News item:
Rian Evans
Tuesday March 18, 2008
The Guardian
Two relationships were celebrated in this Birmingham Contemporary Music Group concert: one with Thomas Adès, the group's music director from 1998 to 2000; the other with the Irish composer Gerald Barry, who has featured strongly in BCMG's repertoire. The vibrancy of the associations was clear from the evening's buzz - proof, too, of the enthusiasm engendered when the audience engages with both heart and pocket, as happens with the BCMG's Sound Investment scheme.
The relationship between Beethoven and his "immortal beloved" - Antonie, the wife of Franz Brentano - was the focus of Barry's latest BCMG commission. Entitled simply Beethoven, and setting his anguished letters to Antonie word for word in the Emily Anderson translation, its initial aura of slightly manic patter embodied Goethe's description of the composer as "an utterly untamed personality". It dealt less comfortably with the emotional intensity, which is perhaps inevitable given the letters' status in our perception of Beethoven. Bass baritone Stephen Richardson managed brilliantly its two-and-a-half octave range, but that could not reconcile one to Barry's final section and his endless quoting of the carol Adeste Fidelis. Perhaps meant to evoke fidelity and the opera Fidelio, it mostly sounded bizarre.
Adès was at the keyboard for his own Court Studies from The Tempest, which opened the evening. A distillation of six numbers from the opera, its haunting beauty was a good foil for the exuberance of Barry's Lisbon. Adès elicited sharply defined performances of Poul Ruders' Abysm and of his own Living Toys, in which Jonathan Holland's trumpet playing was exemplary.
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Rian Evans
Tuesday March 18, 2008
The Guardian
Two relationships were celebrated in this Birmingham Contemporary Music Group concert: one with Thomas Adès, the group's music director from 1998 to 2000; the other with the Irish composer Gerald Barry, who has featured strongly in BCMG's repertoire. The vibrancy of the associations was clear from the evening's buzz - proof, too, of the enthusiasm engendered when the audience engages with both heart and pocket, as happens with the BCMG's Sound Investment scheme.
The relationship between Beethoven and his "immortal beloved" - Antonie, the wife of Franz Brentano - was the focus of Barry's latest BCMG commission. Entitled simply Beethoven, and setting his anguished letters to Antonie word for word in the Emily Anderson translation, its initial aura of slightly manic patter embodied Goethe's description of the composer as "an utterly untamed personality". It dealt less comfortably with the emotional intensity, which is perhaps inevitable given the letters' status in our perception of Beethoven. Bass baritone Stephen Richardson managed brilliantly its two-and-a-half octave range, but that could not reconcile one to Barry's final section and his endless quoting of the carol Adeste Fidelis. Perhaps meant to evoke fidelity and the opera Fidelio, it mostly sounded bizarre.
Adès was at the keyboard for his own Court Studies from The Tempest, which opened the evening. A distillation of six numbers from the opera, its haunting beauty was a good foil for the exuberance of Barry's Lisbon. Adès elicited sharply defined performances of Poul Ruders' Abysm and of his own Living Toys, in which Jonathan Holland's trumpet playing was exemplary.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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