Time Entwined: London Sinfonietta at QEH

Time Entwined Birtwistle, Gerber & Mason Students from the Royal College of Music; Young Musicians from the North London Music Hub;  London Sinfonietta / Geoffrey Paterson (conductor); Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 11.5.2026

Steven Gerber Duet for Solo Clarinet

Florence Anna Maunders Duet for Six Instruments (World premiere)

Christian Mason Time Entwined, In Space Enclosed

James B. Wilson These Sounds Don’t Belong Here (World premiere)

Birtwistle Secret Theatre

The London Sinfonietta is as cutting-edge as ever, offering music fresh off the page as well as an established classic, Harrison Birthwistle’s Secret Theatre (premiered by this very ensemble in this very hall on October 18, 1984, then conducted by David Atherton.

The approach to Britwistle was very much of today, carrying a threads of community involvement and inter-composer tributes: Steven Gerber’s Duo for solo clarinet quotes Robert Parris’ Trombone Concerto and Yehudi Wyner’s Serenade while Florence Anna Maunders’ Duet for Six Instruments is in turn a response to Gerber’s Duet It is fascinating that, while the Gerber takes one instrument and creates a duet, Mainders’ Duet takes an ensemble and creates one (sometimes bi-segmented or otherwise fragmented) ‘meta-instrument’ in a sort of mirroring reversal.

Born in 1948, Steven R. Gerber was educated at Haverford and Princeton, studying with the linked of Robert Parris above, Earl Kim, and Milton Babbitt. The full title of Duet (2005) is “Duet: Prologue, Double Fugue on themes by Robert Parris and Yehudi Wyner, and Epilogue,” which handily lays out the form.  Carinettist Mark van der Wiel is a familiar part of the London contemporary scene, and his virtuosity is beyond words: the opening (which presents a low-pitched, mobile plateau against which a more melodic higher plane can duet) was preternaturally quiet and perfectly controlled. He found the right sense of cantabile, too, his sound velvety, impeccably beautiful Sudden flowerings of rhythm were most effective. The core juxtapositions were perfectly judged.

UK-based composer Florence Anne Maunders’ response to the Gerber also uses steak juxtapositions (both of pitch and dynamic) so that it sounds like one instrument, split into two, pitting what Maunders herself called “fractured frenetic hocketing” against music that features “mysterious stuttering”. There is a disturbed undercurrent to her response (for percussion, piano, violin, flute, clarinet, and cello), while the clarinet clearly references the Gerber. Sighing gestures sit next to deliberate woodowind overblowing (perhaps an ‘analogue’ equivalent of the distortions that appear electronically elsewhere in her music, State of Mine, for example?)

Maunders is a major talent. Her imagination is clearly vast, and yet she has the discipline to succinctly state what she needs; her music is coherent, but more importantly he has the compositional confidence to enable us, the listeners, to trust the trajectory of her music as it unfolds. A fine performance from members of the Sinfonietta - the majority of concerts I have attended by this group were in the 1980s, and their excellence remains.

Christian Mason’s In Time Entwined, In Space Enclosed was commissioned for the London Sinfonietta’s 40th anniversary concert in December 2008. It includes 36 harmonica players around the auditorium (the full line-up is flute/bass, cor anglais, clarinet/bass, three Percussion, violin, viola, cello, and 36 harmonica players (6 groups of 6) in the audience). Instead of riffing on other peoples’ music, Mason riffs on his own” this is an expansion of an earlier Trio for flute, cor anglais, and viola. Here, three on-stage trios interact both contrapuntally and heterophonically which eventually merge into one entity (perhaps a ‘meta-group’) that breaks its bounds and then encroaches into the audience territory via the harmonicas. The inspiration is a poem by Harrow-born  David Gascogne (1916-2001), Antennae, a poignant love poem. My notes refer to the opening of this performance of n Time Entwined, In Space Enclosed  as ‘grumpy glitter’. Make of that what you will. The scoring of the piece, apart from those harmonicas, is Flute (doubling Bass Flute), Cor Anglais, Clarinet in A, 3 percussion, Violin, Viola, Cello, Much of the piece seems to be a sort of nervous continuum, and the most memorable passage is that of slow-moving low strings often interrupted by one or more of the three percussionists. Mason is currently Composer in Residence at the Royal Academy of Music.

James B. Wilson’s piece was written for students from the Royal College of Music and the North London Music Hub. The community aspect was certainly to the fore in These Sounds Don’t Belong Here, an ‘inclusive environment’ cast in three movements. The composer refers to this as a “jukebox piece, a hydra,” and so it is, referencing (energetically more than anything else) genres outside the Classical or modern Classical tradition: heavy metal in the first movement, ‘’When the metal is heavy,’ synth pop in ‘Joy Engine,’ and clubbing in ‘Joy Engine’. The original inspiration came from the multi-genre website Every Noise at Once.  The players are also called upon to sing: it is a wildly ambitious piece, but the concision (in both forces and use of material) elsewhere in the first half felt infinitely more satisfying.

Birtwistle’s Secret Theatre is as enigmatic as the composer himself. It has been posited it is a love duet for Orpheus and Eurydice (given its proximity to The Mask of Orpheus), and while there is theatre there is another Birtwistle preoccupation, ritual, here, too. Other interweavings within the programme occur: the (spatial as well as purely musical) contrast between melody and ostinato  (cantus/continuum) offers a clear parallel to the Gerber/Maunders ‘pairing’. Scored for string quintet,wind quintet, trumpet, trombone, piano and percussion, Secret Theatre, seeks and finds answers to balance issues (two brass versus five strings is never going to end well for the strings) via placement and mobility. 

And again there is a poetic influence, this time a quotation from Robert Graves’ poem of the same name. 

This was a brilliantly realised rendition o f he score, the stage movement ever confident. As Graves’ poem references a flute signals / Far off,’ and so it is indeed the flute (Philippa Davies) who sings first. The idea of a ‘continuum’ is significant, as it was first used in The Mask of Orpheus when Birtwistle creates the sound of Orpheus’ lyre, ‘as if in a dream’. Only one instrument does not move, the bassoon, its song long and lovely. 

The sense of slow processional was here, too, a Birtwistle lifelong preoccupation, while gong strokes acted as articulator, The sense of beauty in dissonance was there throughout, so that when peace is found it is not just a resting place, but transcendental. Dance, too, in the Stravinskian block-woodwind, or a woodwind and violin dance, surfaced easily and naturally.

The idea of a Rückblick to the halcyon 1980s against ink that is still wet worked beautifully, the London Sinfonietta’s legacy both resuscitated and renewed in one evening. Magic.