Last night at the Festival Hall in London the City of Birmingham
Symphony Orchestra under Simon Rattle performed three modern pieces:
Gyorgy Kurtag's "Grabstein fur Stephan", Sofia Gubaidulina's violin
concerto "Offertorium" (Vadim Repin), and Harrison Birtwistle's "Earth
Dances".  I usually complain about London ticket prices, but these were
just seven pounds or eleven pounds, which is definetely a bargain in my
book.  The hall was about half full, and the audience was enthusiastic.

The Kurtag piece is for guitar and several small instrumental groups,
allowing plenty of experiment with spatial effects.  Rattle bounded on
stage with a lot more physical energy than I can usually summon up at the
end of a working week (especially after just rushing around all the big
record stores in the hope of finding a copy of MacMillan's "Triduum" -
despite the BBC magazine's optimism, it's not yet available in the UK!).
Two things immediately struck me on this first time I've ever seen Rattle
in the flesh - first, he's rather shorter than he appears on television;
and second, the quality of the silence he produced as he raised his hands
to begin the Kurtag piece.  I've heard that kind of silence at the end of
pieces - Mahler 9 can often do it, to give just one example - but very
rarely have I met such intensity of quiet and concentrated listening before
a note has been played.  In those few seconds, Rattle established the
atmosphere he wanted in the hall and convinced me (not that I needed
much convincing) that this country will be criminally negligent and
irresponsible if we don't find some way of persuading him to stay rather
than take a Music Director / Principal Conductor post somewhere overseas.
Personally I'd give him the top job with one of the London orchestras, a
blank cheque and a major role in coordinating the work of all the London
bands and opera companies.  If his work in Birmingham isn't proof that he
would repay that kind of trust many times over, I can't imagine what would
be.

Jonathan Ellis wrote enthusiastically about "Offertorium" a few months ago,
and I back his taste and judgement all the way.  It's music of real depth,
fire, commitment and structural quality.  It's based on the "Royal Theme"
from Bach's "Musical Offering", and Gerard McBurney's excellent programme
note analyses it basically as an East-West fusion piece.  The idea is
that the first part of the Royal Theme uses notes that are closely related
in terms of Western harmony (thirds, a sixth, a "hidden" fifth), but the
second part - an almost complete descending chromatic scale - uses notes
that are closely related in terms of Orthodox chant, where movement is
almost invariably stepwise and intervals of a third or more are regarded
as "dangerous and insecure".  So these two parts of the Royal Theme
become effectively first and second subjects.  In the first section of
"Offertorium" they are presented and then "sacrificed" - gradually reduced
to smaller and smaller fragments until nothing is left but the semitone
that joins them together.  That leads into a meditative violin cadenza
and then a "development" section and a second cadenza with a more positive
feeling about it.  The next section has the violin playing a long
chant-like line over bell-like sounds in the orchestra.  The violin line
moves almost entirely in steps of a tone, so it's a halfway-house between
the harmonic intervals of the "Western" first half of the Royal Theme and
the more Eastern, stepwise, semitonal second part.  Apart from a kind of
coda where the violin plays the Royal Theme reversed, this fusion brings
the piece to an end.  Be all that structural logic as it may, the piece
works.  Everyone around me was totally held by the way it moved forward
from stage to stage, and also by Vadim Repin's totally committed and
powerful performance.  When I wrote about Gubaidulina's "Canticle of the
Sun" recently I described her as totally confident of her voice.  I had
exactly the same feeling yesterday, and MacBurney says something similar at
the end of his note: "a vivid reminder of the expressive power available
to a composer who knows without question what the symbols are that she
believes in and what they mean." The more I hear of Gubaidulina the more
impressed I get.

I've been working hard on getting to understand Birtwistle, so I was
very much looking forward to hearing "Earth Dances" performed live.  My
primary reaction in listening to his music is usually "OK, but where is
this going?" I need to feel that a piece of music is a journey, with a
starting point, things happening along the way, and an end that helps to
make sense of it all.  My understanding of music, for better or worse, is
basically narrative.  I've accepted that Birtwistle just doesn't work that
way, and that I need to find ways of listening that short-circuit the "one
thing after another" expectations.  Birtwistle, if I understand him at all,
is about processes rather than results - perhaps the ultimate Birtwistle
piece would attack all expectations about beginnings and ends by just
going on and on idefinitely, with the audience coming in at random points,
staying for a while and then going out for a bit, perhaps coming back later
. . .  There is much effective music in Earth Dances, much to please and
intrigue the ear (and one thing to annoy it, but more of that later).
There is clearly great craftsmanship there, and a powerful intelligence
behind it.  But can it catch the imagination, engage the emotions, make
you feel that here, in this Festival Hall seat at this moment in the
middle of this piece, is the one place in all the world I want to be? Or
are those not relevant questions? If not, what's the point of the music?
The bit that annoyed me: much of Earth Dances is accompanied by one or two
percussionists playing rhythm patterns on (largely) closed hi-hat cymbals,
as you find in a jazz or rock drum set, operated by the drummer's left
foot.  The effect is rather like being stuck on a train or a bus next to
someone with a walkman turned up too loud, so that the hi-hat sound leaks
tinnily from his earphones into your brain, and refuses to get out.  This
added very little to Earth Dances, as far as I could tell, and just
reminded me of Birtwistle's fascination with the rock drum set, which led
him into such trouble when he tried to write for it in the infamous "Panic"
of which the less said the better.  Anyway, Birtwistle was in the audience
and Rattle brought him down to receive the applause, and he seemed happy
enough with the way things had gone.

Ian Crisp
[log in to unmask]