Contemporary music today is usually left to the professionals. The repertoire has become too technically demanding, conventional wisdom says, for anybody other than specialists to take it on. But Birmingham Contemporary Music Group's programme of works by post-war Italian composers was expressly planned to involve as many amateur and student players as possible in a series of promenade performances mounted in one of the exhibition spaces alongside Symphony Hall.
The biggest work, in every sense of the word, was Salvatore Sciarrino's La Bocca, I Piedi, Il Suono, his 1997 piece for a quartet of saxophones and a chorus of at least 100 more, in which the soloists (led by John Harle) call and echo each other, before they are joined by the others, invisible at first but gradually infiltrating the hall. It's a typical Sciarrino soundscape, occupying the territory where music, noise and silence meet, in which breath sounds and key taps are just as significant as conventionally played pitches, and in which the sense of an arcane ritual is strangely compelling.
BCMG had recruited sax players from across the midlands, including members of the National Saxophone Choir for the performance, while the group was supplemented by players from Birmingham University and Birmingham Conservatoire for Bruno Maderna's 1969 Serenata per un Satellite, more composing kit than finished piece, in which the performers improvise around a collection of musical fragments. Berio's Accordo, for four wind bands, brought in yet more reinforcements, this time from the Telford New Symphony Orchestra. The piece conjures up the sounds of a festa in an Italian town square: out of a matrix of pulsations and held chords rotating in space the different ensembles insert quotes from their band repertoire - the overture to Rossini's Thieving Magpie started up in one corner, another group launched into the brindisi from La Traviata, while another, remembering perhaps that the piece was composed in the early 1980s, quoted from the Internationale. All good, clean fun.
