Birtwistle - softer-grained, relatively lyrical and the angular rigorous.

Now that Lyrita appear to have reissued the majority of their own archive, it’s gratifying to see that they are turning their attention to some old Decca/British Council releases from the 1960s and 1970s that would otherwise be languishing in the vaults. The Decca Headline series contained some classic performances of then avant-garde works by contemporary composers; it featured works by international figures such as Messiaen, Lutoslawski and Henze in addition to home-grown talent such as Birtwistle, Bedford and Musgrave. The present CD is a straight reissue of HEAD 7 and contains three key works by Birtwistle from the late 1960s/early 1970s. It offers a useful snapshot of the composer’s style as he moved from the harsh expressionism of his early works (typified by the opera Punch and Judy) to his increasing fascination with the Orpheus legend, itself reflected in a softer-grained, relatively lyrical approach. On this CD The Fields of Sorrow and Nenia represent, broadly speaking, the latter approach; Verses for Ensembles contains elements of the more angular, rigorous Birtwistle.

Jane Manning joins the London Sinfonietta and Chorus for The Fields of Sorrow; word setting is unconventional, being divided across the forces, often syllabically. The performers are also distributed across the sound-stage, creating together with the bell-like sonorities a ghostly, disembodied effect. This effectively reflects the mediaeval poem which Birtwistle sets, depicting the journey of two souls through a gloomy forest in Hades.

By contrast with Verses for Ensembles we have what marks perhaps a culmination of his early, expressionist years. Hieratic brass and woodwind writing, contrasted with ebullient percussion, throw us immediately into a very different sound-world. The work encapsulates many characteristics of Birtwistle’s "early" period; his use of verse and refrain forms as a structural device, his fascination with procession or ritual, and a deployment of contrasting instrumental resources as a way of articulating the structure for the listener. The instrumentation is set into sharp relief by the composer’s spatial distribution of his forces on stage. Thus two woodwind groups sit to the left and right of the stage, with brass and percussion towards the rear. Birtwistle also requires players to move physically to key positions on stage at significant moments in the piece. The sounds themselves contrast harsh, aggressive brass and woodwind writing with softer passages. Verses for Ensembles is by no means an easy work to assimilate, but as ever with Birtwistle the music repays repeated study. The performance, by the forces for which it was written, is everything we could wish for. Perhaps one or two extra tracking points on the CD might have helped those unfamiliar with the music to find their bearings more clearly.

The final work on the CD, Nenia – The Death of Orpheus, was composed the year after Verses. The title refers to a Roman funeral dirge and the goddess invoked; Orpheus and Euridice are the subjects of the ritual. Birtwistle now groups his instrumental forces according to timbres, rather than the contrasting sounds he created in Verses. The instrumental music is dominated by the sound of bass clarinets. The structure of the piece, the instrumental forces, and the vocal style Birtwistle requires of his soloist - Jane Manning again - are immensely fluid, and immensely challenging, but at all times dictated by the text. Once again the performances are astonishing in their virtuosity.

As the composer in his early years moved from one set of preoccupations to another, reflected by a development in his actual compositional style, it’s misleading to suppose that each compositional phase is entirely self-contained, without reference to what came before or after. Birtwistle himself felt that each of his pieces consisted of "layers" reflecting both previous interests and pointing the way forward to future developments. On first hearing the extreme dissonance of Verses for Ensembles may appear to contrast sharply with the softer-grained approach of The Fields of Sorrow; but the composer’s spatial distribution of his forces in both works provides a stylistic link. Nenia, as we have seen, contains the preoccupations with ritual that characterised many of his earlier works. What comes across very clearly - and here I echo a word Paul Conway uses in his excellent booklet notes - is the composer’s stylistic integrity right across his output.

-- Ewan McCormick, MusicWeb International

Born in 1934, Sir Harrison Birtwistle is one of the leading European figures in contemporary music. He first made his mark in 1965 with the decet Tragoedia, a work whose ambience of something at once ancient and modern, with stark juxtapositions of strident violence and fragile lyricism, presented a sound and sensibility quite new in British music. The Nash Ensemble was formed around the same time and over the decades that have followed, a close relationship has developed between Birtwistle and the ensemble. Among the several commissions made by the ensemble are the closing two movements of the Oboe Quartet as well as the Duet for Eight Strings, described by the composer as ‘a string quartet for two players’. Composed in 2018, the Duet is the most recent work on the disc, which also includes the Trio for violin, cello and piano from 2011. The only work of an older date is Pulse Sampler from 1981, originally for oboe and claves, but here heard in a recent version for a more varied array of percussion.

REVIEWS:

All the music here retains a freshness and focus belying the composer’s age; it’s a long way from a mere rehashing of familiar ways of doing things. In strong contrast to its companions, the single-movement Piano Trio sounds unusually expansive and resonant, perhaps in conscious tribute to its dedicatee, Birtwistle’s student friend Alexander Goehr – as committed a follower of Schoenberg as Birtwistle was of Stravinsky. But the relish with which the composer addresses generic traditions doesn’t prevent him from adopting a manner that can suggest parody as much as celebration. The three players engage in a drama that involves multiple roles, and this meticulous performance offers musical play-acting – sometimes melodramatic, sometimes restrained – as the finest of fine arts.

-- Gramophone

The opening work, 2011's Trio for Piano, Violin & Cello, is played with assurance and elan. The other works on this album - the Duet for 8 Strings from 2018, Pulse Sampler for Oboe and Percussion in a version also from 2018, and the Oboe Quartet from 2009-10 - demonstrate that the modernism of the early and mid 20th century is still viable in the 21st. The members of the Nash Ensemble provide stylish and lively performances of this important composer's music.

-- Music for Several Instruments

Visions offers Tamara Stefanovich and Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s return to Pentatone, presenting a programme revolving around Messiaen’s intoxicating Visions de l‘amen for two pianos. This centrepiece is surrounded by Enescu’s Carillon nocturne, Knussen’s Prayer Bell Sketch and Clock IV from Birtwistle’s Harrison’s Clocks. The works performed all share a fascination for the sound of bells, and Stefanovich and Aimard invite the listener on a mesmerizing acoustic journey. Tamara Stefanovich is captivating audiences worldwide with a broad repertoire ranging from Bach to contemporary composers, and made her Pentatone debut with the critically-acclaimed album Influences (2019). Widely acclaimed as a key figure in the music of our time and as a uniquely significant interpreter of piano repertoire from every age, Pierre-Laurent Aimard enjoys an internationally celebrated career. His exclusive engagement to Pentatone has led to a complete recording of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux (2018) and a recording of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata and Eroica Variations (2021).

REVIEW:

Here’s a disc for pianophiles, those with a penchant for the mystical, and campanologists alike. As the song has it, “A bell’s not a bell ’til you ring it”, and here bells toll, peal, chime, carillon and knell throughout a cleverly programmed, acutely played recital by Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich that dazzles with its poetry, intensity and clarity.

The disc’s title, Visions, alludes to the hallucinogenic effect of Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen in which bells sound with an intoxicating allure that speaks of a sense of otherness rooted in self-interrogating interiority. In its searching dialogue between two pianos surface religiosity serves as the portal to something altogether more transcendental and intimate.

Aimard’s familiarity with the work is unimpeachable, having played it, he says, “from the age of 15, turned the pages when Yvonne Loriod and Messiaen performed it, worked on it with him, and played it countless times”. More recently, it has been a part of his concert appearances with Stefanovich, and such accrued acquaintanceship pays enormous dividends here.

With due seriousness and gravity, Aimard assumes the imposing first piano role originally inhabited by Messiaen himself, Stefanovich voicing the narcotic zeal and fantasy of the second piano part, written for and first performed by Loriod. The result, an exercise in atomised contrasts, is something special.

Aimard carries the disc’s adroit finale, Harrison Birtwistle’s Clock IV (from Harrison’s Clocks) inspired by Dava Sobel’s book Longitude about the race to invent a marine chronometer. One of the composer’s “chiming pieces”, it discreetly echoes Messiaen even as its prodigious chord clusters and dramatic dynamic contrasts belong self-evidently to him alone. Aimard dispatches it with due declamatory virtuosity.

Nigel Simeone provides detailed, informative, and accessible notes, the recorded sound, in Stefaniensaal, Congress Graz, Austria as exemplary as you would expect of Pentatone.

-- Limelight