Birtwistle: The Shadow of Night to be premiered in Cleveland
(January 2002)
Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s The Shadow of Night, commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra under Christoph von Dohnányi, is to receive its premiere performances in Cleveland on 10-12 January followed by a visit to Carnegie Hall in New York on 25 January. The new score has been conceived as something of a mirror companion to Earth Dances: whereas the 1985 work is volcanic in its forward-driving energy, The Shadow of Night is slow and reflective, exploring the world of melancholy as understood by Elizabethan poets and composers.
Birtwistle’s worklist includes many scores meditating on themes of melancholy, night and shadows, and the new orchestral piece draws its title specifically from the poem The Shadow of Night by the poet and playwright George Chapman (1559-1634), most well-known for his authoritative translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Melancholy was to the Elizabethans one of the four humours associated in medical terms with the spleen but in spiritual terms with a Hamlet-like poetic state often bordering on insanity. It was this sweet madness that so inspired the Lute Song composers of the age, most famously John Dowland (1563-1626), whose In Darkness Let Me Dwell provides Birtwistle with a three-note musical shape that in constantly changing guise underpins much of the orchestral work.
A further Elizabethan connection is established through Birtwistle’s quotation of the text of a Lute Song by John Danyel (1606) on a page of his score:
No, let chromatic tunes, harsh without ground,
Be sullen music for a tuneless heart;
Chromatic tunes most like my passions sound,
As if combined to hear their falling part.
A selection of Birtwistle’s recent works are making their first appearance on disc. His monumental meditation on poetry by Paul Celan, Pulse Shadows, is featured on a new Teldec disc, performed by soprano Claron McFadden, the Arditti Quartet and the Nash Ensemble conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw (Teldec 8573 26867).
Click here to purchase the new Pulse Shadows CD from Amazon
Claron McFadden and the Nash Ensemble are also at the centre of a forthcoming Black Box release of The Woman and the Hare together with the Nine Settings of Lorine Niedecker (BBM1046).
> Further information on Work: The Shadow of Night
Photo: Richard Kalina
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