Birtwistle - The Fields Of Sorrow (1972) (with score)

Описание: Harrison Birtwistle's Latin text is by late Roman poet Ausonius:

“They wander deep in woods, in mournful light,
Amid long reeds and drowsy-headed poppies,
And lakes where no wave laps, and voiceless streams,
Upon whose banks in the dim light grow old
Flowers that were bewailed names of kings.”

(tr. Helen Waddell)

The Fields of Sorrow is scored for 2 sopranos, chorus and 16 players (1971-1972)

Jane Manning, soprano

London Sinfonietta
David Atherton

"The Fields of Sorrow shares the Orpheus-orientation with Nenia--The Death of Orpheus (1970) (the text by Ausonius from the Aeniad refers to the souls of lost lovers wandering around the underworld); and shares the spatial, symmetrical layout of the voices and instruments with Verses for Ensembles (1969), though the actual constitution of the instrumental groups develops the single-timbre principle of Nenia.

Unlike Nenia, however, the continuity of The Fields of Sorrow is not dependent on the text, but is laid out in the formalised manner of Verses. But gone is the hard-edge, high-contrast dynamism of Verses, and not merely because it would be inappropriate in a setting of the text. For in his third phase Birtwistle has initiated a primarily melodic, nondynamic, processional style which might appear to have more in common with first phase works such as Monody for Corpus Christ; than with the post-Tragoedia music.

Now colours and densities evolve and change gradually as in a procession across a landscape, and time is not sharply subdivided (as it is in Verses) but unfolds as a broad, slowly-progressing continuum. Of time, music's most precious commodity, Birtwistle has recently said: "Music is the one medium where Time can transcend itself more than anything else. With poetry you are always up against language and meaning in theatre too while with painting you're up against the frame, which limits the size and scale. Time scale in music is something which has nothing to do with the length of a piece -and new concepts of Time are my main compositional preoccupation." -- Michael Nyman