If you take awards seriously (which of course you shouldn’t) you could argue that Rebecca Saunders is now Britain’s most important living composer. Last week she won music’s Nobel, the Ernst von Siemens prize. €250,000. And its record is pretty good — if you ignore 1974 (Britten) and 1987 (Bernstein).
There are many reasons to love Saunders. Her post-concert talk was terrifically cheering. Explaining why she rarely writes vocal compositions, she told us blithely that it was because she ‘didn’t have anything to say’: ‘I don’t want my works to mean anything.’ Quite right. Meaning should be to music what shame is to Theresa May. A distant and hazy thing. At the South Bank’s slightly basic festival of new music, SoundState, those composers who had lots to say ended up saying very, very little — and vice versa.
Saunders is a perfect example. She is a kind of musical Sarah Kane, full of threat and thuggery. Rottweilery double basses, piano parts that deserve Asbos, a percussion section trained to slit throats. Her programme notes — seemingly sober and cerebral, line after icy line of dictionary definitions — read like autopsies. And all this visceral intensity springs from the most nerdy, abstract manipulations of timbre.
We don’t get to hear her work often in Britain. As with so many of the best British composers, her voice — like Kane’s — finds more sympathy on the continent (she lives in Berlin). It was a German outfit, Ensemble Modern, which gave last Saturday’s portrait concert. And on the evidence of the three works it performed, she deserves every cent of that prize.
Her 2016 masterpiece Skin, for solo voice and chamber ensemble, is an encyclopedia of speech that isn’t quite speech. Speech that is mumbled in fear, inhaled backwards, gasped in excitement (Molly Bloom’s orgasmic monologue is quoted), whispered as gossip under the breath.
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