Harrison Birtwistle Punch and Judy - new production

A new production of Harrison Birtwistle's Punch and Judy now available online on arte tv. Although Punch and Judy was Birtwistle's big public breakthrough, it's rarely done, so any chance to see it is worthwhile. This new production comes from the small but enterprising Armel Opera Festival  based in Budapest, though this performance comes from Vienna.  Neither cast nor production are world-class but  finesse is perhaps the last thing you'd want in Punch and Judy, Indeed, the raw enthusiasm of the cast and the rough edges in the production are rather effective in an opera where fairground puppets go berserk and beat each other up. The orchestra, Amadeus Ensemble Wien, conducted by Walter Kobéra,  definitely has a feel for Birtwistle's idiom  The theatre is very small, which emphasizes the intense, claustrophobic atmosphere. All in all, a good, idiomatic realization.

"Punch and Judy" is a delightful "tragical comedy or comic tragedy", which rather sums up its anarchic spirit. When it was premiered at Aldeburgh in 1968, Benjamin Britten reportedly walked out. There's doubt about the story since it's unlikely that Britten would have intoroduced it to Aldeburgh in the first place without having seen the score.. Time, however, has vindicated Birtwistle, who has now become almost part of the establishment. without sacrificing his idiosyncratic soul. 

Punch is a vicious psychotic, and the policeman almost equally evil. Violence is staple fare in popular culture – think of Sylvester the Cat and Tweetie Pie. On the other hand, Tweetie Pie always escapes, and is clearly a character to identify with. Punch, however, is an unredeemed psychotic, an evil force straight out of the Id, controlling and himself uncontrollable. Traditionally, Punch and Judy are puppets safely contained within the confines of a booth. On stage, however, they are unrestrained and wander dangerously free. Birtwistle creates a tight musical structure to hold in the drama, a kind of musical puppet booth, perhaps even a prison without walls. The action starts and ends with the Choregos (Greek chorus), who comment on the action with an element of detachment: when he himself is drawn into the action part way through, it’s quite unsettling, as Birtwistle no doubt knew. The music is also organised in distinct sections, modelled explicitly on the Bach Passions. This adds yet another disturbing element to the whole, but has a certain logic, given that Birtwistle has said he considered the St Matthew Passion "an ideal in that the very layout and structure of the work constitute a kind of theatre which does not depend on theatrical realisation to make its point".

Fifty years on, the music doesn’t sound nearly as bizarre as it must have sounded at first hearing. Indeed, now we've heard fifty more years of Birtwistle's strikingly original idiom, we can appreciate Punch and Judy all the more.  Oddly enough I can now hear the Brittenesque aspects of Birtwistle's music, and imagine what might have drawn Britten to Birtwistle in the first place, even if Punch and Judy might have seemed a bit much, once.

 The best and only recording (unsurpassable, perhaps) comes from NMC Records - David Atherton and the London Sinfonietta when they were cutting edge.

Harrison Birtwistle - Gawain, NMC review

New from NMC, a reissue of the recording of Harrison Birtwistle's opera Gawain, being performed live at the Barbican tomorrow, part of the Birtwistle at 80 celebrations. HERE IS THE LINK TO MY REVIEW OF THE CONCERT.This was recorded live by BBC Radio 3 on 20 April 1994 at the Royal Opera House. Elgar Howarth conducted. Soloists included a very young Omar Ebrahim and John Tomlinson, like Birtwistle an Elder Statesmen of British music. Tomlinson is reprising the Green Knight again tomorrow, a role so suited to his voice and artistic persona that he's bound to be commanding, A friend heard him sing this at Salzburg last year, and admired him..

Twenty years later this recording feels like a glimpse into a distant past, which is rather appropriate, since the plot revolves around medieval myth, half-glimpsed through shadows. King Arthur (Arthur Greager) isn't a  merry man, though it's Christmas, which coincides with the Winter Solstice, the darkest time of the year, when sinister things happen. Morgan Le Fay (Marie Angel) and Lady de Hautdesert ( Anne Howells) chant a strangle duet, their voices overlapping, wavering up and down the scale., their voices underlined by an orchestra which seems at once to wail, shriek and murmur.  "The warp and the weft of innocence", the text perfectly describing the way Birtwistle's music operates.  Arthur wants dangerous thrills: long brass lines surge forwards, probing space.  Suddenly, silence, and Arthur asks, "Who...is...it" in an oddly conversational style. This interjection undercuts the complexity in the music but creates patterns of its own, for interjections recur throughout the opera, sometimes spoken, sometimes as the tolling of bells..

The Green Knight (John Tomlinson) arrives in the midst oif an amazing fugue of  screaming brass and percussion - the hooves of a horse from hell? The Green Knight is a figure from pre-Christian mythology, who connects to Earth spirits, renewal and death. Tomlinson intones his lines with gravity, growling along the lowest point of his register, then suddenly rising to its top, where even he strains, but the tension feels right. Magnificently theatrical. But what follows is even more powerfully written. When The Green Knight takes his leave, the Court is thrown into horrified confusion.The  "Turning of the Seasons" is pivotal. Wild cacophony, but meticulously delineated and measured - Birtwistle, a master of puzzles and mazes, doesn't do indiscipline.  Arthur cries, "it's nothing...nothing...nothing" repeating himself as if to nullify the horror. But perhaps he understand more than he realizes. "a game... an escapade, Christmas mummery, a raree show". Birtwistle relishes games and strategems, patterns in abstract sound. Winter turns to spring, to summer, to autumn and thus to winter, the music turning like a series of tableaux marking time and approaching fate. Wonderful choral singing, which lifts the action away from "characters" into something more primeval and universal.

Huge planes of sound open the Second Act. They're reminiscent of the beginning of the First Act, this time undercut by Morgan Le Fay's shrill, fluttering cries of alarm. She's Fata Morgana, a sorceress whose weapon is illusion. When Birtwistle describes Gawain's journey to destiny, she taunts and tantalizes. The lullaby she sings is poisoned. Lady Hautdesert tries to seduce Gawain, and her husband Bertilak hunts a boar. Seduction and bloodlust: talismanic references to "The Cross of Christ" seem powerless in this primordial struggle.Morgan Le Fay and Bertilak shape shift, creating confusion, as in a nightmare. Francois Le Roux sings Gawain, while Tomlinson sings both The Green Knight and Bertilak, suggesting complexities one can hardly grasp,. Eventually The Green Knight re-emerges. Instead of killing Gawain, he spares him because Gawain has faced himself. "I wanted fame, I loved myself too much, I'm guilty of cowardice, too". So Gawain returns to Camelot, a wiser man. Arthur and the court repeat the same old fomulae ("Who is it"). "Nothing has changed" sings Morgan Le Fay, "....except for dreams of fear and fame, except for lies.....". Birtwistle gives Morgan Le Fay a brilliant coda : the text may be opaque, but the music crackles and sparks. "Look in your mirror, you might see the the image of someone retreating before your face.Think only of dreams and promises..." The vocal line fragments into crazy angles as if a mirror were being smashed. Perhaps the "window" she refers to opens out into alternative reality, closed to fools like Arthur and Guinevere. .
 
Buy the recording here so the money goes direct to NMC, a not for profit organization that has done almost more than anyone else to promote the best of modern British music.  

More on Birtwistle on this site than anywhere else ! (see also Earth Dances and Theseus Games)

Huw Watkins NMC In my craft or sullen art

Huw Watkins's opera In a Locked Room starts at the Linbury at the Royal Opera House this week. (Read about the Edinbugh premiere here). Huw Watkins is a famous pianist, but as composer he's best known to those who've heard live performances and read his scores. He's a significant composer, so this new recording, on NMC, will establish his reputation in wider circles.

Watkins's Sonata for Cello and Eight Instruments dates from 1999, and was previously only available on CD in piano/cello transcription.  In this version (recorded 10/2010) Paul Watkins's cello is supplemented by the Nash Ensemble, conducted by Ian Brown. The woodwind parts are alluring, mediating between cello and piano.  Watkins's gift for clarity comes over well in Partita for solo violin (2006). Despite the allusion to Bach, it's not baroque. As Bayan Northcott says in his notes "no double dotted rhythms, no courante, sarabande or gavotte". Alina Ibragimova, the dedicatee, negotiates its tricky turns gracefully, so the wayward molto allegro sounds vivid, even humorous.

Four Spencer Pieces (2001) for solo piano, played by the composer himself . Each of these miniature tone poems was inspired by a specific painting, like "Shipbuilding on the Clyde" and "The Resurrection of Soldiers". Stanley Spencer's paintings show ordinary events but lit by preternatural light, every detail crystal clear. The "pictures" are framed by a Prelude and a ravishingly beautiful Postlude in which cascading cadences suggest light, clarity, contemplation. Watkins isn't "illustrating" the pictures so much as expressing the earthy surrealism of Spencer's work, so the rapture of the Postlude is extraordinarly perceptive. This exqusite miniature is the highlight ofthe whole recording.

Like so many British composers before him, Watkins turns to W H Auden. Three Auden Songs (2009) are settings of Brussels in Winter, At last the secret is out, and Eyes look into the well. Thorny text lines twist. The mood is menace. "Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire"...."There is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this". An understated refrain but naggingly persistent.

Dylan Thomas's craft was poetry, but Watkins's setting of In my Craft or Sullen Art (2007) suggests that poetry, like alchemy, has the power to transmute base material into magic, "exercised in the still night when only the moon rages". A strange unworldly cello entices us in, and the first voice setting is relatively straightforward. A second, longer section for the Elias Quartet, singing together with their strings. Perhaps this is an interlude, but it feels central to the piece, sparking off a completely different setting of the same poem. This time the mood is agitated, insistent. The words "In my Craft or sullen art" are projected like a cry. Mark Padmore adapts his usual smooth urbanity so it captures the surreal nature of the piece. At times he sounds uncannily like Ian Bostridge. This isn't a work for voice and string quartet so much as a work for string quartet with additional voice. In the final strophe of the second setting of text, the strings subsume the human voice, and take over where it leaves off.  That's Huw Watkins's "Craft": singular and very original.

I've been reading the libretto to In the Locked Room and will be writing more on Huw Watkins's new opera soon.