Music
Short and to the point
Robin Holloway
Norman, Saxon and Dane are we' sang the Bard. Though the French ingredi- ent sweetened our language and enriched our architecture, not much Gallic survives in the modern English sensibility. We value the rough, uncouth, 'natural', over the refined, the delicate, the intricate. Blunt speech, feelings curbed, and aversion to theorising, cerebration and experiment, appear more honest and true.
The high estimation of Harrison Birtwistle in the last decade or so is surely a manifestation of this taste. Monolithic and merciless, music like The Triumph of Time and Earth Dances grind the listener very small. Yet his earlier reputation was built upon just the kind of complexity and compression that these blockbusters eschew. And I believe that his most power- ful impact is still produced by brevity and reduced forces. His best opera remains Punch and Judy which is made up of a pat- terned succession of tight numbers, with a cast of six and an orchestra of 15. The Mask of Orpheus was already distended, though its aura of magnificent authenticity is unim- pugnable. With Earth Dances and the more recent piano concerto one feels blud- geoned with a truncheon for 40 minutes — also authentic in its way. But with Gawain tedium wins. Replacing jagged nuggets with vast slow quasi-Wagnerian continuity, while not remitting the high level of physi- cal assault, results oddly enough in bland- ness. It has found widespread favour, rather I suspect as an operation of the law whereby an important artist tends to catch the critical and public imagination when he begins to repeat himself at full volume.
But the miniature Birtwistle has not van- ished amidst his own sonorous debris. New settings of Celan for soprano and a handful of instruments reveal more intensity in their few minutes than the hours of Gawain with all its tubas and xylophones. Its recent revival at Covent Garden makes an instructive comparison with the recent pre- miere run of Judith Weir's Blond Eckbert round the corner at the Coliseum. Both are remote in time and place — the land of saga or fairytale; both involved testing and doubt, with a strong element of riddle, set amidst nature that can be malevolent or benign. Birtwistle's treatment is ritualistic, Weir's psychological, and both end in spiri- tual darkness. Both too are strikingly staged and have been played and sung with wholesale commitment.
And neither shows its composer at his best. And this too is complementary: whereas Gawain underwhelms by overkill, Blond Eckbert underwhelms by sheer refusal to overstate. Judith Weir's fascinat- ing sensibility has always been poised upon a knife-edge of musical content. Pellucid, exact, delicate, her music is absolutely devoid of fudge or faking. This frugality, together with a sharp ear for new-minting old sonorities and a deft touch with sub- ject-matter more disquieting than it seems, has produced a string of successful theatre- related pieces. In Blond Eckbert the nature- music — above all, that old German romantic waldeinsamkeit where horncalls hang in the air and every rustle seems to Promise great joy or great loss — is as beautiful as anything in contemporary music. Elsewhere the score often made a thin impression, particularly in the claus- trophobic interactions of the three princi- pals — admittedly just the kind of action most easily lost in this large house. But repeated hearings have revealed ever more of the kind of shy yet canny detail that makes Blond Eckbert so much more than a feminine pendant to Gawain. 'Norman Saxon and Dane' for sure; why did Tennyson omit the indispensable strain of Celt?
But we have no Mediterranean! Under the impact of la vera storia, Series Calvino- collaboration, broadcast live from the Festival Hall under the composer's own direction, the Scot and the Lancastrian must scuttle for shelter. What can one say about this pullulating stew of noise and nonsense beyond the fact that, as always Berio can temporarily melt every reserva- tion by his sheer sweep and skill? Though a terrific showman, he remains a professional modernist to whom mixing in ambiguity and subversion is as normal as it once was to go for resolution, a deux ex machina, and a happy ending. The result is, at bottom, a load of froth; but the flair, exuberance, lack of shame and scruple with which he piles it all in, Milva and band and all, has a headlong exhilaration foreign to both his British col- leagues. And more: something of the envi- able, expensive quality of sophisticated West End window-dressing — seductive and available (but not really) stirring infi- nite hankerings even while one knows it's all run up from wire, plaster, fibreglass, stage-properties, a vehicle of illusion and dellusion.
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