A big orchestral work, with two conductors, is due from Harrison Birtwistle this year, as well as a new chamber opera for the next Aldeburgh festival. But Cheltenham secured a smaller-scale premiere from its composer laureate, too, when Andrew Watts and members of Endymion introduced the Orpheus Elegies. In fact, it was a semi-premiere, for there will ultimately be 26 of these settings of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus for counter-tenor, oboe and harp, and about half of them were performed here.
The German texts, and Birtwistle's responses to them, drive the cycle, but not all of them are sung. In fact, most of the numbers are purely instrumental, with the oboe taking the role of Orpheus and the harp his accompanist; when the counter-tenor does make an appearance, it is to offer commentary and narrative background. As in Birtwistle's previous large-scale song cycle, Pulse Shadows (based on the poetry of Paul Celan), vocal and instrumental numbers are interleaved, and the ordering of movements is left to the performers.
Oboist Melinda Maxwell and harpist Helen Tunstall embedded Watts's gently eloquent delivery of the words of three sonnets in groups of miniatures whose instrumental tracery is by turns suavely lyrical and jaggedly insistent, and which frequently pushes the oboe line into multiphonics. In one movement, a muffled metronome provides a ticking backdrop to their dialogue; in another, the two instruments are entirely independent, working their way through separate musical mobiles. Everything is beautifully judged, and the range of expression that Birtwistle draws from the two instruments, and from the voice, is enormous.
In the Cheltenham programme book, Birtwistle is cited, along with Tippett and Andriessen, as one of the major influences on the music of Mark-Anthony Turnage, which might come as a bit of a surprise. Turnage's latest piece, Eulogy for viola and eight instruments, was another Cheltenham premiere, introduced by the Nash Ensemble under Lionel Friend. Though its material is quite different, Eulogy is a kind of appendix to Turnage's viola concerto, On Opened Ground, first performed in Cleveland last year; the mellow, undemonstrative sound world of the accompaniment tends to emphasise the same middle registers as the solo instrument. It all conjures up an autumnal, nostalgic world that touches on a kind of latter-day pastoral, in which the viola sings its own nostalgic songs, poised and quietly eloquent.
