Julian Anderson has been composer-in-association with the City of Birmingham Symphony since 2002, and has already completed two substantial pieces for the orchestra - a piece for five horns and, a year ago, a one-movement symphony. The third of his commissions, Book of Hours, has been composed for the CBSO's sibling, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG), and turns out to the most substantial and ambitious of these projects so far. It is cast in two movements lasting about 22 minutes, and combines the instrumentalists of BCMG with electronic sounds.
Anderson likens the electronic component in Book of Hours to the gold-leaf applied to a medieval manuscript, and the inspiration for the work came from medieval art, too: the paintings in the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry and the tapestries of La Dame à Licorne. But there is nothing programmatic about the music, which is built from the simplest of ideas, the first four notes of a major scale. They generate music of real rhythmic and harmonic complexity, however, and much striking imagery, with the second movement beginning as a speeded up reprise of the first but soon veering off into new territory; the electronics provide their own ever more elaborate embroidery and eventually, at the climax, have a lengthy interlude all to themselves.
Oliver Knussen conducted the typically assured premiere, and juxtaposed Anderson's piece with Elliott Carter's Dialogues for piano and chamber orchestra, new last year and now played with dash and brilliance by soloist Nicolas Hodges. A sequence of Stravinsky miniatures sung by Mary King also included the British premiere of Louis Andriessen's Letter from Cathy, his contribution to a memorial for Cathy Berberian, the mezzo who was Berio's first wife. As the title states, it's a setting of a letter to the composer from the great singer recalling a meeting with Stravinsky; it's delivered as a mixture of speech and song, in English and French, with an instrumental accompaniment that's wryly humorous and very touching: a beautifully worked tribute.
