Birtwistle: Night's Black Bird / The Shadow of Night / The Cry of Anubis

This is a great new disc of orchestral music by Birtwistle with the same high quality of earlier works such as "The Triumph of Time" (1971-2) and "Earth Dances" (1985-6). It represents a continuation of Birtwistle's handling of musical time -- "the constant disruption of forward motion, so that the listener has the recurrent sense of having to repeat the journey by a different route, or of retracing steps in a maze -- never finally arriving or getting out" (from the excellent liner notes by Bayan Northcott).

The central and longest piece is "The Shadow of Night" (2001 -- 28'15), commissioned by the BBC and scored for a very large orchestra with six horns, four each trumpets and trombones, and five percussionists. Birtwistle describes it as "a slow and reflective nocturne, exploring the world of melancholy as understood and celebrated by Elizabethan poets and composers... I took inspiration from two dark sources -- the expressions of melancholy in Albrecht Durer's engraving 'Melancholia I' (1514) and John Dowland's song 'In Darkness Let Me Dwell'." He goes on to describe his use of a three-note motif from Dowland's song. The title comes from a long poem by the Elizabethan poet George Chapman where, according to Birtwistle, "melancholy is no longer an inert and depressive mood, but a humour of the night, an inspired spiritual condition."

As described by Northcott, "Shadow of Night" has three parts, "[t]he first is a substantial introductory section of tenebrous and sub-lunary textures, halting melodic fragments and anticipatory upsurges and descents. The second, launched by a magical texture of keening wind phrases over ripplings and rockings for tuned percussion, harps and strings, comprises a long, central nocturne ... eventually gathering in a sustained accelerando ... [and] an almost expressionistic outburst of violence ... midway through the recapitulatory third part, before the music ebbs away beneath a brief skirl of nocturnal birdsong." I don't doubt that some would find this music to be lugubrious, but I have come to love Birtwistle's style, and the slow-moving dynamics to be fascinating.

On the disc "Shadow of Night" follows "Night's Black Bird" (2004 -- 14'04), which was actually written three years later for similarly large forces. It is in the same vein, but half the length, and utilizes Dowland's "Flow My Tears." "Night's Black Bird" is more concise and clear-cut in structure than "Shadow of Night," with a simpler central section and a conclusion without any apocalyptic climaxes. It serves on disc as an accessible introduction to the soundworld that is developed at greater length and with greater complexity in the piece that follows.

There is no single recipe for a satisfying music album. Sometimes variety works, while sometimes it can sound too eclectic. Sometimes developing one consistent sound is powerful and effective, and sometimes it can be too monotonous. Following "Night's Black Bird" and "The Shadow of Night" with the tuba concerto "The Cry of Anubis" (1994 -- 13'24) is a winning gamble that continuing in the dark, melancholy vein will work. Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the ancient Egyptian city of the dead, is a character in Birtwistle's never-recorded opera "The Second Mrs. Kong" (1993-4), but "Cry of Anubis" is not an extract, rather it develops some of the opera's material in a new work. Owen Slade masterfully plays the tuba.

These excellent performances by The Halle, the Manchester-based orchestra, led by Ryan Wigglesworth, were made at the BBC Manchester's Studio 7 in July 2010.

Britten famously walked out of Harry Birtwistle's opera, Punch and Judy, at the 1968 Aldeburgh Festival (or retired to the anteroom behind the director's box for a drink, depending whose account you believe - all accounts agree that he `was quite appalled by what he heard'). This makes an interesting reflection in the light of this new disc of Birtwistle's music which deals with matters of the night and with reflections on the melancholia of Dowland's music that was also once the object of Britten's explorations. Only four years before that Aldeburgh Festival, Britten had written his own Nocturnal after John Dowland for Julian Bream during a period when he, too, was fascinated by things nocturnal and was writing The Dream, the Nocturne, the Notturno, his setting of Goethe's Um Mitternacht, not to mention the `Let Us Sleep Now...' finale of War Requiem.

While musically very different from the Britten works, the mood of mystery and melancholy in these three Birtwistle pieces is not so dissimilar. The first two - Night's Black Bird and The Shadow of Night - are a complementary pair, both exploring the moods evoked by Albrecht Durer's engraving, Melancholia I, and sparked by the melodic and harmonic lines of two Dowland songs, Flow My Tears and In Darkness Let Me Dwell respectively. Though the orchestral textures and the ebb and flow of the related tempi hark back to Earth Dances and Gawain, the spirit of the music perhaps leads us even further back through Birtwistle's oeuvre to the worlds of Tragoedia (1965), Nenia (1970), The Fields of Sorrow (1971) and, of course, Melencolia I (1976). The moods and feelings engendered by melancholia (in its Elizabethan sense) have, it seems, always held Birtwistle in their thrall.

The performances of both these pieces by the Halle under Ryan Wigglesworth perfectly capture Birtwistle's unique sound-world. The tensions of the harshly juxtaposed sections of this mostly slow-moving dark music captures the listener's attention and hangs on to it throughout. This is not easy listening in any sense of the phrase, but disturbing, fascinating and ultimately moving it certainly is.

The final work on the disc is similar in mood to the preceding Nocturnes, though it dates from a decade earlier. The Cry of Anubis is a tuba concerto and is really a pendant or a satellite to The Second Mrs Kong, that wonderfully lyrical opera (still sadly unrecorded) in which the jackal-headed Egyptian God of the Dead appears as a character. It is a tour de force for the soloist, showing off his instrument in all its moods from plaintively lyrical to disturbingly explosive. Owen Slade is the breathtaking soloist in this last piece, fully encompassing its enormously demanding writing - as does the Halle supporting him.

It would be foolish to deny that Birtwistle's music is tough - but it more than repays any amount of serious concentration you can give it. And here on this disc are revelatory performances of some of his latest orchestral work.

. . . if you don't like Birtwhistle, you will hate it !
I have noticed when reading serious music reviews that if the piece is well known and part of the general repertoire, then the reviewer tends to concentrate on the performance and recording, but where the music is relatively unknown, or it is the first recording, greater emphasis is put on a discussion of the relative merits of the piece itself. I have listened to quite a bit of Birtwhistle now - one piece that I have particularly come to love is 'The Triumph of Time' - another is his recent opera 'The Minotaur'. This recent offering is in a similar dark-hued, rugged form, which on first-hearing would be termed 'difficult' by many I'm sure. I find a bit of perseverance to familiarise oneself always pays off, as it does when listening to anything, and I now enjoy this music greatly. I cannot comment on the performance, not having any other versions to compare, but the recording and presence is excellent, and to anyone who feels like letting some quality modern serious music wash over their eardrums, I recommend this CD wholeheartedly