BCMG/Rattle, CBSO Centre, Birmingham
An intense and dramatic world premiere
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Your support makes all the difference."I felt a funeral, in my brain..." So begins the Emily Dickinson poem on which Boots of Lead, Simon Holt's latest Sound Investment Scheme commission, is based. The keystone of an arch of five Dickinson settings by the composer, its relation to the overall cycle is comparable to that of the Funeral March from Webern's Op 6 Orchestral Pieces, a movement whose orchestration shares with the new work a cerebral reverberation of bells and gongs.
The poet's stringent but explosive language makes an ideal springboard for Holt's style – a powerful fusion of the implacably spare with the emotionally intense. More an aural expansion of the poem than a conventional setting, Boots of Lead enhances and develops the text with some of Britten's alchemical skill. In the world premiere, soloist Rinat Shaham was alive to the potency of both words and music, her sense of drama ignited by the virtuosity of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) soloists. Sir Simon Rattle was evidently thrilled with this score – the dark, intensely personal work he expected from Holt in Sunrise, Yellow Noise, a CBSO commission also to a Dickinson text, now fully realised.
Of the rest of the programme, Rinat Shaham brought her creamy tones to a ravishing performance of De Falla's Psyche, a Gallic-accented sarabande. This is a work Rattle recorded for Decca over 20 years ago and he clearly feels affection for it – the burnished tone he drew from the BCMG was radiant.
The soprano Nicole Tibbels was no less impressive in her rendition of Johannes Maria Staud's quirky "vielleicht zunachst wirklich nur" and Unsuk Chin's waggish "Acrostic Wordplay". The former started off as a Webern-meets-Weill desiccated jazz session, and Rattle was in his element conjuring up an array of fresh-sounding sonorities. The latter work managed to be both fun and microtonal, the soloist negotiating a fiendish series of impishly reconstructed words and sentences.
A magnificently played performance of Ligeti's Chamber Concerto, combining laser-like accuracy with heart and humour, officially ended the concert, but Rattle squeezed in a desirable encore in the shape of two of Birtwistle's coolly beautiful Bach Measures – a satisfying conclusion after Ligeti's playfully open-ended finale.
In sum, Boots of Lead formed the eloquent and moving centrepiece of a curiously devised programme, with no less than three other works for female soloist and chamber ensemble. The neighbouring items in particular ran the risk of dissipating the potency of the new piece. I look forward to hearing it again in a different context.
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