In 2019, Freya Waley-Cohen discovered Witch, a cycle of poems by Rebecca Tamás. Among the longer poems in the collection are a series of shorter “spells”, which Tamás defines as taking us “into a realm where words can influence the universe”. Almost immediately Waley-Cohen began making settings of some of these texts; it seemed “fitting and almost natural”, she thought, “to bring these incantations into the ritualistic setting of the concert hall”. Her Spell Book, performed complete for the first time by the Manchester Collective, with soprano Héloïse Werner and mezzos Fleur Barron and Katie Bray, now contains eight of these pieces, two of which were receiving their first performances here.
Tamás’s poems are vivid, oblique and fierce, and Waley-Cohen’s treatment of them often matches their strangeness and vehemence. The instrumental commentary varies from number to number, with only the first and last songs requiring the full ensemble, while some use just a string quartet. Words weren’t always discernible, though, and with the auditorium lights down – the performance was not quite staged, but it was enhanced with lighting effects and generous use of a smoke machine – it was sometimes hard to follow the course of the cycle. Yet the power of the presentation was unmistakable, whether it was Bray’s sinuous delivery of the opening Spell for Lilith, Barron’s confrontational Spell for Reality, or all three singers together in the final Spell for the Witch’s Hammer, steadily building intensity over John Adams-like pulsings from the ensemble.
As a prelude to the cycle the collective played the instrumental piece that Waley-Cohen composed as a tribute to her former teacher Oliver Knussen, and which was first performed at the Proms in 2019. Naiad is an elegant, eight-minute octet, which gains much of its touching power from its simplicity. Two kinds of material are superimposed – one flighty and florid, the other a slow-moving, chorale-like duet, and those musics pass between the instruments, to be differently coloured and inflected on each reworking, before finally settling on a falling, wistful phrase.