It’s 25 years since the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group came up with its unique way of supporting new music. Under its Sound Investment scheme, members of its audience were invited to buy “shares” in its commissions; there was no financial return, just the satisfaction of having helped a new score to come into existence.
The initiative has been hugely successful. After a quarter of a century there are more than 80 pieces that only exist because of the generosity of more than 400 Sound Investment donors, and BCMG’s latest concert, conducted by Thomas Adès, celebrated that collective achievement with some past commissions and two premieres.
Adès led fizzing, brilliant performances of the existing works – the 2009 revision of Simon Holt’s Goya-inspired Capriccio Spettrale, Zoë Martlew’s tongue-in-cheek Broad St Burlesque, and Gerald Barry’s rampaging Wiener Blut. All were presumably chosen to show the scheme’s wide range, while the new pieces spread that stylistic net wider still.
Richard Baker had added a second piece to his rather wistful, mysterious Hwyl Fawr Ffrindiau/Bant â Ni, based upon a Welsh children’s song that shares its melody with the 19th-century minstrel number Good Night Ladies, while Francisco Coll describes his all new Ceci n’Est Pas un Concerto as a “tragicomedy for soprano and ensemble”. It’s a music-theatre piece of sorts, in which the soprano (the wonderfully precise Elizabeth Atherton) appears first as the page turner for a concerto pianist, but soon becomes the centre of attention in a scena addressed to the pianist. It’s surreal, expressionist and sometimes rather unsettling, if a bit insubstantial in the end, for all the glistening virtuosity of Coll’s instrumental and vocal writing.
