Q Club ideal for University of Birmingham's huge concert

Mar 19 2010 By Christopher Morley

University of Birmingham’s music department heads to the Q Club for a big concert. Christopher Morley find out more.

The music department from the University of Birmingham moves out of its idyllic Edgbaston campus and back into the very heart of Birmingham for two spectacular concerts this week.

Previously known as the Methodist Central Hall, and latterly a rock venue, the Q Club in Corporation Street (opposite the magistrates’ court) is the venue for a huge presentation of works scored for massive forces – two from the Renaissance period and two from the second half of the 20th century.

Allegri’s famous Miserere, sole property of the Papacy but famously illicitly scribbled down by the teenaged Mozart in the Sistine Chapel, and the 40-part Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis, recently heard at Birmingham Town Hall in a spectacular concert from Ex Cathedra, rub many shoulders with music by Stockhausen and Luciano Berio.

Stockhausen’s Carre, composed in 1959/60, surrounds the audience with four groups of instrumentalists and singers, exploring subtle changes of timbre, and was inspired by the composer’s observations of shifting clouds from an aeroplane window over North America.

And Luciano Berio’s Laborintus II from 1965 will be staged within the vast arena of this historic religious venue turned night-club, bringing to life the work’s implied groupings of narrator, singers, instrumental ensemble – and “an unruly chorus of actors”.

Among the performers are the Birmingham University Singers, the New Music Ensemble, BEAST (Birmingham Electro-Acoustic Sound Theatre) and members of Birmingham Opera Company, who had their initial rehearsals for this project in the Old Joint Stock pub in Temple Row, just opposite St Philip’s Cathedral.

Vic Hoyland, from the university’s department of music, is one of the instigators of this mammoth conception, which he says was originally devised in the 1990s.

“Around 15 years ago my colleague Jonty Harrison, myself, our New Music Ensemble, plus some singers from Birmingham Conservatoire, put on Stockhausen’s Momente in collaboration with the then very youthful Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, and it attracted Simon Rattle’s attention,” he said.

“Since those early, heady days, somewhere in the back of my mind, and shared with Jonty, has been a dream to attempt a performance of Carré.

Vic said the work is significantly shorter than Momente but the reason it had been left on the shelf until now was due to the complexities of the performance.

These include the necessity for a large orchestra and chamber choir, split into four teams, with the audience “inside” the performance, surrounded by the four ensembles.