Birtwistle enthusiasts will probably already have Elgar Howarth’s fine account of Secret Theatre with the London Sinfonietta, of which AW wrote that “no more exciting recording of contemporary music has appeared for many a day”. Kalitzke and Musikfabrik NRW (Dusseldorf’s answer to the London Sinfonietta) offer a performance of great virtuosity and character, but a slightly less generous coupling. However the two works they have chosen to go with Secret Theatre are an even better introduction both to it and to Birtwistle’s style than Howarth’s Silbury Air and Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum.
Secret Theatre is a powerful drama, with each instrument acting a part in it. The same is true of Ritual Fragment, but here the instrumental characters appear successively, each with its own tribute or reflection (the work was written in memory of Michael Vyner, joint founder and director of the Sinfonietta). Nenia is a grave monologue, one of a group of works that can be seen as ‘studies’ for Birtwistle’s second opera The Mask of Orpheus. Nenia and Ritual Fragment provide clues to the rite enacted in Secret Theatre, where the instruments not only step forward for monologues but also group themselves into parties or alliances, one concerned primarily with melodic material, the other with harmony. There are tensions, therefore, between solo and corporate statement, and mysterious but powerful forces drawing individual instruments from one group to another. All of which may sound dry, but the seamless argument is grippingly dramatic throughout. It is Birtwistle at his most compelling, and the players on this recording are obviously convinced of that.
The two shorter pieces, both beautiful laments, are finely done. Rosemary Hardy is as virtuoso in her rapid alternation of words and non-verbal exclamations as she is moving in her cries of “Euridice!” and the gravity of her final narration. It is a pity that CPO have omitted four lines of the text from their booklet. The recording, however, is excellent: powerful in impact without being oppressively close.'