It’s almost 30 years since Birmingham Contemporary Music Group was launched as a specialist offshoot of the city’s superb symphony orchestra. Throughout that period Stephen and Jackie Newbould have been part of the ensemble’s administration, for half of that time as its artistic director and executive producer respectively. Now the couple are stepping down from their roles, and the last concert under their aegis was a special affair, with most of the great and good of British new music in attendance. It’s a long time surely since so many of Britain’s leading composers were gathered together under the same roof.
The programme consisted of works by composers particularly associated with BCMG during the Newboulds’ era. Judith Weir’s Blue-Green Hill for the Pierrot Lunaire quintet of piano, winds and strings, grew out of trip to India with BCMG in 2000, while Howard Skempton’s typically wistful, haunting oboe quartet Field Notes was composed for a rural tour in Shropshire two years ago. There were specially commissioned new pieces by Luke Bedford, Richard Baker, John Woolrich and Zoe Martlew, all of them affectionate farewells and heartfelt tributes to a couple who have overseen BCMG’s rise to the top of the new-music tree in the UK.
The day before, the group had been at the Aldeburgh festival, with conductor Ilan Volkov repeating a programme they first gave in Birmingham last month. It was devoted to two of the featured composers at this year’s festival, Benedict Mason and Julian Anderson. The Comedy of Change, the vividly coloured, protean score that Anderson wrote for Ballet Rambert in 2009, was sandwiched between two pieces that Mason composed for the group more than 25 years apart.
The two could hardly have been more sharply contrasted. The earlier of the pair, Nodding Trilliums and Curve-Lined Angles, from 1990, is effectively a six-movement concertante piece featuring different selections of percussion instruments in turn, and using them to generate brightly coloured textures of teasing rhythmic complexity and tempo dislocations. But Horns Strings and Harmony, which BCMG played for the first time at the concert in May, belongs to the series of pieces in which Mason explores the acoustics and geometry of the spaces in which his music is performed.
Mason’s new piece is certainly singular, though perhaps not as strikingly effective as Meld, the extraordinary work Mason composed for the Royal Albert Hall which was first performed at the Proms two summers ago. The musicians – brass players, percussionists and two pianists – were constantly in transit, moving in and out of the doors to the Britten Studio, playing isolated phrases from distant corridors, rolling balls across the performing space, or at one point rubbing brushes against its walls to create sounds which changed as the textures of the walls themselves changed; occasionally they would gather together to deliver a fractured chorale. The music was occasionally reminiscent of Richard Ayres, while its whole surreal theatricality sometimes recalled Kagel; really, though, it’s hard to think of any other composer working today who could have conceived anything quite like it.
