s musical bedrock. And like Stravinsky’s Pierrot, it was above all an instrumental masterpiece—and yet… 

To hear …when falling asleep immediately after (twice, the second time as an encore) was instructive and, it seemed, inevitable. The 2019 commission sounded less a homage to the earlier work, despite the return to responsorial combination of singer and reciter, than its distillation in a new yet related world. Rilke in English translation (Jochen Voigt) and words drawn from Swinburne’s elegy for Baudelaire here sounded more strongly in opposition, until they were not. Instrumentalists played on as as ever-changing voice of continuity, in this world and the evening’s music as a whole.

Tiberghien - Illean and Beethoven, 25 October 2024

Wigmore Hall

Lisa Illean: Sonata in ten parts (world premiere)
Beethoven: 33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli, op.120

Cédric Tiberghien (piano)

How to present the Diabelli Variations? What better way than commissioning a new, related piano work to precede them? I should never have guessed that Lisa Illean’s Sonata in ten parts was her first work for solo piano, so assured was the writing, realised beautifully and meaningfully, as if a classic work, by Cédric Tiberghien. Each of the ten ‘parts’, which I think we might consider in some sense variations – the interesting question being variations on what? – is derived from a short passage, often as little as a bar, from Beethoven’s set. Interconnections in Illean’s own work were sometimes clear even on a first hearing; I suspect there will be more to be discovered on levels subterranean and subliminal. The opening seemed designed, both in work and performance, to invite us in, questing and uncertain (in a positive sense), full of potential. It was not Beethoven so much as Debussy and Schoenberg who initially came to my ears, though his ghost certainly visited the feast later on, perhaps as much through passages of unmistakeable dignity as through thematic connection. So too did others, Chopin and Brahms included. Not that these were necessarily overt references or even reminiscences, more points in common via, for instance, exquisite voice-leading (again both Illean’s and Tiberghien’s), use of the sustaining pedal, or horizontal employment of chords. Here was a splendidly old-school beauty of pianistic sonority put to contemporary musical ends, to the distinct benefit of both. 

Tiberghien elected to offer his engaging spoken introduction to the Diabelli Variations immediately after Illean’s Sonata, leaving us to ponder during the interval before launching into the fabled Schusterfleck. That worked very well, I thought, both in forging a greater whole and in rejuvenating a Beethovenian shock of the new. The Waltz, at any rate, was delectably sprung, without affectation, the first variation an excellent alternative beginning, as if Beethoven were saying – and surely he is – ‘that aside, now let us begin afresh’. As soon as its successor, we were in definably ‘late’ territory, kinship to the composer’s early years apparent in the third, for a distinct virtue of Tiberghien’s performance was sympathy to the multiplicity of voices, letting them sing to combine in the unmistakeable single voice of Beethoven. Here were humour, vigour, sheer élan, the knowingly wayward, and so much more, stretching in reference from the beguiling contrapuntal legacy of Bach, through heartfelt Mozartian equipoise, to Boulezian ‘organised delirium’ (to borrow the title of Caroline Potter’s new book). Formal command and communication were crucial, however lightly worn: one experienced groups of variations as something akin to sonata movements, whether in the rapt hush of a slow movement or the display of a finale. Overall balance and individual character were equally well judged, a Beethovenian hour passing in the twinkling of an eye. The composer’s apparent, readily explicable unwillingness to let go for (almost) the last time was captured to near perfection, as heart-rending as it was truthful. We had come home, though home would never be quite the same again.

'A Catalan Celebration': London Sinfonietta/Colomer - Gerhard, Magrané, García-Tomás, and Illean, 1 December 2021

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Roberto Gerhard: Libra
Joan Magrané Figuera: Faula
Raquel García-Tomás: aequae
Lisa Illean: Januaries
Gerhard: Leo

London Sinfonietta

Edmon Colomer (conductor)

A miserable, rainy night seemed just the right time for the London Sinfonietta, in association with the Institut Ramon Llull, to light up the Queen Elizabeth Hall with what they called ‘A Catalan Celebration’. 2020, the year without music, marked fifty years since the death of Roberto Gerhard. It was doubly welcome, then, to have this celebration of mostly Catalan music take place in 2021, the year when music tentatively returned to our lives. To hear fine performances not only of music by Gerhard, but also works by contemporary (to us) Catalan composers, Joan Magrané Figuera and Raquel García-Tomás, as well as one by the Australian-born, London-resident Lisa Illean, would have been a splendid opportunity at any time. It also helped dispel a little of the current misery outside. 

Gerhard himself was represented by two of his three late astrological pieces, Libra and Leo, from 1968 and 1969 respectively (the 1966 Gemini for piano and violin missing). Both ensemble works were premiered and recorded by the London Sinfonietta under David Atherton. I have not heard those (nor any other) recordings, but these performances under Edmon Colomer spoke clearly not only of excellence in execution but of deep familiarity and understanding of Gerhard’s music, of its language and colour, but also of its structure becoming living form in time. The éclat, to use an intentionally loaded term, of Libra’s opening chord having grabbed one’s intention, one immediately garnered a post-Schoenbergian (post-Webern too, I think) sense of every line counting, heard through exemplary clarity in scoring and performance alike. One might have heard the guitar as ‘Spanish’, but I think that would have been lazy; both Schoenberg and Webern used the instrument in ensemble works too. One felt, not merely recognised, a multi-movement structure condensed into one, placing it in a tradition dating back at least to Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony—and, of course, beyond to Liszt and Schubert—though here, perhaps, sonata-form inheritance, Gerhard’s own Third Symphony notwithstanding, was not so apparent. A dialectic between abstraction and Romantic sensibility lay the heart of what we heard. Glistening, above all it sang. Music of exile? It is other things too, yet that conclusion did not seem unreasonable, especially at a close that approached, or perhaps better referred to, a sort of modal tonality born of ‘national’ roots. 

Magrané’s Faula (Fable) followed. Written in 2017 and inspired by a novel of the same name by Jaume C. Pons Alorda, it seeks, to quote the composer, not to ‘elucidate his narrative,’ but ‘first and foremost to use Pons Alorda’s ideas and aesthetic world to conceive of its structure texture, and sound’. Four sections, essentially sets of musical material, recur throughout the work, taking their own line but also necessarily interacting. What soon struck me, even within the first, ‘Mosso, con foco’, was a fascinating polyphonic tendency—would it be too fanciful to ascribe this to the composer’s interest in Renaissance polyphony?—of individual, sometime fractious lines combining to effect that ‘line’ of which we speak so often as the prevailing melos, as Wagner would have had it, of so much Western music. A phrase that came to my mind, knowing nothing alas of the novel, was multiple tectonics; there was musical grit, it seemed, both in that necessary interaction between different types of material but also in their contrast. This could produce music of great beauty: atmosphere, propulsion, emotion. There was also, I felt, a sense of play to it: of chance, of contingency, however carefully designed, and yet productively within a framework of structural determination. Schoenberg’s—Bach’s for that matter—dialectic between freedom and determinism seemed in the context of this concert to extend via Gerhard to newer music, not necessarily in the sense of ‘influence’, but as a way to listen, even if it were only mine. 

García-Tomas’s aequae (2012) is divided into six parts of equal (hence the title) duration, two minutes each. In its exploration of ‘the relationship of equality between the musical materials that make it up as well as the paradoxes that such equality can produce’, it made its way with strikingly powerful integral development, through timbral as well as harmonic tension. Bowing cymbals, for instance, proved generative yet also resistant: an observation of the work in microcosm. There was a slower pulse (than in the hectic contrasts of Magrané), yet much happening within that pulse. Instruments not previously heard, such as saxophone and muted trombone, opened up new aural vistas: the art of programming, it seemed, very much part of the overall performance. Likewise the lack of strings, if only in this context, suggested something colder, even icier. 

After the interval, we heard Illean’s Januaries (2017), shaped in some sense by ‘memories of summers spent as a child with my grandparents in Queensland’. What might initially have seemed more textural music in quality had a definite guiding thread, suggestive initially, if only to me, of a process of melting. Descending, sliding figures were part of that; so too were ever-transforming harmonic fields. Distant bells first seemed to evoke something, or perhaps the point was that they did not; they were part of the landscape, of a space that could not necessarily be delineated, that slipped between our fingers, even our ears.

For the final piece, we returned to Gerhard for Leo. Again, I was struck by its opening éclat, though its development and general character took a different path. There was again complexity to this music, but never superfluity; everything mattered, had a relationship to the greater whole, even though one knew it would take greater familiarity precisely to discern it. Serialism, almost as if a magic square before our ears, was a guiding framework but never in itself the point. This was a powerful, directed, and highly dramatic performance; much, clearly, was at stake. A hieratic section, initially brass-led, reminiscent of chorale writing without simply reproducing it, was heard as the work’s emotional core, prior to initiation of further frenetic activity, material ever transforming before our ears. As first clarinet, then flute sang at the close a pentatonic, folk-like melody, suggesting this discovery may actually have underlain what previous we had heard, yet without our recognising it as such, exile as reminiscence in surroundings transformed returned, poignantly, to our aural stage.