Tag Archives: BCMG: NEXT

In concert – Birmingham Contemporary Music Group: Blossoming In Birmingham

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Oliver Janes (clarinet), Philip Brett, Stefano Mengoli (violins), David BaMaung (viola), Arthur Boutillier (cello), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group / Otis Lineham, Kazuki Yamada (conductors)

Illean Januaries (2017)
Fujikura Perpetual Spring (2017)
Ligeti String Quartet no.2 (1968)
Hosokawa Blossoming (2007)
Fujikura Secret Forest (2008)

BCMG NEXT [George Blakesley (clarinet), Anna Vaughan (violin), Alma Orr-Ewing (viola), Finley Spathaky (cello), Rob Hao (piano)

Fujikura Scion Stems (2010)
Illean Février (2019)
Fujikura Halcyon (2011)

CBSO Centre, Birmingham
Saturday 29 April 2023 (7pm and 9pm)

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

Spring may have arrived tardily this year, but Birmingham Contemporary Music Group was certainly in full bloom with this judiciously balanced and absorbing programme that featured one post-war classic and two pieces by one of the leading composers from the present time.

First, though, the welcome opportunity to hear a work by Lisa Illean, whose understated and fastidiously realized music conceals more than is evident on initial hearing. Such is true of Januaries, inspired by memories of holidays in Queensland together with descriptions of the Australian landscape. Its innate subtlety finding a direct parallel in this composer’s drawing of often ethereal yet always evocative timbres and textures from her 12-strong ensemble; and throughout which BCMG responded with due commitment to the direction of Otis Lineham.

The first of two pieces this evening by Dai Fujikura, Perpetual Spring drew inspiration from the Japanese Garden in Portland (US), notably the idea of growth as a process both ongoing and inexorable. Heard from this vantage, the clarinet represented a conceptual and expressive focal point; around which the string quartet weaved its dense if never claustrophobic texture with audible dexterity. Here, too, the music implied considerably more than was ever stated – no doubt in accord with the ‘‘power of ‘quiet’ nature’’ its composer took as his starting-point.

Although it now tends to be overshadowed by its predecessor, Ligeti’s Second String Quartet remains one of his most significant works – its five movements a compendium of his musical practice during the late 1960s, but with a formal and expressive focus that amply sustains the 20-minute whole. It was a measure of this account that a cumulative impetus carried through not merely to the explosive fourth movement, but also a finale whose textural mirage took in allusions to what went before: the music not so much ceasing as dispersing beyond earshot.

The string quartet was also Toshio Hosokawa’s chosen medium for Blossoming. Taking the image (and most probably its mythical association) of a lotus as its starting-point, the piece opened out in music typical of this composer for its unforced elegance and felicitous aura.

Considerably more engrossing an all-round experience, Fujikura’s Secret Forest is among the most impressive of his ensemble works and not least for its visceral conception. Placed centre-stage, the string nonet was balanced with groups of woodwind and brass either side, and above the auditorium. It was the ensuing interplay between the spatially arrayed sound-sources, strings intense in their eloquence and winds hieratic in their intangibility, that the conductor shaped over its course – not forgetting the solo bassoon, seated in the auditorium, who became a human figure plotting a course through this sonic landscape. The piece was directed with conviction by Kazuki Yamada and promises much for the Fujikura commission Wavering World, which he will premiere with the CBSO in Symphony Hall on January 17th.

A pity not more punters remained for the post-concert performance by musicians of BCMG NEXT, which featured two more works by Fujikura. Scion Stems took string trio as the basis for a wide-ranging discussion of textures made even more immediate by its brevity, whereas Halcyon pursued a more circumspect yet never disengaged interplay between clarinet and string trio. In between, Février found Illean’s writing at its most sensuous in its sequence of exchanges between clarinet, cello and piano to which these players likewise did full justice. The current NEXT line-up performs its final concert on June 11th, while BCMG itself returns to Birmingham Town Hall on May 12th for its TREE Concert featuring a new commission by Christian Mason alongside one of the most impressive compositions by Helmut Lachenmann

For more on future BCMG events, click on the link to visit their website. For more information on the composers featured, click on the names to read about Dai Fujikura, Lisa Illean and Toshio Hosokawa, while you can read about the conductors by clicking on Kazuki Yamada and Otis Lineham

In concert – Birmingham Contemporary Music Group & PRiSM: Iannis Xenakis Centenary – Maths and Music

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CBSO Centre @ 3pm:

Xenakis Plektó (1993)
Pattar Philosophy should stop at midnight (2022) [World Premiere]
Tzortis Croque strideurs (2022) [World Premiere]
Xenakis Anaktoria (1969); Nomos Alpha (1966); Phlegra (1975)

Arne Deforce (cello), Musicians of BCMG: NEXT / Melvin Tay

CBSO Centre @ 5pm:

Xenakis Ittidra (1996)
Fernando Breathing Forest (2022) [Sound and Music commission: World Premiere]
Xenakis Akanthos (1977)
Howard Compass (2022) [BCMG Sound Investment commission: World Premiere]
Xenakis Jalons (1986)

Anna Dennis (soprano), Julian Warburton (percussion), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group / Gabriella Teychenné

The Exchange @ 7pm:

Luque It Is happening Again (2019-21) [UK Premiere]
Xenakis La Légende d’Eer (1978)

Birmingham Electro Acoustic Sound Theatre, Sunday 29 May 2022

by Richard Whitehouse

There could been no better way for Birmingham Contemporary Music Group to round off its current season than with this extended tribute to Iannis Xenakis on his 100th birthday. Over three events, a representative selection of the Greek composer’s work was heard within the context of new commissions and realizations of graphic scores.

The latter featured in the Synesthesia concert, after an earlier session where this ‘free, internet-browser-based music application’ (continuing from the UPIC programme that Xenakis pioneered in the 1980s) was made available – two previous graphic scores forming the basis of those pieces heard this afternoon.  Philosophy should stop at midnight found Frédéric Pattar following quite literally the contours of the score, a deft humour pointed up though the verse by Richard Brautigan (perhaps a latter-day ‘consolation of philosophy’?), whereas Croquis strideurs found Nicolas Tzortis aligning his score with poetry by Arthur Rimbaud in what was a more capricious or ‘off the wall’ approach.

The three pieces by Xenakis (above) were well chosen to demonstrate the expressive range of his music. Plektó (Braids) is typical of the music from his last years with its teasingly subversive take on a mixed ensemble, while Anaktoria (a lover of Sappho) puts an ensemble as modelled on Schubert’s Octet through its paces in music by turns ingratiating and obstreperous. Most impressive was Phlegra (being (different) regions of modern and ancient Greece), written at the advent of that period when ‘arborescence’  principles brought a new evolutionary dynamism to the composer’s thinking evident in this assured reading by musicians of BCMG: NEXT under the attentive direction of Melvin Tay.

Cellist Arne Deforce earlier took the stage for a performance of Nomos Alpha, typical in its utilizing mathematical abstraction to create viscerally emotional music. Visuals by Marcus de Sautoy and Simon Russell, as derived from the symmetrical properties of a cube, were arresting but it was the musical realization which commanded attention.

Three more pieces by Xenakis were included in the late-afternoon concert. Among his last works, Ittidra (unusual for this composer with its being the reverse spelling of the dedicatee’s name) is a brooding and ultimately fatalistic reassessment of the string sextet, and Akanthos (a city in ancient Greece) extends its instrumental remit to include woodwind and brass as well as soprano whose vocalise adds an often ethereal but at other times keening timbre to the ensemble – vividly conveyed here by Anna Dennis. Again, it was the closing item which made the most lasting impression. Xenakis’s relations with the modernism as represented by Pierre Boulez might at times been strained, but there was evident accord by the time he wrote Jalons for the latter’s Ensemble Intercontemporain. Here those ‘signposts’ or ‘landmarks implied by the title emerge as gestural peaks in music whose headlong motion generates irresistible excitement, and not least with BCMG sounding so responsive to the  guidance of Gabriella Teychenné.

Alternating with these works in either half were new commissions by very different composers. With its libretto by Zoe Palmer, Breathing Forest is described by its composer Samantha Fernando as ”A meditation on the inner struggles of a woman and her transformation through the Japanese art of … forest bathing”. What resulted was an exploration of its atmospheric text, realized with audible precision and elegance by Anna Dennis, whose musical substance – while not unappealing in itself – remained too inert to convey the emotional catharsis likely intended. More absorbing was a BCMG commission from Emily Howard, whose Compass takes those spatial and nautical connotations of its title as basis for music that unfolded as a cohesive dialogue between string septet with Julian Warburton‘s array of percussion. Few latter-day composers have shown Howard’s zeal for the interplay of music with mathematics, BCMG’s committed realization vindicating her latest piece musically as well as conceptually.

The final event, an acousmatic concert by Birmingham Electro Acoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST), relocated from CBSO Centre to The Exchange – an impressive Grade Two-listed building on Centenary Square under the auspices of University of Birmingham. Its third-floor conference room certainly suited these two pieces – starting with It Is Happening Again by the Mexican-born, now Madrid-based composer Sergio Luque. Drawing on his development  of Xenakis’s stochastic synthesis process, this proved to be a short while evocative study in density of sonic waves whose inherent abstraction was far from being without a tangible atmosphere through its succession of sonic ideas.

Although hampered by microphone malfunction, Christopher Haworth‘s introduction to the next piece was full of relevant detail concerning the purpose and reception of electroacoustic music. Not least when the piece in question was La Légende d’Eer, most expansive and all-encompassing of those Xenakis realized and which caused no mean controversy when initially heard as a musical facet of Diatope at the inauguration of the Pompidou Centre, with its apparently high level of amplification. The present multi-channel version was more easily accommodated, if not at the expense of its dazzling variety – Xenakis evoking the Platonic legend of a soldier returning from the dead via a symmetrical form which takes in an array of instrumental and synthesized sounds as they build to a sustained peak of organized frenzy before the almost regretful evanescence. Had nothing else survived, Xenakis would still have been thought a key creative figure from the post-war era and its impact has not lessened with time or expectation.

It certainly set the seal on a finely conceived and impressively realized sequence of events that reaffirmed Xenakis as a composer whose legacy is undeniable and his influence enduring. The 2020s will bring a whole succession of notable centenaries (that of Ligeti being just a few months away) and BCMG has set the bar high for those to come.

Click on the names for more information on the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, composers Frédéric Pattar, Nicolas Tzortzis, Samantha Fernando and Emily Howard, and performers Sergio Luque, Anna Dennis, Arne Deforce, Julian Warburton, –
Melvin Tay, Gabriella Teychenné and Christopher Haworth.