A pregnant silence, a peaty belch from the tuba, and the scrape of brass on brass as gears lock into position and judder forward. It’s almost worth making a bingo card for a Harrison Birtwistle première these days, and I’m not complaining. His last big orchestral work, Deep Time, showed worrying signs of him mellowing into some sort of late period. Not here though, he isn’t. Grinding brass cogwheels? Tick. Sudden stillnesses, punctuated by deadpan creakings and poppings? Tick. Primal screeches from the woodwinds, jarring against chords of millstone grit? House!
Birtwistle’s new fanfare achieves a lot in just three minutes, and it’s a handsome gift to Sir Simon Rattle, who was batting for Birtwistle’s music when that was still quite a courageous thing to do. (The title, Donum Simoni MMXVIII, looks like a joke at the expense of Birtwistle’s one-time fondness for po-faced Latin titles.) Today, a Birtwistle première is a status symbol, reserved for the world’s elite ensembles. After discreet enquiries about a possible Birtwistle commission a few years back, it was made politely but unambiguously clear to me that if you have to ask his fee, you can’t afford it. Donum Simoni MMXVIII was co-commissioned by the LSO and the Barbican Centre, an indicator of a desire to share either the prestige or the cash value of even 180 seconds of premium Birtwistle in the fantasyland marketplace of contemporary classical music.
Still, it made a classy bonnet ornament for the first concert of Rattle’s new season with the LSO. It’s increasingly evident that Rattle’s career is following symphonic form, with his LSO period as the recapitulation. This concert paid homage to old friends: the double trumpet concerto Dispelling the Fears by Mark-Anthony Turnage (whose Birmingham residency under Rattle effectively launched his career as an orchestral composer) and, more surprisingly, Rattle’s Birmingham predecessor Sir Adrian Boult, who in the last years of his life (as Rattle explained) urged him to conduct Holst’s tone poem Egdon Heath.
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