Gramophone – September 2019

gramophone.co.uk GRAMOPHONESEPTEMBER 2019 89

CONTEMPORARYCOMPOSERS

of a Russian doll’. More

recent works exploring

similarly rich imagery

include Rumpelstiltskin (2009),

a 70-minute score for

13 instruments and

six dancers which Sawer

sees as more like a silent film

than a conventional ballet –

a 25-minute Rumpelstiltskin

Suite (2011) is soon to be

issued on CD. More recent

still is Coachman Chronos

(2014) for instrumental nonet,

specially commissioned for

the Objects at an Exhibition

project at the Science

Museum in London

(recorded on NMC D215).

Like his near contemporary

Simon Holt, Sawer has always

responded strongly to visual

as well as verbal imagery, and

the 12-minute piano piece The

Melancholy of Departure (1990)

gave record-buyers their first

indication of a new musical

voicetobereckonedwith.Sawer’s pictorial cue was a 1914

painting of the same name by Giorgio de Chirico, and his aim

of the piece was ‘to evoke the instability that you would feel

could you walk around the strange architecture of its buildings,

with their menacing shadows and irrational perspectives’.

Sawer’s representation of menace and the irrational is vivid in

the extreme, especially when tension mounts, as if the walker is

momentarily rooted to the spot with indecision within the

nightmarish world they inhabit. But at the same time Sawer

sought out ways of making the music flow more easily, in the

interests of a balanced design that holds the promise of more

extended single-movement structures. That promise was

handsomely fulfilled in Byrnan Wood, commissioned for the

BBC Proms in 1992, and recorded for NMC by the BBC SO

under Sir Andrew Davis three years later.

Byrnan Wood was, as Sawer has explained, ‘one of the

original Shakespearean spellings’ of Macbeth’s Birnam Wood.

At first the music seems less concerned with the specific

features of an imaginary landscape than with the epic stress

and strain of violent military action; and there is a degree of

affinity with the kind of ritualised processionals that Birtwistle

projected in Earth Dances (1986), processionals echoed in the

forceful journeyings central to his opera Gawain (1991), in

whose premiere run Sawer performed as one of the silent

onstageactors,theknightBedevere.Sawer’smusicisless

sheerlyjaggedthanBirtwistle’s,lesspronetotumultuous

fragmentation,butithasitsownverypotenthallucinatory

power.GivenSawer’savowedinterestinthespecialability

ofmusictorepresentmotionaschangeandchangeasmotion,

thesenseofacompellingprocessdeterminingthesinister

progressofByrnanWoodacrossits20-minutelengthisclear

throughout.Mostpowerfulofall,perhaps,isthechangeat

midpointfromviolentaggressiontoeerilyrestrainedlament,

aqualitythatalsohelpstodeterminethecharacterofthe

work’snot-entirely-tragic,hauntinglynon-violentending.

Howbettertocastasidetheshadowyimaginingsofdeathand

tragedythaninthe 1997 workTheGreatestHappinessPrinciple!

Another BBC commission, this 12-minute orchestral score

was ‘inspired by the utopian ideas of the English philosopher

Jeremy Bentham’, and Sawer’s first orchestral piece after

living in the USA for a year. At the time, the composer wrote

of his hope that the work echoed ‘some of the freshness and

openness’ he encountered when visiting that country for the

first time. Like his near contemporary Mark-Anthony

Turnage, Sawer has increasingly recognised the dramatic

potential of surging rhythmic repetition, not as laying down a

framework for minimalist incantations but to project a musical

life force less conflicted, less potentially dystopian than can be

heard in Byrnan Wood. A high point in this evolution towards

a more expansive, lyrical expressiveness was April\March

(2016), a 22-minute ballet score commissioned by the RPS

and the BBC, given its concert premiere at the 2016 Proms,

and its dance premiere (as Blue Moon, with choreography

by Aletta Collins) by the Royal Ballet this February.

The teasing back-to-front title stems from A Survey of the

Works of Herbert Quain (1941), a short story (originally in

Spanish) by Jorge Luis Borges. Among the fictitious Quain’s

works is April March, a novel described by Borges as ‘a kind

of game’ in which it is the juxtaposition of its various sections

‘that makes them effective’. Borges is all about playfulness, the

special ambiguity when ‘before’ and ‘after’ change places, and

Sawer’s musical game responds to the multilayered form-plans

for the April March story which are included in Borges’s text.

In this recent ballet score, as in the 2018 opera The Skating

Rink, Sawer sustains his special understanding of that

‘freshness and openness’ whose upbeat utopian potential has

been so productively prominent in his more recent work.

Record buyers will be able to judge for themselves when

a new NMC Sawer CD from BCMG and Martyn Brabbins,

to include Cat’s-Eye and the Rumpelstiltskin Suite, as well as

April\March,becomesavailableattheendofSeptember.

SAWER ON CD

Representinga broadrangeofhisinstrumentalmusic

The Melancholy of Departure

Rolf Hind pf

NMC

This short but highly evocative piano piece

(coupled with Vic Hoyland’s The Other Side of the

Air) is performed with exceptional clarity and concentration by

contemporarymusicspecialistRolfHind.

Byrnan Wood

BBC Symphony Orchestra / Andrew Davis

NMC (2/96)

Sinister and menacing, the ‘moving forest’ of

military might that secured the downfall of

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is brought to abrasive life in the sharply

focused orchestral colours of Sawer’s tone poem, rendered with

maximumconvictionbytheorchestrathatirstperformedit.

‘From Morning to Midnight Symphonic Suite’

Simon Blendis, Alexandra Wood vns BCMG /

Susanna Mälkki, Martyn Brabbins; BBCSO / Brabbins

NMC (4/07)

Sawer skilfully encapsulates the wide dramatic range

of his opera From Morning to Midnight in this half-hour orchestral

suite. With another orchestral work, The Greatest Happiness

Principle, and a characterful pair of chamber pieces, this disc

provides a good cross-section of his purely instrumental output.

PHOTOGRAPHY:

GARSINGTON OPERA

 

Born Stockport, England,

September 14, 1961

Studies University of York

(197983); with Mauricio Kagel

in Cologne (198485)

Awards and appointments

Sony Award (1990) for

Swansong; Fulbright-Chester-

Schirmer Fellowship (1992);

Paul Hamlyn Foundation

Award (1993); Arts Foundation

Fellowship (1995); composer-

in-association, Bournemouth

SO (1996); From Morning to

Midnight (2001) nominated for

2002 Laurence Olivier Award,

Outstanding Achievement in

Opera; British Academy British

Composer Award 2003 for

Piano Concerto (2002); Civitella

Ranieri Fellowship (2006);

Professor of Composition, Royal

Academy of Music, London,

from 2008; MacDowell Colony

Fellowship (2016)