Krishna rides Garuda
THE INDEPENDENT - 12 May, 2003
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, CBSO Centre, Birmingham
The footstomping way to repay a sound investment
BY NICK KIMBERLEY
New work is the lifeblood that keeps art beating; and by and large audiences thrive on it. Classical music, though, finds it difficult to attract people to new pieces. Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) has devised a surprisingly simple formula for keeping its audiences interested: it makes them pay for new works. And they do, over and over again, as part of the ensemble's Sound Investment project.
This is a straightforward "take the money and run'' scheme: run, that is, to the composer and hand over the money to help pay for the new work to be written. The investors get their name in the published score and in the programme; they attend rehearsals; and they eventually see the work premiered. For many of them, it doesn't stop there. They actually follow "their'' piece around: when I saw BCMG play Mark-Anthony Turnage's The Torn Fields in Berlin last September, a dozen Sound Investors had travelled to see the performance.
The latest work to be thus Soundly Invested is Param Vir's The Theatre of Magical Beings, and at its premiere last Tuesday, that entirely healthy proprietorial interest was plain to see. The risk might be that a composer writes down to his patrons, but Vir's piece is not simple or formulaic; it communicates by aural seduction. The composer provides an elaborate note, linking each of the four movements to ancient myth: the self-consuming serpent. Uroborus, the birth of the Buddha and so on. For once, I found the associations too specific, more hindrance than help; as Vir writes: "The music has not been approached through narrative.'' He set things in motion with agitated rustling from a string sextet that quickly infected the rest of the strings, and then the winds. A thunderous percussion episode set up a vigorous momentum, quickly curtailed before it became dogmatic. The second movement grew from slow double-bass glissandos, answered by a brief but haunting oboe melody, the mood quickly picked up by the flute. This was the "Uroborus'' movement, and the string glissandos might somehow represent a serpentine slither, but as the music slid into silence, submission to its woozy charms required no such pictorialism. The short third movement played with sonic contrasts, between silvery vibraphone and low percussion, between flute and bass clarinet; while the final movement took off from a clattering confrontation between the two percussionists, eventually resolved through the emollient efforts of the piano.
The footstomping that greeted the composer's bow showed that his listeners felt their investment, of money, interest and attention, had been amply repaid. The players too, seemed to have enjoyed themselves, responding alertly to conductor Susanna Malkki's absolutely clear direction. The rest of the programme fitted well around this world premiere. David Sawer's Tiroirs ticked mischievously towards something like minimalism, but always retained its own distinct sense of rhythmic life; while Toru Takemitsu's Rain Coming revealed the composer's textural subtlety at its most delicate. Magnus Lindberg's Jubilees permutated familiar gestures to telling effect, even finding room for a genuine slow movement, a most unfamiliar device for this composer. The evening closed with Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks, in which Malkki located something ominous, even aggressive in what can all too easily become an undemanding listen. She is a conductor to watch, and this ideally varied programme shows her, and BCMG at their best.