Harrison Birtwistle – The Moth Requiem
Roderick Williams; BBC Singers; Nash Ensemble; Nicholas Kok
Signum Classics SIGCD368
This fourth of Signum’s series of composer-led releases with exquisite performances by the BBC Singers is perfectly timed to coincide with Harrison Birtwistle’s 80th year. Though a mixture of recent and older compositions, this is a premiere recording for all works on the disc.
The title piece is the most recent. The Moth Requiem is composed for 12 female voices, alto flute and 3 harps. The beauty and tenuous life of the moth is explored through a text based on The Moth Poem by Robin Blaser, with the names of moth species, both common and close to extinct, intertwined throughout. An eerie, shimmering fragility is perfectly evoked by the women’s voices while the music is crafted to portray a moth trapped inside a piano, touching the strings and bumping on the lid in its efforts to escape.
This tenuous hold on life is mirrored through similar effect in Three Latin Motets employed as interludes for Birtwistle’s opera The Last Supper. In The Ring Dance of the Nazarene, Christ is alternately represented by the superb baritone Roderick Williams and the chorus while an Iranian darbuka drum is employed to evoke the dance that Christ performs for his disciples. On the Sheer Threshold of the Night, is taken from his opera The Mask of Orpheus, a setting of Boethius’ early Christian interpretation of the Orpheus myth, set underneath the motif of Orpheus and Eurydice calling out to each other over the great divide between life and afterlife.
