When Peter Eötvös died in March at the age of 80, one of the projects he left unfulfilled was a concert with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group that would include the English-language premiere of Secret Kiss, his melodrama for narrator and five instrumentalists. Eötvös had collaborated on the whole concert, but never got to take part in it; Geoffrey Paterson conducted the programme, exactly as originally envisaged.
Secret Kiss was first performed in 2019, with the text delivered in Japanese. It’s based on a scene in Alessandro Baricco’s bestselling novel, Silk, which describes an encounter in 19th-century Japan between a Frenchman seeking a supply of silkworms and the concubine of the man who controls the silk supply. It’s a slender, nuanced collision of cultures, but puzzlingly Eötvös’s 15-minute treatment of it manages to make it seem even more inconsequential, its Japanese inflections, particularly from the Noh tradition, hardly noticeable. The delivery of the text (by Meg Kubota here) is punctuated by instrumental solos, alto flute and violin representing the woman, bass clarinet and cello the man, but never holds the attention, and overamplifying the voice, makes it all seem too contrived.
