Mimi Doulton (soprano), Thando Mjandana (tenor), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group / Vimbayi Kaziboni
Kidane Primitive Blaze (2022)
Birtwistle Today Too (2004)
Birtwistle …when falling asleep (2018)
Kendall Tuxedo: Between Carnival and Lent (2022)
Kidane Cradle Song (2023) [BCMG Sound Investment commission: World premiere]
Anderson Mitternachtslied (2020) [UK premiere]
Anderson THUS (2023) [World premiere of final extended version]
Elgar Concert Hall, University of Birmingham
Wednesday 18 October 2023
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
A varied programme greeted attendees at tonight’s concert from Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (to be repeated in Bristol on October 29th), consisting largely of vocal pieces and directed with precise assurance by the highly regarded (justifiably so) Vimbayi Kaziboni.
Equally well regarded at present, Daniel Kidane (recently signed to Schott) was represented by two works – of which Primitive Blaze made for an effective curtain-raiser with its array of interlocking rhythmic patterns whose elaboration brought greater emphasis on a linear continuity in its wake. Both the electric guitar and tenor saxophone were prominent within this ensemble – the latter instrument emerging at the forefront in the final stages, when its plangent tones signified a closure as decisive formally as it sounded decidedly equivocal.
Next came settings by Harrison Birtwistle. To a text by the 18th-century Japanese poet Tanko (translated by Joel Hoffman), Today Too found tenor, flute and guitar evoking a twilit scene whose ominous elements are subsumed into an aura of shimmering, even sensuous stillness.
Rehearsal considerations necessitated exclusion of the David Harsent setting From Vanitas (hopefully not in Bristol) but not of …when falling asleep – Birtwistle’s last completed work, which intersperses lines by Rilke (translated by Jochen Voigt) with those by Swinburne in a sequence the more affecting for its understatement. Mimi Doulton brought a keen eloquence to the sung component, though Thando Mjandana seemed a little tentative with those spoken in parallel, and quite why the final lines of his contribution had been excluded was unclear.
Doulton returned for Between Carnival and Lent – one of Hannah Kendall’s ongoing Tuxedo series drawing on the art-print of that name by Jean-Michel Basquiat; abrupt juxtaposition of keening melisma with spoken polemic rather tending to cancel out each other as it proceeded.
Mjandana duly came into his own with the premiere of Cradle Song, Kidane’s setting of verse from the poem by Blake, though an evident desire to avoid the winsomeness associated with ‘innocence’ led to a highly rhetorical vocal line surely at odds with the semantics of this text.
The evening closed with two settings by Julian Anderson, both from his song-cycle In statu nascendi and drawing on a linguistic variety of verse in the context of an ensemble similar in line-up while not in usage to that of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Nietzsche (in the original German) was the basis for Mitternachtslied, familiar lines here exuding an anguished elation wholly different from that encountered in Mahler or Delius. Longfellow at his most visionary was the starting-point for THUS, building gradually from speculative beginnings towards a climactic section whose visceral impact felt less a setting than an intuitive riposte to its text. This premiere of the ‘final extended version’ drew a forceful though slightly self-conscious response from Doulton, in what seems the likely culmination of the song-cycle in question.
It certainly brought to a striking close a programme whose relative short measure was more than outweighed by its variety or its intrinsic interest. Hopefully those who hear it in Bristol will be equally responsive to its enticements as those who were present at Elgar Concert Hall.
For ticket information on the forthcoming Bristol concert on Sunday 29 October, click here, and click here for more information on the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Click on the artist names for more information on Vimbayi Kaziboni, Mimi Doulton and Thando Mjandana, and on the composer names for more on Julian Anderson, Harrison Birtwistle, Hannah Kendall and Daniel Kidane
Published post no.1,986 – Sunday 22 October 2023
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