Sakari Oramo was to conduct two concerts in Birmingham this week, both including major premieres - the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group's programme with the new piece by Michael Wolters last Sunday, and this one in the City of Birmingham Symphony's regular season, which included the first performance of a major commission from Richard Causton. But Oramo is ill, instructed not to conduct until the New Year, so the CBSO programme was shared out. The Russian Alexander Anissimov took over Britten's Lachrymae, with Christopher Yates as the solo viola player, and Shostakovich's socialist-realist Symphony No 11, The Year 1905. Michael Seal, meanwhile, took charge of the very competent premiere of Causton's Between Two Waves of the Sea.
The title comes from the last of TS Eliot's Four Quartets, Little Gidding, and alludes to the ways in which Causton plays with notions of musical memory and linearity in the 20-minute work. The playing of the orchestra is shadowed, answered and confronted by pre-recordings of itself, which are triggered by a sampling keyboard played on stage. The recorded material sometimes anticipates what the live band has to do and sometimes offers a distant recap of what has already been heard. Some of those contributions are heard unadorned, through aural windows cut into the orchestral fabric; others make their point almost subliminally, adding density and ambiguity to the textures rather than presenting specific, identifiable ideas.
There are two movements. The first is busy and agitated, firing out tightly coiled bundles of ideas that gradually unravel and acquire their own momentum; it's music that initially seems cluttered and hyperactive, though as the ideas coalesce everything settles down and Causton's harmonic planning becomes much clearer. The second movement then works away at the longer-range implications of the basic ideas with glistening planes of sound, live and recorded, moving over each other, so that as the work fades from view, with the last traces of the recorded sounds becoming ever more distant, the sense of a journey completed is strongly felt.
