Birtwistle's new piano concerto

Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s new piano concerto entitled Responses, written in celebration of his eightieth birthday, is a recurring, and fascinating, topic in the recent book of Birtwistle interviews by Fiona Maddocks, music critic of The Observer.

As usual, while writing the piece, he needed to be convinced that he was on the right track, and thereby convince the reader that the work was going to be another Birtwistle masterpiece. Maddocks, as well as the composer himself,  certainly knew how to whet one’s appetite. 

As a long-term devotee of his music, I thought that his whole characteristically indivudal  approach to the art of the piano concerto rang true.  But when the work was premiered the other day in Munich’s marmoreal Hercules Hall with Pierre-Laurent Aimard - who better? - as soloist, the Financial Times systematically destroyed it, declaring that it was hard to tell which was worse, the performance or the densely written piece itself. Though the critic, one of the paper’s German correspondents, admiited that reviewers sometimes get first performances sensationally wrong, her review lacked nothing in brimming self-confidence. 

But to call Birtwistle’s music dense is par for the course. That is how it sounds a lot of the time and that is part of its fascination. Birtwistle is surely well accuustomed by now to the fact that people - though surely not a German-based correspondent  of the Finncial Times - use this as a weapon against him. 

It has been a rebuke frequently suffered by his operas and his major  orchestral works as well as, notoriously, the piece he wrote for the Last Night of the Proms. Up to now he seems  to have taken such  diatribes, which go right back to his early opera Punch and Judy in the claustrophobic surroundings of Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall, quite successfully in his stride. But when Peter Diamand brought the querulous Punch and Judy to the Edinburgh Festival it was the triumph it deserved to be at the King’s Theatre.

Nevertheless here in Scotland, though he lived for a while on the remote island of Raasay, the trouble is that so little of his music is ever actually heard. His old friend Peter Maxwell Davies, another islander, is our man, while Birtwistle remains perplexingly neglected. Where is Gawain, the greatest of his operas? At one time, Scottish Opera would have staged it. Fat chance of that happening now, though   Covent Garden and the Salzburg Festival have both performed it. 

Yet the occasion when the great Paul Sacher came from Switzerland to the Queen’s Hall  and conducted  the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a performance of Endless Parade sticks indelibly in the memory. Alexander Gibson and the RSNO played his exquisite Melencolia II in their Musica Nova series. 

And now the piano concerto. Fiona Maddocks makes it sound worth hearing. But shall we ever hear  it?

28 October 2014