After Babel

It is always very strange to write long time afterwards about performances one experienced, even more if one –that is, me- seemed to rather carelessly not take down notes about it. Nevertheless, I reckon the distance and the forgetting provide an extra filter for the judging of the pieces, as indeed one only carries within the more memorable instances, the more striking gestures and long lasting instants. It is under this distant and faint light that I approach the reviewing of these two performances: Birtwhistle’s double bill at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (Semper Dowland, Semper Dolens and The Corridor) and (in the following A Composer’s Notebook entry) the English National Opera rendition of Kaija Saariaho’s opera L’Amour de Loin.

Sir Harrison’s Fest opened with Semper Dowland, Semper Dolens -overall, a truly remarkable enterprise to undertake-. This adaptation/rewriting combined together two peaks of the lute’s master production: the Lachrimae and six beautiful songs. Although, as Sir Harrison writes in the notes that he thinks of arrangement as an act of love, I still thought there could (or even should!) have been some more love (as in arranging) going on in this work. In a way, I was expecting him to have found a wonderful way of writing in those original pieces by Dowland into something bigger, of the sort of creating a contemporary context for them: make them appear and disappear, skilfully, from within the textures and back again in a sort of exquisitely controlled palimpsestic discovery.

We had a glimpse of an attempt to do precisely that in the first and last Lachrimae, but everything else in between just felt a little bit too much of a costumary –if superbly executed- transcription. Because there were no truly remarkable additions to the originals, I could never understand why there was a need not to have a consort of viols play the Lachrimae, as Birtwhistle’s different ensemble didn’t seem to add that much to it. Similarly, the songs (only accompanied by a modern harp) made me wonder why not use a theorbo, a lute, or whatever good old Dowland chose himself to accompany the singer, since nothing was done to alter the music, or add layers to it.

In an ironic way, for a man so bold in his statements, Semper Dowland, Semper Dolens felt like an awkward state of indecision: neither just presenting the original music and claiming authorship only of the actual idea of the juxtaposition/interspersing, neither a complete and bold reworking of the pieces so that they became part of a much larger –with much more Birtwhistle in it- work.

On the contrary, with The Corridor we found Sir Harrison much more at ease and, indeed, we did hear some true sparks of his bold dramatic talent. A piece of musical drama that wants to look at a very brief moment of time (that of Orpheus and Eurydice transiting from Hades and back to the world, and the former’s fatal turn to look back with the consequent loss of Eurydice), and so not unlike –at least in intent- to Arnold Schönberg’s Erwartung.

Here, with a hands-free set up, Birtwhistle manages to achieve again that well known skill of his which is dramatic pacing. I wouldn’t say completely flawless, as there was abundance of rhetorical moments which did weaken the direction of the piece, which was overall gripping and very effective indeed. The vocal lines were in places reminiscent of certain features of his opera The Minotaur, if –at least for myself- more expressive and successful than those sung by the half man, half beast and his Cretan colleagues.

Despite all of that, the sung passages lacked a certain variety and a stronger sense of direction. Not dramatic direction, but purely a sense of musical journey through different areas (either textural, tonal or rhythmical). The music felt disappointingly unchanged after all the emotional transformation the characters –and the audience- underwent.

But the greatest moments of the piece, and indeed the night, were the instrumental interludes for the main action, when the singer took over the stage acting as a sort of commentator/spectator of the unfolding drama reciting the text rather than singing it. Then the music was focused –with Birtwhistle’s little obsessive mobile motives that kept rotating in the ensemble- and the whole atmosphere just lifted up. The somehow rhetorical text could flow undisturbed, the ensemble could be what Birtwhistle is as a composer, and –sadly, but not that much- we could dispense with his vocal lines.

It is a bitter irony that the best parts of what pretends to be a musical drama are those spoken and not those sung. But we shouldn’t mind when those are totally gripping and extraordinarily expressive; and when the whole enterprise shows so much integrity and talent.

Filed under: Art, In English, Music by admin