Harrison Birtwistle Night’s Black Bird The Shadow of Night The Cry of Anubis The Hallé Owen Slade tuba Ryan Wigglesworth conductor Harrison Birtwistle Photo: Hanya Chlala / Arenapal.com Photo: Hanya Chlala / 1 Night’s Black Bird 14'04 2 The Shadow of Night 28'15 3 The Cry of Anubis 13'24 Owen Slade tuba Total timing 55'58 The Hallé Owen Slade tuba Ryan Wigglesworth conductor This recording is made possible in part by Roche, who also commissioned the composition of Night’s Black Bird by Sir Harrison Birtwistle in 2003. 3 Harrison Birtwistle: A Personal Note by Ryan Wigglesworth Like Birtwistle, I grew up in the industrial North, though on the – a fact manifestly displayed by the three works on the present opposite side of the Pennines. And like Birtwistle my earliest disk, each recorded here for the first time. And while the gut- experience of music making came from playing in the local band wrenching forcefulness of Verses, Tragoedia and Punch and Judy, (mine brass, his military). In themselves, such slight childhood or the monolithic grandeur of Mask of Orpheus and Earth Dances parallels are of little significance, and yet, when as a thirteen-year- may have given way to a more subtle, perhaps more reflective old budding composer I came to experience quite by chance discourse in The Shadow of Night, Night’s Black Bird, and The Cry Birtwistle’s music for the first time, the world it inhabited felt of Anubis, this is certainly not indicative of any late-period immediately and strangely familiar. This was a radio broadcast of mellowing; indeed, in each of these works can be identified the Verses for Ensembles (1968-9), and I can recall the visceral effect same steel and absence of compromise that have remained of the encounter just as vividly now. What was it about these hallmarks throughout his career. Personally, at least, there lingers sounds, written a decade before I was born, that imprinted the childhood sense that these three journeys were in some way themselves so indelibly on my memory? Apart from its sheer grit waiting to be discovered by Birtwistle – that their craggy lyricism and energy, its opposition of violence and stark tenderness, its exudes a timelessness unaffected by trend or fad. It also seems to roughness harnessed by a severe formalism, what struck me at me that something of the Lancashire land – or the time was a sense that this music had always existed. What’s townscape continues to inform Harry’s more, it seemed to me to be singing a peculiarly Northern song. creative consciousness. As Auden, writing of his industrial North, put it: ‘Tramlines Much later, I had the pleasure of working closely with Harry on the and slagheaps, pieces of machinery, premieres of two of his operas, and in the meantime I had /That was, and still is, my ideal discovered and absorbed, bit by bit, the rest of his remarkable scenery.’ output. Regardless of the piece and the period, what was always self-evident was the unwavering independence of his musical mind Ryan Wigglesworth, 2011 4 Anatomies of Melancholy On a number of occasions, Sir contexts of disruption – ‘a logic firmus unfolded by a woodwind Anatomies of Melancholy Harrison Birtwistle has suggested that’s been fractured’, as he has quartet that is gradually by Bayan Northcott that he thinks of himself put it – from which spontaneous amplified until it drowns out the essentially as a melancholic; not and original inventions may yet orchestra, taking over the so much in the sense of a be wrested. heterophony – only to retreat, person subject to glooms, more with seeming indifference, into as someone constantly aware of Beside the theatrical scores and silence. In the baleful the interplay of fate and chance ensemble pieces that make up processional The Triumph of and how little space this leaves much of his output, Birtwistle’s Time (1971-72), a more or less for individual freedom and concert works for full orchestra unrelated sequence of ideas is choice. The negative response to comprise a fairly select group – only just held together by this awareness could of course just seven scores, if one superimposed repetitions of a be a sense of helplessness excludes the medieval short saxophone figure and a leading to depression. But no recomposition Machaut à ma long, winding cor anglais melody, genuine depressive could have Manière (1988) and the operatic while Earth Dances (1985-86) found the purpose and drive to spin-off Gawain’s Journey derives its vast and unpredictable create a catalogue of something (1991). Yet each exploits the course from the simultaneous like 130 works to date, many on tension between the formalistic unfolding of several independent the largest scale. Rather, and the arbitrary in a distinctive orchestral layers which grind and Birtwistle seems to regard way. In Chorales for orchestra buckle against one another like composition as a kind of grim (1960-63) the process is tectonic plates. game in which, by seeming to essentially a stripping away of submit at once to fate in the layers of disparate detail to Despite the variety of procedures guise of deterministic reveal the starkly unified chorale in these earlier orchestral works, procedures, and to chance beneath. In Nomos (1968), the certain aspects emerge as through the operation of random orchestra generates elaborate constants. The most obvious of numbers, he is able to set up heterophonies around a cantus these is the predominant 6 7 harshness and bleakness of the more ancient circular time- of the skills composers were have been interspersed by a sound and imagery – tokens less experience, the ‘eternal return’ traditionally supposed to acquire, more fluctuating, wave-like of self-expression than of a view of the revolving seasons and the and constructing a language of handling of tempo. Indeed, a of life in general as a tragic life cycle. his own out of a few musical listener, knowing nothing of predicament. In keeping with elements and ‘source’ works Birtwistle’s background and this, Birtwistle’s orchestration is These characteristics and that seemed absolutely basic. coming to the darkly swirling almost entirely ‘functional’: preoccupations have certainly But this has enabled him latterly ebbs and flows of The Shadow of geared to the clear presentation not vanished from his more to come to such composers as Night (2001) for the first time, of the keening monodies, block recent orchestral works – on the Beethoven and Wagner with might be forgiven for mistaking it contrasts and varied ostinati that contrary, his labyrinthine Exody fresh ears. Typically, his first as a latter-day descendent of the comprise his characteristic (1997-98), composed during comment on getting to grips with late Romantic tone-poem procedures, without sensuous or the upswing to the millennium, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony tradition. Most saliently, perhaps, picturesque indulgence. And comprises his definitive was that it discovers a whole this score, together with its behind this lies his idiosyncratic realization of time as circular: ‘In new range of roles for the satellite Night’s Black Bird handling of musical time: the my end is my beginning, and in bassoon. And so it does – but (2004), moves the treatment of constant disruption of forward my beginning is my end,’ as the how few commentators had melancholia on from an movement, so that the listener medieval tag has it. Yet in previously noticed this. apprehension of collective plight has the recurrent sense of certain respects, his handling of towards something more having to repeat the journey by a sound and procedure has grown Birtwistle’s own approach to the personal and positive. Birtwistle different route, or of retracing more subtle and flexible. In part orchestra, though fundamentally tells us that he took the title The steps in a maze – never finally this may reflect his belated unchanging, has certainly gained Shadow of Night from a long arriving or getting out. Ultimately, engagement with aspects of in the precision of its balances poem by the Elizabethan poet Birtwistle seems to be implying Western music he ignored and in the atmospheric, even George Chapman, ‘where that the modern Western before. At the outset of his sensuous qualities of its melancholy is no longer an inert concept of time as progressive career he appeared to evolve by blendings. And the juxtapositions and depressive mood, but a may be less powerful in a strategy of artistic autism; and reversals that characterized humour of the night, an inspired determining our existence than simply turning his back on most his earlier handling of timing spiritual condition’. 8 9 and composers… I took melodic fragments and (2004) Night’s Black Bird inspiration’, he continues, ‘from anticipatory upsurges and two dark sources – the descents. The second, launched (2001) The Shadow of Night (2001) expressions of melancholy in by a magical texture of keening Albrecht Dürer’s engraving wind phrases over ripplings and For a composer who has often symbiotic relationship is easier Melancholia I (1514) and John rockings for tuned percussion, spoken of viewing ‘musical to feel than to trace in Dowland’s song In Darkness Let harps and strings, comprises a objects’ from different angles, technical detail. Me Dwell, the first three notes of long, central nocturne in several or of pursuing alternative paths which are quoted in the piccolo’s paragraphs, punctuated by more across the same musical Commissioned by the BBC, solo soon after the opening of turbid outbursts – Birtwistle’s landscape, it is perhaps scored for very large orchestra the piece. This motif, which rises ‘passing clouds’ perhaps – and strange that Birtwistle has including six horns, four each of a semitone and then down eventually gathering in a rarely, if ever, taken an entire trumpets and trombones and five again, is woven into the fabric of sustained accelerando building existent work of his own as percussionists, The Shadow of the work and also alluded to to what proves not quite to be such an object or landscape to Night was premiered under figuratively: lines split and later the work’s climax.