Harrison BIRTWISTLE (b.1934)
Angel Fighter for tenor, counter-tenor, chamber chorus, and instrumental ensemble (2010) [31:09]
In Broken Images for mixed ensemble (2011-12) [18:21]
Virelai (Sus une fontayne) for ensemble of 12 players (2008) [3:55]
Andrew Watts (counter-tenor), Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts (tenor)
BBC Singers (Angel Fighter)
London Sinfonietta/David Atherton.
rec. live, 20 August 2011, Cadogan Hall, London, UK (Angel Fighter); 24 May 2012, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, UK (In Broken Images); 5 December 2014, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, UK (Virelai).
NMC D211 [53:36]
Birtwistle’s Angel Fighter was commissioned
for the Bach Festival in Leipzig, and was given its first performance in Bach’s
Thomaskirche on 13 June 2010. This recording was made live by the BBC the
following year. The work is written for chamber chorus, tenor, counter-tenor
and instrumental ensemble. Pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns,
trumpets and bass trombones (various doublings expand the ranges and colours
available), harp and a small string band. There is no percussion, but each
member of the small chorus — 24 or 36 singers says the score —
is to be given a pair of claves, and there are six guiros, the notched hollow
gourds that make a ratcheting sound when stroked with a stick. Jacob is sung
by the tenor and the Angel by the counter-tenor.
The libretto by Stephen Plaice — who worked with the composer on The
Io Passion — is based on a strange, symbolic and dramatic episode
from Genesis 32: 22-30 in which Jacob is returning to his homeland seeking
reconciliation with his brother Esau, whose inheritance he stole many years
before. In the Old Testament source Jacob spends a fearful night by the brook
Jabbok, where “there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the
day”. The Bible does not use the word 'angel' here but
the man’s words soon make him seem to be God or His messenger. In the
fight Jacob will not relinquish his grasp on the Angel, even though day dawns,
but demands a blessing. The Angel asks Jacob his name, on learning which the
Angel says “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for
as a prince thou has power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.”
The Angel declines Jacob’s request to give his own name but confers
the requested blessing. The biblical passage ends: “Jacob called the
name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is
preserved.”
Plaice’s libretto is true to all this, but makes it much less elusive,
and more concrete and dramatic. Thus this work which Wagner-like deploys the
mythic tropes of naming, re-naming, and name-witholding, actually begins with
an episode of name-calling, as the chorus representing his resentful people
(or his own conscience), traduce Jacob as ‘seducer’, ‘deserter’,
‘appeaser’, ‘coward’ and ‘faker’. Jacob
enters on the note E (a Birtwistle fingerprint), as does Peter Grimes in the
pub, another visionary set apart from those around him. The chorus withdraws
when Jacob tells them “Yahweh wishes to speak to me alone”. His
ensuing aria pleads “Yahweh give me a sign” and the Angel enters,
initially - like a modernist Cio-Cio-San - from a distance and with a halo
of female voices, but made otherworldly by the androgynous sound of the counter-tenor
voice. The Angel speaks at first in Enochian, the original and lost angelic
language 'discovered' by the 16th century occultist, John Dee.
Jacob calls on “Great Father Enoch” to translate, and is then
able to understand the speech of the Angel.
The central and very exciting action is the fight, which is a formal wrestling
match. There is nothing otherworldly about this ritualized hand-to-hand combat,
for which the Angel gives oddly explicit instructions – “Oil yourself!
Lay hold! Three falls or a submission!” The instrumental groups within
the ensemble underline every blow in cut-and-thrust writing. The chorus joins
in — and slaps those claves — as the Angel gains two falls, and
fiercely punctuates the climax as they protest against the Angel’s foul
play. The Angel renames Jacob as Israel, and then declines to give his own
name, in an aria for the counter-tenor to balance that given near the beginning
to the tenor. Two trumpets, placed behind the audience, call the Angel back
to heaven. This superb work closes in choral splendour as the people and Jacob
sing “Hear O Israel” in an ecstatic blend of brazen voices and
vocal brass.
The performance throughout is very involving, the outstanding BBC singers
rising to the challenge of some virtuoso demands. Counter-tenor Andrew Watts
sings, well, like an angel. If tenor Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts sounds under strain
at times, it is never more so than is appropriate for a man in extremis,
a figure engaged in a struggle with the divine. The London Sinfonietta and
David Atherton roll back the years to the glory days of the 1970s when they
often brought us expert interpretations of the most exciting new music. The
recording is very good too, even if the live conditions prevent the spatial
effects of the Angel’s entry and the trumpet calls near the end from
being ideally atmospheric; the trumpets sound rather close in the mix in fact.
Above all the piece itself is an undoubted success, a new English mini-opera
like Holst’s Savitri or dramatic scena like Britten’s
Phaedra. Perhaps Plaice and Birtwistle will go on and make this the
centre-piece of a full-length opera, Jacob and Esau. With his Angel
Fighter, Birtwistle has provided a new recruit to the company of English
music’s angels, if a very different one from the consoling examples
in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius or the Abraham and Isaac setting
in Britten’s War Requiem. “Jeder Engel ist schrecklich”
(“Every angel is terrifying”) said Rilke opening his second Duino
Elegy, and Birtwistle’s and Plaice’s angel is the Old Testament
at its most uncompromisingly fierce. Jonathan Cross in his book on the composer
speaks of his score for The Oresteia as having ”the quality
of being utterly modern yet … as ancient as the text itself”,
and so it is here.
In Broken Images, whose title comes from a poem of Robert Graves,
is a purely instrumental work and for an instrumental ensemble similar to
that of Angel Fighter, with three groups of percussion replacing
the horns. One source for the work is Gabrieli's multi-group canzonas.
The composer splits the ensemble into four groups (woodwind, brass, strings
and percussion) and the score indicates their relative physical locations.
All that is rather lost in a two-channel stereo – as with other Birtwistle
pieces the organising principles are clearer when you see the piece live but
oh for a recording company that really uses the multi-channel format in music
like this ... or in Gabrieli for that matter. Nonetheless from the opening
brass exchanges this is still a button-holing sound, from composer, players
and recording engineers. The groups break up and reform into different
combinations as they build to a climax, after which the forces thin out as
the work evaporates into silence.
On the Boosey & Hawkes website there is a nice short video of Birtwistle,
in which — once he has finished showing off his tomato plants grown
from seed — he mentions his fascination with the music of the remote
past. The starting point of the final item on the disc is from some way back
in the musical past, as Virelai (Sus une fontayne), is an
enchanting and intricate realisation of the piece of that title by Johannes
Ciconia, who flourished in the late Middle Ages. The original song is recognisably
retained throughout even through the metrical intricacies and what Paul Griffiths
in his excellent booklet note calls “Birtwistle’s precisely all-over-the-place
orchestration.”
This is an essential Birtwistle disc, and NMC and the London Sinfonietta once
again place us in their debt with a disc of his compelling new music. In fact
its contrasting elements make for an enjoyable short Birtwistle concert, especially
if the works are played in the reverse order they appear on the disc. Boosey
& Hawkes have freely viewable online scores of both the larger items on
their website – though I recommend using a device with a large screen,
as the scores have too many staves for a mini-tablet. The text of Angel
Fighter is given in the CD booklet – and in both English and Enochian.
Though the latter is effectively translated
by the Angel himself for those of us who, like Jacob, are unversed in the
angelic tongue.
Roy Westbrook
Editor's Note
I note in passing that Martin Anderson's label Toccata Classics has
just released a CD (TOCC0281) of Birtwistle's songs (1970-2006) in
which the soprano soloist with various configurations of instrumental ensemble
is Alice Rossi. Readers may also be interested in a Lyrita
CD of music by Birtwistle.
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