A Little Requiem

Setlist

Ferruccio Busoni Berceuse élégiaque
Aaron Copland Appalachian Spring
Alex Groves Curved Form (No. 4)
Henryk Górecki Kleines Requiem für eine Polka

Line-up

I think if FERRUCCIO BUSONI was alive today, he may well have been the kind of performer and composer that Manchester Collective would have aspired to collaborate with. Busoni was a pianist, Italian, and lived between 1866 and 1924. He was a big name at the time, touring and teaching extensively across Europe and the United States. However, it’s not his notoriety that would have made him an attractive colleague, but his philosophy.

Busoni’s musical focus was firmly centred on the performer, rather than on the composer. He liked to perform the music of Bach a great deal, but was pretty fast and loose when it came to the notes that he actually played, frequently reorganising and recomposing passages of music that he thought could be made more effective, as well as adding extensive performance directions and musical markings to scores. In his edition of the famous ‘Goldberg Variations’, he actually recommends that the performer cuts eight of the thirty variations entirely. It’s hard to overstate how different this way of thinking is when compared to the way things are currently organised in the classical world.

There are three elements to every concert: the piece of music being played, the artist/s giving the performance, and the audience listening to the show. Current classical music fashion dictates that the most important of these three elements is always the piece of music. After all, it’s the original text, the roadmap, therefore the will of the composer should always be respected and upheld. Busoni clearly didn’t think in this way. He was interested in the performer, but crucially, he was interested in the audience. How could this music be performed in the most thrilling, effective way? How can we bring these dusty scores to life? Busoni’s philosophy is very close to our own way of thinking at Manchester Collective, so it’s a treat to be playing music that he wrote for the very first time this evening.

This quiet, meditative lullaby on a theme of death is a kind of spiritual bookend with the last piece on the programme tonight – HENRYK GÓRECKI’s enigmatically titled ‘Kleines Requiem für Eine Polka’, or, ‘Little Requiem for a Polka’. It’s a strange title, and there’s no real consensus on what it actually means. One theory is that the word ‘Polka’ refers to a Polish girl or woman, making Górecki’s Requiem a work of remembrance. In any case, it’s a dazzling piece, by turn reflective, haunting, and then full of frenetic energy and mania. We’ve had this one on our programming lists for a long time, and it’s a thrill to finally be able to bring this strange work to life on stage.

As a prelude to the Górecki Requiem, one of the largest pieces we’ve ever performed, we’ll play one of the most compact. ALEX GROVES is fast becoming known for his hypnotic ‘Curved Form’ works, and today, Adam Swayne performs ‘Curved Form: No. 4’ for solo piano. This is economical music of great beauty, made up of the simplest possible musical cells – repeated single notes that slowly stack up, blooming, melting into each other, and developing into much larger, shining musical textures. I’ve listened to this particular work a lot. (Like, a lot, a lot.) There’s something addictive woven into these deceptively simple musical lines.

We finish the first half with AARON COPLAND’s ‘Appalachian Spring’. I don’t really want to write too much about this one – it’s unusual for us to play music that is this open, this optimistic, this earnest. I never quite know why, but when the first ‘big moment’ arrives a couple of minutes into the work, I always find myself wanting to cry. Sometimes to try and explain something is to destroy it.

Towards the end of the piece, listen out for Rakhi’s gorgeous, soaring violin solo as she joins Anna on clarinet for one last statement of Copland’s magical Appalachian theme. Truly, it doesn’t get any better than this.