Between 2006 and 2022, Birmingham Trees for Life was responsible for the planting of 100,000 trees across the city and surrounding areas, increasing its canopy by 10%. Birmingham Contemporary Music Group played its part, too, with workshops and education initiatives, and to mark the end of this phase of the project it commissioned a large-scale choral work celebrating trees from Christian Mason.
With a text by Paul Griffiths, The Singing Tree is an “environmental cantata” for five solo voices (members of Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart), children’s choir (Finchley Children’s Music Group) and a large ensemble. Mason writes that he finds “analogies between trees and the musical meanings and processes that coalesce in [his] work”. He also notes that Griffiths has supplied him with a “wonderfully arborescent text”, which is printed in the shape of a tree, and grows exponentially across the seven sections from the single word “tree” that is set in the first movement, to four words in the second, 16 in the third, and so on.
The problem was that in this performance in Birmingham town hall, very few of those words were decipherable. Mason certainly creates beguiling textures around them, using the two choirs deftly, with the adult quintet on the concert platform and the children’s choir high above them in front of the hall’s organ, clothed in dense instrumental webs from the wind-heavy ensemble. But little verbal meaning escaped from this intricacy, except in the quotations from Guillaume de Machaut’s 14th-century rondeau Puis Qu’en Oubli, which haunts the music like a ghost from a long-lost blameless age. In a work with an avowed “message”, that lack of communication is hard to justify.
For directness and clarity we had to wait for the second half of the programme, which BCMG and conductor Michael Wendeberg devoted to a superb performance of Helmut Lachenmann’s Concertini, the large-scale score he composed for Ensemble Modern in 2005, and which stands as a virtuoso summation of his achievement as a composer. As the sounds and gestures shuttled thrillingly between the four groups of instruments arrayed around the hall, occasionally halted by unexpected solos (one for guitar, others for harp and tuba), it was all so vivid and instantly engaging – everything that Mason’s well-intentioned score just wasn’t.
