Harrison Birtwistle’s relationship with the Nash Ensemble stretched back over four decades, and in his final years he composed a succession of works for the group. Two years after Birtwistle’s death, and a few months short of what would have been his 90th birthday, the ensemble had assembled a generous three-part celebration; the first concert was shared with students from the Royal Academy of Music, while the second and third, conducted by Geoffrey Paterson, featured the soprano Claire Booth and the BBC Singers.
Both concerts alternated chamber pieces with some of the songs with ensemble that Birtwistle composed intermittently throughout his career – Three Songs from the Holy Forest, to poems by Robin Blaser, the librettist of Birtwistle’s penultimate opera, The Last Supper; Songs by Myself, to the composer’s own texts; and the wonderfully spare Nine Settings of Lorine Niedecker, in which Booth’s supple, intense singing was supported by just a solo cello line.
A common factor in all these works, vocal and instrumental, was the Nash’s cellist Adrian Brendel. He was joined by viola player Lawrence Power in Duet for Eight Strings, one of the most intense of Birtwistle’s late pieces, alternating fierce double-stopping with intricate hockets between the two instruments, while with the pianist Alasdair Beatson, Brendel played the one work in the two concerts not by Birtwistle, Simon Holt’s Serra-Sierra, which was receiving its first performance. The title references both the huge abstract sculptures of Richard Serra, and the Sierra Nevada of southern Spain, where Holt spends much of the year. It’s a substantial piece in four sections, fiercely explosive and wonderingly expansive in turn, and fiercely demanding on both players.
But the final work in the evening was very different from everything that had come before it. The Moth Requiem, first performed in 2012, is one of Birtwistle’s most beautiful late works, centred on a setting of a Blaser poem for a chorus of 12 female voices (the BBC Singers) with a solo alto flute (Philippa Davies) and three harps, and punctuated by a litany of the scientific names of moths, some of them common species, others extinct or nearly so. Ideally it’s music that needs more space around it than the Wigmore allowed; though beautifully sung and played, everything seemed just a little too close-focus, though the vividness of it all emphasised that as well as a sense of regret and loss, the music is pervaded by anger too.
