New/Old
| I was very keen to go to the BBC Singers’ afternoon Prom on Sunday 4 September but I was away – and I never thought I would write these words – on a camping weekend. So I have had to make do with Listen Again, which is not quite the same thing. But I still enjoyed this beautifully crafted programme a great deal.
Most of the pieces looked back to older music, except for two pieces by John Taverner , which really are old. Judith Weir’s All the Ends of the Earth is a brilliant palimpsest, putting new upper parts over the plainchant lines of Perotin’s Viderunt omnes. The melody lines are wonderfully new/old: modal, elaborate but delicately dissonant. The piece is a modern classic. |
 The Earwig |
| I have always found Thea Musgrave an impressive composers and her new work Ithaca was a fine response to Cavafy’s well-known poem, conjuring the swaying rhythms of a boat journey. Bayan Northcott’s Hymn to Cybele was gritty and intense, bringing out some impassioned singing from the admirable soloists.
The Arditti Quartet played Ferneyhough’s Dum transisset I–IV based on works for viol consort by the Elizabethan composer Christopher Tye. I am not a particular Ferneyhough fan but the piece worked well within the programme. The source material is buried deep beneath the usual Ferneyhough filigree, but each movements was sharply individuated, with a wealth of instrumental colour. The Ferneyhough was followed by two choral settings of the Dum transisset, one by John Taverner – the BBC Singers switching effortlessly to Renaissance mode – and Jonathan Harvey’s striking 1995 version. The concert finished with Gabriel Jackson’s ruminative but slightly diffuse In Nomine Domini, alternating choral sections with meditatons on Taverner’s In Nomine for string quartet, ending with a powerful, light-drenched apotheosis. I only wish I’d been there.
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This article first appeared at soundandmusic.org. See all postings by The Earwig.
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