Two concerts of Harrison Birtwistle's music, and two sides of his output: the epic orchestral energy of Earth Dances, played by the Philharmonia Orchestra, and the intimate chamber music of Pulse Shadows, performed by the Nash Ensemble and the Arditti Quartet. For all their differences of scale, there were profound connections between both pieces, revealing the fundamental concerns of Birtwistle's music.
The pulses in Christoph von Dohnanyi's performance of Earth Dances were volcanic and monumental. He made each gesture part of a huge musical strata, from pounding brass rhythms to delicate string glissandos. It was a musical geology that moved with the suddenness of an earthquake. The music's gigantic mechanisms wound down at last in an unforgettable tableau of pulsing piano and percussion, and a serene stasis in the strings.
Much of Birtwistle's music is structured like a huge mosaic, with blocks of music simply placed next to one another. But nowhere is this idea pursued more rigorously than in Pulse Shadows. The piece interleaves a cycle of nine settings of Paul Celan's poetry, sung by soprano Claron McFadden with the Nash Ensemble conducted by Martyn Brabbins, and nine fragments for string quartet, played by the Arditti Quartet. The pulsing in this performance was not just in the motoric rhythms of the string quartet's music, but also in the continually changing relationship between the ensemble and the quartet, and between the words and the music.
There were sounds of vivid luminosity for Celan's imagery of White and Light, in a shimmering string harmonic, but the settings did not so much illustrate the poetry as reflect and refract it. McFadden's intensity was breathtaking in the final number, the mixture of speech and song of Give the Word; the quartet were just as impressive in the furious, angular counterpoint of their last movement, Frieze 4 - Todesfuge. The whole performance had a mysterious cumulative effect, creating a multifaceted, cubist meditation on the relationship between poetry and music.
