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The Io PassionRobert Adlington takes stock of a prolific recent period in Harrison Birtwistle’s work |
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| It would be hard to underestimate the single-mindedness with which Harrison Birtwistle has gone about his compositional work in recent years. Boosey and Hawkes' official worklist identifies no fewer than 20 works from the last five years, many of them substantial in scoring and length. Bolstered by an attitude to musical history that traces 'a direct line from the year 1000 to now' - and which thus disregards the manifold complexities of cultural interaction of the last 150 years - he has obstinately continued to map the territory laid out early in his career, territory whose most prominent landmarks are ancient myth, primitive ritual, dance and song. However, those alert to fault lines beneath this self-legitimating narrative may have been struck by something of a schism in the recent music. On the one hand, there has been a series of texted works in which Birtwistle's response to dramatic situation and image has become ever more flexible and imaginative. On the other, with works like The Axe Manual (2000) and Theseus Game (2002), we have been treated to some of the most forbidding exercises in compositional technique in his entire output. It is as if, in the context of the illustrative immediacy of the recent theatre and vocal pieces, Birtwistle has needed periodic reassurance as to the heady onward march of purely musical invention. With regard to the first of these trends, the National Theatre production of 'The Bacchae' (2002) provided something of a blueprint. Where, twenty years earlier, Birtwistle's music for the National's 'Oresteia' had imposed an ascetically disciplined order, in 'The Bacchae' wailing clarinets, thudding synthesiser samples and a panoply of percussion combined to impressively orgiastic effect. Equally substantial but largely overlooked in this country was The Ring Dance of Nazarene, a 25-minute work for baritone, chorus and wind ensemble first performed last October in Amsterdam. Stamping, clapping and pitchless chanting are juxtaposed against the sinuous counterpoint familiar from the choral Visions in The Last Supper to provide an appropriately visceral context for David Harsent's adaptation of the apocryphal gospel of St John. A lack of embarrassment at pictorial gesture is also evident in the imposing cycle of 26 Orpheus Elegies (link to pt.1, link to pt.2) for countertenor, oboe and harp, half of which were premiered at last year's Cheltenham Festival. Rilke's Sonnets provided the inspiration for the work, and some are treated to vocal settings, but in fact the majority of the pieces are purely instrumental. For Birtwistle, Orpheus is represented not by the countertenor (who might appear to be reprising his role from The Second Mrs Kong) but by the oboe, with the harp as his 'lyre'. Nevertheless, each instrumental movement ends with a poetic epigraph, and these often point to the music's evocative function - the clicking mechanisms of No. 8 respond to Rilke's 'Sieh, die Maschine', for instance, and the bit-part for metronome in No. 5 is occasioned by a poetic reference to a clock. The Elegies' lyrical counterpointing of melody and percussive articulation continues a formula established successfully in the classic works of the 1970s and 1980s. The rebarbative effect of The Axe Manual for piano and percussion is due in part to the unavailability of this textural contrast; instead the work is principally preoccupied with the exploration of different sorts of alignment between the instruments. Such alignment is also visibly a concern of Theseus Game, whose much-vaunted two conductors provide the springboard for an extended spree of elaborate notational devices. In spite of incidental moments of bravura, however, the conceit remains largely opaque to the ears and the sheer density of event acts more as a manifesto for complexity than a driver of involving drama. Less danger of this with The Shadow of Night (2001), the latest addition to Birtwistle's orchestral oeuvre. While in many respects faithfully re-treading old ground, this work's most compelling feature is its comparative restraint - though faint reminiscences of the textures of The Axe Manual may be heard in the chiming harp and percussion figuration that garlands later stages of the piece. The prospects for a rapprochement between ludic obscurity and expressive directness look stronger still with the forthcoming music-theatre work, The Io Passion. The tightly-wrought scenario juxtaposes the main action, which involves two former lovers, with a 'shadow world' (upstage) and a 'heightened world' (downstage), each occupied by a different pair of actors. In addition, stage left and stage right present a kind of mirror image, presenting respectively the inside and outside of the same door and window. The title thus carries a double resonance: 'Io' is the mythic character seduced and turned into a heifer by Zeus; but it is also the 'Inside' and 'Outside' of the work's contemporary action. Predictably, myth eventually erupts into the midst of the 'real' world, a progression traced by a gradual shift from mime to speech to song. For aficionados, the parallels with The Mask of Orpheus hardly need underlining, although the earlier work's orchestral forces are here replaced simply by a solo clarinet and string quartet. Nevertheless, those who feel that Birtwistle has most to say when (paradoxically) things are reduced to conceptual basics - in this case the fundamentals of performance - can only view the work with the keenest anticipation. Robert Adlington is Director of Research at the Department of Music, Nottingham University and author of 'The Music of Harrison Birtwistle' (Cambridge University Press, 2000) For more details and booking information for the June 11th Aldeburgh Festival premiere of The Io Passion
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