Nyman: Piano Concerto / Where The Bee Dances

Description

Michael Nyman (b.1944)The Piano Concerto;Where the Bee DancesWhen Michael Nyman published his study Experimental Music: John Cageand Beyond (1974), he could hardly have foreseen his own contribution tothat "beyond". Rejecting the orthodoxies of British modernism, Nymanhad abandoned composition in 1964, working instead as a musicologist, editingPurcell and Handel, and collecting folk-music in Romania. Later he became amusic critic, in which capacity he was the first to apply the word "minimalism"to music, in a 1968 review for The Spectator of Cornelius Cardew's TheGreat Digest.That same year, a chance encounter with a BBC broadcast of Steve Reich'sCome Out opened Nyman's ears to further possibilities. A route back tocomposition was emerging. He wrote the libretto for Harrison Birtwistle's 1969"dramatic pastoral" Down by the Greenwood Side. In 1977,Birtwistle, by now Musical Director of the National Theatre, commissioned himto provide arrangements of eighteenth-century Venetian songs for the productionof Carlo Goldoni's play Il Campiello, to be performed by what Nymandescribes as "the loudest street band" he could imagine: rebecs,sackbuts, shawms alongside banjo, bass drum and saxophone.Thrilled by the results, Nyman kept the Campiello Band together, nowpropelled by his own piano playing, but a band needs repertoire, which Nymanset about providing, beginning with In Re Don Giovanni, a characteristictreatment of a sixteen-bar sequence by Mozart. Soon the band's line-up mutated,amplification was added, and the name changed to the Michael Nyman Band. Thishas been the laboratory in which Nyman has formulated his aesthetic, itssound-world shaping a compositional style built around strong melodies,flexible, assertive rhythms and precisely articulated ensemble playing.Besides concert-hall works, Nyman has written dozens of film-scores fordirectors as diverse as Peter Greenaway, Jane Campion and Volker Schlondorff;and pieces to accompany dance, a cat-walk fashion show (Yamamoto Perpetuo forJapanese designer Yohji Yamamoto), the opening of a high-speed rail link (MGV,1993) and a computer game (Enemy Zero). That acute sensitivity tooccasion and context is enriched by a talent, shared with baroque composers,for refiguration: the 1995 Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings developsideas previously encountered in The Convertibility of Lute Strings and Tangofor Tim; the Third String Quartet lies behind the score forChristopher Hampton's 1996 movie Carrington. At every turn Nyman hasproved eminently practical. Not for him the ivory tower anguish of a tormentedcomposer grappling with abstract systems, rather an openness to collaboration,a spry sense of humour, a highly literate imagination and an instant,instinctive ability to engage a highly diverse audience.Nick KimberleyMichael Nyman's saxophone concerto Where the Bee Dances waswritten for John Harle, a performer who has had a continuing association withthe Michael Nyman Band. The title of the work makes obvious