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THE MOTH REQUIEM HARRISON BIRTWISTLE both sacred and secular traditions of text choice CHORAL WORKS BY HARRISON BIRTWISTLE (b.1934) 4HE 2ING $ANCE OF THE .AZARENE s 4HREE ,ATIN and treatment. -OTETS s #ARMEN 0ASCHALE s ,ULLABY s /N THE 3HEER 4HRESHOLD OF THE .IGHT s 4HE -OTH 2EQUIEM All of this gives his choral music a less 1 The Ring Dance of the Nazarene (2003) [24.14] ‘prehistoric’ slant than much of his instrumental Roderick Williams baritone Chris Brannick darbuka With two short seasonal pieces nested at its and dramatic work, but Birtwistle is not one of centre – one Easter- and one Christmas-related, those composers whose choral music seems to Three Latin Motets from ‘The Last Supper’ (1999) one early and one recent – this disc might, if its stand entirely separate from the rest of their 2 O bone Jesu [3.39] composer were a more conventional figure, have output. Recognisably Birtwistlian concerns are 3 Pange lingua [2.45] 4 In supremae nocte cenae [3.25] been a survey of sacred choral music from a present throughout this disc, and recognisably career now spanning fifty years. In fact it is Birtwistlian sounds, too – particularly in the 5 Carmen Paschale (1965) [5.50] rather less easy to categorise than that, even accompaniments, with their avoidance of Philippa Davies flute if we exclude from consideration the one work bowed string instruments and concomitant 6 Lullaby (2006) [2.08] with apparently pre-Christian subject matter. focus on woodwinds, harp and percussion. 7 On the Sheer Threshold of the Night (1980) [13.17] But perhaps Harrison Birtwistle is not so Furthermore, all but the two shortest works Eurydice - Emma Tring soprano unconventional a composer after all, and if there here relate in some way to Birtwistle’s operas, Orpheus – Margaret Cameron alto, Stephen Jeffes tenor Hades – Charles Gibbs bass is little here that the Christian liturgy could either sharing their subject matter or setting accommodate, we are not so far away as one words by one of their librettists. Birtwistle has 8 The Moth Requiem (2012) [18.32] might at first think from Western sacred music’s tended, particularly in the last twenty years or Philippa Davies alto flute Lucy Wakeford harp themes (Christ’s life, death, and continuing life so, to work repeatedly with certain favoured Helen Tunstall harp in us) and genres (hymns, motets, even a sort writers, and the two major recent works which Hugh Webb harp of requiem). Birtwistle’s music has always been frame this programme both use texts by writers Total timings: [73.54] concerned with memory, and here too, even as with whom he had already collaborated on an choral music’s traditional styles and functions opera. In the case of The Moth Requiem, as BBC SINGERS s RODERICK WILLIAMS baritone fall away, we see him taking on a range of we shall see, it was to an earlier poem by THE NASH ENSEMBLE s NICHOLAS KOK conductor English and Latin texts in ways that engage with that writer that he turned, whereas for The www.signumrecords.com - 3 - Ring Dance of the Nazarene – as is his more practice well into medieval times). But the the Canadian poet Robin Blaser, had departed trace the story of Christ’s Passion in reverse, usual practice – he requested a new text from mystical association between a circular dance and from Biblical orthodoxy in a different way, using beginning with a prayer to the crucified Christ David Harsent, who had been the librettist for themes of eternity and resurrection is clear a female character called Ghost to mediate and moving through the Stations of the Cross Birtwistle’s 1991 opera Gawain and who had enough, and Harsent’s text frames them for between the historical setting and our present to the Last Supper itself, the night of Christ’s also provided the text for The Woman and the Birtwistle within a characteristically ritualised day and to question the story’s contemporary betrayal (when the action of the opera also ends). Hare, for reciter and small ensemble. More structure of call and response, verbal echoes, meaning. The Three Latin Motets were composed recently the two have collaborated again on and longer, aria-like statements. ‘The Nazarene’, for that opera, although they function within If the idea of treating such a familiar story as a further opera, The Minotaur, and a smaller of course, is Christ, who is sometimes it not as part of the drama but as interludes, the Last Supper (and, within such a retelling, dramatic work, The Corridor, and in 2012 represented by a baritone soloist, although accompanying three ‘Visions’ – still tableaux of treading in the footsteps of a composer like Harsent provided the poems for Birtwistle’s at other times his words are taken over by the that in the opera’s first Glyndebourne production Palestrina or Victoria) appealed to Birtwistle’s first voice-and-piano song cycle, Songs from choir, which thus conveys at different times were staged as reconstructions of paintings by interest in placing familiar objects in new the Same Earth. the words of Jesus and of the disciples, as Zurbarán. Scored for a six-part a cappella choir contexts, a similar concern must have informed well as fulfilling a more conventionally choric (three voices per part) which in the first his selection of the middle English carol text Like Holst in The Hymn of Jesus, Birtwistle turns role. The overall manner of the setting, with motet is further subdivided into shifting ‘The faucon hath born my mak away’ in one of for his subject matter to a gospel episode individual wind instruments occasionally combinations of single and paired voices, his earliest works, Monody for Corpus Christi. connected with the Last Supper but described emerging from the accompanying sextet they were further separated from the action Birtwistle returned to a sixteenth-century text only in the apocryphal Acts of John, a collection in obbligato fashion, suggests a Baroque by being pre-recorded (there are no male – this time in Scots, the Wedderburn brothers’ of texts suppressed by the Church for carrying inspiration, while an intriguing additional voices in the opera’s on-stage chorus). Their famous depiction of Mary singing to the infant traces of the docetic belief that Christ’s human contribution is the sound of an Iranian drum texts, too, are separate, not part of Blaser’s Jesus – in 2006 in a short work for divided form was illusory (“We wanted to see the print (perhaps itself a symbol for Christ as dancer?) libretto but drawn from a fourteenth-century sopranos: Lullaby was premiered by the trebles of his foot”, as Harsent puts it: “if it showed on which is present throughout much of the work as a prayer and from a hymn by Thomas Aquinas: of Southwark Cathedral Choir in November the ground …”). The central role of dance in kind of percussion continuo. canonical Latin texts, then, all set for example of that year. this episode was presumably also problematic by Palestrina, and treated by Birtwistle in a for the Church as it became more equivocal This was not in fact Birtwistle’s first engagement style which if not strictly polyphonic seems The earliest piece included here was completed about the role of dance in worship (although with the story of the Last Supper. Four years designed to evoke the aura of Renaissance on New Year’s Day 1965, fulfilling a commission dance seems to have featured in paraliturgical earlier his opera on the subject, to a libretto by sacred music. As placed in the opera, they – from the BBC Transcription Service of all - 4 - - 5 - places – for that year’s Aldeburgh Festival. A simpler than in any of the other choral works sopranos, four altos, four tenors and four directly with the myth. The work has a turning little confusingly perhaps, its text is not by the on this disc, the choir remaining in four parts basses), but to very different effect from in point of its own, with the four soloists absorbed fifth-century poet Sedulius (known as Coelius (SATB) throughout and alternating passages ‘O bone Jesu’, assigning to one singer in each into the choir for the central cry of “Quis legem Sedulius), author of the Christmas and Epiphany in unison rhythm with passages of gentle vocal range a dramatic role. The first soprano …” (‘Who makes the law for lovers? Love is his hymns ‘A solis ortis cardine’ and ‘Hostis Herodis counterpoint led off by the women and is Eurydice, the fourth bass is Hades, and own greater law’). After this the discourse is split impie’, whose long poem Carmen paschale was men in turn. At the mention of a nightingale the fourth alto and first tenor sing together as again, in texture but now in language too: the a five-volume narrative and commentary on Birtwistle adds a new, instrumental line; marked a double-voiced Orpheus. four soloists begin to narrate Orpheus’s episodes from the Gospels. Rather, Birtwistle’s ‘Free like a bird’, it is assigned in the published awful mistake in Waddell’s English (“On the text is a shorter poem by a ninth-century Irish score to an organ, although Birtwistle now says The work opens with Orpheus gently calling sheer threshold of the night Orpheus saw grammarian also called Sedulius, now generally that he intended a flute, and that is what is Eurydice by name, while the twelve ensemble Eurydice, looked, and destroyed her”) while the known as Sedulius Scotus to distinguish him heard on this recording. voices start to sing Boethius’s poem, in Latin.