Luminous, but with shadows

Musical Times, Autumn 2003 by Jones, Nicholas

Anthony Powers at 50

NICHOLAS JONES surveys the oeuvre of the quinquagenarian English composer

FOR THE PAST TWENTY YEARS, the music of Anthony Powers has elicited much favourable criticism. Indeed, who could not fail to be impressed by the immaculate craftsmanship, the poetry and drama of its musical language, and the compelling blend of iridescent textures and dark sonorities? A pupil of Elisabeth Lutyens, Harrison Birtwistle and Nadia Boulanger,1 Powers has been the recipient of a number of high-profile commissions, including three from the BBC - for the orchestral pieces Stone, water, stars (1987) and Terrain (1992), and the cantata A picture of the world (2001); and one from Peter Maxwell Davies and the Fires of London - for the chamber piece Another part of the island (1980). These have enhanced considerably an already substantial and impressive output. But it was the success of the First Symphony (1994-96), premiered at the 1996 Proms, which brought Powers to the attention of a wider musical public. Since then he has consolidated his reputation with other distinguished works, including a song cycle, Memorials of sleep, which received its first performance at Aldeburgh in 1998, a Second Symphony (1998-99), and A picture of the world. And this year - his fiftieth - he has been working on three major commissions.

The first of these, a twelve-minute piano piece entitled Vista, was premiered by William Howard at the Cheltenham Festival in July. It is the first in a series of five projected works, all of which will involve the piano, based on ideas and imagery from Italian Renaissance gardens. The second commission, for the Hanover-based Ensemble Musica Viva, sets extracts from Seamus Heaney's cycle of poems Station island for speaker, baritone and six instrumentalists and will receive its first performance in October at the Lower Saxony Music Days. The most substantial commission, however, has been a work for the Three Choirs Festival, Air and angels, which received its premiere in Hereford Cathedral in August.

Scored for soprano and baritone soloists, mixed chorus and large orchestra, Air and angels is cast in seven movements and sets passages from John Donne's Holy sonnets and Songs and sonnets. Donne's text, which broadly concerns the intimate relationship between human and divine love, abounds in striking and mystical imagery and is perfectly complemented by Powers's rich and vibrant orchestration, which includes the deployment of electric and bass guitars. These 'exotic' instruments not only exploit the unique acoustic that a cathedral affords but also, according to the composer,2 highlight a specific connection between the guitar and its predecessor, the lute indeed some of the guitars' more soloistic moments (as in the fifth movement, for example) suggest a modern version of the sixteenth-century lute song.

The work's opening - a setting of the words 'At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blow your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise from death, you numberless infinities of souls' - effects a gradual build-up from a pianissimo pedal-note E on low strings and woodwind, with material in the choral lines derived from an octatonic scale: E-F-G-G#A#-B-C#-D-E (ex.1). The initial motive, x^sup 1^, permeates the whole work: prominently in the altos at the start of the second movement and the sopranos at the start of the sixth, and elsewhere in more subtle forms (see, for example, the chordal presentation in ex.2). Most of the time, however, the motive is heard linearly and defined by the interval between its first and last notes for its development. Thus the major third, E-G#, outlined at the start is expanded to the perfect fourth, B-E, at bars 5-6 (x^sup 2^ in ex.1), before firmly establishing this interval (vertically - now E-A) in the orchestra at fig.1 (ex.2: the first instance of the verticalisation of the four-note motive as chords (y)). As Air and angels proceeds, the perfect fourth version is employed for the more contemplative sections: at the start of the third movement, for instance, but most notably towards the end of the final movement (three bars before fig.69), where we encounter a reminiscence of the work's opening, evoking through its twenty-first-century modally-inflected lines a quasi sixteenth-century English sound-world. At the very end of the piece, in a very contemporary strategy, the perfect fourth yields to a tritone, C-#, thereby obscuring an unambiguous closure in an enriched tonality of D major.

From this brief discussion of Air and angels, five major characteristics of Powers's compositional rationale may be identified: a far from straightforward use of tonality; the development of small motivic cells, used harmonically as well as thematically; a penchant for counterpoint; a sense of musical recollection; and a rather unperturbed attitude towards musical tradition. This list of characteristics is far from complete, though, and the discussion will now move to examine several of Powers's other pieces.