OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, 8 March 2011

THE MUSIC of Harrison Birtwistle makes demands on both the performers and the audience, and clearly scared off the Hebrides Ensemble’s usual healthy audience.

The very modest band who did turn out were treated to a memorable performance of Pulse Shadows, interleaved with several ‘Fantasias’ and two ‘In Nomine’ selections from a much earlier English composer, Henry Purcell.

Harrison Birtwistle

I’m not sure that we really learned a lot from the juxtaposition, but the interpolations allowed the ear a rest from the complex sound world of Birtwistle’s music. The structure of Pulse Shadows allowed William Conway, the Hebrides Ensemble’s artistic director, the liberty to make these additions, albeit with the composer’s sanction.

Pulse Shadows, subtitled Meditations on Paul Celan for Soprano, String Quartet and Ensemble, consists of nine segments for string quartet and nine segments for soprano and the rest of the ensemble (viola, cello, bass and two clarinets), and the composer states that they may be performed in any order.

Conway came up with a satisfying logical sequence, leading to a natural conclusion in the final voice and ensemble segment, ‘Give The Word’, with it’s resounding and affirmative final word, ‘light’. The group’s guest singer, American soprano Claron McFadden, gave the world premiere of this work in 1996, and was fully alive to the intricate nuances of Birtwistle’s intensely wrought word-setting.

Those words were drawn from Michael Hamburger’s translations of the poems of German writer Paul Celan, whose mission was to re-make the German language that had been tainted by the Second World War. Birtwistle consistently found a precise musical idiom for the concise, allusive and often fragmentary texts.

The nine segments for string quartet, heroically performed by Lesley Hatfield, Sarah Bevan-Baker, Catherine Marwood and Philip Higham, divide into five numbered ‘Fantasias’ and four knottier, more densely energised pieces which Birtwistle named ‘Frieze’, the last of which is a purely instrumental response to what is perhaps Celan’s starkest poem of all, his reflection on the events of the Holocaust.

Birtwistle has acknowledged the earlier example of Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître in the structure of this piece, and although he readily permits permutations and omissions, the music achieves its full effect in the interleaving and interaction of the component parts. In a nice touch, Conway gradually expanded the size of the ensemble in the Purcell segments in the second half, creating a sense of building toward the finale.

It was a bold and ambitious undertaking on the part of Conway and the musicians, and if the empty seats must have been a somewhat dispiriting reward for their efforts, it was an achievement in which they can take immense satisfaction.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2011

Links

• Hebrides Ensemble
• Claron McFadden