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	Programme Notes A - E


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Programme Notes A - E

Abstract Mirror - String Quintet (2002)

I have, for many years, wanted to write a quintet using an extra cello. Listening to the great Schubert Quintet, it occurred to me that one of the many virtues of that score is the way the second cello is absorbed effortlessly into the texture whereas I became fascinated with quite the reverse; with pointing up the added sonority of bass texture even, at one point, lowering the bottom string of the second cello. I was also attracted to the idea of initially using the viola as a sort of middle-man between the contrasting pairs of violins and cellos which often play at the extremes of their respective ranges.

This grouping is immediately apparent at the opening where the outer instruments hold chords against the chanting viola. By the time we reach the end of the music a transformation has occurred and the same material emerges in a quite different light. During the journey the instruments move in and out of integration, sometimes acting as a single minded corpus but frequently returning to a state of division.

The title refers not only to the reverse image that a mirror provides (reflected again in the use of pairs) but also to the idea of fragmentation, refraction and distortion.

Abstract Mirror was commissioned by The City Music Society (with funds donated by its members) and the Chilingirian String Quartet. It is in a single movement and lasts around twenty minutes.

At the Round Earth's Imagin'd Corners (1980)

At the Round Earth's Imagin'd Corners is dedicated to John Birch who commissioned it for the Southern Cathedrals' Festival in 1980 and directed the first performance in Chichester Cathedral. It is a setting of the sparkling poem by John Donne, the great 17th-century metaphysical poet. Like most of my music from this period, it is in a straightforward diatonic language, and has exuberant outbursts of brass which were specially arranged for a concert in the 1997 Spitalfields Festival given by the Joyful Company of Singers and the Fine Arts Brass Ensemble.

At the round erthe's imagin'd corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scatter'd bodies go:
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrranies,
Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space,
For if, above all these, my sins abound,
Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace
When we are there; here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent; for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.
John Donne

Baa Baa Black Sheep (1993)

The opera, to a text by a distinguished Australian novelist David Malouf, is based on the autobiographical short story Baa Baa Black Sheep by Rudyard Kipling. It describes how, as young children, Kipling and his sister were brought to England from India and sent to live with a retired ship's Captain, his fanatical wife (Auntirosa) and their bully of a son, Harry.

Auntirosa took violently against Kipling and the boy was constantly beaten. In his short story, Kipling constantly referred to his new abode as the House of Desolation, and called himself Punch, and his sister Judy.

This childhood experience marked Kipling for life and explains a great deal of his later writing - the often terrifying elements of revenge, for example, and of course the escape offered by fantasy. In Something of Myself, Kipling acknowledged that it was during this ordeal that he first thought about children living amongst animals.

The Opera marries up these two ideas using those elements of the Jungle Book that quite naturally seem to comment psychologically on the child's predicament. Each of the other characters from one world has its counterpart in the other, and thus a comparison of human and animal behaviour is drawn. So, for instance, the bully, Harry, becomes Mowgli's arch-enemy in the jungle, the tiger Sheer Khan.

David Malouf has further endowed the child with the power to effect his own "wild justice" - a power born of the imagination which was itself the product of abuse and the need to escape it.

Catch Me If You Can (1993)

Catch me if you can was specially written for the Haffner Wind Quintet. It belongs to a group of pieces (including my opera Baa Baa Black Sheep and the solo viola piece Odd Man Out) that are all connected to or inspired by children and in particular their behaviour and their games. What fascinates me is not just the fun or the invention but the elements of kindness and cruelty that often emerge side by side; the combinations of vulnerability and strength, or resignation and ruthlessness.

The music follows a Sonatina-like structure with a fast-slow-fast pattern. Most of the work is based on the notes that make up the short phrase of wide intervals first heard on the bassoon.

This opening vivo soon develops into multi-textured ideas and considerable friction. By contrast the slow, uncluttered centre of the work is, I think, perhaps coloured by recollections of playing Bartok's piano music for children, which certainly brightened up many a tedious hour for me in my schooldays. I especially liked the simple but rather wistful and melancholy folk melodies that so attracted Bartok. The last movement is a chase but once again there are some rather nasty and unexpected twists and turns.

Catch me if you can was commissioned by the National Federation of Music Societies with funds provided by BT and the Arts Council of Great Britain for the Haffner Wind Ensemble of London for the inaugural NFMS/BT Making More of Music Educational Artists Tour 1994.

Cello Concerto (1993, rev. 1997)

Michael Berkeley's Cello Concerto was written early in 1993 to a commission from the Milton Keynes February Festival and first performed by Robert Cohen and the London Mozart Players conducted by Nicholas Kraemer. It is a single-movement chamber concerto deliberately scored for the forces of the Boccherini and Haydn concerti. Light-hearted in spirit, it could easily be described as a divertissement.

A scherzando mood prevails, but the cello does initiate a number of more serious, rhapsodic interludes. Unusually, the soloist enters with a cadenza but this does not preclude a second cadenza-like passage towards the end of the music, providing a moment of repose before the rhythmic drive of the scherzando material takes the work to its lively conclusion.

Michael Berkeley extensively revised the work in 1997 for a performance at the Presteigne Festival, Wales, with Alice Neary, cello, and George Vass conducting the Festival Orchestra.

reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

Clarinet Concerto (1991)

The Clarinet Concerto was commissioned by Emma Johnson who gave the first performance at the 1991 Huddersfield Festival. Written in one continuous movement, it is the second of two purely instrumental works that I wrote while preparing the score of my opera Baa Baa Black Sheep. David Malouf's libretto is based on Rudyard Kipling's autobiographical short story of the same title which describes the traumatic experience of being brought to England by his parents and left with a fiercely Evangelical woman called Auntirosa who took violently against the young child and made his life a misery. This painful period as an outcast provided Kipling with the inspiration for the Jungle Book, where a child finds acceptance in the animal kingdom.

The opera combines these two worlds - the austere childhood experience and its magical and imagined counterpart. In very different ways this scenario has influenced both the concerto and Entertaining Master Punch which was written for Lontano. Where in that piece I was experimenting primarily with different colours and textures, including aspects of Gamelan, in the Clarinet Concerto I have been more concerned with a single musical argument; there is no percussion, but the role of the timpani is crucial. Although Kipling's childhood predicament is the starting point for the relationship between the clarinet and orchestra, the music develops from there into an abstract essay. The clarinet frequently merges with the woodwind section while at other times stands out against it. I decided to keep two clarinets in the orchestra so that the solo clarinet can be triple-voiced at one point, the orchestral clarinets ape the solo line like rooks mobbing an outsider. Indeed in the first part of the work the clarinet is frequently subsumed by the lines of the orchestra: rather like a beleaguered swimmer in heavy waves it dips, diappears and then bobs above the surface, making large leaps, taking great gulps of air. Gradually, orchestra and clarinet become more distinctly separate, and the wide intervals heard first at the opening grow closer together and become more obviously lyrical. The music closes, as it began, with the muttering timpani and a ticking clarinet, but now the quality of that ticking has changed irreparably.

Clarinet Quintet (1983)

The Clarinet Quintet was commissioned by the Battle Festival Society in memory of Anthony A Shillingford and first performed by Andrew Marriner and the Fairfield Quartet in Battle in July 1983. It has become one of Berkeley's most popular chamber works having been toured all over the world by the Nash Ensemble who have also recorded it with Michael Collins playing the clarinet.

The work opens with a gently lilting clarinet melody, evoking a slight air of melancholy which indeed permeates much of the piece. Though the theme is original, its parameters are derived from the melodies and rhythms of 16th century carols and all the music that follows is based on this opening tune.

As the tempo picks up pace, so the music takes on a more rhythmic, even jazzy feel, with the clarinet racing up and down arpeggios and scales at high speed. A return to the music of the opening is announced as the solo cello plays the theme in retrograde and then all five instruments take up this idea in overlapping free canon which Diana McVeagh has nicely described as having "the curiously tender effect of a blessing".

Concerto for Orchestra (2005)

This is the second piece I wrote as associate composer to the BBNOW and is dedicated to the orchestra's principal conductor, Richard Hickox. The first, Tristessa, featured the viola and cor anglais but this new work requires a degree of virtuosity from the whole orchestra.

The Concerto is in three movements with the outer two having a fast-slow-fast design which indeed mirrors the overall structure of the piece.

In thinking about the music I was conscious that the finding of ideas is seldom the problem; it is how they are developed that matters. So, I deliberately began with a very simple motif: falling tones (think Three Blind Mice!) and soon decided that the first two movements would be based on a downward progression while the third should invert the whole process and move constantly upwards.

If you extend three falling whole tones to a fourth you end up with the more angular sounding interval of an augmented (or sharpened fourth) - say C to F sharp. This led me to the second principal subject of the first movement, indeed the whole piece, and a slightly oriental pattern that was a prominent melodic figure in my first opera, Baa Baa Black Sheep.

Each of the outer movements begins with a gaudy, scherzo like atmosphere but become increasingly serious, even desperate, as the music progresses. The first is marked Energico (energetic) and has a slow section in which quiet, held strings form a background to the falling tones on the piano with gently lapping and overlapping woodwind (alto flute, clarinet in A and cor anglais). The somewhat driven conclusion to this opening movement sets up the still, beating heart of the piece, 'Threnody For A Sad Trumpet.'

The principal trumpet of the orchestra, Phillippe Schartz, and I had previously had some interesting discussions about things like mutes when he had often suggested a piece featuring his instrument. This slow movement seemed the perfect opportunity and it unfolded so naturally that I did away with anything that would corrupt the natural open bore beauty of a quiet trumpet played with great control. The falling scale is here put to a melancholy purpose and as I was working on the music on boxing day 2004 so word of the Tsunami filtered through. We all deal with these world tragedies at a certain layer of consciousness but they hit deeper when we can put a face and a personality to the victims. When I heard that Jane Attenborough (who I had met through her work at the Paul Hamlyn Foundation) had perished, along with her daughter and mother-in-law, I was profoundly shocked. It seemed natural that this music which is both grief stricken and yet strangely tranquil should be an In Memoriam to some one who had worked so passionately to bring the arts to a wider cross section of society.

Rudely breaking the mood, the final movement, Con Fuoco (with fire), begins with splashy and metallic Chinese Cymbals that trigger waves of upward rushing sound in the the orchestra at a point where, in the first movement the equivalent passage was racing downwards. This last third of the work is essentially a synthesis of what has passed and in the slow section the cor anglais and trumpet sadly remind us of where we have been. The music builds to a climax that pivots on the harmonic axis at the heart of the music and the upward striving scale. At its apex there is a moment of silence, an intake of breath, before a brief reflection on the Threnody is brutally curtailed by a final reordering of the opening; but now the thirds on the brass have inexorably and enharmonically (same notes, different context) moved from a bright and vaguely A major to the far more disquieting world of C sharp minor.

Coronach (1988)

Coronach is a Scottish Highland lament. It belongs to a group of pieces I wrote in the late 1980s exploring the complex emotions of grief: the rage and the anger, as well as the sadness - the other pieces being Fierce Tears I and II for oboe and piano, and Keening for saxophone and piano. Coronach also provided the nucleus of the melody for the Mother's lament in my new opera for Cheltenham, Baa Baa Black Sheep.

Eager eared listeners may also detect a short quote from the tempestuous and tragic Scottish Folk Song, the Bonny Earl of Moray.

Coronach was commissioned by the 1988 Presteigne Festival for a course for young string players and together with members of the English String Orchestra they gave the first performance in September 1988, conducted by William Boughton.

Cradle Song (1976)

This is one of three Christmas carols that I wrote in 1976, each with a single line and keyboard accompaniment. This year I re-set the music for SATB chorus and this will be the first outing for Cradle Song in its new form. I was very attracted by the devotional simplicity of these early anonymous words which create in effect a gentle lullaby. The carol is dedicated to my brother Julian.

Dark Sleep (1994)

Dark Sleep lasts just under ten minutes and was commissioned by the BBC for the Fairest Isle celebration of Henry Purcell and Michael Tippett. It looks back, as though in some troubled dream, to fragments of Purcell and Tippett and was first performed by Peter Donohoe at Pebble Mill in January 1995.

The widely spaced opening notes, marked "very slow and considered", are only much later re-ordered to reveal their genesis - Dido's lament from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. This slow introduction is only eight bars old before the music breaks into a quick and relentlessly turbulent passage. A brief reference to the opening of Tippett's Fourth Symphony leads into a slower, more expressive section; a predominantly mysterious, even glassy sound world from which emerges the poignant notes of the lament, now at last momentarily in their correct juxtaposition. Finally, a tiny fragment of the music is spinned obsessively until it falls out of control and back into the carefully placed notes of the opening.

Double Guitar Concerto (2004)

When, in the late 90's, the Katona twins first asked me to write for them, I went to a couple of their recitals and was amazed at their intuitive playing; it was as though each knew exactly where the other was heading before the notes were sounded. So I became intrigued by the idea of using the instruments not so much as contrasting or antiphonal voices but rather as one double instrument, hence the title. In another recent work, Tristessa, for viola, cor anglais, and orchestra, I also have the soloists playing together to create a two toned single voice for much of the music. But where that is a single span, this concerto is in three contrasting but related movements with the guitars having a role rather akin to a harpsichord in a Concerto Grosso. In yet another recent piece, Glass Tears for the OAE, a Shakuhachi was partnered by two Kotos which are indeed interchangeable with a harpsichord. There is a feeling then of revisiting the Concerto Grosso of Handel or the Brandenburg of Bach, but informed by a contemporary sensibility.

The first movement, Intrada, is the shortest and suggests material that will emerge later. The slow central movement, Stillness, animation, stillnesss, opens and closes with an opaque sense of space and clock-like chimes. In the finale, Pursuit, ideas from the previous two movements are brought together with the guitars being constantly harried by the ensemble. There is a slow middle section before the clarion motif of the Intrada further encourages the idea of a chase.

Easter (1982)

Easter was commissioned for a special service in commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the BBC. The anthem, using words by George Herbert and set for SATB choir, organ and optional brass, was performed by St Paul's Choir and the BBC Singers in the presence of Her Majesty the Queen on 12 July 1982 in St Paul's Cathedral, London.

The music richly depicts Herbert's wonderful words which contrast praise and celebration at the rising of the soul, with tenderness and humility for the fragility of the human condition.

The anthem is also a hymn in praise of music and Berkeley conjures up a touching solo melody for the words that begin 'Awake my Lute...'. Herbert's genius for metaphysical ideas led him to complete this line in a quite extraordinary way; 'His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key is best to celebrate this most high day.'

Elegy from the Oboe Concerto (1976)

Michael Berkeley's Oboe Concerto was commissioned by the Burnham Market Festival with funds provided by the Arts Council of Great Britain. It was first performed by Janet Craxton with the Snape Maltings Training Orchestra conducted by Michael Lankester.

Elegy is the final movement of the concerto, and dedicated to the memory of Benjamin Britten - the composer's godfather. It is based on an augmented fourth - the interval central to the War Requiem. Over these stark chords the oboe traces a melancholy line that gradually becomes infused with warmth. After a central climax a fugato section leads back to the opening subject but now its three soloists (oboe, violin, and viola) weaving between the shifting fourths until finally the oboe intones the notes Britten used to depict Wilfred Owen's line, `let us sleep now', whereupon the music gradually comes to rest.

Entertaining Master Punch (1991)

This piece is an offshoot of the opera, Baa Baa Black Sheep. It is based on an instant in Kipling's childhood when, aged 5, he and his sister were brought to England to be raised on the south coast by a mad evangelist woman called Auntie Rosa. She and her 13 year old son made Kipling's life a misery as he was continually beaten and at one point started to go blind. It was as a result of this torment that the young Kipling dreamed up, as a means of psychological escape and comment, the idea of a young outcast being accepted by animals - hence the 'Jungle Book'.

In the short autobiographical story Baa Baa Black Sheep which the opera is partially based on, Kipling refers to himself as Punch and his sister as Judy. Although this piece, written for the ensemble Lontano, takes Punch's predicament as its starting point and there are sudden breaks in the music, perhaps depicting sudden darkness and the bewildering effect that must have on a young child, the piece is not basically programmatic but an abstract instrumental essay which goes off at a tangent from my work on the opera.