When Peter Eötvös died in March at the age of 80, one of the projects he left unfulfilled was a concert with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group that would include the English-language premiere of Secret Kiss, his melodrama for narrator and five instrumentalists. Eötvös had collaborated on the whole concert, but never got to take part in it; Geoffrey Paterson conducted the programme, exactly as originally envisaged.
Secret Kiss was first performed in 2019, with the text delivered in Japanese. It’s based on a scene in Alessandro Baricco’s bestselling novel, Silk, which describes an encounter in 19th-century Japan between a Frenchman seeking a supply of silkworms and the concubine of the man who controls the silk supply. It’s a slender, nuanced collision of cultures, but puzzlingly Eötvös’s 15-minute treatment of it manages to make it seem even more inconsequential, its Japanese inflections, particularly from the Noh tradition, hardly noticeable. The delivery of the text (by Meg Kubota here) is punctuated by instrumental solos, alto flute and violin representing the woman, bass clarinet and cello the man, but never holds the attention, and overamplifying the voice, makes it all seem too contrived.
The two pieces by Harrison Birtwistle that ended the concert, in which Kubota was joined by soprano Alice Rossi, were shorn of their magic by amplification, too. The Woman and the Hare, for soprano, reciter and ensemble, to a text by David Harsent from 1999, and … When Falling Asleep, its little companion piece on texts by Rilke and Swinburne from 20 years later, Birtwistle’s last ensemble work, both rely on a delicate balance between the two protagonists which was destroyed by the electronic intervention.
At least in the rest of the concert there were no such miscalculations: Rossi was the impassioned soloist in Julian Anderson’s setting of Nietzsche’s Mitternachtslied, and a more reflective one in Lisa Illean’s rather elusive song cycle Cantor, on poems by Willa Cather, while the BCMG instrumentalist had begun the concert with a beautifully focused performance of Rebecca Saunders’ Stirrings, a slowly unfolding processional of fragile textures which emerge from in front of and behind the audience.
• At CBSO Centre, Birmingham, on 27 November
