Lash, Deutsche Oper, 20 June 2025

Images: © Marcus Lieberenz

A – Anna Prohaska
S - Sarah Maria Sun
N – Noa Frenkel
K – Katja Kolm
Live Camera – Nadja Krüger
Synthesiser, Piano – Christoph Grund, Ernst Surberg
Electric Guitar – Adrian Pereyra
Stage percussion – Thomas Döringer, Florian Glotz, Konstantin Tiersch, Laslo Vierk
Box operators – Nana Ajei Boateng, Zé de Pavia, Lennie Fanslau, Victor Naumov, Paula Schumm

Director – Dead Centre (Bush Moukarzel)
Designs – Nina Wetzel
Lighting – Jörg Schuchardt
Sound design – Arne Vierck
Video – Sébastien Dupouey
Dramaturgy – Sebastian Hanusa

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin

Enno Poppe (conductor)

Having been an avid follower of Rebecca Saunders’s music since my first encounter at the Wigmore Hall in 2012, mostly in Germany (Berlin and Munich in particular) but also in London, I was excited to learn her first opera would be given at the Deutsche Oper—and still more excited to be able to visit for the premiere. Equally interesting and exploratory in vocal and non-vocal music and with an excellent track record in choice of verbal texts, Saunders seemed in many ways an ideal candidate for operatic composition. It would at the very least be interesting to see what that development entailed—and so it was. 

Lash—Acts of Love, to give it its full title, is not a conventional opera. No surprises there, one might say. Yet if it has elements of something more installation-like, more in Ed Atkins’s libretto (if one can call it that, Saunders also credited for conversion of the initial text) and general dramaturgy than in Saunders’s score, it certainly qualifies as an opera. The Deutsche Oper did it proud, with Bush Moukarzel of Dead Centre; video work by Sébastien Dupouey; a cast of three truly outstanding singers, Anna Prohaska, Sarah Maria Sun, and Noa Frankel, plus the equally excellent actor Katja Kolm, all clearly working together and filmed live by Nadja Krüger; and the house orchestra on fine form indeed, conducted by Enno Poppe. Each of the female voices, indeed their bodies more generally, is intended as the foundation of what we hear and largely succeeds in conveying that sense: four parts of the same woman, not only mirroring, often explicitly, but forming—themselves or rather herself, and the images around them. 

What a welcome change, moreover, it was to have so little of the male standpoint (and gaze). Indeed, if that could have been excluded more tightly still – one of many reasons, I fear, to have wished for a different libretto – the work might well have been enhanced. Not that there was any reason to be ungrateful for Enno Poppe’s unfailingly alert, comprehending, dramatically alive conducting, nor for the excellence of the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, male musicians included—and first among equals, those musicians onstage during the third act. Perhaps, though, less might have been more. The excellence of performance, the excellence of the composition also served, perhaps ironically, to point to a lack in Atkins’s text (or whatever we want to call it). 

Sex and death are and always have been inextricably interlinked. This presentation of ‘a woman … suspended in the immediate aftermath of a death,’ recounting ‘fantasies and memories of love and loss and fucking and sickness, kissing, eyeballs, genitals, fingertips, lips, and lashes—each scoured for consoling significance to hold back death’s meaninglessness,’ has a stated idea: ‘through the imminence of her own body, her own mortality, she rediscovers loss as the precondition of experience—of love.’ It is not experienced as a narrative; nor would one expect it to be. But Saunders’s writing, through three acts spanning almost two hours, draws it together, like a great symphonic poem with voices. It grows in intensity – judged, I think, by whatever parameter(s) – and gives the strong impression of binding the work together. It also becomes more instrumental/orchestral, both onstage and around the auditorium, but also in the proportion of writing—or so it seemed to me. ‘Organic’ is doubtless an epithet outdated by at least two centuries for such writing, but perhaps I might be indulged here, if only in the Hegelian sense of a musical owl of Minerva spreading its wings at the performance’s dusk.

That said – and with all the caveats concerning a single hearing/viewing – my expectations were only partly fulfilled. This is owed in no part to the difficulty and particularity of writing opera, even for otherwise excellent composers. With the best will in the world, Schubert, generally recognised to be one of the supreme vocal and instrumental composers in the Western tradition, was not a significant composer of opera, though his operas are far from without interest. I could not help but wonder whether Saunders’s musical and dramatic gifts were not so readily operatic, whether a large-scale concert-work such as YES were more her thing. My problems, though, did not really lie there. At the post-show reception, Intendant Dietmar Schwarz described Atkins’s text as ‘postdramatic’. I suppose so, if, as Hans-Thies Lehmann more or less intended the term, we look at what is held to fall under that umbrella rather than using it to define. Whether it works well, in this context or any other, is another matter. 

Ambiguity is often a good thing. That as to whose the ‘lash’ is – the woman’s, the creator’s (i.e. Atkins’s own private-public monologue), or anything else – has much to be said for it, though it does not really seem to lead anywhere, without that failure to lead anywhere making an evident point. Ultimately, the music and the performances seem to shoulder all the work, hamstrung by a stream of consciousness that is hardly Joyce or Beckett. Constant repetition of ‘fucking’ and so on may not be intended to shock, yet comes across as thinking itself edgier than it really is; hand on heart, I found it more than a little tedious, more akin to a little boy shouting ‘look at me’ than anything that might have been claimed for it (and doubtless will be). 

I felt ambivalent, then, and not a little saddened to do so. The Blue Woman, seen at London’s Linbury Theatre in 2022, struck me as an ultimately more successful example of what postdramatic, feminist opera (as opposed to postdramatic and/or feminist productions of operatic repertoire) might be—at least restricted to words, their dramaturgy, and to a certain extent their further implications, as opposed to musical quality (or performance). By the same token, I certainly felt a desire to revisit the work, to continue, like the woman at its centre, to piece together my experience, although perhaps not immediately. I shall only too happily find myself ashamed concerning initial lack of understanding. In the meantime, a handful of boos (grow up!) and a houseful of rapturous applause told a more straightforward story.

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.

Musikfest Berlin (5) - Klangforum Wien/Pomàrico: Saunders and Aperghis, 4 September 2020

Philharmonie


Rebecca Saunders: Flesh, for solo accordion with recitation (2018)
Sole, Trio in F-sharp for mobile accordion, percussion, and piano (2019)
to an utterance – study, for solo piano (2020, world premiere)
Scar, for 15 soloists and conductor (2018/19)

Georges Aperghis: Der Lauf des Lebens, for 6 voices and ensemble (2019, world premiere)

Joonas Ahonen (piano)

Krassimir Sterev (accordion)

Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart

Klangforum Wien

Emilio Pomàrico (conductor)

Two concerts from Klangforum Wien: one a world premiere, the other including a world premiere and its ‘early music’ coming from 2018. New music indeed, then, however distant 2018—Theresa May: remember her?—may seem to those of us bewildered and exhausted by the current plague. I hope I shall be forgiven for any errors I might make, confronted with such a wealth of new sounds and their organisation, without so much as a programme note, coronavirus precluding such, let alone a score. Is that not, however, an ideal way for us to approach new music, whether ‘New Music’ or not? It was certainly welcome exercise for ears starved of such experience over the preceding months.


First, we heard works by Rebecca Saunders: not only one of the most important composers of her generation, but also one of my favourites. It certainly seems another world since I flew to Munich last June to see and hear her receive the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. Indeed, some of the music we heard had then yet to be written. The opening Flesh, however, had. We hear much about embodiment nowadays, but here the physicality of Saunders’s work and Krassimir Sterev’s astounding performance as accordionist and reciter could not have been more physical: quite erasing, like Molly Bloom’s monologue itself, any thought of dualism between mind and matter. This is not ‘programme music’, certainly not in the sense of mere portrayal, but it was difficult not to think or rather to experience the piece’s progress in extremely direct as well as more indirect terms. Squeezing, shuddering, rattling, shouting, screaming: this was a musical performance of musical material.


Sole for accordion, percussion, and piano was taken attacca, its predecessor necessarily influencing our reception, yet beautifully setting the scene, the next piece stealing in to our consciousness in the after-glow or -shock of Flesh. Resonance and even ritual—perhaps closer to Stockhausen than I might have expected—enabled pitch to be heard both ‘in itself’ and as the key to transformation of other parameters, such as timbre, rhythm, and dynamics. Put another way, post-Debussy and post-Webern tendencies united, without ever remotely sounding like Boulez or any other such forerunners. There were no electronics; yet, as so often in Saunders’s work, I could have sworn I heard them.


Next, Joonas Ahonen gave the first performance of to an utterance – study, for solo piano. Its opening pitted bass resonances, later spreading across the instrument, against glissandi and similar devices: some more scampering, some more furious, again in a not entirely un-Debussyan fabric (at least to my ears). Listening, one created and dissolved new aural hierarchies; and yet again, the sheer physicality of an outstanding performance proved just as crucial to one’s experience. Ahonen’s commanding virtuosity left one in no doubt one was hearing what one should be. Chases were as furious, perhaps even more so, as or than anything in the previous night’s Rihm Jagden und Formen. Ultimately, the piece seemed to me very much to take its part in the distinguished line of (extended) piano studies, growing into something emotionally and intellectually more all-encompassing. Were ‘symphonic’ not so obviously clichéd a misnomer, I might have been tempted to use it with less caution.


The opening of Scar, with its opening soft drum tattoos, dark pitched sounds emerging therefrom, put me in mind of Berg’s Op.6 Pieces. The tricks one’s ears and such resourceful writing can play, not to mention the ensemble performance under Emilio Pomàrico, convinced me at one point I had heard a voice. Slides, dark flashes, an aural landscape in their shadows, a liminal zone between tearing and torn: this was certainly the world of scars. Flights of fancy or of flesh took wing in a process of persistent metamorphosis, leading to dazzling climax and return to the opening material, transformed by our experience of listening.


In the second concert, the ensemble and Pomàrico were joined by the six voices of Neuevocalisten Stuttgart, for the premiere of Georges Aperghis’s Der Lauf des Lebens. Words, at least my words, are still more problematic an approximation here than usual, but I sensed something of a distinction between the dramatic use to which words were put in Saunders and a more ‘purely musical’—to resurrect a choice vintage chestnut—approach to their qualities from Aperghis. Accordion at the opening (the indefatigable Sterev) made for a nice link between the two worlds, but Klangforum Wien and the (initially) female Stuttgart voices immediately took our experience in a very different direction. A riot of sound, not without resonances from jazz, raucous riffs and all, put me a little in mind of Berio at times; that, however, was just me finding my bearings, for this was exuberance very much on its own terms. Vocal parts, sung and spoken, solo and ensemble, may or may not have made ‘verbal’ sense, yet who cared? Both work and performance offered a strong sense of a greater whole over an hour-long span, despite or perhaps on account of a host of mood swings and other transformations. In such winning superfluity, the overriding, most welcome sense was of fun, even of Alice in Wonderland-like wonder. 

For International Women's Day

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.

SoundState Festival – Fraser/Ensemble Modern/Kaziboni - Gedizlioğlu, Abbasi, Grütter, Fure, Žuraj, and Saunders, 19 January 2019

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Zeynep Gedizlioğlu: Kesik (2010, UK premiere)

Anahita Abbasi: Situation II/Dialoge (2016, UK premiere)

Martin Grütter: Die Häutung des Himmels (2016, UK premiere)

Ashley Fure: Feed Forward (2016, UK premiere)

Vito Žuraj: Runaround (2014, UK premiere)

Rebecca Saunders: Fury II (2009, UK premiere)

Saunders: a visible trace (2006)

Saunders: SKIN (2015-16)

Paul Cannon (double bass)

Juliet Fraser (soprano)

Ensemble Modern

Vimbayi Kaziboni (conductor)

Musical performance comes in many varieties, many of which I love. I should be lying if I claimed not greatly to look forward to evenings with the likes of Maurizio Pollini or Daniel Barenboim, or my annual visit to Salzburg. There is nothing, however, quite like being confronted with new music: either brand new, in which case only the performers and perhaps the odd rehearsal observer will have heard it, or verging upon it, as for instance in the first of these two concerts in the Southbank Centre’s new SoundState Festival, which, as its publicity puts it, ‘bringing together an unrivalled concentration of global creativity, … celebrates the artists,’ or at least some of them, ‘who are defining what it means to make new music in the 21^st century’. It is good for the ears and the mind: I have nothing on which to go other than what I hear there and then. It is crucial for the future of music. And it is far more exciting than any run-of-the-mill subscription concert, with an equally run-of-the-mill audience. A severe spot or two of bronchial activism is likely to prove the most surprising thing in the latter case. Here, who knows what might happen?

The two concerts I heard were both given by the Ensemble Modern and conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni. Performances, insofar as I could tell, were just as excellent as one would have expected from such players. The first concert offered five works by young composers, chosen by the ensemble as musicians they admired, the second three works by Rebecca Saunders, one of my most admired living composers, who just two days previously had been awarded the 2019 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the first woman composer to have received the prize and only the second woman at all (the first having been Anne-Sophie Mutter). That, of course, tells its own tale, so it was heartening to hear one concert in which three of the five composers featured were women and another in which the sole composer was Saunders. Such is again another advantage of much, if not yet quite enough, that happens in the world of new music.

Zeynep Gedizlioğlu’s Kesik, or ‘Cut’, opened the first concert. Its opening wind éclat promised much, repeated yet never quite: different outcomes, different potentialities. ‘Lacerating’ was another word that came to mind – not only, I think, on account of the work’s title. Part way through, the oboe cut in, with a microtonal melody line more or less unbroken, that spoke perhaps of the ‘oriental’ or ‘orientalism’, or was that my orientalist projection? There was little or nothing in the way of repose until that oboe line ceased, followed by a thwack of the bass drum.

Two United Kingdom premieres of Anahita Abbasi works within a couple of days of each other: first it had been her Intertwined Distances for harpsichord and electronics, courtesy of Mahan Esfahani; now we heard her ensemble piece, Situation II/Dialoge. A sense of landscape was strong, at least to my ears and imagination: wind, or something like it, something like its effects, rustling through bunches of leaves shaken by two of the players; sounds from inside the piano; cello and double bass working together in crude (from the standpoint of a Mozart orchestra) sounds heard in more or less contrary motion. Sounds that were (relatively) more expected emerged out of that eery calm before a storm, without the storm ever truly materialising. Unisons were achieved rather than a given, quickly lost, prior to a return to the aural world of the opening, chimes fading away a niente.

Martin Grütter’s Die Häutung des Himmels (‘The Skinning of the Heavens’), scored for seven instruments (flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet/bass clarinet, horn, trombone, double bass, and distant percussion), came next. The distance of the percussion, behind and above evoked the celestial or at least skyward dimension – like many languages, French does not distinguish between ‘sky’ and ‘heaven’ as English does – of a distant world whose goings on (aural in this case) shaped, even determined those back down on earth, or onstage. A sense of musical drama was strong: almost a scena without words. Teeming wind lines, jazzy (yes, I know, but the cliché seems to work here) bass pizzicato-led riffs: quickly changing moods, like products of the weather or warring gods – are they perhaps the same? – processed before our ears. It felt – and I am doubtless romanticising here, as is my wont – as if a new Alpine Symphony were less being presented then already reimagined, reinterpreted, redramatised.

Ashley Fure’s Feed Forward was the only one work I found over-extended, but that may well have been my misunderstanding: I should happily re-listen in order better to find my feet, should the chance arise. There was, at any rate, some initial overlap or affinity with sounds in Grütter’s piece: happenstance, maybe, or good programming? Structure was quite different, as was the overall sound world, accordion sounding surprisingly unearthly in context. A sense (deliberate, I think!) of tiring, of gesture wearing thin, seemed integral to the work and its course.

The first concert came to an end with Vito Žuraj’s Runaround, for brass quartet (two trumpets, trombone, and horn) and ensemble. This was, I think, the second time I had encountered Žuraj’s music, the first having been at the Salzburg Festival in 2013. (Salzburg and new music, you see, are anything but antithetical, whatever false dichotomy I drew at the opening.) Žuraj, it seems, is a tennis enthusiast, many of his pieces (French Open, Changeover, etc.) finding inspiration in some aspect of the game. In this case, it was table tennis: a game in a hotel room with brass players from the Ensemble Modern. There was certainly a sense of everything to play for, aleatoric elements apparently being present. Another thing that struck me was the fineness of ear: even when using extended techniques, there was always a sense of working with rather than against the instruments and their possibilities. Spirits of jazz bands past hovered in fond parody, prior to a whirling, intermittently waltzing vortex that for me faintly echoed – not necessarily a matter of ‘influence’ – Ravel’s La Valse.

Comparison with Saunders would be futile: an established, if woefully underrated (especially in this country) composer spoke for herself, or rather her works spoke for themselves. First to be heard was Fury II, for double bass and ensemble, here with Paul Cannon as soloist. He seemed to me very much first among equals, though, for at heart this is as much an ensemble piece (piano, accordion, bass clarinet, cello, double bass, two percussionists) as anything else. The dark, low rumbling from various instruments played on their affinity: any might have emerged as the ‘soloist’ – or none. Indeed, other instruments seemed often almost to speak as if they were double basses. Saunders’s finely honed, post-Webern writing once again revealed the importance of every note, timbre, combination, and so forth. There was drama – drum thwacks and all – but with the tightest of focus, no ‘mere’ effect. Highly wrought, pent up in the best sense, this was a work of undeniable mastery both as written and in performance.

 a visible trace again offered much affinity and elision between instrumental lines that yet remained clear: for instance, opening transformation of viola into trombone. Intensity of string playing (and writing) was striking indeed, an agent ultimately of distillation that was not quite spare. This is not parsimonious writing, any more than Webern’s is. There is fragility, even lack, yet neither is accidental. As in Italo Calvino’s inspiring words, ‘The word,’ or perhaps the note, ‘connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.’ Slow, yet ever-changing (not to preclude frenzy within), this is a piece whose timbral and other relationships never cease to fascinate in their unfolding, in their paths, in the traces they leave and mark out. As one instrument falls silent, another has (almost) imperceptibly already begun.

Juliet Fraser’s soprano performance proved the crowning joy of the evening and of SKIN, a work catalysed by lines from Beckett: ‘… this is the room’s essence/not being/now look closer/mere dust/dust is the skin of a room/history is a skin’. Interrelationships again came to the fore, perceived as if through a skin-like membrane. What was the sound of, say, a string instrument and what suggested it? Breath and its possibilities seemed to permeate the membrane of perception, of consciousness. The eloquence of every differentiation in stages from speaking to not-speaking, from speech to song, created and deconstructed words and music before our ears. Words could speak, but so could instruments; likewise with song. How meaningful was the distinction at all? Was it not the all-embracing drama of something not so very distant from what we should once have called a cantata the thing, the non-staged play, the drama of notes and their performance? It is a large-scale work, yet every note counted: just as much as in its two predecessors. A cry of ‘Sk – in’ at the close reminded us of the work’s origin, course, and destination. End: or, as Beckett might have put it, ‘fin’.

Quatuor Diotima - Szymanowski, Saunders, and Schubert, 18 January 2018

Wigmore Hall

Szymanowski: String Quartet no.2, op.56

Rebecca Saunders: Unbreathed (world premiere)

Schubert: String Quartet no.15 in G major, D 887

Yun-Peng Zhao, Constance Ronzatti (violins)

Franck Chevalier (viola)

Pierre Morlet (cello)

Bracingly modernist Szymanowski opened this Quatuor Diotima concert. Tremolandi in the first movement of the Second String Quartet sounded almost as if presentiments of Ligetian swarming. Clarity was striking too; there was nowhere to hide, almost as if this were Mozart. (It would have been very odd Mozart indeed, but anyway…) And when Ligeti bowed out, there was a Schoenbergian violence to the string-writing, married in performance to a very Gallic abrasion. Harmonics sounded other-world – and not in a sentimental way. There was palpable fury in the precision of the second movement, not unlike Bartók, although certainly not to be reduced in that way. Tonality sounded just as ambiguous here as it had in the first movement; one ‘knew’ it, yet did not always experience it. If there were a little less of such ambiguity in the third movement, there was at least as much emotional ambiguity to its unfolding. This was some of the least gorgeous Szymanowski I have heard, but was none the worse for it; it seemed to speak with, even of, truth.

If the shock of the new infused the Szymanowski performance, and would do so still more the Schubert in the second half, Rebecca Saunders’s Unbreathed, here receiving its world premiere, was performed with all the confidence of an established repertory work – which surely it will become. The title comes from her own poetic inscription:

Inside, withheld, unbreathed,

Nether, undisclosed.

Souffle, vapour, ghost,

Hauch and dust.

Absent, silent, void,

Naught beside.

Either, neither, sole,

Unified.

Written in a single movement, it seemed to me to be divided into two sections, the second initially perhaps suggestive of a slow movement that is not a slow movement, before turning out to breathe – or perhaps to unbreathe – if the reference will be forgiven, the air of another planet beyond the more familiar ‘another planet’. A destination of sorts, I think: but how had the music got there? Phrases, arguably ‘gestural’, yet certainly not only gestural, seemed to incite one another: consecutively, overlapping, even simultaneously; rhythmically as well as melodically. As often in Saunders’s music, the illusion of an electronic penumbra proved melodically fascinating, indeed constructive; it was no mere ‘effect’. Was that perhaps even an approach to Stockhausen in a frenetic, hard-won upward passage? I found myself preoccupied by the relationship between vertical and horizontal that yet, almost contradictorily, seemed to play itself out through time, in a dramatic form creating itself in modernistic fashion. Then the relative calm of much of that second section, eerie and not at all still, suggested ghosts in a reinvented, reset machine, anything but dualistic.

Schubert’s G major Quartet, D 887, sounded quite unlike any Schubert I had ever previously heard, although I am not sure I can really put my finger on how, let alone why. As in the Szymanowski, there was something truly menacing, coldly so, to the tremolandi, but it was much more than that. Likewise it was more than a matter of febrile energy, although that too played its part. It was not that the performance was fragmentary; it had a strong sense of line, at least in certain ways; nevertheless, sometimes phrases, again as in Szymanowski, seemed on the verge of taking leave of their tonal moorings. Passages of relative stasis sounded all the odder in this context, at least to begin with all the more unnerving. However, by the time we reached the second movement, which, like its predecessor, sounded slower than it most likely was, I was missing a little too much a sense of harmonic motion. Was it I who was merely missing it, though, or was it not there? I genuinely do not know, especially since it seemed to be restored somewhat in the scherzo, if only on account of the nature of the material. Its trio, though, sounded especially weirdly distended, all the more so on account of generally glassy tone. This was strange, even wearing Schubert. Should it (not) have been? Again, I do not know.

Performances attended during 2017; or, where were the women?

Rebecca Saunders

For the past few years, I have tried to count up the composers featured in performances I have attended, and wanted to do likewise for 2017: not the best of years in other respects, but with much for me to rejoice about musically. One review I have still to write, La bohème at the Deutsche Oper (29 December), but that should follow soon. Here, then, is the breakdown, for operas, for concerts, and together. As before, one appearance in a programme is counted once, whether it be for a Webern canon (alas not at all this year: not a single Webern performance) or a Wagner drama; so be it. And I have tended towards a more generous definition of opera, including music theatre, and so on, even including the Staatsoper Unter den Linden’s staging of Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust. Wagner’s extraordinary dominance in opera is quite unlike any other year, but there is quite a mix otherwise, including two (I know only two…) women composers, and it is wonderful to see Monteverdi in second place there.

When it comes to concerts: Beethoven-Mozart-Brahms. I am a Viennese classicist, am I not? Boulez’s reappearance, though, is most welcome, with seven concerts: thanks here are due to the opening of the Pierre Boulez Saal, and to the Vienna Konzerthaus’s Boulez festival.

To return, though, to women, and indeed to turn to a subject I should have thought about long ago when making such a list: how is it that, of 96 composers featured, only six are women? (I think I have done my sums correctly; please forgive any slips in that respect, and feel free to tell me!) The problem is certainly not that I have not attended enough contemporary music. Of those 96 composers, 32 are living: one thing, at least, of which I am quite proud. Yet, whilst all six of those women composers are alive, the contemporary scales are still weighted 6:26. Is this partly my fault? Doubtless. I could certainly make more of an effort to attend and to review performances of music by women. (I could also make far more of an effort when it comes to teaching too.) Is it entirely my fault? Clearly not. This is systemic. What, then, are we going to do? We cannot pretend there is no problem here.

Opera/music theatre, etc.

Wagner 15

Monteverdi 4

Strauss 3

Debussy, Mozart 2

Bartók, Benjamin, Berg, Berio, Borodin, Busoni, Cavalli, Humperdinck, Elena Kats-Chernin, Janáček, Ligeti, Menotti, Mussorgsky, Puccini, Ravel, Reimann, Nicola Sani, Rebecca Saunders, Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini, Schreker, Schumann, Shostakovich, Johann Strauss, Stravinsky, Verdi, Weber, Ryan Wigglesworth 1

Concerts

Beethoven 13

Mozart 10

Brahms 9

Boulez, Schubert 7

Debussy, Schoenberg, Schumann 6

Haydn, Ligeti, Jörg Widmann 5

Berg, Ravel, Stravinsky 4

Bach, Bartók, Dvořák, Mahler 3

CPE Bach, Carter, Chopin, Messiaen, Monteverdi, Rihm, Shostakovich, Strauss, Takemitsu, Tchaikovsky, Isang Yun 2

Mark Andre, Georges Aperghis, Julian Anderson, WF Bach, Vykintas Baltakas, Alessandro Baticci, Benjamin, Birtwistle, Johannes Boris Borowski, Bruch, Busoni, Duparc, Britten, Fodé Lassana Diabaté, Eisler, Grisey, Ivan Fedele, Luca Francesconi, Franck, HK Gruber, Lou Harrison, Hindemith, Ibert, Alexandra Karastoyanova-Hermentin, Kodály, Kurtág, Liza Lim, Liszt, Luca Marenzio, Christian Mason, Mendelssohn, Nono, Helmut Oehring, Eva Reiter, Matthias Pintscher, Enno Poppe, Prokofiev, Roussel, Rzewski, Rebecca Saunders, Iris ter Schiphorst, Johannes Schöllhorn, Marco Stroppa, Telemann, Nicola Vicentino, Walton, Weber, Weill, Gerhard E. Winkler, Wolf, John Zorn 1

Concerts and opera combined

Wagner 15

Beethoven 13

Mozart 12

Brahms 9

Debussy 8

Boulez, Schubert, Schumann 7

Ligeti, Monteverdi, Schoenberg 6

Berg, Haydn, Ravel, Stravinsky, Jörg Widmann 5

Bartók, Strauss 4

Bach, Bartók, Dvořák, Mahler, Shostakovich 3

CPE Bach, Benjamin, Busoni, Carter, Chopin, Messiaen, Rihm, Rebecca Saunders, Takemitsu, Tchaikovsky, Weber, Isang Yun 2

Mark Andre, Georges Aperghis, Julian Anderson, WF Bach, Vykintas Baltakas, Alessandro Baticci, Birtwistle, Borodin, Johannes Boris Borowski, Bruch, Cavalli, Duparc, Britten, Fodé Lassana Diabaté, Eisler, Grisey, Ivan Fedele, Luca Francesconi, Franck, HK Gruber, Lou Harrison, Hindemith, Humperdinck, Ibert, Alexandra Karastoyanova-Hermentin, Janáček, Elena Kats-Chernin, Kodály, Kurtág, Liza Lim, Liszt, Luca Marenzio, Christian Mason, Mendelssohn, Menotti, Mussorgsky, Nono, Puccini, Helmut Oehring, Eva Reiter, Matthias Pintscher, Erno Poppe, Prokofiev, Reimann, Roussel, Rzewski, Nicola Sani, Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini, Iris ter Schiphorst, Johannes Schöllhorn, Schreker, Johann Strauss, Marco Stroppa, Telemann, Nicola Vicentino, Walton, Weill, Ryan Wigglesworth, Gerhard E. Winkler, Wolf, John Zorn 1

One sign of hope, if hardly of mitigation: the new work that made the strongest impression on me was, I think, Rebecca Saunders’s Yes. New music groups of the world: unite and perform it as soon as you can, please. Audiences of the world: unite and attend.

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.