The relationship between Harrison Birtwistle and the London Sinfonietta spanned more than half a century, and took in more than 30 premieres and performances in 28 countries. The orchestra’s tribute to the great composer, who died 11 months ago, was generous and sincere – a concert conducted by Martyn Brabbins that included both the first and last of the large-scale ensemble works that the Sinfonietta introduced, and which also involved musicians from the Manson Ensemble of the Royal Academy of Music, where Birtwistle studied clarinet in the late 1950s, a connection that he renewed at the end of his life. And, with the news of the sudden death three days earlier of Nicholas Snowman, co-founder of the Sinfonietta, who was a close friend of Birtwistle and a steadfast champion of his music, the occasion had taken on an extra poignancy.
Snowman in fact commissioned the earliest piece in this programme, Verses for Ensembles, which the Sinfonietta first performed in 1969. With its block-like construction, raw, uncompromising soundworld of wind instruments and percussion, and mysterious elements of ritual as the instrumentalists move around the platform, Verses remains in many respects the archetypal Birtwistle score, and, as Brabbins’s performance showed, it has lost none of its excoriating power, derived in large part from its debts to Stravinsky and Varèse.
Birtwistle observed that he always felt he was composing the same piece, exploring different facets in turn of one block of musical material, but how his music evolved was shown by the ensemble piece here from the other end of his career, In Broken Images, from 2011. The musical blocks by then have smoother edges, their rawness is tempered by a group of strings, and the argument is less static, more in a continuous process of development, while its rhetorical power remains intact.
On occasions like this, one always wants to hear more pieces than a single concert can contain, but it seemed a pity that the programme began with a couple of miniatures, the “conversation for two instruments” Duet 1, and Virelai, an arrangement of a 14th-century work by Johannes Ciconia, rather than a more muscular piece. There was room however for one of Birtwistle’s most beautiful scores, The Fields of Sorrow, a setting of a brief Latin text by Ausonius for two sopranos (Abigail Sinclair and Lisa Dafydd) and chamber choir (Londinium), with two pianos and the inevitable wind instruments creating fragile, mysterious textures around them. Here, between the more strident pieces, were a few minutes of perfect tranquillity.
This article was amended on 9 March. The word ‘fulsome’ was changed to ‘generous’.
