Persistent drizzle and umbrella-wrecking winds are not the best weather for a waterborne 30th birthday party, but Birmingham Contemporary Music Group’s celebration went ahead regardless. The ensemble was conceived in 1987 by Simon Rattle as a new-music offshoot of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and though many of its players are current or former members of the orchestra, it has carved out a niche as one of the UK’s leading specialist ensembles.
The specially commissioned birthday piece was a collaborative effort between three composers, resulting in a canal serenade to be performed on narrowboats at the convergence of three of Birmingham’s main waterways in the centre of the city. Yannis Kyriakides contributed Music for Barges, in which a solo trombonist (Tony Howe of BCMG) summoned electronic responses (supplied by Beast, Birmingham University’s resident electronic ensemble) from loudspeakers on three boats approaching the junction from different directions. Ondřej Adámek’s Share the Space was a setting for voices (Ex Cathedra) and percussion of words taken from canalside signage, while Richard Baker’s Birmingham Canal Songs, with tenor Nathan Vale accompanied by accordion and percussion, set a specially commissioned poem by Liz Berry evoking life on the canals.
The three pieces were interleaved, but it seemed rather disjointed and never really coalesced into a convincing musical experience. The weather made sure of that. The call-and-response effects of Kyriakides’ composition disappeared into the wind, while the sight of the members of Ex Cathedra muffled in waterproofs, and Andreas Borregaard playing his accordion from under a plastic poncho just about summed things up.
BCMG returned to more familiar – and drier – territory in the CBSO Centre for the second half of the celebration, a short programme, conducted by Emilio Pomárico, that was something of a manifesto for the group’s new artistic director Stephan Meier. There was another piece by Adámek, Sinuous Voices, which translates vocal lines – a Czech prayer and a New Caledonian lullaby – into strikingly bold instrumental writing, and a wonderfully volatile performance of Rebecca Saunders’ Into the Blue, teetering between high-register and gravelly grumblings in the extreme bass. Best of all was the most lucid performance that I’ve heard of Helmut Lachenmann’s “...zwei Gefühle...”, Musik mit Leonardo, with Peter Hoare and Paul Carey Jones as the perfectly dovetailed speakers, and tinglingly precise instrumental playing under Pomárico.
