Birdsong has inspired composers from Beethoven to Messiaen, but few have attempted to fuse the worlds of birds and music as completely as Jonathan Harvey in his Bird Concerto with Pianosong, given its London premiere by the London Sinfonietta and Joanna MacGregor. Instead of simply translating bird calls into the registers of acoustic instruments, Harvey juxtaposes samples of birdsong with his music for the ensemble. By slowing down the calls of Californian birds in his writing, he reveals the otherwise inaudible riches of their songs as if the musicians were an ensemble of surreal, gigantic birds.
For Messiaen, birds were tokens of God's love, but for Harvey, they are the catalyst for a complex negotiation between nature and culture, between birdsong and technology. The piece uses electronics to manipulate the sounds of the birds and the players, but the music resists the temptation to become a paean to nature or to technology. Instead, Harvey uses the inherent conflicts of his material, between the different musical realms inhabited by the birds and the musicians, to create a concerto-like discourse.
In this performance, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, the music veered from the heights of the piano's top register to the depths of percussion and woodwind rumbles. The piece created a drama - in musical space as well as time - as the sounds of the birds wheeled around the audience, transforming the Queen Elizabeth Hall into a musical aviary. But the final sounds of the piece offered no easy resolution between the two worlds: the piano's low, tolling notes were the musical ground beneath the trilling of birdsong, and the birds seemed to fly free of the musicians.
The sinfonietta further explored electronics and live performance. Pierre Boulez's Anthèmes II surrounded a solo violin played by Clio Gould. The music meandered through this hall of mirrors, endlessly varying a handful of musical gestures.
But, for all the polished sheen of the electronic sounds, the result was an indulgent musical narcissism in which the piece was trapped by the beauty of its reflections. In Matthias Pintscher's Tenebrae, electronics formed a ghostly underscore to a dark sound world of solo viola and ensemble. Despite its eerily effective sounds, such as the detuned lower strings of the viola, the piece sounded like a shadow of a musical drama that was never fully revealed.
