BBC SSO/Wigglesworth - Birtwistle and Beethoven, 28 July 2025

Royal Albert Hall

Birtwistle: Earth Dances
Beethoven: Symphony no.3 in E-flat major, op.55, ‘Eroica’

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

This was a strangely disappointing Prom, which promised much in programming, received excellent playing from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and yet was somewhat let down in the first half, rather more than that in the second, by Ryan Wigglesworth’s conducting. Birtwistle and Beethoven offer in many ways an excellent pairing: much in common, not least aspects of temperament, an indomitability of what we might still cling to as embodying human spirit, and much that contrasts too. The goal-orientation that Birtwistle often – not always, and not always fully – eschewed is unquestionably central to Beethoven’s music, nowhere more so than in the ‘middle period’ more or less inaugurated by his Eroica Symphony. By the same token, the importance of continuity, no matter what the obstacles, remains crucial to both. Birtwistle himself pointed to the ‘wonderful example’ of Beethoven in ‘order or disruption of order’: ‘He never does what you think he is going to do. The surprise is perpetual.’    

We could have done with more surprise on this occasion, in both halves, though Earth Dances fared better. I should not be unduly harsh about what was in many ways a fine performance. Wigglesworth conducted The Minotaur at Covent Garden twelve years ago: very well, I thought, though I see now that I noted a certain ‘Classicism’ to his approach, which might be read in more than one way. Here, that translated, if indeed it were a similar thing at all, into apparent reluctance, doubtless furthered by the Royal Albert Hall’s cavernous acoustic, to let the music have its head. Clarity of detail was admirable and the performance was not without cragginess, but it came perilously close to drifting at times, especially during softer, slower passages. That said, there was a proper sense of the primordial at the beginning, of an aural landscape that had both always been and yet was anything but constant. It is difficult not to summon up some sort of images here, but the grit remained, as it should, in the music ‘itself’ and its tectonics, its dances not balletic but rather stratified and hieratic successors to Stravinsky’s Rite via Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Brute force and melancholy emerged as near-dialectical opposing forces in a world that lay beyond good and evil, a world that might be that of Nature yet is surely not only so. The performance was strongest when its dances registered as such, when fractures opened, volcanoes erupted; sometimes, though, it would have benefited from a stronger, not necessarily more interventionist but more determined (even Beethovenian) hand in having them do so. A due sense of return, not complete, not merely cyclical, proved nevertheless necessary and palpable at the close. 

The ecstatic reception accorded the Eroica in the hall bewildered me. To my ears, it never so much as stirred, at most skimming the surface in a performance that, to quote Dorothy Parker, ran the gamut of emotions from A to B. Put another way, it moved from an amiable first movement to a merely inconsequential finale, with only a hint of something more interesting in a Funeral March that disintegrated into something approaching stream of consciousness. It felt long, although it was probably on the quick side. (The two tend to go together, whatever metronome enthusiasts may tell you.) The first movement was certainly Allegro, arguably more than that, though brio was more or less entirely absent. It was less Bonaparte, let alone the memory of a great man, than Petit Trianon—with apologies to Marie Antoinette, in reality a far more interesting figure than that might imply. It had line, though scant sense of harmony, with a little more ib the way of temperament as time went on. Sadly, though, it was a matter of too little, too late. 

The second movement opened with greater promise. Although on the swift side, it was not unreasonably so; one sensed both greater character and more appropriate character. It was hardly granitic, yet there was nonetheless a darkness emerging from instrumental timbre without being limited to it. The turn to the major was odd, by turns tentative and insistent. Without a stronger – much stronger – sense of harmony, it all sounded rather episodic and empty. If designer Beethoven were your thing, the scherzo might have been it: sleek and, if not quite empty, little more than blithe. Exquisite horn playing notwithstanding, the trio offered little in the way of contrast. The finale offered a disjunct if pretty set of variations, with little in the way of humour, defiance, exultancy, anything Beethovenian. If ever there were a time in which our world needed to hear from the symphonic Beethoven, it would be now. Alas, he seems more distant than ever.

Bevan/BBC SO/Wigglesworth - Berg and Debussy, 4 April 2025

Barbican Hall

Berg: Three Pieces from the Lyric Suite
Debussy, arr. John Adams: Le Livre de Baudelaire
Berg: Der Wein
Debussy: Nocturnes

Sophie Bevan (soprano)

BBC Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Neil Ferris)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

Not the least of Pierre Boulez’s legacies, in London and across the world, is programming such as this. It may be difficult for us now to realise – given the disappointing size of the Barbican audience, less difficult than we might have hoped – but a concert of Berg and Debussy would not so long ago have seemed daring, even reckless. Boulez, one might say, created the ‘modern’ orchestral repertoire. There is some exaggeration in that. He did not do so alone, even in his generation: musicians such as Michael Gielen played crucial roles too. They had forerunners too, conductors such as Hans Rosbaud and Hermann Scherchen, as well as successors. Boulez’s time at the BBC was nonetheless pivotal for London musical life; his more general example was of incalculable significance. Hearing this concert just a few days after the Barbican and BBC’s Total Immersion event for Boulez’s centenary extended the celebration—and the homage. 

Boulez would surely have appreciated the clarity of the BBC SO strings in the three movements from Berg’s Lyric Suite, and indeed throughout, under Ryan Wigglesworth’s leadership. The ‘Andante amoroso’ started polished, directed, and cool, though not cold, its temperature rising without ever sounding Romantic. Whilst string orchestra versions of quartet music have a tendency to sound smoothed over, less radical, in their new, orchestral guise, the second movement here was an exception, especially in its scurrying, heard with impressive unanimity. One was drawn in to listen, in a manner not dissimilar to Webern or Nono. Wigglesworth and the orchestra fashioned a fine interplay between texture and harmony. The ‘Adagio appassionata’ dug more overtly deep, emanating from the world of Wozzeck and Lulu—as if a staging post between them, which in a way it is. The Zemlinsky quotation (‘Du bist mein Eigen’) was poignant, meaningful, and generative: far more than mere quotation. 

John Adams’s 1994 orchestration of Debussy’s Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire (minus the fifth, ‘La Mort des amants’) varied in its proximity to what the composer might have done. There is nothing wrong with that; it was always skilful and inventive on its own terms. The opening ‘Le Balcon’ did not sound especially Debussyan in that respect. Hearing it after Berg, its twists and turns sounded more Germanic than one might have expected. At any rate, Sophie Bevan communicated Baudelaire’s words with great clarity, shaping them, as Wigglesworth did the orchestra’s, unobtrusively yet to excellent effect. There was languor, but not too much, motion and overall shape well balanced. ‘Harmonie du soir’ was similarly evocative; it seemed at times to move closer to a Debussyan, as well as a Wagnerian (above all Tristan) orchestral and particularly string sound. Pelléas hovered in the wings vocally for the final two, the charged language another connection in ‘Le Jet d’eau’. The opening scoring of ‘Recueillement’ seemed again to come from a Wagnerian world, violas, cellos, and harps, paving the way for woodwind and voice to combine in flesh and desire for its transcendence.     

Baudelaire spanned the interval, twinned in the second half with Berg for Der Wein, which many will know from Boulez’s recording with Jessye Norman. Pelléas-malevolence persisted and mutated in the first poem, ‘Die Seele des Weines’, all the more so given Wigglesworth’s deliberate tempo. The opening, wandering bass line sounded as if Fafner had made his way onto the stage as Lulu’s new amant. (There is an idea for an opera—or perhaps not.) This was a rich vinous soul indeed, redolent of the French Wagnerism of a subsequent generation to the poet: the Revue wagnérienne, perhaps. Bevan once more span the line and worked the text with alchemy inherent in a fine vantage, matched note for note by the BBC SO. A riotous opening to the central ‘Der Wein der Liebenden’ subsided to suggest a world, as it is, very much post-Das Lied von der Erde, which persisted to a dark, yet ambiguous climax in ‘Der Wein des Einsamen’. 

Back to Debussy to close, for Nocturnes, colours variegated to permit, if not quite every shade between rare primaries, then a good few nevertheless. Enchantment and ambiguity characterised ‘Nuages’, its musical parameters kept in fruitful, shifting balance. Allemonde malevolence gave way, at least momentarily, to fluted rays of sun. Colour was well and truly switched on for ‘Fêtes’, over which a celebrated maître had left an unforgettable visual and musical BBC performance to haunt memories and even proceedings. Wigglesworth was not inflexible, by any means, but rather ensured that relative flexibility was always directed towards a goal. Even in the Barbican, whose acoustic can hardly be accused of accentuating the mysterious, ‘Sirènes’ offered a more distant form of seduction than Der Wein. It flowed beautifully, and not without a little menace, in a full-blooded account from orchestra and voices alike. This was not a Debussy painted in pastel shades; it sounded all the better for that.

Lamento d'Arianna, Ariadne auf Naxos (Prologue), and Witch (world premiere), Royal Academy Opera, 23 March 2022

Susie Sainsbury Theatre, Royal Academy of Music

Arianna – Sophie Sparrow
Prima Donna – Josi Ann Ellem
Composer – Bernadette Johns
Zerbinetta – Kathleen Nic Dhiarmda
Dancing Master – Liam Bonthrone
Tenor – Ryan Vaughan Davies
Wigmaker – Jacob Phillips
Music Master – Will Pate
Officer – Samuel Kibble
Lackey – Wonsick Oh
Major Domo – Michael Ronan

Jane – Bernadette Johns
Agnes, Troll 3 – Julia Portela Piñón
Interrogator 1 – Wonsick Oh
Interrogator 2 – Ryan Vaughan Davies
Wandering Minstrel, Executioner – Will Pate
Sarah, Sun Witch – Sophie Sparrow
Little Miss Manifest, Troll Mum – Nina Korbe
Green Death Witch – Kathleen Nic Dhiarmada
Troll 1 – Marcus Dawson
Troll 2 – Samuel Kibble

Polly Graham (director)
April Dalton (designs)
Jake Wiltshire (lighting)
Hayley Egan (video)

Ensemble singers and actors
Royal Academy Sinfonia
Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

Sarah (Sophie Sparrow)
Image: Craig Fuller

Commissioning a new opera for its 200^th anniversary, and then staging and performing it with such excellence, are laudable things for the Royal Academy of Music to have done. If only, alas, the world premiere of WITCH, music by Freya Waley-Cohen and libretto by Ruth Mariner, had shown us a superior work than it did. The problem lay at least as much, probably more, with Mariner’s libretto, weirdly devoid of dramatic intent, let alone achievement, but it would be difficult to make claims for Waley-Cohen as a musical dramatist either. 

What is WITCH ‘about’? A bullied teenage girl alone in her bedroom, save for a giant rabbit (I don’t know either), finds solace and ultimately takes action through discovery of a coven of witches on the Internet. Despite attempted disruption by a group of online trolls, they manage to cast a ‘penis hex’ on the world—shouting ‘Hex in the City!—which (here, I quote the programme) ‘aims to cleans the world of toxic masculinity and goes viral’. Meanwhile, another story is sketched—barely sketched, let alone anything more—of a sixteenth century Scottish witch; it may have been discovered by the teenagers online, or may have been referred to entirely independently. That was not clear (at least to me). As the late Anna Russell might have said, ‘I’m not making this up, you know.

The problem is not the worthy intent; doubtless these are issues that could, indeed should, be treated dramatically, though whether an opera is the best place to do so may remain an open question. Perhaps a documentary or, indeed, one of the TikTok-style videos screened in Polly Graham’s inventive, often brilliant staging would be a better place to start. (I remain unsure whether casting a ‘penis hex’ is the most obviously efficacious remedy, but what do I know?) There is little or no attempt to create character, still less character development. There is no dramatic grit, let alone ambiguity. It is essentially a school assembly talk writ large, feeling as though it goes on for ever, though it actually extends for ten minutes or so more than an hour. Waley-Cohen’s contribution has some of what one might consider to be the essentials: different sound worlds for the two centuries, which begin to collide (far more so than in the preachy libretto); a keen ear for musical process, albeit one that struggles, perhaps understandably, to align itself dramatically; and a definite move towards culmination as the ‘hex’ is cast. Set against that, there is likewise little in the way of musical characterisation; vocal writing is often ungrateful to no evident end; and the dramatic function of the orchestra, though vividly present, remains uncertain throughout. I suspect something less inert could have been made out of this, but a series of workshops combined with a few periods of reflection and revision would have been necessary. 

Ryan Wigglesworth led the excellent Royal Academy Sinfonia in an incisive account, as well paced as the work would permit. Pulsating with colour, it had me wonder whether an orchestral piece, perhaps with film, might have been a better option. The orchestra was certainly put through its paces, having earlier given a bright-eyed account of the Prologue to Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, albeit one in which Wigglesworth sometimes seemed a little too inclined to follow the singers, lessening dramatic tension. Given with a wonderful, preceding performance of Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna, directed from one of three theorbos by Elizabeth Kenny with great understanding and infinite flexibility, it was unclear what either was doing alongside WITCH. Connection in general mistreatment of women seemed implied, but surely the Opera rather than the Prologue would have made that point better. (There were doubtless musical reasons for not attempting that.) 

It was also surprising that no real attempt seemed to be made to connect Monteverdi and Strauss. Graham’s direction of each taken in separation had much to commend it, save the strange, distracting cries (‘witch’-like?) emitted at one point by Ariadne’s companions in the Monteverdi. The Lament was otherwise focused and powerful, due in no part to Sophie Sparrow’s stylish and richly expressive performance. Strauss proved full of incident, a cue to plenty of character creation (retrospectively showing up its successor all the more), though there was considerably less in the way of Hofmannsthal. In that connection, some dialogue was delivered so deliberately that translation into English would probably have been the better option. The flashing screens and general stage incident of Witch went a long way to contribute interest otherwise lacking, signs of what might have been—and, who knows, may still be. 

As a showcase for young singing talent, this triple-bill achieved more. Sparrow did much to engage our sympathy not only as Arianna but also as Sarah who became a Sun Witch. Her counterpoart Kathleen Nic Dhiarmada (Green Death Witch) presented an unusually sympathetic Zerbinetta, having us engage with her as a human being rather than metadramatic cipher. (This was, after all, only the Prologue.) Bernadette Johns’s Composer, if sometimes lacking in verbal accuracy, likewise engaged us keenly in her character’s emotional trials, the production’s feminist idea here seeming to be that this was actually a woman in trousers, rather than a ‘trouser role’. It was impossible to know how the rest would have turned out, but Will Pate’s Music Master, Liam Bonthrone’s Dance Master, and Ryan Vaughan Davies’s Tenor all suggested great promise for the Opera that never came. Pate and Johns, moreover, suggested greater emotional depth as the sixteenth-century pair of Wandering Minstrel and Jane than otherwise emerged from Witch. In truth, almost every sung performance impressed. If only half the dramatic material had been stronger…

Bevan/ASMF/Wigglesworth - Wigglesworth, Mozart, and Ravel, 6 August 2021

St Martin-in-the-Fields

Ryan Wigglesworth: Piano Concerto: ‘Notturno’

Mozart: Piano Concerto no.12 in A major, KV 414/385p
Ravel: Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé
Mozart: Concert Aria: ‘Ch’io mi scordi di te … Non temer, amato bene’, KV 505

Sophie Bevan (soprano)
Ryan Wigglesworth (piano/conductor)

Academy of St Martin in the Fields

The ASMF’s concerts at the church in which it was born and from which it takes its name were rare musical beacons during the few occasions last autumn when performance and attendance at performance were possible. The two concerts I was able to attend—maximum audience of thirty, for reasons best known to whichever eminent statesman was then making such decisions—meant a great deal to me. Here stood another in that line, albeit in slightly brighter times. Ryan Wigglesworth joined the Academy as both pianist as conductor, with Sophie Bevan the soprano soloist for the last two items. 

First, though, we heard some of Wigglesworth’s own music, the ‘Notturno’ from his Piano Concerto. According to the composer, this movement, in which chamber orchestra is reduced to strings and harp, ‘is a kind of fantasia on a Polish folk song I first heard sung, movingly, around a late-night campfire’. That I only learned after the event, but heard, following a (relatively) long string introduction, a piano solo, clear and directed (combining well in retrospect with music by Mozart and Ravel), sometimes in dialogue with harp, which seemed to set up material for subsequent variation and development. There was, I felt, a sense of lament, or at least of bitter-sweet lyricism. Henze with an English accent was one thought that came to mind, though perhaps that said more about me than anyone or anything else. I should certainly be intrigued to hear the rest of the work.

Without a break, the players moved into the first of Mozart’s two A major Piano Concertos, no.12. Wigglesworth’s direction may have been on the brisk side by historical standards, but not really by those of our own time. Most important, it yielded. The ASMF offered, as is its wont, cultivated and variegated playing. There was to be heard from all fine, seemingly instinctive senses of line and fun, inextricably interlinked. The opera house was rightly an inspiration but form, quite rightly, was communicated as of the concert hall. This is a concerto readily underestimated, but it was not here. If, in the slow movement, I occasionally missed the cushion of a larger number of strings, I should stress ‘occasionally’. For there was no gainsaying the excellence of playing, nor this movement’s role as the emotional heart of the work. Songful yet ever-developing, it was sometimes blighted by a mysterious high-pitched electronic sound from somewhere in the building (I presume), yet was never obliterated. The finale was keenly responsive and endlessly surprising: the spirit of Haydn, perhaps, yet unquestionably directed by Mozart, whose cadenzas were employed with great imagination by Wigglesworth.

I think that may have been the first time I had heard the Mozart concerto in the flesh: testament to just how narrow the benighted ‘repertoire’ has become, even in the case of its most widely acknowledged geniuses (if we may still use the word). It was also the first time I had had opportunity to hear Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, save on record. Why do we not hear them constantly? Who knows? This, at any rate, was a performance to savour. Thinned down to a delectable chamber ensemble, the Academy offered opening string quartet harmonics that, whilst perfectly in keeping with Ravel’s style and language seemed to peer across to Schoenberg and perhaps even forward to Ligeti. Etched like waves, they prepared the way for the vocal line to sail. In the second part of this first song, ‘Soupir’, a French vision of Vienna emerged from the string quartet. And what harmonies there were to be heard, not least from voice against, or rather with, piano. ‘Placet futile’ sounded a little more operatic, even before the vocal entry. Inviting, sensuous, and knowing in its mock-innocence, such qualities were both added to and questioned by Bevan in a garden of distinctly sunnier delights than Pierrot lunaire, whose ghost unavoidably hovers here. The instrumental introduction to ‘Surgi de la croupe et du bond’ seemed to long for something beyond: temporally or geographically, maybe even both. The ‘Asie’ of Shéhérazade? It unfolded, pli selon pli.

Finally, Mozart’s ‘Ch’io mi scordi di te … Non temer, amato bene’, KV 505. The opening recitative was well handled by all, the following aria slightly static at first but increasingly dramatic as it progressed, so perhaps that was a deliberate strategy. It benefited from fuller-throttled operatic treatment than anything heard previously, not only from Bevan on superlative form, but from the Academy and Wigglesworth. Here, if only in concert, was a true successor to Idomeneo from the seria-deprived (though never quite, as is sometimes claimed, seria-starved) Vienna of Joseph II. It made for a resounding, resplendent culmination to a wonderful concert.

Benedetti/LSO/Wigglesworth - Piper, Witter-Johnson, Jolas, Stevenson, and Simpson, 13 June 2021

Barbican Hall

Charlie Piper: Flēotan (2007)
Ayanna Witter-Johnson: Fairtrade? (2008)
Betsy Jolas: Well Met Suite (2016)
George Stevenson: Vanishing City (2020, world premiere)
Mark Simpson: Violin Concerto (2020-21, world premiere with live audience)

Nicola Benedetti (violin)

London Symphony Orchestra

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

Another return to old musical friends at an old musical haunt: in this case the LSO at the Barbican. It proved as moving and thrilling as any other, although quite different in nature, the earliest music here being the first of three LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme commissions, Charlie Piper’s Flēotan, from 2007, the newest two premieres of works from this year and last. Patricia Kopatchinskaja and François-Xavier Roth having been unable to travel here on account of interminable travel restrictions, the British premiere of Francisco Coll’s Violin Concerto had to be postponed, replaced with the live audience premiere of Mark Simpson’s Violin Concerto. The rest of the programme was unchanged. Ryan Wigglesworth stepped in at five days’ notice to learn and conduct five pieces new entirely new to him. Wigglesworth, Nicola Benedetti, and the LSO did all five pieces—and themselves—proud.


Flēotan’s title comes from an Old English word, meaning ‘to float’ or ‘fleeting’. (It would later form the foundation for a larger LSO work, The Twittering Machine.) Its glistening, somewhat metallic colours, seemingly born as much of French orchestral tradition as anything closer to home, were married, both in work and performance, to a sharply rhythmic profile. It came across as an extended fleeting moment: perhaps evoked more than merely represented. It was followed by Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s Fairtrade?, which aims to bring to the audience’s attention the high cost of ‘fast fashion’, encouraging us ‘to consider our economic choices and the cost of our convenience at others’ expense’. Whirring, whirling, the machine-like sounds here, aptly enough, came across as necessity rather than choice. A sense of going inwards, of highlighting humanity crushed by such processes, concluding this unsettling, finely crafted piece.

 

Betsy Jolas’s Well Met Suite transforms four pieces from her 2004 Well Met 04 – Pantomime for 12 strings, into a suite for strings. Sharply etched, even contagious (a word for our times!) the material maintained a keen sense of narrative, though not necessarily one that could be put into words. Relationships between instruments took on a life of their own: double bass pizzicato inciting solo cellos, in turn inciting strings above. Stamping of feet was no gimmick, coming across instead as light yet necessary reminder of theatrical roots. Were those shades of Bartók we heard at times? Perhaps, but there was no suspicion of imitation. Scurrying development imparted its own identity and justification.


George Stevenson’s Vanishing City remembers those who, over the winter of 1941-2, successfully undertook the well-nigh incredible task of camouflaging Leningrad’s skyline against German attack. A hard-edged opening gave way, via Russian-sounding brass, to fantasy and still darkness. Bells recalled to us not only what was being lost, but what was being kept. Like everything else heard here, there was fine command of the orchestra as instrument and as collective of instruments: testament to the excellence of performances from the LSO and Wigglesworth, as well of course as to that of the work of composers young and old.

The second half was given over to Mark Simpson’s Violin Concerto. Its scale, but also its emotional impact, were palpable, an audience starved of music for so long responding with enthusiasm to a performance that had kept them on the edge of their seats. Simpson had begun work on the piece just before lockdown last year, and had found, ‘as the pandemic worsened … that it was impossible to “carry on as normal”,’ that ‘the work would need to explore a different set of responses’. It certainly seemed to be the case that audience, composer, and performers alike were responding to shared experience. Its roots, aptly enough, lay in what had gone before, not least in Simpson’s strikingly fantastical violin writing: Szymanowski a hundred years on? Foreboding was recognisable, yet content was new. Tension between a past world in which we already had enough to be angry about and that which we wished—perhaps still wish—to conserve from it came to the boil, shaped and sustained through a keenly felt and projected narrative of five movements (Lamentoso, Dance, Andante Amoroso, Cadenza, Presto con fuoco – Finale). That second movement sounded just as the composer described it: ‘a fast, energetic dance that is in essence a response to having a huge amount of pent-up energy that I was unable to release during the period of lockdown restrictions.’ It and its successors likewise drew freely on ‘tradition’, whatever that may be, without sounding (or feeling) remotely hidebound. Benedetti’s virtuosity captivated throughout, nowhere more so than in a cadenza that was almost a solo violin work in itself—until one began to appreciate its dependence on earlier material, the Dance subdued, perhaps, and sublimated. The hectic frustration of the fifth movement, the LSO at inimitable full throttle, led to final release: much needed and much celebrated.

The Winter's Tale, English National Opera, 27 February 2017 (world premiere)

Coliseum

Hermione (Sophie Bevan), Mamillius (Zach Roberts), Leontes (Iain Paterson)
Images: Johan Persson

Leontes – Iain Paterson

Hermione – Sophie Bevan
Perdita – Samantha Price
Polixenes – Leigh Melrose
Florizel, Court Official – Anthony Gregory
Paulina – Susan Bickley
Antigonus/Shepherd – Neal Davies
Camillo – Timothy Robinson
Mamillius – Zach Roberts
Two Guards – Geraint Hylton, Michael Burke
Servant – Paul Napier-Burrows
 

Rory Kinnear (director)

Vicki Mortimer (set designs)
Moritz Junge (costumes)
Jon Clark (lighting)
Imogen Knight (movement)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: James Henshaw)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

New work is the lifeblood of any opera company, any orchestra, any theatre, any artistic institution worth its salt. We all love what Pierre Boulez called the Museum; perhaps we love it too much. That is not going to change. There is, though, nothing unhealthier than a reverence for the past – or rather for a ‘traditionalist’ recreation of a past that never was – which excludes enthusiasm for the present. We shall make mistakes in the present; no sane person would ever deny that. Whilst there is every reason to try to minimise them, we should never do so with over-zealous caution. We certainly should not replace them with n^th revivals of some hideous – or even non-hideous – ‘revival’ of La traviata. Apart from being wrong in itself, it would kill so many of the achievements of the present and future it is our duty to nurture.

ENO Chorus

One such is Ryan Wigglesworth’s new opera, The Winter’s Tale, here receiving its world premiere. How will it fare in the future? Who knows? That is not our concern. What I can say is that it emerged on its first night as a highly accomplished operatic debut, given splendid advocacy from all concerned with its production and performance. A more detailed analysis, of whatever variety, must await proper study of the score (for which, many thanks to ENO and Schott!) Wigglesworth paces the action very well, though, and his own adaptation of Shakespeare for the libretto works equally well. Indeed, I find its focus upon the action – something mentioned by director Rory Kinnear in a programme article, suggesting a strong, deep collaboration, of which there is evidence in abundance – especially well suited to a reworking of the tale as opera. Having recently examined a fine doctoral thesis on modern Shakespearean opera and Tippett’s The Knot Garden, I hope that this new instalment will, in the best sense, extend and even challenge some of its discussion, as any new contribution should. One of the potential problems of Shakespearean opera, as well as the oft-mentioned inherent musicality of the words as they stand, seems to me (as I had actually been discussing with a friend the previous evening) the complexity of the plot or, better, the number of sub-plots. There is, for instance, no Autolycus; we can probably all live, for one evening at least, without his snapping up of unconsidered trifles. Here, the narrative assumes an almost Attic tragic inevitability – there is some of that in the play, of course, but it is, fascinatingly, one of several competing tendencies there – which has long, with good reason, been thought conducive to successful opera. (Cue Straussian cries of ‘Agamemnon’ in your head.)

 

It is difficult and, I am sure, undesirable, to try to separate Kinnear’s staging, or indeed the cast’s performances from that. (Is not such unity of dramatic purpose what opera is supposed to be about? Yes, we can deconstruct it and often should, but deconstruction implies construction in the first place. And yes, it is perfectly possible for different aspects to be saying or doing different things at the same time, but again, usually in the service of a greater whole, however fragmented it might be in (modernistic) practice.) For instance, whereas the jealousy of Leontes can sometimes seem unmotivated, or at least abrupt, here the tyrannical tendencies of the king and their close alliance to his suspicions are reinforced scenically, musically, and performatively. Iain Paterson’s portrayal of his changing moods (redemptive transformation in the third of the three acts included) was imbued with the confidence suggested by a role he might have been singing all his life. Sophie Bevan’s not entirely dissimilar journey, from the lightness of a woman undeniably attracted to Polinexes, through savagely wronged consort, to miraculously transfigured voice as statue come-to-life at the close, brought emotional weight and dramatic credibility to Hermione. Polinexes, in the excellent hands and voice of Leigh Melrose, offered another, equally crucial tragic strand. Binding these strands together, nascent yet also fully formed in the first act, is Kinnear’s production – not only his first of opera, but his first in the theatre at all – provides a crucial politico-military setting (Moritz Junge’s costumes here crucial too), statues already representative of power, might, and all manner of repression; it also provides space for these characters to work out their fates.

 

Florizel (Anthony Gregory), Perdita
(Samantha Price)

Wigglesworth’s score – his conducting too, no doubt – binds this dramatic opening still more closely together. Structurally, it made excellent sense even on a first hearing (as I said, detail will have to come later, once I have studied the score); there are none of the formal deficiencies that so bedevil, say, much of Britten’s excessively lauded writing (The Turn of the Screw perennially excepted). What Britten could do – indeed seemingly could not fail to do – was set English words; so can Wigglesworth, albeit without the preciousness. Vocal lines move between arioso and, for instance, in the case of almost Hans Sachs-like depression for Leontes, something approaching a more traditional aria. But much of the real action is in the orchestra. Here, I think we hear Wigglesworth’s finest achievement: he knows what the orchestra can, even should, do in opera – and does it. Interludes play a dramatic role, just as they might in exalted predecessors such as Wagner or Debussy; they do not merely fill time. Harmonies and harmonic rhythm sound as integral parts of the drama, not merely ‘expressive’ thereof. Glistening instrumental strands prove illustrative, characterful, yet also musically (and musico-dramatically) generative. If I thought occasionally of a line from Henze here, or Tippett there, and so on, that was no more than a matter of coincidence, of me finding my aural feet, as it were; the use to which phrases were put in the larger scheme of things seemed entirely Wigglesworth’s, indeed the work’s, own.

 

Moreover, the contrast between the closed, seemingly inward-gazing intensity of the musical language of the first act and the pastoral joy, soon occluded by the intrusion of Polinexes (I thought, however inappropriately, of a post-Janáčekian sound world threatened, even conquered, by grinding, post-Bergian musical processes), was apparent for all to hear. So too was the different world again, a world yet seemingly born of dialectical synthesis and/or progression, of the third act. Ghosts from the past seemed to appear musically, transfigured, with a magic whose benign quality needed to be proved rather than merely asserted.  Crucial to that outcome, far from unambiguous, were excellent performances from Anthony Gregory’s youthful, hopeful Florizel, Samantha Price’s heartfelt Perdita, and a commanding assumption of the role of Paulina by Susan Bickley: again, a focus for unity that needed to be won, not merely assumed. With excellent performances from the rest of the cast, the orchestra, and, anything but least, the outstanding ENO Chorus – its threatening presence during the Queen’s trial redolent, perhaps, of a Mussorgskian operatic tradition, although never hidebound by it – The Winter’s Tale received a baptism of which all should be proud indeed.

 

Così fan tutte, English National Opera, 22 May 2014

Coliseum

Fiordiligi – Kate Valentine

Dorabella – Christine Rice

Guglielmo – Marcus Farnsworth

Ferrando – Randall Bills

Despina – Mary Bevan

Don Alfonso – Roderick Williams

Phelim McDermott (director)

Tom Pye (set designs)

Laura Hopkins (costumes)

Paule Constable (lighting)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Genevieve Ellis)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

I hoped I should never live to see a worse staging of Così fan tutte than Jonathan Miller’s; indeed, I should not have thought it possible. It may resemble the proverbial variety of judgement concerning angels on a pinhead – though I have never quite understood the objection to scholasticism as such – but Phelim McDermott’s mindless farrago may well have edged to victory, or to whatever we shall elect to call it. Having deliberately waited a couple of days, to give my initial anger time to cool, I still find McDermott’s ‘entertainment’, for want of a better word, one of the most offensive vulgarisations Mozart can ever have received, even if we include nineteenth- and twentieth-century maulings of the text.

 

Miller at least spoke about the artificiality of the work being crucial to its understanding, though it was difficult to see how that informed a staging that was merely tacky. McDermott seems to have no ideas whatsoever, whether appropriate or otherwise. The designs are doubtless what had been requested; the problem is the lack of any justification for them or for what unfolded in front of them. This most exquisitely painful of works, in which that artificiality is the only way we can deal with realities that are otherwise simply too agonising to bear, becomes a silly story – well, barely even that – set, for no apparent reason, in a 1950s (?) American seaside resort. Now where Così is set really does not matter; it is in no sense ‘about’ eighteenth-century Naples, though an eighteenth-century understanding of musical form and parody remains absolutely crucial. (How on earth can one perform, stage, or appreciate ‘Come scoglio’ without some inkling of the opera seria it parodies? It is akin to the iconography of saints; some things one simply has to know, in order to understanding the painting in question.) Abstraction tends to work better, as in the case of the Magritte-like Salzburg production of Karl-Ernst and Ursel Herrmann, and/or an exploration of the work’s dark eroticism, as in Salzburg’s unforgettable predecessor, from Hans Neuenfels. At any rate, there is no danger of representation, let alone probing, of musical and/or verbal parody, of eroticism, or of anything whatsoever. Instead, we have a series of scenes whose sole purpose seemed to be to bring on an irrelevant troupe of circus-like artists, the ‘Skills Ensemble’. A moronic audience laughed at everything it did: people drawing words out of a box and holding them up resulted in helpless belly-aching.

 

Still worse, though, was the applause endured not only between numbers, but within them. I am not sure that I have heard greater violence done to Mozart than by those ‘clapping terrorists’. As for having Despina’s appearance as notary transformed into the appearance of a Texan (the accent…!) entertainer, to which some of the audience elected to clap along, I can safely say I have never experienced anything like it, and earnestly pray that I shall never do so again. In the context, the ‘traditional’ cuts I usually deplore might usefully have been expanded, perhaps to the extent that Mozart’s music were preserved entirely for another occasion. Jeremy Sams’s self-regarding ‘translation’ did not help. Veering wildly between something akin to translation and free composition, it had no settled voice of its own. For some reason, any forced rhyme – for instance, ‘rabbit’ with ‘grab it’ – elicited yet more helpless laughter from the audience. ‘Fifty bucks’ cued yet more hilarity; is it not utterly hilarious that someone should mention American currency? Perhaps the nadir, though, came with a bizarre interpolation of gratuitous racism, one of the men – I cannot remember which – saying that he would rather marry a ‘gypsy on a dung-hill’ than either of the ladies. It must, I think, have been at the exchange ‘Vorrei sposar piuttosto la barca di Caronte/La grotta di Vulcano’. Quite why that would suggest such a slur upon a vulnerable people is quite beyond me; needless to say, the audience exploded.

 

There was not a great deal to cheer about in the performances either, though, with one exception, they marked a significant improvement upon the staging. That exception was Randall Bills’s Ferrando, quite the worst I have heard: a mixture of strenuous over-emoting on top with persistent weakness of tone and flatness lower in the range. I have not had much patience with the talk in some quarters that ENO should be casting more English artists; it is not, after all, an extension of UKIP.  In this case, however, it is difficult to understand why one would go to the trouble of importing an American tenor who was so clearly not up to the job. Marcus Farnsworth, however, showed a good degree of swagger as Guglielmo. Kate Valentine and Christine Rice had their moments as Fiordiligi and Dorabella. There was palpable sincerity to much of what they sang, though neither quite had the measure of Mozart’s coloratura, and blend sometimes proved elusive. Mary Bevan’s Despina was strongly projected, if some way from a paragon of style. Even Roderick Williams, a singer whom I have always greatly admired, seemed somewhat out of sorts, his first scene in particular weakly sung, almost to the point of inaudibility. No one, however, should have been asked to indulge in the embarrassing finger-clicking that accompanied (I think) ‘È la fede delle femmine’. Maybe, with the exception of the tenor, matters would have improved dramatically with a better staging; maybe some of the cast were just having an off-night. If so, one could hardly blame them.

 

Ryan Wigglesworth’s conducting proved disappointing too. The Overture was not only taken far too fast; it was brutal. As those of us who are regulars at the Coliseum know very well, the ENO Orchestra is a fine ensemble. Here it sounded dull and uninvolving, picking up a little in the second act. Of grace, agony, wonder, any of the human and divine qualities Mozart demands, and through which his drama develops, we heard little of all. It was not really a matter of tempi, although, more often than not, they were on the fast side. More fundamentally, there was little sense – and of course the staging did not help – of what lay in, between, beneath the notes. Wigglesworth is an excellent musician; Mozart, however, is very clearly not his thing. If only it had been possible to lie back, to think of Sir Colin Davis…

The Minotaur, Royal Opera, 17 January 2013

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Ariadne – Christine Rice

Theseus – Johan Reuter
The Minotaur – Sir John Tomlinson
Ker – Elisabeth Meister
Snake Priestess – Andrew Watts
Hiereus – Alan Oke
First Innocent/Young Woman – Susana Gaspar
Second Innocent – Nadine Livingston
Third Innocent – Justina Gringyte
Fourth Innocent – James Laing
Fifth Innocent – William Towers

Stephen Langridge (director)

Alison Chitty (designs)
Paul Pyant (lighting)
Philippe Giraudeau (choreography)
59 Productions (video)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master/second conductor: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

Hiereus (Alan Oke), Snake Priestess (Andrew
Watts), Ariadne (Christine Rice)
Image: Bill Cooper

If, first time around, in 2008, The Minotaur offered the obvious excitement of the premiere, it was now noteworthy how quickly it had settled into repertory status. Not that it has yet been performed elsewhere than Covent Garden, though it should be as a matter of urgency, but that its 2013 outing proceeded with the apparent ease one might expect of, say, The Magic Flute or Carmen. That is surely testament both to the excellence of the performances we heard as well as to the stature of Birtwistle’s opera itself.

 

Though it packs an undoubted musico-dramatic punch, The Minotaur is not perhaps the overwhelming experience, the assault upon one’s faculties, offered by The Mask of Orpheus. It arguably stands a ‘late’ or at least ‘later’ work, somewhat simpler – these things are relative, of course – and more direct (ditto). The unbroken thread of the score, a metaphor for Ariadne’s own thread, brings the work closer to conventionally understood operatic tradition. This is a more linear work than many, for though Birtwistle and his librettist, David Harsent, also play once again with ritual and repetition, re-telling is incorporated, expressed, almost Wagner-like, within an essentially linear narrative. The labyrinth, then, has order, clearly discernible, beyond the apparently senseless chaos of human-bestial existence, as symbolised in the person of the ‘half and half,’ Asterios the Minotaur. Whether to start here, with The Mask of Orpheus, with Gawain, with Punch and Judy, or elsewhere is not something about which to become unduly worked up; the choice would be akin to deciding or falling upon a Wagnerian baptism  of fire with Tristan or the Shakespeare-like entrée of Die Meistersinger, and so on. It is difficult to imagine, however, that anyone with ears to hear and with the slightest curiosity would not be hooked; my immediate response upon emerging from the theatre was to hope that I should be able to find a ticket for a subsequent performance.

 

Reworkings of myth proceed in typical Birtwistle fashion, though here of course the credit is at least as much Harsent’s. An especially interesting idea is the presentation of the bull who mounted Pasiphae as Poseideon; the Minotaur is therefore perhaps Theseus’s half-brother. (We still do not know, nor does he, whether Theseus be the son of Poseidon or the son of Aegeus.) It is, moreover, an excellent touch to tantalise us with Theseus’s future abandonment of Ariadne; it is stressed that they will board the ship together, but it is equally noteworthy that no one foresees her reaching Athens. The orchestra, meanwhile, acts very much in neo-Wagnerian style as Chorus, shadowing, intensifying, commenting upon the action. Perhaps there is something of Bach in the well-nigh obbligato quality of the alto saxophone identified with Ariadne – who in this retelling becomes perhaps a more compromised, even ambiguous character. She is not always ‘straight’ with Theseus; she even attempts to trick Fate, both by moving a pebble from one hand to hand. It takes a second try, moreover, before she acts truthfully towards the Snake Priestess. Things could readily have turned out otherwise, then, or maybe not, if one believes in Fate. At any rate, thinking about such matters, experiencing them through the drama, is unavoidable.

 

Ryan Wigglesworth’s conducting proved almost Classical, again contributing very much to the suspicion that this opera has already attained ‘classic’ status.  With an orchestra and chorus on top form, the musical drama, incisive, ominous, gripping, beautifully melancholic, spoke, as the cliché would have it, for itself. There was no need for any extraneous ‘excitement’ to be applied from without; this was a far more fulfilling, musically-involving approach. The battery of percussion spoke, of course, but so did the steely yet malleable tones of orchestral woodwind, and not just the saxophone. Choral baiting of the Minotaur truly chilled our blood, just as others’ blood will be spilled on stage.

 

Christine Rice offered a heartfelt, conflicted Ariadne, Johan Reuter a stolid – but deliberately so – Theseus, his heroism thoughtfully questioned. John Tomlinson, celebrating an extraordinary thirty-five years on the Covent Garden stage, seems to have made the role of the Minotaur just as much as his own as he did the Green Knight in Gawain. (Salzburg’s new production this summer will almost inevitably feature him.) It is a part well suited to his advancing years. Vocal perfection is not required; it might even be out of place. But dramatic presence and integrity most definitely are; the tragic plight of a creature created and rejected so cruelly by ‘humanity’ was searingly portrayed. Andrew Watts again caused consternation with the mysterious archaic babble of the Snake Priestess, tellingly translated by another old Birtwistle hand, Alan Oke. Elisabeth Meister made an equally fantastic impression as the chilling Ker, feasting on the innocents’ blood; it is a screaming harpy-like role, but a musically screaming one, especially in this assumption. There was, in short, no weak link in the cast, and it is a very strong cast indeed.

 

Stephen Langridge’s staging tells the story with clarity, aided by Alison Chitty’s straightforward yet imaginative designs. I cannot help but retain a niggling doubt that a more adventurous production might have brought out a good number more dramatic strands than we see here. Something more Mask of Orpheus-like or indeed Soldaten-like might have alerted the audience to dramatic layers that went unseen, if certainly not unheard. By the same token, however, there is nothing wrong with expecting and/or permitting the audience to do some ‘aural thinking’ for itself. Let us hope, in any case, that before long there will be alternatives, which will expand our imaginative understanding of the work.

 

Programme essays were for the most part particularly informative, pieces by Rhian Samuel and David Beard especially so, though it is slightly odd to read Samuel referring to The Mask of Orpheus as ‘Birtwistle’s early opera’; ‘earlier’ perhaps? Moreover, Ruth Padel’s piece is simply incorrect to claim that ‘Monteverdi’s first opera was Arianna’; it was of course Orfeo. Nevertheless, I learned a great deal from the contributions taken as a whole. How splendid, then, to experience the Royal Opera House very much back on form – and on form in so many ways.

Carmen, English National Opera, 21 November 2012

(sung in English)

Carmen – Ruxandra Donose

Don José – Adam Diegel
Escamillo – Leigh Melrose
Micaëla – Elizabeth Llewellyn
Zuniga – Graeme Danby
Moralès – Duncan Rock
Frasquita – Rhian Loise
Mercédès – Madeleine Shaw
Dancairo – Geoffrey Dolton
Remendado – Alan Rhys-Jenkins
Lillas Pastia – Dean Street
Girl – Anya Truman

Calixto Bieito (director)

Joan Antonio Recchi (assistant director)

Alfons Flores (set designs)
Mercè Paloma (costumes)
Bruno Poet (lighting) 

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

 

A triumph for ENO! I suspected that Carmen would prove eminently suited to Calixto Bieito’s talents, and so it proved. Shorn of any ‘picturesque’ pandering – remember Francesco Zambello and her donkey? – what we saw here is perfectly attuned to Bizet’s resolutely unsentimental score. Spanish heat is for once no cliché; instead, we feel that heat almost unmediated, its oppression, its sexiness, its glory, its desperation. This is a more unsparing depiction of 1970s Spain than anything one would see in Almodóvar. Life is brutal: Carmen seems much more a product of her society, defiant and yet unable to transcend it, than we tend to imagine. The tawdry car-park world of gypsy trading is not romanticised; it does not necessarily appear better – or for that matter, worse – than that of the army. The figure of the abused girl is all the more disturbing for the lack of exaggeration. Ruthless realism, as in the opera, is the order of the day. We always think of Don José as a mummy’s boy; here his most erotic moment is the lingering, passionate kiss with Micaëla – a far more rounded, credible character than a mere angel of goodness – when she passes on the kiss from his mother.  Escamillo is no deus ex machina; he is cut down to size as twentieth-century ‘heroes’ tend to be. The marking of the bullring in the fourth act circumscribes the boundaries for the action in a fashion more chilling than I have ever experienced. The crowd has turned to us, has made its own entertainment – shaping of bull and toreadors from the men available is a masterstroke – and has disappeared. Now we – or they – are alone. Fate, as foretold in the cards, is played out. Hesitance prolongs the agony, yet the desert bleakness – social, scenic, existential – of the drama is in a sense the true protagonist here. Franco or his successors? Is there that much of a difference, especially under the present regime?

 

Ryan Wigglesworth conducted as fine an account of the score as I can recall hearing in the theatre, infinitely more subtle than the bandmaster performance of Antonio Pappano at Covent Garden, let alone the perverse manufactured intimacy of Simon Rattle in Salzburg. Rhythms were precise yet never – save, perhaps at the very opening – did the score seem harried. Colour was painted vividly; at times, this might almost have been Ravel. And Wigglesworth knew when to hang back, especially during the opening of the fourth act. There was nothing arbitrary to this; the score was not pulled around. Rather, dramatic tension was screwed up in tandem with the action on stage. Throughout the ENO Orchestra played magnificently, the performance from the chorus – and children’s chorus – equally faultless.

 

Ruxandra Donose made an excellent Carmen: vulnerable but not too vulnerable, strong, but not too strong, complex, conflicted, and at times devastatingly alluring. Grame Danby and Duncan Rock made great impressions as Zuniga and Moralès respectively; it would be well-nigh impossible to distinguish between the distinction of their vocal and acting performances. Elizabeth Llewellyn was a touching Micaëla, though here at least as much as anywhere else, one regretted the lack of the original French (not that there was anything intrinsically wrong with Christopher Cowell’s valiant translation). Leigh Melrose sang well enough as Escamillo, but his portrayal lacked the requisite virility – even given the concerns of Bieito’s staging. He seemed somewhat miscast. The only real fly in the ointment, however, was Adam Diegel’s Don José. Uncertain of intonation, whether through excess vibrato or simple poor tuning, this was a performance whose stiffness seemed anything but dramatically motivated; stylistically it hovered at its best between Puccini and musical theatre. Such, however, was the power of the ensemble performance that it was difficult to mind too much.

 

This was the best performance I have seen at ENO for quite some time – and the best performance of Carmen I have ever seen. More Bieito and more Wigglesworth, please!

(Pictures shoud follow when available: later today, I hope.)

Total Immersion - Oliver Knussen at 60, 4 November 2012

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

Masks, op.3 (1969)

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

Martha Lloyd (flute)

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

Autumnal, op.14 (1976-7)

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

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

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

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

Claire Booth (soprano)

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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