Tag Archives: Birmingham Contemporary Music Group

In concert – Echoes/BCMG NEXT @ Centrala

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Anderson Scherzo (with trains) (1993)
Salonen Pentatonic Étude (2008)
Birtwistle Duets for Storab (1983)
Donatoni Soft (1989)
Finnis Brother (2012/15)

Musicians from BCMG NEXT

Centrala, Digbeth, Birmingham
Thursday 16 November 2021

Written by Richard Whitehouse

It may not be the most easily locatable arts venue of those within Birmingham’s inner suburbs, but Centrala – launched almost a decade ago as a base for the dissemination and promotion of Central and Easter European cultures – was an appealing space for this latest recital featuring NEXT musicians from Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. The performance area itself might have been compact to a fault, but there no feeling of excessive restriction in the course of what was a varied yet balanced programme of works stretching across almost four decades.

It began in invigorating fashion with a timely revival of Scherzo (with trains) whose premiere at Wigmore Hall was an early success for Julian Anderson – being one of his most engaging works for ensemble and a major contribution to its genre. Drawing inspiration from Thoreau as well as rhythms of high-speed trains, two clarinets (Heather Ryall and George Blakesley), basset horn (Beth Nichol) and bass clarinet (Emily Wilson) unfold an unpredictable discourse; one whose requirements of technique and coordination were met in this assured performance.

A pity that the scheduled account of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Spectra was lost through Covid-related issues, but a further hearing for Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Pentatonic Étude was certainly no hardship. This testing paraphrase on a passage from Bartók’s unfinished Viola Concerto puts the soloist through its paces, restating the original in an understated apotheosis realized by Cameron Howe with evident sensitivity. Also reappearing from NEXT’s recent recital at Coventry Cathedral was Harrison Birtwistle’s Duets for Storab. Written when the composer lived on the Inner Hebridean island of Raasay, its inspiration lies in locations each having the name of a Viking prince whose shipwreck, pursuit and death are charted over six evocative pieces. Flautists Rebecca Speller and Leila Hooton were heard in (mainly) whimsical accord.

The music of Franco Donatoni enjoyed a brief vogue here in the decade before his death, but there have been few performances since – so making this revival of Soft the more welcome. Written for the late Harry Sparnaay, the bass clarinet’s doughtiest champion, this tensile and eventful piece feels typical of his late maturity in the way that seemingly detached, and even arbitrary gestures gradually build into a cohesive and cumulative continuity; one in which the expressive possibilities of the instrument are explored intensively though with no little irony.

Heather Ryall proved no mean exponent of this piece, as were Claudia Dehnke and Cameron Howe of Brother by Edmund Finnis. Written while he was composer-in-residence with the London Contemporary Orchestra, its four movements chart a gradually elaborating interplay between violin and viola, evolving from the meditative and incremental to the energetic and demonstrative – without the rapport between these instruments drawing apart in the process. Suffice to add the present performance lacked for nothing in terms of incisiveness or finesse.

It also brought to a close this final BCMG event for 2021. Dates of further performances are being announced in the new year, and it would be a shame if these not to feature a return to Centrala – well worth a visit by anyone who happens to be passing through Birmingham B5.

Further information on the BCMG can be found at their website. For more on NEXT Musicians click here, then on each of the composers names for the websites of Julian Anderson (with an alternative here), Esa-Pekka Salonen, Harrison Birtwistle, Franco Donatoni and Edmund Finnis. Finally for more information on the Centrala venue, click here

In concert – BCMG: Nights

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Cage The Perilous Night (1944)
Woolrich Watermark (2010)
Bray Midnight Interludes (2010)
Crumb Four Nocturnes (Night Music II) (1964)
Anderson Capriccio (2017); Sensation – Nuits (2015/16)
Jia Ripples in Spacetime II (2017)

Members of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group [Mark O’Brien (clarinets), Colette Overdijk (violin), Ulrich Heinen (cello) John Reid (piano)]

Jennifer Blackwell Performance Space, Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Friday 12 November 2021

Written by Richard Whitehouse

This recital by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group promised ‘‘An evening of starlight-inspired music’’, the environs of Jennifer Blackwell Performance Space – part of the recently completed refurbishment of Symphony Hall’s main foyers – showcasing a programme which ranged over 75 years of creativity. The attraction of Ice Skate Birmingham provided a scenic backdrop, and if the reflection from a repeating promo-video for B:Music proved on occasion distracting, it never drew attention away from the music heard or those musicians playing it.

John Cage may have been at emotional and aesthetic crossroads at the time of The Perilous Night, but its deft sequence of vignettes – obliquely inspired by Irish folktales – finds him at his most focussed and engaging when writing for prepared piano. It certainly drew a lively response from John Reid, who characterized the pieces with great delicacy but also a rigour which prevented them from sounding decorous. Cage later undertook more ambitious works in the medium, yet without recapturing the elegance and inquisitiveness demonstrated here.

More metaphysical matters are addressed by John Woolrich in Watermark, its imaginative interplay for bass clarinet and violin likened to ‘‘Planets revolving around the same sun’’ and whose juxtaposing same or similar material accrues palpable momentum before its dispersal. One of Charlotte Bray’s most notable scores is her song-cycle Midnight Closes after Thomas Hardy, and Midnight Interludes draws on the same texts for three miniatures that summoned a quizzical and sometimes even brusque response from Mark O’Brien and Ulrich Heinen. 

When George Crumb wrote Four Nocturnes for violin and piano as the second of his Night Music series, he was embarking on his most productive phase. Echoes of Bartók and Webern are frequent, though the finesse with which the composer elides between these apparent poles of dynamism and introspection is captivating – particularly when realized with the sensitivity and attentiveness of Colette Overdijk, in a performance to remind one that Crumb is too often overlooked as part of a decade (the 1920s) with more than its share of compositional mastery.

Next came two piano pieces by Julian Anderson. Capriccio is a heartfelt yet never turgid memorial to Steven Stuckey, its balance between precision and playfulness a reminder that the latter composer was a leading authority on the music of Lutosławski. More elaborate is Sensation, a cycle of six movements playable either separately or in various combinations – of which Nuits ‘‘presents the sounds and perfumes of the night’’ in music by turns evocative and ominous, all the while encompassing the extent of the keyboard to an enticing degree.

Finally, to Jia Guoping and a welcome revival for Ripples in Spacetime II. Drawing upon cosmic waves as emitted from a pulsar, the piece evolves in terms as emphasise the timbral diversity of its instrumental quartet. Its pitches derived from the acronym CHINA FAST (a radio telescope), its playing techniques evoke traditional Chinese instruments over the course of a capricious interplay between those competing (and ultimately irreconcilable?) claims of innovation and tradition – making for an absorbing end to a thoughtfully planned programme.

Hopefully BCMG will return to this performance-space during the second half of this season (details of which are imminent). Next month sees a recital by the musicians of NEXT at the Centrala Gallery in the suburb of Digbeth, providing another change of scene and ambience.

Further information on future events can be found at the BCMG website

In concert – BCMG NEXT @ Coventry Cathedral

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Kerkour Procession in Remembrance (2010)
Salonen Pentatonic Étude (2010, rev. 2014)
Roxburgh Wordsworth Miniatures (1998)
Birtwistle Duets for Storab (1984)
Lachenmann Pression (1969)
Saunders Bite (2016)

NEXT [Leila Hooton, Rebecca Speller, Gavin Stuart (flutes), Emily Wilson (clarinets), Cameron Howe (viola), Carwyn Jones (cello)]

Coventry Cathedral
Wednesday 3 November 2021

Written by Richard Whitehouse

This evening’s concert by NEXT (musicians training as performers of contemporary music in a partnership between Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Royal Birmingham Conservatoire) was to have featured Gérard Grisey’s penultimate work Vortex Temporum, but a player’s withdrawal after testing positive for Covid led to this alternative programme of solos and duos from the past half-century; one that, coming together as an effective and appealing recital in its own right, showed no sign of having been assembled at short notice.

The Anglo-Moroccan composer Brahim Kerkour is little heard in the UK, though Procession in Remembrance (the central piece in Three Modules for Sketches of Miniatures) suggests a continuation of spectral thinking (Kerkour studied with Tristan Murail) for the way alto flute and bass clarinet intertwined to create raptly translucent textures at once abstract yet tangible. Music to which Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Pentatonic Étude offered a notable foil – this paraphrase on a passage from Bartók’s unfinished Viola Concerto putting the solo instrument through its paces, before reclaiming the original in an understated apotheosis realized by Cameron Howe with due sensitivity. Hopefully a full-scale viola concerto by Salonen will yet be forthcoming.

Two sets of interdependent pieces came next. Edwin Roxburgh remains best known for larger-scale compositions, but Wordsworth Miniatures finds him no less adept when working on a more limited canvas – poems by the English author serving as the titles for these four deftly contrasted clarinet miniatures which Emily Wilson rendered with appropriately lyrical poise. Written while resident on the Inner Hebridean isle of Raasay, Harrison Birtwistle’s Duets for Storab draws its inspiration from three locations featuring the name of a Viking prince whose shipwreck, pursual and death are not so much portrayed as evoked by the six atmospheric and plaintive pieces with flautists Rebecca Speller and Leila Hooton in (mainly) whimsical accord.

Finally, to two more substantial and combative solo pieces which both conveyed the essence of their respective composers. Helmut Lachenmann’s Pression expounded a radical notion of ‘instrumental musique-concrète’ explored in later orchestral and chamber works – its utilizing cello as a means of sonic inclusiveness summoning a trenchant response from Carwyn Jones. Even more visceral in content, Bite finds Rebecca Saunders draws on the thirteenth and final prose from Beckett’s Texts for Nothing in this monologue for bass flute whose phonetic and syntactical elements are subsumed into a tensile continuum where anticipations and echoes merge freely or often forcefully – Gavin Stewart entering into its spirit with evident resolve.

Such a programme might not have seemed suited to the expanse of Coventry Cathedral, but the situating of musicians and listeners in a semi-circle adjacent to the entrance and at right-angles to the nave kept proceedings well within focus and allowed for the acoustic’s natural ambience to come through. Hopefully the Grisey can be rescheduled in due course, but the qualities of these pieces and their performances could not be gainsaid. Meanwhile, BCMG returns next Friday with a late-evening recital BCMG Nights in the foyer of Symphony Hall.

Further information on future BCMG and NEXT events can be found at the BCMG website

In concert – Birmingham Contemporary Music Group: Mark-Anthony Turnage

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Pre-Concert Event:
Ma Xiao-Qing Back to the Beginning (2021)
Skempton Heinen Skizzen (2021) [BCMG Commission: World premiere]
Colette Overdijk (violin), Ulrich Heinen (cello)

Concert:
Turnage This Silence (1992)
Alberga On a Bat’s Back I do Fly (2000)
Saunders Stirrings (2011)
Turnage Concertino for Clarinet and Ensemble (2020) [BCMG commission: World premiere]

Jon Carnac (clarinet), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group / Thomas Kemp

CBSO Centre, Birmingham
Sunday 12 September 2021

Written by Richard Whitehouse

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group began its new season with a concert centred around music from Mark-Anthony Turnage, and what should have been a premiere to mark his 60th birthday last year but which still left a favourable impression however belated its emergence.

First came an earlier Turnage piece, This Silence drawing clarinet, bassoon, horn and string quintet into an intensive dialogue whose opening Dance built up a fair momentum that the ensuing Dirge channelled towards an eloquent if by no means unruffled set of variations as found just tentative closure. Three decades (and a brief Uli fanfare) later, Concertino exudes a far more relaxed aura, doubtless occasioned by its being a tribute to clarinettist (and fellow sexagenarian) Jon Carnac – his artistry to the fore in the playful Study in Fifths and incisive Carnac with its ingenious workout on the soloist’s name. In between, a soulful Romanza afforded contrast but if this and the final Sad Soliloquy found Turnage’s cool-jazz leanings at their smoothest, the alluring interplay of clarinet and ensemble was no less appealing for it.

In between these works came, firstly, a timely revival for Eleanor Alberga. On a Bat’s Back   I do Fly takes its cue from Ariel’s final song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest for music whose fluid contrasts of motion and expressive force, ably drawn into a cohesive whole, brought an agile response from BCMG – not least percussionist Julian Warburton. Appreciably different was Stirrings, the third in a sequence of ‘‘quiet and fragile collage compositions’’ by Berlin-based composer Rebecca Saunders, which took extracts from Samuel Beckett as the starting-point for an evocative soundscape whose simple yet effective spatial disposition – woodwind being situated around the gallery, with strings and piano spread across the platform – audibly enhanced the succession of echoes and resonances informing this frequently intangible score.

The pre-concert event (essentially the first half, given the interval which followed) brought a welcome further hearing of Ma Xiao-Qing’s Back to the Beginning, arguably the most striking of the ‘Soliloquys and Dialogues’ series written for BCMG musicians during the pandemic – violinist Colette Overdijk eliding between some vividly rhetorical passagework and spoken interpolations with a confidence borne of familiarity. Ulrich Heinen then gave the premiere of Heinen Skizzen, a miniature wholly typical of Howard Skempton in its deceptive simplicity.

This latter piece ably served its purpose of honouring Heinen’s retirement from BCMG after 35 years of commitment to the ensemble and its music-making. Not a few listeners (including the present writer) fondly recall his cycle of Bach’s Cello Suites given at St. Paul’s, Hockley in the late 1980s, with his subsequent recordings of the initial five of these – placed within a stimulating contemporary context – well worth investigating on the Métier Sound and Vision label. Hopefully his retirement will not preclude the occasional reappearance with BCMG.

Back to the present, this evening’s main concert is being repeated at West Malling in Kent on September 26th, with BCMG’s subsequent recitals in Birmingham and Bristol on November 12th and 13th. A full programme of activities for the 2021/22 season hopefully (!) lies ahead.

You can find information on further BCMG activities here, while further information on Ulrich Heinen’s Bach can be found at the Divine Arts website

In concert – NEXT and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group: Past the Stars

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NEXT [Joe Howson & Mikaela Livadiotis (pianos), Gavin Stewart (bass flute), Olivia Jago (violin)

Adams Hallelujah Junction (1996)
Saunders Bite (2016)
Mason When Joy Became Mixed with Grief (2007)

Patricia Auchterlonie (soprano), Ulrich Heinen (cello), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group / Geoffrey Paterson

Birtwistle Cantus Iambeus (2004)
Vir Wheeling Past the Stars (2007) – Songs 3 and 4; Hayagriva (2005) [UK premiere]

Town Hall, Birmingham
Sunday 20 June 2021

Written by Richard Whitehouse

It might have taken 15 months plus a couple of false alarms, but Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (above) finally resumed live performances en masse this afternoon and with this wide-raging concert typical of its programming across more than three decades of music-making.

Not least with its throwing the spotlight onto players of the next generation, the opening half featuring NEXT musicians as mentored by their senior colleagues. Things got underway with Hallelujah Junction, John Adams’ alternately incisive and soulful evoking of a truck-stop on the California-Nevada border; along with a tribute to orchestra manager Ernest Fleischmann, which doubtless explains its heightened peroration. Nor, despite some occasional vagaries of coordination, was there any doubting the conviction of Joe Howson and Mikaela Livadiotis.

From two pianists situated amid tables in the stalls to a bass flautist just in front of the organ console: Gavin Stewart made the most of this unlikely context with a committed reading of Rebecca Saunders‘ Bite, less a setting than paraphrase of the thirteenth from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing in which words or syllables are variously sounded in anticipation, or as consequence of the flute’s contribution. It certainly left a fragmented, even rebarbative impression compared to the seamlessness of When Joy Became Mixed with Grief – Christian Mason’s contemplation of a sixth-century Jainist account over several ages of declining natural and human wonder; in which violinist Olivia Jago rendered the music’s gently enveloping pathos with unfailing poise, as well as a sure sense of where this deceptively understated music might be headed.

BCMG accordingly took to the stage for Cantus Iambeus, among the more recent of Harrison Birtwistle’s curtain-raisers for ensemble and arguably his most approachable in the unfolding of expressive contours and its frequently diaphanous textures; all underpinned by the role of iambic rhythm in promoting continuity through to an almost inviting final cadence. Nor was there a lack of that intensive interplay as has been a hallmark of this composer’s music from the outset, and to which these musicians responded with their customary precision and verve.

The other pieces (both included on a new NMC release) were by Param Vir, whose music has been a welcome if undervalued presence over four decades. Firstly, the latter two items from his song-cycle Wheeling Past the Stars after Rabindranath Tagore – the charm and vivacity of Grandfather’s Holiday then musing inwardness of New Birth, both eloquently rendered by Patricia Auchterlonie with Ulrich Heinen. Finally, to Hayagriva – the horse-headed being and mythological archetype behind a work whose headlong rhythmic energy suddenly moves, via an intricately detailed transition, to a final section whose subdued manner does not preclude music of fastidious textural variety emerging. The analogous sequence ‘red-green-blue’ was reinforced by overhead lighting, even if Vir’s musical trajectory is appreciably more subtle.

BCMG responded to Geoffrey Paterson’s direction with alacrity, not unreasonably pleased to be back performing for a live audience in an impressive indication of what can be expected from this ensemble during the 2021-22 season and barring, one hopes, no more false alarms!

You can find information on further BCMG activities here, while further information on Wheeling Past the Stars by Param Vir can be found at the NMC website