Gramophone – September 2019

88 GRAMOPHONE SEPTEMBER 2019 gramophone.co.uk

CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS

D

uring a career spanning three decades, David Sawer

has made a particularly strong contribution to music for

the theatre – both opera and ballet. After The Panic –

a one-acter written in 1991 for the Royal Opera House’s

Garden Venture project – and theatre work with various

playwrights including Edward Bond, his full-length operatic

debut came with From Morning to Midnight (English National

Opera, 2001). This has been followed by major commissions

from Opera North (Skin Deep, completed in 2008, premiered

2009) and Garsington Opera (The Skating Rink, 2018). None

of these has so far been commercially recorded, although the

From Morning to Midnight Symphonic Suite (2005), on NMC,

gives a strong sense of the darkly exuberant musical drama

which Sawer derived from the surreal expressionism of Georg

Kaiser’s 1912 stage play. This ENO opera can easily stand

comparison with recent high-profile stage works by Thomas

Adès (The Exterminating Angel, 2016) and George Benjamin

(Lessons in Love and Violence, 2017), and like these composers,

Sawer occupies the fertile middle ground between the vividly

characterised musico-dramatic extremes in current British opera

represented by Sir Harrison Birtwistle and Jonathan Dove.

Full-size opera apart, Sawer’s openness to a diversity of

dramatic genres (perhaps owing something to the spontaneity

and musical freethinking of his principal post-university teacher,

Kagel) is easily confirmed by a glance at his catalogue of

compositions. To begin with, there is Swansong (1989), a prize-

winning radio feature built around the work of Berlioz, and

Hollywood Extra (1996), a chamber score to accompany a silent

expressionist film from 1928. Then comes the dramatic scena

Flesh and Blood (2011), a BBC commission, and The Lighthouse

Keepers, composed and first presented at the Cheltenham

Music Festival by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group

(BCMG) in 2013. Sawer has regularly sought out ways of

keeping music drama, whether sung or danced, clear of the

opera house and – at a mere 30 minutes, scored for two non-

singing actors, instrumental nonet and tape – The Lighthouse

Keepers might best be described as a ‘concert drama’. The

anarchic spirit of Kagel can possibly be glimpsed behind this

adaptation of a full-on melodrama from 1905 associated with the

Parisian ‘theatre of horror’ the Grand Guignol, in an English

version by David Harrower. But Sawer’s economical and

unapologetically pictorial musical background avoids playing

for laughs, proving that an over-the-top horror story whose

climactic stages pack in rabies and potential shipwreck can still

prove uncannily compelling, given the right musical context.

Sawer may not have taken Kagelesque propensities for

exaggerated parody as far as Gerald Barry does in his highly

diverting opera The Importance of Being Earnest (2010); but

a feeling for farce as perilous rather than merely amusing

brought a special edge to the musical atmosphere of his

earlier compositions, and most powerfully to Cat’s-Eye (1986),

a 25-minute score for instrumental octet (two clarinets,

trumpet, trombone, harp, piano, viola, cello), which will

shortly appear on a new NMC CD. Choreographed by

Richard Alston for Ballet Rambert in 1992, Cat’s-Eye has

nothing to do with the safety device used in road markings; as

Sawer explains, the cat’s eye was a device found in a projector

called the fantascope, first used in Paris in 1798, which

‘brought the optical tricks of the magic lanterns to their most

spectacular’, shocking audiences ‘with fantastic images of

spirits and demons’. Sawer’s score delivers a wealth of

splintering and shivering textures, and his later compositions

have continued to relish Cat’s-Eye’s surreal mechanisms.

Another vividly characterised instance is Tiroirs (1996) for

large ensemble (played by BCMG on the third disc opposite),

where Sawer gives full rein to his liking for what he terms

the ‘magical and monstrous’ materials of surrealist art, and

for a form whose interlocking episodes ‘open up in the manner

David Sawer

This British composer’s music is undergoing

a shift from a dystopian feel to something

fresher, more upbeat, says Arnold Whittall

Sawer’s music is less sheerly jagged

than Birtwistle’s but it has its own

very potent hallucinatory power