The original Manchester School of composers, centred around Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr and the late Peter Maxwell Davies, exerted a decisive influence on the course of contemporary English music. A second generation has yet to emerge; though the BBC Philharmonic is sufficiently confident about the talent in the city to have commissioned five young composers based or trained in Manchester to create new pieces to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.
These 10-minute interludes form the incidental music to the Sonnets in the City series; a sequence of contemporary dramas set in Manchester and read by Maxine Peake. It’s an ambitious project, though curiously ill-coordinated. Some of the dramas were not scheduled for broadcast until after this concert was given; while others, bizarrely, were going out on air at the same time that the performance was taking place. As no texts were made available, it required a prodigious memory for Shakespeare’s shorter poetry to know precisely what the composers were responding to. Perhaps it was important that the compositions should stand alone on their own merits. But it still left a frustrating sense that you were listening to background music for radio plays you couldn’t hear, inspired by sonnets you couldn’t read.
It was at least possible to perceive that most of the works seemed well-attuned to the homoeroticism of Shakespeare’s poems; creating a febrile sense of a heady cruise through Manchester’s gay village. Daniel Kidane’s propulsive, eclectic piece, Sirens, soaked up influences of jungle, dubstep and R&B sampled from a trawl through the city after dark. Chiu-yu Chou’s Tongue was based on a surreal reading of Sonnet 140, imagining a blind, gay man driven insane by jealousy and wandering the streets of Manchester speaking with his lover’s tongue. The mania was broken by a plaintive solo violin meditation, though the instruction for the brass players to suck air through their instruments in imitation of a big, wet kiss also sounded rather unfortunately like someone taking a plunger to a blocked sink.
Nina Whiteman’s more placid contribution, The map of days outworn, was a beguiling exploration of the soft, map-like capillaries running across the landscape of a lover’s cheek. Aaron Parker’s After Sunset Fades took a more structured approach, breaking Sonnet 73 down into a neatly crafted miniature symphony. Tom Coult’s Sonnet Machine referenced the theory of artificial intelligence developed by Alan Turing while working at the University of Manchester; spitting binary pattens back and forth in awkward imitation of a computer attempting to compose a piece of music.
It is currently impossible to hear Prokofiev’s Montagues and Capulets suite without picturing deluded young entrepreneurs incurring the wrath of Alan Sugar. Yet conductor Andrew Gourlay’s pulverising account of the ballet in the second half confirmed that, in comparison with the grandeur of Prokofiev’s Shakespearean inspiration, what had gone before were mere apprentice pieces.
- The concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 27 April at 7.30pm. The Sonnets in the City series is available on BBC iPlayer.
