Gavin Bryars has been giving concerts with his own instrumental ensemble since 1986. Inevitably its members and quirky instrumentation have changed over the years, and the current lineup consists of piano, electric guitar, viola and cello, with Bryars himself playing the double bass. Two further cellists, Bryars’s daughters, Ziella and Orlanda, are part of the group for the series of concerts this autumn that are a belated celebration of his 80th birthday earlier this year.
The programme changes from venue to venue throughout the tour, but its centrepiece is a constant – a performance of Bryars’ most famous work, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Composed in 1971, when Bryars was very much one of the leaders of British experimental music, this piece, which is entirely built around a 26-second tape loop of a homeless man singing a couple of phrases from a hymn that perhaps he remembered from his childhood, has never lost its power to move. The work exists in a number of realisations of very different durations – in the 1990s Bryars made a CD-length recording of it with Tom Waits singing along with the tape in the final section – but the accompanying ensemble always enriches and cradles the fragile, unknown voice, before it gradually fades away.
It worked its magic again in this 25-minute realisation, with the strings providing the comforting cushion and the guitar adding an unearthly aura as it went on. If nothing else in the evening came close to matching its intensity, the rest of the Snape programme, most of it from the last two decades, showed how varied the starting points for Bryars’ music can be. Here there was a group of short ensemble pieces – The Flower of Friendship, Lauda (con sordino), Ramble on Cortona – based on “lauda”, medieval Italian hymns that were sung in the open air, while another work, The North Shore, had been inspired by the coastline of North Yorkshire, and had begun as a score for viola and piano.
What all these later works underline is Bryars’ increasing reliance on extended melody; it’s the intrinsic poignancy of those long, steadily unfurling lines, almost invariably emerging from dark-hued string textures, that now gives his music its special flavour.
• Summer at Snape continues until 2 September.
