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.

 

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (3) – ‘Songs and Fragments’: Eight Songs for a Mad King and Kafka-Fragmente, 10 July 2024

Théâtre du Jeu de Paume

Man – Johannes Martin Kränzle
Woman – Anna Prohaska
Violinist – Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Director – Barrie Kosky

Design and lighting – Urs Schönebaum  

Ensemble Intercontemporain

Pierre Bleuse (conductor)

Images: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence 2024 © Monika Rittershaus

Virtuosity of the highest degree, entirely at the service of musical drama, characterised this Aix production under Barrie Kosky’s direction. Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King and György Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente formed a staged double bill, given without a break, at that eighteenth-century jewel among theatres, the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume. The ghost of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire haunted proceedings, audibly in the Davies’s music theatre monodrama, written for the composer’s own, Schoenberg-inspired Fires of London (here, Schoenberg’s ensemble plus percussion), and more scenically in the Kurtág fragments, not of course intended to be staged, but here given an intriguing new slant through the mediation of expressionist cabaret.   

Johannes Martin Kränzle’s assumption of the mad king – referred to in the cast list simply as ‘Un homme’, though it is of course George III – was something never to be forgotten. Quite how much was his, how much was Kosky’s, we shall never know—and why should we particular care? Theatre is collaborative, even in what might seem to be a one-man-show. With a single spotlight, a single unsparing spotlight, this poor (rich) man, clad only in sagging underpants, bared his soul to the birds, the audience, and indeed the musicians of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, incisively conducted by Pierre Bleuse, who in turn offered us their own, related musical tour of whimsy, parody, and brutal violence. From an early promenade, through the haunting of an imaginary yet ever-so-real queen ‘Esther’, via the king’s beloved Handel – with biting irony, ‘Comfort ye…’, to the final, shocking smashing of the violin, this was a psychological study, which in a sense revealed nothing other than itself, and thus in another sense proved all the more revealing. Through the countless ways he marshalled his voice and his entire body, Kränzle touched, amused, and horrified us. It was gripping, concentrated theatre, which one might well have wished to experience again, but knew one could not, even if the attempt had immediately been made. 

Anna Prohaska and Patricia Kopatchinskaja, minus the EIC, were our guides for Kurtág’s extraordinary set of miniatures. The violin provided, as it were the bridge: destroyed and now resurrected as a one-woman orchestra who was also a protagonist—and by her double-companion. Equality here, between two more consummate musicians and communicators seemed, by virtue of staging and performance, the former still astutely straightforward yet minutely observed, to be both immediately, immanently manifest and yet also maintained through ever-shifting dramatic power relationships: one conducting the other, one pulling the other’s strings, one inciting and consoling, and so on. Where Davies’s expressionist nightmare had stunned us into submission, here a different ghost of Pierrot – perhaps surprisingly given the more ‘abstract’ nature of the work – proved more founded in re-gendered harlequin character. We turned inwards, Kurtág’s Webern-like miniatures commanding and receiving absolute concentration, in more than one sense. Prohaska’s spellbinding performance – imagine having to sing that by heart, and engage in minutely planned physical performance too – was impossible to dissociate from Kopatchinskaja’s. The two musicians seemed almost to emerge as two emanations of the same soul. A response to their male counterpart in the first half, or something subtly yet, in that subtlety, defiantly different? Why choose? Again, there was so much one could not possibly have taken in, which cried out for another chance to do so, yet which was tantalisingly lost in the passage of concentrated time. Above all, though, and this may be the ultimate ‘lesson’, we learned a little better to listen to one another.

In the Locked Room/The Lighthouse, Royal College of Music, 27 June 2018

Britten Theatre

Susan Wheeler – Lauren Joyanne Morris

Ella Foley – Beth Moxon

Stephen Foley – Thomas Erlank

Ben Pascoe – Theodor Platt

Sandy, Officer 1 – Richard Pinkstone

Blazes, Officer 2 – James Atkinson

Arthur, Voices of the Cards, Officer 3 – Timothy Edlin

Stephen Unwin (director)

Hannah Wolfe (designs)

Ralph Stokeld (lighting)

Royal College of Music Opera Orchestra

Michael Rosewell (conductor)

It was, on paper and not only on paper, an excellent idea to pair Huw Watkins’s 2012 chamber opera, In the Locked Room, with Peter Maxwell Davies’s classic drama, The Lighthouse. In both works, it is – or should be – far from clear where the boundaries between ‘reality’ and ‘imagination’ might lie, indeed whether such boundaries might justly be said to exist or at least to have meaning. Where does delusion take over? Are we deluding ourselves to think that it has not been in the ascendant all along? Is there any scope, as Hans Sachs might advise us, to manipulate the dark forces of Schopenhauerian Wahn? In many respects, this Royal College of Music double-bill worked well; I was certainly left thinking about what the works had in common and what they did not. I am not entirely convinced, though, that Stephen Unwin’s staging of the former and indeed David Harsent’s libretto always made as strong a case as they might have done.

Two friends who had known Thomas Hardy’s original short story beforehand felt more dissatisfied than I did. Whether I should have felt differently had I too known the ‘original’, I am not sure. I am, to quote an accessory to war crimes, ‘intensely relaxed’ about adaptations taking on whatever new form is wished, so long as it works on its own terms. Nevertheless, from having read the story since, I could not help but think that something had been lost in ambiguity, whether by Harsent, Unwin, or, I suspect, by both. The updating works well. A joyless marriage, kept in place by banker, Stephen Foley’s money and, doubtless, by inertia, even by social pressure, comes across well. In a programme note, Unwin speaks of ‘the lonely yearnings of the housekeeper, Susan’; I found her somewhat under-written, though, and indeed had thought her a mysteriously reappearing estate agent. (My fault in the latter case, no doubt.)

What I missed, and what is perhaps only really suggested by Watkins’s score, is a suggestion that the poet-lodger, Ben Pascoe, for whom Ella falls might or might not be in her imagination; realism ruled too strongly on stage. (Hardy called his tale The Imaginative Woman, which, sexism aside, surely points to a more interesting reading.) There is a splendid addition to that in Stephen’s talk about derivatives: surely the most lethal imaginary world of our time. That perhaps made him the most interesting character, especially when played with so strong a combination of toxic masculinity (Hannah Wolfe’s designs surely helped too) and implicit, yet only implicit, doubt as by Thomas Erlank. Otherwise, however, it is in the ghostly musical imaginings that seem to take their linguistic leave as much from the later world of Owen Wingrave and Death in Venice as from the more obvious Britten opera, that that realm seems capable of musico-dramatic expression. A fascination with patterns, too, however, seems fruitfully suggested, in the end once more reminding us of that Turn of the Screw precedent. I am certainly not saying that what is heard musically must be recreated on stage, or indeed match the words. A little too often, though, I found the score, as it were, visually drowned out.

Such perhaps only became truly apparent in retrospect, following the second half’s powerfully integrated performance and production of The Lighthouse. Here, claustrophobia and terror grabbed us by the neck and never let go; yet so too did the suggestive and still surprising (however much one ‘knows’) turns of the dramatic screw. This, it seems to me, is an opera whose stature grows with every hearing, and London has been fortunate in recent years with possibilities. Richard Pinkstone, James Atkinson, and Timothy Edlin brought sharply characterised readings to their characters, yet their interaction proved just as impressive. So too was the playing of the RCM Opera Orchestra under Michael Rosewell: insidious purveyors and blenders of reality and imagination, complementing and immeasurably enhancing Unwin’s resourceful staging (not least Ralph Stokeld’s lighting, atmospheric and blinding by turn). Peter Maxwell Davies’s cunning use and abuse of parody set boundaries and dissolved them in oracular pronouncement. This was truly an apocalyptic pit of bestial expressionism. Every minute, even every second, was made to count: repetition never just repetition, development always called into question. Whether the Beast were ‘real’, whatever that might mean, proved both the question and quite beside the point. Tremendous stuff, then, as always: fully the equal of what we should have any right to expect from London’s larger houses.

LSO/Rattle - Davies and Berlioz, 26 June 2016

Barbican Hall

Peter Maxwell Davies – The Hogboon (world premiere, LSO commission)

Berlioz – Symphonie fantastique, op.14

The Hogboon – Mark Stone

Magnus – Sebastian Exall
Mother – Katherine Broderick
Good Witch – Claudia Huckle
Earl of Orkney – Peter Auty
The Cat – Capucine Daumas
Princess – Lauren Lodge-Campbell
Bat – Lucas Pinto

Karen Gillingham (stage director)

Ruth Mariner (assistant stage director)
Rhiannon Newman-Brown (designer)
Sean Turner (associate designer)

LSO Discovery Choirs (chorus masters: David Lawrence and Lucy Griffiths)
London Symphony Chorus (chorus masters: Simon Halsey and Neil Ferris)
Guildhall School Singers
London Symphony Orchestra
Guildhall Symphony Orchestra
Simon Rattle (conductor)

Peter Maxwell Davies’s last major work, a children’s opera, The Hogboon, here received its world premiere. It may not be a musical masterpiece on the level of a Birtwistle opera; I doubt that anyone would make such a claim. That, however, is not really the point. It seems to me the very model of a community opera, offering a good story and good music both to amateurs, indeed to children, and to professionals; this was an opportunity and an experience many of those taking part are unlikely ever to forget. We need to do much more of this sort of thing, and who could set a better example than the LSO and Simon Rattle? Something for royalists too: the work is dedicated to the Queen on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday.

 

Each house in Davies’s beloved Orkney is said to have its own Hogboon, a familiar spirit who, in return for food and drink left out every night, tends to its family’s wellbeing. In this case, the Hogboon helps Magnus, seventh child of a seventh child, mocked as useless by his Six Elder Brothers, to defeat the Nuckleavee sea-monster, averting the threat of that monster breakfasting on six golden-tressed maidens and the daughter of the Earl of Orkney. How is that accomplished? By music and dance. As a reward, Magnus is betrothed to the Earl’s daughter, and the boy’s brothers receive those golden-tressed maidens in marriage. There is a social and environmental message: care for each other and for the world around us. It is lightly worn, and perhaps the more convincing for that. Give or take the odd unfortunate updated Tippettism in the composer’s own libretto – ‘Have we shown disrespect to your otherness?’ does not appear to be intended ironically – the story works well over the course of a little under an hour.

So does the score. Davies, needless to say marshals his forces well, offering them apt, challenging, yet eminently performable music. (Performances were certainly eminent on this occasion.) There is bold, large-scale orchestral and choral writing, tuneful solo vocal writing, nothing outstaying its welcome, with a wide variety of expressive means and plenty of variation. For instance, following the opening ‘Nucklavee!’ chorus, a beautifully written (and here, beautifully played) flute interlude leads into Magnus’s song by the peat fire of the heroic deeds to which he believes he will one day be called (and, of course, will). The melody is in many respects quite conventionally operatic; the excellent treble, Sebastian Exall, here and elsewhere took well his opportunity to shine. I am sure we shall hear more from him. Brass from the back of the hall herald the Hogboon’s arrival; there is some splendid post-Mahlerian band music when the players are joined by onstage wind. The Good Witch’s Cat is undoubtedly – well, catlike, her feline vocal and stage presence adding much to the fun of proceedings. Singing and dancing were all very well coordinated. There is even a non-singing role for a Bat, flying through the auditorium, here taken by young Lucas Pinto. And the final farewell – ‘And so goodbye. God bless you all. Goodbye.’ – proves both rousing and moving. Many congratulations to all concerned!

 

Another splendid example of cooperation was offered by the combined forces of the LSO and students from the Guildhall School, next door. What a wonderful luxury it was to hear the Symphonie fantastique with such large (and excellent) forces, just what Berlioz – for whatever this is worth – always ‘intended’. I counted, for instance, no fewer than twelve double bass players and six harpists: not bad at all for the Barbican. I wonder also whether the circumstances led Rattle to be less idiosyncratic than he has often shown himself to be in recent years. Whatever the reason, this was a far more satisfying performance than I have heard from him in quite some time. The LSO, with its long Berlioz tradition, above all with Colin Davis, but stretching back much further than that, sounded in its element; so did its young guests. Indeed, had I not known, I cannot imagine that I should have guessed this was a ‘combined’ orchestra at all. The fabled attack and precision of the LSO was matched note for note by its partner musicians.

 

The opening bars of the first movement sounded fragile and intense; indeed, string vibrato considerably more intense than one generally hears, and all the better for it. The introduction was moulded, yes, but not unreasonably so. Indeed, its moulding struck me almost as a musical equivalent to the composer’s unquestionably ‘interventionist’ Memoirs. This was probably a more ‘Romantic’, less ‘Classical’, account than one would have heard from Davis: an exciting new chapter beginning, perhaps? Yet, by the same token, there were times when Rattle would stand back and simply let the orchestra play: another excellent sign for the future. Insanity shone through, but it was not arbitrary: this was disciplined madness. The second movement really danced, with grace and menace: sometimes in turn, sometimes in contest. We heard the cornet solo for once too. The music glittered and was gay; it had splendid swing. And the power of the whirling vortex towards the close was quite something indeed!

 

I was struck by the extent to which the opening duetting in the ‘Scène aux champs’ was heard musically: this was counterpoint as well as the instantiation of a programme, indeed arguably more the former than the latter. There was dramatic, quasi-operatic tension, although the theatre remained, of course, a theatre of the mind. Beethoven’s precedent was clear: not just the Sixth Symphony but also the Ninth. For music of the music sounded akin to accompagnato or arioso; I began to wonder also about possible Gluckian precedents here. The eloquence to the great melody on the cellos was certainly such that it might have been a vocal solo of its own. Timpani rolls sounded as much symphonically anticipatory as ‘atmospheric’.

 

That near-verbal – and yet, by the same token, resolutely non-verbal – eloquence continued in the ‘March to the Scaffold’. It was not, though, at the expense of any martial quality; the two tendencies incited one another. Brass were as resplendent as one might have expected, but there was menace in their muffled tones too. The finale proved both catchy and grotesque, and not only from the superlative woodwind. The Dies irae music, whatever the composer’s ‘intentions’, sounded both chilling and, I think, witty. ‘Rollicking’ is perhaps an adjective too readily attached to ‘finale’, but here it seems inescapable. Exhilarating!

 

 

 

The Lighthouse, Royal Opera (Jette Parker Young Artists), 22 October 2015

Samuel Sakker as First Officer, Yuriy Yurchuk as Second Officer. David Shipley as Third Officer. All images: (C) ROH. Photographer: Clive Barda

 

 

Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House

Sandy, First Officer – Samuel Sakker

Blazes, Second Officer – Yuriy Yurchuk
Arthur, Third Office – David Shipley

Greg Eldridge (director)

Alyson Cummins (designs)
Warren Letton (lighting)
Jo Meredith (movement)

Southbank Sinfonia

Jonathan Santagada (conductor)

 

 

Peter Maxwell Davies’s chamber opera, The Lighthouse, made an excellent showcase for three singers from the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker Young Artists Programme. More to the point, they made an excellent case for the opera, which has been fortunate indeed in London over the past few years.

 

The opera, as I wrote when reviewing English Touring Opera’s 2012 production, has the gripping quality of a superior detective – and ghost – story. Inspired, as the cliché has it, by a true story, in this case an account from Craig Mair’s A Star for Seamen: The Stevenson Family of Engineers, the opera’s unsettling mix of courtroom drama, in almost modern televisual terms, and all-too-real (or is it?) Revelation-style apocalypticism presents both narrative and self-critique, verbally and musically. It makes sense out of, or at least deals with contradictory ‘truths’ – and the magpie tendencies, which yet synthesise, of Davies’s score lie at the heart of that achievement. Words and music from characters in ensemble come together to present something that may or may not be more or less truthful than what it is they and we think they are saying individually. The difficulties of the three men’s relationship – they have been penned together for several months – is menacingly conveyed, though not without affection either. Parody is present, of course, most evidently in the reimagination of the ballads – a street variety from Blazes and Sandy’s sickly drawing-room version – and hymns. Arthur is the sort of pig-headed Protestant fundamentalist who has always drawn Davies’s ire, but there is an element again of affection, such as memories so often bring in spite of themselves, as well as anger in Davies’s presentation and subversion of the hymn tunes. The rhythm of the closing automation – ‘The lighthouse is now automatic,’ we hear at the end of the Prologue – sounded as stubbornly memorable as ever in this performance from the Southbank Sinfonia and Jonathan Santagada.

 

Their performance had been a little hesitant at first. Indeed, a lack of definition at times, mostly from the strings, had made the Prologue drag somewhat. There were no such problems in ‘The Cry of the Beast’, in which the players and Santagada seemed very much in their element, a far more colourful and rhythmically alert performance. In that screwing up of dramatic tension, the orchestra seemed at one with Greg Eldridge’s period staging: straightforwardly presented, yet seething with menace later on. Alyson Cummins’s designs proved a major contributor, likewise Warren Letton’s lighting; in Eldridge’s words, he and his designer had ‘tried to capture the dichotomy between the naturalistic action and the heavy supernatural elements present throughout the score. In the world of the music everything is metaphor and this sis a theme that we have continued in our design. Everything on the stage … is physically real … but also serves a representative purpose that underscores a symbolic element of the story.’

 

Within that staging – that imprisonment, we might say – our singers brought the drama to life. Samuel Sakker’s lyric tenor covered an array of musico-psychological states as Sandy. He even pulled off the difficult trick of questionable singing – in the ballad – as character portrayal, rather than from inability to sing it ‘right’. Yuriy Yurchuk’s diction was on occasion a little occluded, yet for the most part his was a powerful performance as Blazes, again encompassing a good deal of musical and dramatic virtuosity (to refer to a concept the composer has suggested is necessary, and surely is). David Shipley’s Arthur was possessed of as well as by frightening fanaticism, all founded upon a splendidly deep bass voice. Interaction between all three soloists was convincing throughout. I look forward to hearing them again.
 

The Medium/The Wanton Sublime, Grimeborn Festival, 27 August 2015

Studio 2, Arcola Theatre

Hai-Ting Chinn (mezzo-soprano)

Orpheus Sinfonia

Andrew Griffiths (conductor)

Robert Shaw (director)

Gillian Argo (designs)
Tom White (lighting)

What an evening for Hai-Ting Chinn, taking the starring and indeed only role not only in Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Medium but also in Tarik O’Regan’s The Wanton Sublime, here receiving its first European performances! She must have been on stage for not far short of an hour and a half, singing for most of that time. I was a little surprised to hear her described as a mezzo; to my ears, she sounded much more of a soprano. What was not in doubt, however, was her accomplishment as a singing actress; nor, indeed, her accomplishment as a vocalist, not least in the unaccompanied Medium, written for Jane Manning. Called upon to alternate between Sprechgesang, rapid coloratura, hymn singing, and much else besides, Chinn managed both to remain in control and to convey meaning. A more ‘conventionally’ sung part in O’Regan’s work nevertheless offered plenty of opportunity for development, within its relatively short duration; much was made, capitalising upon Gillian Argo’s necessarily spare yet telling designs, of the conflict between different aspects of Mary’s – yes, the Virgin’s: ‘I am a virgin’ – character.

Davies’s work, if perhaps a little over-extended, presents a welcome continuation, albeit from a female standpoint, of some of the preoccupations of the slightly earlier The Lighthouse. Theology, religious fanaticism, fraudulent representation and self-representation, even some of the downright insanity of the composer’s earlier work: they co-exist, conflict, even fuse in a largely compelling three-quarters of an hour. The voices in the medium’s head whose urgings she feels compelled to act out, almost to give birth to, offer an intriguing ‘period’ lace introduction to the contemporary – New York, I presume – reimagining of Mary as Virgin in an equally uncomprehending world of The Wanton Sublime. Undressing and re-dressing (in what, before its obliteration before over-use and misuse, one might once have called ‘iconic’ blue), more of a sexual being than she is generally given credit for, this Mary has much to intrigue, although Anna Rabinowitz’s libretto perhaps tries a little too hard to be ‘streetwise’. O’Regan’s score, expertly played by the Orpheus Sinfonia (violin, viola, cello, double bass, flute/piccolo, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, two on percussion) under Andrew Griffiths, progresses alternately by angular, but not too angular, action passages and frozen, more melismatic passages of reflection. There is thus perhaps something filmic to what we hear as well as to what we see. Recorded voices – Mary’s own – surface too: largely confirming, but perhaps also questioning. Much to ponder, then, from a fascinating evening at the Grimeborn Festival.

 

Prom 70: SCO/Gernon - Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, 80th birthday concert, 8 September 2014

Royal Albert Hall

Concert Overture: Ebb of Winter (London premiere)

Strathclyde Concerto no.4

An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise

Dmitri Ashkenazy (clarinet)

Robert Jordan (bagpipes)

Scottish Chamber Orchestra

Ben Gernon (conductor)

Image: Chris Christodoulou/BBC

Unlike many such occasions, this concert actually did take place on the composer’s birthday, albeit banished to a ‘late-night’ slot. I wish I could feel greater enthusiasm for the more recent works of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, at least taken as a whole. Too often, especially during the Fourth Strathclyde Concerto, I was left hankering for something of the violence of Eight Songs for a Mad King, of Taverner, or of Worldes Blis. (When, I wonder, shall we hear the latter again? Or, in my case, hear it for the first time in concert?) One would not, of course, expect any composer to stay the same throughout his career, and it is perfectly understandable that Davies should consider such works those of an ‘angry young man’ and feel the need to do something different. At any rate, it was good to have the opportunity to hear three works of his which I had never heard ‘live’ before.

Ebb of Winter was written last year, commissioned by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra for its fortieth anniversary. I found it the most compelling of the three pieces performed here, having the scale and ambition of a true tone poem.  The opening calls from horns are – and, in performance were – arresting. Within a minute or so, one hears them, all almost jazzy syncopation, something more ‘involved’ in a Schoenbergian sense, and the ‘Scottish’ rhythms of the Scotch snap: material and moods aplenty, then, for development, and it is that which most impresses. Trumpets seemed to offer a reminiscence of the frenetic world of The Lighthouse. A stentorian chorale made its mark, both uncertain and certain; so did delicate woodwind solos. The depth of orchestral sound from the SCO under Ben Gurnon belied the relatively modest forces.

The fourth of Davies’s ten Strathclyde Concertos followed, Dmitri Ashkenazy joining the orchestra. Again, the performance seemed beyond reproach, and there could be no gainsaying the composer’s command of line. Ultimately, however, what one might call its ‘meditative’ quality proved a little monotonous – and grey – for me. That is not to say that there were not interesting moments. Following the brief introductory Lento, the second section, Allegro moderato, sounded almost like whimsical Brahms, the example – at least to my ears – of Schoenberg again apparent, if somewhat tamed. (It was the First Chamber Symphony that sprang to mind, albeit with thinned-out texture.) ‘Scottish’ rhythms again were to be heard. The following Adagio was gentle, unassuming, but a bit of an endurance test. That said, a discernible thread continued to be heard, so my disappointment may simply be a matter of taste and/or mood. (It was quite late in the evening by this stage!) The marimba, however, offered some sense of relief. Ashkenazy’s account of the cadenza clearly had its measure, preparing the way for a simple, folk-like melody to emerge, the final section proving numinous, even moving.

The frankly pictorial An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise followed, the SCO players clearly enjoying themselves, some of them – and the composer, onstage, with Tom Service – being offered a drink of celebration during the performance. There was characterful, at times boisterous playing: just as it should be. The descent into the darkest hours of night was expertly handled, both by the orchestra and by Gurnon. Those more enthused than I by the sound of bagpipes will have loved what came next; the instrument made its point, even as I wondered whether Scottish independence might not be so bad a thing after all. An arrangement of Happy Birthday, apparently made by one of the SCO’s players, rounded off the evening.

Proms Saturday Matinee no.2 – Hardenberger/Lapland CO/Storgårds: C.P.E. Bach, Birtwistle, Honegger, Davies, and Sibelius, 9 August 2014

Cadogan Hall

C.P.E. Bach – Symphony in B minor, Wq 182 no.5

Birtwistle – Endless Parade

Honegger – Pastorale d’été

Davies – Sinfonia

Sibelius - Rakastava

Håkan Hardenberger (trumpet)

Lapland Chamber Orchestra

John Storgårds (conductor)

 

A principal theme of this year’s Proms has been the greater-than-ever variety of ensembles from across the world, many of them making their debuts here, whether at Cadogan Hall or a short walk away at the Royal Albert Hall. This Saturday Matinee offered the Proms debut of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra, the most northerly orchestra in the European Union, conducted by its Artistic Director, John Storgårds, with trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger joining for Birtwistle’s Endless Parade.

 

To hear an orchestral work – or indeed any work – by C.P.E. Bach is a rare treat. Unfortunately, the performance of his ‘Hamburg’ Symphony in B minor, Wq 182 no.5 (a Proms first), was not the most ingratiating; indeed, the first movement proved downright abrasive, and not only on account of some dodgy intonation. The strangeness of Emanuel Bach’s orchestral tessitura registered, as did the disjunctures – a canny programming presentiment of Birtwistle? – but there is more to the composer than that. A slightly fuller tone was permitted to the small orchestra (4.4.3.2.1, expanded for the following works) in the slow movement, and the finale was frenetic in a good sense. Still, it is sad to reflect that, on the few occasions when modern orchestras feel able to perform this music, they nevertheless so often feel constrained to ape ‘period’ mannerisms. If you have modern strings, make use of them!

 

Birtwistle’s Endless Parade offered what the composer, in a brief conversation with Clemency Burton-Hill, called a ‘piece of permanent discontinuity’, after Cubism, and more particularly after Picasso. The orchestra now sounded more at home, doubtless helped by the virtuosity and musical understanding of Hardenberger. Indeed, it would be little exaggeration to speak of ‘supreme command’ in his case. The piece was played as chamber music writ large, material tossed between soloist and various orchestral instruments. In its syncopation, it even approached ‘swing’, though jazz enthusiasts would probably beg to differ. It is, of course, a typically perspectival work, but I was struck – as was my companion, new to Birtwistle’s music – at the continuity that yet dialectically emerged from discontinuity. As Birtwistle commented, Beethoven is a true master in such matters, working, however, with the disadvantage (!) of tonality. Birtwistle’s language, technique, and for much of his career, eschewal of goal-orientation might seem to make him and Beethoven odd bed-fellows, but the comparison is well worth reflecting upon. As ever, of course, there was a keen sense not only of drama and landscape, but of drama through landscape, and of landscape through drama.

 

Another great English musical knight, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, was represented by his early (1962) Sinfonia, one of the works he wrote after – in one sense or another – Monteverdi’s Vespers, which, in a performance under Walter Goehr, had so inspired him and many others. (What a pity no recording seems to exist of any of Goehr’s performances! If anyone knows differently, I should be delighted to hear.) Davies admitted that he had not heard the piece since having conducted it during the 1980s with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and that he would take a red pencil to it now. I was interested to hear it, but should not necessarily rush to do so again. The opening clarinet solo was properly ‘recitando’, the first movement being marked ‘Lento recitando’, and that movement as a whole was full of expectant energy. None of the piece, though, seemed especially characteristic. The slow onward tread of the last of the four short movements came across very well in performance.

 

I could not bring myself to become excited about the other two pieces on the programme. Honegger’s Pastorale d’été ideally needs a greater cushion of strings than was available here. However, the essence of the music was well conveyed, greatly helped by steadiness in the rocking movement upon which it rests. Woodwind playing especially impressed – as indeed it had in Birtwistle. Sibelius’s Rakastava, the third of the pieces receiving its first Proms performance (Sinfonia having been the second) received an idiomatic, committed performance, if with smaller forces than it would doubtless often receive. (In this hall, it did not seem to matter.) Despite the characterful muted playing in the second movement, and especially fine solo cello playing throughout from Lauri Angervo, it remained for me a largely bland work. The encore, a Romance by Nils-Eric Fougstedt, was pleasant enough in a generic film-music sort of way.

Dido and Aeneas/The Lighthouse, Royal Academy Opera, 16 May 2013

Sir Jack Lyons Theatre, Royal Academy of Music

Dido – Sarah Shorter

Belinda – Sónia Grané
Second Woman – Helen Bailey
Sorceress – Rozanna Madylus
First Witch – Tereza Gevorgyan
Second Witch – Irina Loskova
Spirit – Rosalind Coad
Aeneas – Samuel Pantcheff
Sailor – Ross Scanlon

Sandy, Officer 1 – Iain Milne

Blazes, Officer 2 – Samuel Queen
Arthur. Officer 3, Voice of the Cards – Andri Björn Róbertsson

John Ramster (director)

Jake Wiltshire (lighting)
Patrick Doyle (costumes)

Chorus

Royal Academy Sinfonia

Iain Ledingham, Lionel Friend (conductors)

 

Samuel Queen (Blazes), Andri Björn Róbertsson (Arthur) and Iain Milne (Sandy).
Pictures © Royal Academy of Music, May 2013

Not the most obvious of pairings, perhaps: Dido and Aeneas and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse. One can certainly find connections if one tries, as director John Ramster valiantly did in his director’s note, especially with respect to the role of Fate. And of course one can make connections between most things if so inclined, when placed together. This, however, seemed more like an evening of two halves.

 

The performance of The Lighthouse was spectacularly good, at least a match for the recent English Touring Opera production, and arguably still more theatrically gripping. (How fortunate we are to have had two stagings in close succession!) There was not a great deal in the way of scenery; much was done with Jake Wiltshire’s brilliant – at some points, literally so – lighting, by turns suggestive of the lighthouse itself, the red eyes of the Beast, and much more. Ramster and his colleagues engendered a terrifying sense of claustrophobia and whatever horror – production, like opera, leaves matters tantalisingly unclear – it is that actually takes place. The sheer hell of being cooped up together, the promise of release having clearly been frustrated more than once, is conveyed viscerally, more by the characters’ interaction than anything external, and thus all the more powerful for it.

 

For that, of course, the three singers should claim a great deal of credit. Andri Björn Róbertsson struck Calvinistic terror into the heart as the hypocritical fundamentalist, Sandy. From the moment of saying grace, his sonorous deep bass, combined with charismatic stage presence, had one thinking of a perverted (anti-)Christ figure. His physical excitement during Blazes’ song, offered attempted release in more than one sense. Samuel Queen and Iain Milne presented a nicely ambiguous Blazes and Sandy, quite as impressive as actors as singers. Lionel Friend’s direction of the Royal Academy Sinfonia was quite beyond reproach; after a lacklustre showing in the first half (about which, more below), the orchestra sounded rejuvenated: precise, sardonic, and at times overpowering. The knife-edge balance between fatalism and human agency on stage was replicated, indeed engendered, in the pit. Quite outstanding!

 

What a difference a conductor makes, for Iain Ledingham’s direction of the same orchestra in Dido and Aeneas had been disappointing. Adopting that strange practice of having modern strings simply eschew vibrato, as if that somehow were enough to qualify as an ‘authentic’ performance, whatever that might be, Ledingham set the tone for what was to follow in the Overture: listless, hard-driven, and with sonority redolent of a school orchestra. (It was certainly not in any sense the players’ fault, as The Lighthouse demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt.) If only Friend had conducted both. Vocal performances were less impressive too, or rather they were in the title roles. After a shaky start, Sarah Shorter recovered well, but was so let down by Ledingham’s conducting that it was difficult to reach any proper judgement. Samuel Pantcheff sounded out of sorts as Aeneas; maybe he was under the weather. Not for the first time, though, Sónia Grané shone, this time as a mellifluous Belinda. Rozanna Madylus made for a nicely malign Sorceress, ably supported by weirdly snarling witches, Tereza Gevorgyan and Irina Loskova. Ross Scanlon almost threatened to steal the show as a wickedly camp Sailor.

 

Ramster’s staging of Purcell’s masterpiece presented a similar meeting between camp and stylisation, perhaps strongest in the choreographed dances. Maybe that match was an expression of his ideas concerning Fate; it would make a good deal of ‘Baroque’ sense on paper. However, I could not help but agree with my companion’s observation when, slightly ruing her inability to watch a Eurovision semi-final, she said that it was actually all to be seen here. Certainly the strange portrayal of the underwear-flashing witches did not seem so very distant from what one might have imagined unfolding in Malmö at the same time. Despite some fine offstage choral singing, I felt strangely unmoved by what should be one of the most tragic of all operatic final scenes. (‘Tristan und Isolde in a pint-pot’, was Raymond Leppard’s wonderful description of the opera.) No matter: it would have been worth travelling a long way for a performance such as we heard of The Lighthouse.

On the centenary of Pierrot lunaire...

... or rather of its first public performance, on 16 October 1912. Is there any work that stands so proudly before the music of the twentieth century and pushes the Romanticism of the previous century to its extreme and beyond? Not even The Rite of Spring, whatever its musical greatness and the quasi-legendary nature of its premiere the following year. If too often today performances of Stravinsky's masterpiece have been neutralised, the Rite degraded into an orchestral showpiece, then Pierrot seems, like so much of Schoenberg's œuvre, still, in an almost Adornian sense, to resist. The very notion of adequacy in performance seems misplaced. It seems impossible even to agree upon how its Sprechstimme should be 'voiced'. The very make-up of its instrumental ensemble is prophetic of so much 'New Music' to come. Can one imagine Le marteau sans maître without Pierrot? More to the point, could Boulez have done? Peter Maxwell Davies's Pierrot Players, later the Fires of London, took Schoenberg's quintet as its core. Hans Werner Henze's Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer took the same ensemble as its emobdiment of sickly, bourgeois expressionism - and, almost despite itself, despite the composer's intentions, ended up offering to the Pierrot-ensemble the most compelling music. Stravinsky, who could in equal measure hit musical nails squarely on the head and prove himself grotesquely wrong-headed, came perhaps closer to the truth than anyone else when he celebratedly described Pierrot as  'the solar plexus as well as the mind of early-twentieth-century music'. We might simply delete the 'early'. And so, in tribute to that performance in Berlin's Choralian-Saal from Albertine Zehme as reciter, Eduard Steuermann, Jakob Masiniak, Hans Kindler, Hans de Vries, and Karl Eßberger, here are the score and one of the great recorded performances of the Dreimal sieben Gedichte, from Boulez, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and Christine Schäfer:

The Lighthouse, English Touring Opera, 11 October 2012

Linbury Studio Theatre

Sandy – Adam Tunnicliffe

Blazes – Nicholas Merryweather
Arthur – Richard Mosley-Evans 

Ted Huffman (director)

Neil Irish (designs)
Guy Hoare (lighting)
Oliver Townsend (costumes)

Aurora Orchestra
Richard Baker (conductor)

 

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s chamber opera, The Lighthouse, received a splendid performance from English Touring Opera, just as Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis did last week. At little more than an hour and a half, including an interval, this proved a far more satisfactory dramatic experience than the Royal Opera’s Götterdammerung on the main Covent Garden stage. (To be fair, that would not be difficult, and ETO’s performance was far better than merely preferable.)

 

The opera has the gripping quality of a superior detective – and ghost – story. Its Prologue sets up the situation as three naval officers answer questions concerning the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers, questions posed by a solo horn. As time goes on, their interrogation metamorphoses into something approaching reconstruction, the point we reach in the opera proper, in which the singers who have played the officers turn to play the lighthouse keepers – and, at the end, return to the guise of the officers, who may or may not bear guilt. Davies wrote the libretto as well as the score, composed for an expanded Fires of London ensemble, out-of-tune piano, banjo, and flexatone included.

 

Misunderstandings and the weird ways in which makes sense out of disparate, perhaps even mutually exclusive, ‘truths’ are finely portrayed musically and verbally as well as scenically. Words from the three characters come together to present something that may or may not be more or less truthful than what it is they think they are saying individually: a verbal magic square perhaps? Webern’s shadow is cast longer and more widely than one might expect. The instability of the three men’s relationship – they have been together for a good few months now – is menacingly conveyed, though not without affection either. Arthur is a different matter, or at least he seems to be, but there is certainly at least a hint of homoeroticism, especially in Ted Huffman’s excellent production, between Sandy and Blazes. Parody is present, of course, most evidently in the reimagination of the ballads – a street variety from Blazes and Sandy’s sickly drawing-room version – and the hymn tunes. (Arthur is clearly the kind of Protestant fundamentalist who has long drawn Davies’s ire.) The rhythm of the closing automation – ‘The lighthouse is now automatic,’ we hear at the end of the Prologue – is as stubbornly memorable as the New York traffic-jam sounds at the beginning of Stravinsky’s Agon, another work owing a great debt and repaying it handsomely, to the jewels of Webern. All of the way home and for some time afterwards I found it impossible to rid my head of its repetitions.

 

Both Huffman’s staging and Richard Baker’s conducting are excellent, equal in precision; so, unsurprisingly, is the expert witness of the Aurora Orchestra, as fine an ensemble of young soloists as one is likely to encounter. The simple set, faithful to the work, provides a suitably claustrophobic backdrop and indeed participant – who are the ghosts and where are they are? In the characters and/or our minds, or are they something more? – for the keenly directed drama to unfold. Guy Hoare’s lighting did its job very well indeed, especially when it came to showing the automated signals in the deserted, desolate house. Tenor Adam Tunnicliffe offered a sensitively sung performance of Sandy, both contrasting and blending well with baritone Nicholas Merryweather as Blazes. Richard Mosley-Evans presented a powerful portrayal of Arthur, alive to his daemons, and to the illusory and real strengths and weaknesses arising therefrom.

 

It is not merely that there was no weak length in the cast; these were performances that would have graced any stage. The excellent news is that they will grace a good few more stages, for after the Linbury performances, this production will be seen in Cambridge, Exeter, Harrogate, Bath, and Aldeburgh. For further details from ETO’s website, click here.

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’.