Life and death in English music: Earth Dances and Skempton
Earth Dances
BBCSO and Martyn Brabbins
Barbican
Stalls G35
13 October 2017
Barbican page
Followed by…
Howard Skempton at 70
Esther Cavett, Morgan Hayes, Matthew Hough, Thalia Myers and John Tilbury; Jack McNeill and Gildas Quartet; Addison Chamber Choir and David Wordsworth; Club Inégales
Kings Place
General admission, £24
13 October 2017
If I’d been braver, it would have been an interesting investigation of English music if I’d stayed for the second half of the BBCSO concert and gone from Birtwistle to Vaughan Williams (the Sea Symphony) to Skempton. As it was it was still interesting, if not particularly flattering to Skempton.
BIrtwistle’s Earth Dances is a known quantity and a very exciting one. Its challenges also are known and so it shouldn’t be too disappointing when the players look as wretched as they did by the end of this performance. Nevertheless, it was. Earth Dances is a magnificent piece and it retained its power even with this scrapping and wrangling. Maybe it’s not a great idea to programme two such differently meaty works together.
After Earth Dances I hotfooted it to Kings Place to enjoy the remains of the ticket for the Howard Skempton celebrations I had expensively and rashly bought. Rashly because until that concert the only Skempton I had heard was his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which I saw with Roderick Williams in the Wigmore Hall and thought was transformative.
I stand by that piece and its superb recording but on the basis of the Skempton assembled for this celebration it must have been something of a one-off. Common to Rime and the scrips and scraps we heard here are an interest in subtly varying but otherwise endless repeats and a love of kooky modes. But without the cadence and drama of Coleridge’s text, and of Roderick WIlliams, what else is there? Especially after the intensity of Earth Dances, this felt like music leached of all vitality, music for the dying or already dead.
Things improved when we moved into Hall 2 for a set by Club Inégales. Life returned, if not in the musty Skempton then with reckless glee in the birthday tributes by Club directors Peter Wiegold and Martin Butler. A worthy end point, but maybe even the ghastly Sea Symphony would have been a better transition.
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