The last programme in HearNow, aka Towards the Millennium, Simon Rattle's decade-long pilgrimage through the music of the 20th century, was unveiled before a well-nigh capacity audience, who had faithfully come along to a concert in which all of the music was composed in the 90s. In London, where audiences tend to be both more suspicious and more blasé about contemporary music, the response to the series has been increasingly patchy but in Birmingham there has been wonderful support every year.
In the last tranche of concerts there have been premieres as well as revivals of major scores - two of each in this programme. Tippett's The Rose Lake, completed in 1993, and Ligeti's 1990 Violin Concerto (with Tasmin Little as the assertive soloist) were cheek by jowl with new works by Hans Werner Henze and Simon Holt.
The Tempest is the first movement of Henze's Tenth Symphony, which Rattle and the CBSO are scheduled to premiere complete in two years' time. Despite the title, and the composer's repeated connections with Shakespeare in his recent works, this music carries no literary associations. "Noise and movement of wind racing along with the enchafed flood," says Henze, was the only image he had in mind when writing this big-boned rondo scored for orchestra with quadruple wind and six horns. At times it seems over-scored; even Rattle couldn't make all of the detail count, though the fleet scurrying figures and purposeful harmony have the well-made quality that Henze puts in to his orchestral writing. It is a great vehicle for an orchestra on top form and the CBSO delivered it immaculately.
Holt's Sunrise' Yellow Noise, though, is explicitly literary; a soprano setting of Emily Dickinson's poem from which the title comes is one element in the 12-minute piece. But it is more than a simple text-based work. The vocal lines are embedded in the teeming fabric of curious hollowed out colours from a band without violas and cellos; the voice disappears for long stretches, as the orchestra takes off on glittering, tangled excursions of its own. Holt's sound world is utterly distinctive, his ideas indelible. Lisa Milne's singing was so compelling, so secure and lustrous, that one longed for more of it. Henze's work is just a starting point, but Sunrise' Yellow Noise could be made the beginning of a much larger work too; Holt has never written with such confidence for the orchestra before.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
