Wolff, Birtwistle, and After-Stockhausen; NMS, Sat 25/5/19; 10:00pm

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

No sign of the Beeb at the Donnerstag performances - but this week's NMS gives us something of an echo of Stockhausen's Licht-cycle in a "reimagining" of the Welt-Parlament section from Mittwoch. Darren Cunningham (b1989) who works under the name "Actress" (in the same way that Jeanneret worked under the name "Le Corbusier", Theotokópoulos, "El Greco", or Remi, "Hergé") has taken recordings from the House of Commons Brexit debate on Love during last December's No-Confidence Vote (the satirist despairs!) and "fed" these into Young Paint, an Artificial Intelligence Music software. (My apologies if any of this isn't an accurate description of the composing process - I'm putting together information from a variety of online sources.) The results are then combined with with Live Music performed by pianist Vanessa Benelli Mosell, and the Netherlands Chamber Choir and London Contemporary Orchestra conducted by Robert Ames, to create a new opera, Sin {x} II.

Also on the programme, the World Premiere of Duo for Eight Strings (for viola and 'cello) by Harrison Birtwistle (b1934) ["played by the Nash Ensemble" according to the NMS website - which either means that this is an arrangement for larger forces, or that Arts Funding Cuts have really hit hard, .. or that the Beeb has boobed].

And Robert Worby in conversation with Christian Wolff (also b 1934).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005gv2

It sounds like it's going to be a very interesting programme indeed - new work that refers to older, a new work by one of the very best living composers, and a conversation with one of the keenest Musical thinkers and doers around. What could possibly go wrong?!


Tom Service presents.

[Richard Barrett]

What could possibly go wrong?!

Tom Service presents.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I found this an infuriating programme. Robert Worby's interview with Christian Wolff was a delight; Birtwistle's work a great pleasure to hear ... but the presentation, with TS leaving about a third of a second after the end of the Birtwistle before delivering his comments on it, as if the piece were just a pretext for those comments ... was this TS's fault, or had a Studio Editor decided that, if there was enough time for the listener to just take in for a moment what they'd just heard, they might instead switch to a different station? (The comments themselves weren't at all "bad", and even humorous, but give us a moment, please.)

No hypothetical editor can be blamed for TS's comments about the Stockhausen events on the South Bank last week - especially the claim that the "highlight" of the week wasn't anything by Stockhausen himself but Actress' (rather feeble, I thought) reworking of his Welt-Parlament. No mention at all of the Donnerstag performances, either - as if the Beeb, rightly disgraced by its own neglect, decided to airbrush the event out of existence.

Several opportunities seriously missed here.