Jonathan Harvey’s Bird Concerto with Pianosong makes its Swiss debut on 10 October with Antoine Francoise and Ensemble Contrechamps conducted by Gregory Charette, at the Auditorium Ansermet in Geneva.
The 30-minute work is scored for piano, ensemble of 17 players and live electronics, with the soloist doubling a synthesizer programmed to emulate the calls of some forty colourful Californian bird calls. These samples revealed to Harvey level after level of detailed ornamentation - baroque curlicues and arabesques – that he sought to bring into dialogue with the instrumental ensemble, especially the piano.
Just as birds are drawn into a human musical language, so too does Harvey imagine the orchestra, like the birds, winging their way through the bright air. He adapted, too, the quasi-electronic frequency modulation found in birdsong to the electronic modulation of the orchestra. “If the songs and objects of the score can bring some inkling of how it might feel to be a human in the mind of a bird, or vice-versa, then I would be happy”, Harvey remarked.
It premiered in 2001 at the Cheltenham Festival with Joanna MacGregor, Martyn Brabbins, and Sinfonia 21; MacGregor would subsequently perform the piece with the London Sinfonietta, Schoenberg Ensemble, and International Contemporary Ensemble. Its other champions include Michael Wendeberg with Ensemble intercontemporain and Bertrand Chamayou, who performed it in 2019 with the Orchestre National de Metz and David Reiland. It was recorded in 2012 by Hideki Nagano with David Atheron and the London Sinfonietta, and most recently performed by Laura Sandee, Ensemble Insomnio and Ulrich Pohl at the Muziekgebouw in 2024.
The concerto will also appear in June 2027 with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group with Joseph Havlat as soloist, at both the CBSO Centre and London’s Royal Academy of Music, side-by-side with students. BCMG also perform another work expressive of Harvey’s aerial imagination in their coming season: Cirrus Light for solo clarinet (2012), his final published work, which was the fruit of his hours observing the high cloud formations of the summer sky from his wheelchair.