On 7 and 8 May Sinfonieorchester Basel and Ivor Bolton give the Swiss premiere of Oliver Knussen’s Music for a Puppet Court. The 10-minute set of four ‘Puzzle pieces’ for an antiphonally-arranged chamber orchestra exemplifies the composer’s mercurial handling of texture, melody, and ensemble.
Music for a Puppet Court is a recomposition and expansion of two puzzle-canons, attributed to the sixteenth century English composer John Lloyd, which Knussen arranged for ensemble in 1972, bookending two substantial variations of his own. The puzzle-canons were found in a court songbook dating from the early years of Henry VIII’s reign; the solutions to their crossword-like matrices were not discovered until the 1950s. The title is partly a reference to the historical origin of these canons, and partly the fanciful nature of Knussen’s instrumental settings.
One orchestra centres around a celesta, a guitar, and 2 flutes; the other around a harp and 2 clarinets. Winds, percussion, and strings amplify, echo, and sustain the music played by these core groups; the richly-varied palette of orchestral colours draws on delicate tintinnabulations, soft-edged textures created from combinations of winds, marimba, guitar, and harp, and fragments of melody that whiz across the ensemble.
The work was premiered by Simon Rattle and the London Sinfonietta at the Southbank Centre in 1983; the ensemble recorded the work with Knussen in 1996. An extract from the piece, alongside The Way to Castle Yonder, was choreographed for New York City Ballet by Miriam Mahdaviani in 2002 for In the Mi(d)st.