Benedetti/LSO/Wigglesworth - Piper, Witter-Johnson, Jolas, Stevenson, and Simpson, 13 June 2021

Barbican Hall

Charlie Piper: Flēotan (2007)
Ayanna Witter-Johnson: Fairtrade? (2008)
Betsy Jolas: Well Met Suite (2016)
George Stevenson: Vanishing City (2020, world premiere)
Mark Simpson: Violin Concerto (2020-21, world premiere with live audience)

Nicola Benedetti (violin)

London Symphony Orchestra

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

Another return to old musical friends at an old musical haunt: in this case the LSO at the Barbican. It proved as moving and thrilling as any other, although quite different in nature, the earliest music here being the first of three LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme commissions, Charlie Piper’s Flēotan, from 2007, the newest two premieres of works from this year and last. Patricia Kopatchinskaja and François-Xavier Roth having been unable to travel here on account of interminable travel restrictions, the British premiere of Francisco Coll’s Violin Concerto had to be postponed, replaced with the live audience premiere of Mark Simpson’s Violin Concerto. The rest of the programme was unchanged. Ryan Wigglesworth stepped in at five days’ notice to learn and conduct five pieces new entirely new to him. Wigglesworth, Nicola Benedetti, and the LSO did all five pieces—and themselves—proud.


Flēotan’s title comes from an Old English word, meaning ‘to float’ or ‘fleeting’. (It would later form the foundation for a larger LSO work, The Twittering Machine.) Its glistening, somewhat metallic colours, seemingly born as much of French orchestral tradition as anything closer to home, were married, both in work and performance, to a sharply rhythmic profile. It came across as an extended fleeting moment: perhaps evoked more than merely represented. It was followed by Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s Fairtrade?, which aims to bring to the audience’s attention the high cost of ‘fast fashion’, encouraging us ‘to consider our economic choices and the cost of our convenience at others’ expense’. Whirring, whirling, the machine-like sounds here, aptly enough, came across as necessity rather than choice. A sense of going inwards, of highlighting humanity crushed by such processes, concluding this unsettling, finely crafted piece.

 

Betsy Jolas’s Well Met Suite transforms four pieces from her 2004 Well Met 04 – Pantomime for 12 strings, into a suite for strings. Sharply etched, even contagious (a word for our times!) the material maintained a keen sense of narrative, though not necessarily one that could be put into words. Relationships between instruments took on a life of their own: double bass pizzicato inciting solo cellos, in turn inciting strings above. Stamping of feet was no gimmick, coming across instead as light yet necessary reminder of theatrical roots. Were those shades of Bartók we heard at times? Perhaps, but there was no suspicion of imitation. Scurrying development imparted its own identity and justification.


George Stevenson’s Vanishing City remembers those who, over the winter of 1941-2, successfully undertook the well-nigh incredible task of camouflaging Leningrad’s skyline against German attack. A hard-edged opening gave way, via Russian-sounding brass, to fantasy and still darkness. Bells recalled to us not only what was being lost, but what was being kept. Like everything else heard here, there was fine command of the orchestra as instrument and as collective of instruments: testament to the excellence of performances from the LSO and Wigglesworth, as well of course as to that of the work of composers young and old.

The second half was given over to Mark Simpson’s Violin Concerto. Its scale, but also its emotional impact, were palpable, an audience starved of music for so long responding with enthusiasm to a performance that had kept them on the edge of their seats. Simpson had begun work on the piece just before lockdown last year, and had found, ‘as the pandemic worsened … that it was impossible to “carry on as normal”,’ that ‘the work would need to explore a different set of responses’. It certainly seemed to be the case that audience, composer, and performers alike were responding to shared experience. Its roots, aptly enough, lay in what had gone before, not least in Simpson’s strikingly fantastical violin writing: Szymanowski a hundred years on? Foreboding was recognisable, yet content was new. Tension between a past world in which we already had enough to be angry about and that which we wished—perhaps still wish—to conserve from it came to the boil, shaped and sustained through a keenly felt and projected narrative of five movements (Lamentoso, Dance, Andante Amoroso, Cadenza, Presto con fuoco – Finale). That second movement sounded just as the composer described it: ‘a fast, energetic dance that is in essence a response to having a huge amount of pent-up energy that I was unable to release during the period of lockdown restrictions.’ It and its successors likewise drew freely on ‘tradition’, whatever that may be, without sounding (or feeling) remotely hidebound. Benedetti’s virtuosity captivated throughout, nowhere more so than in a cadenza that was almost a solo violin work in itself—until one began to appreciate its dependence on earlier material, the Dance subdued, perhaps, and sublimated. The hectic frustration of the fifth movement, the LSO at inimitable full throttle, led to final release: much needed and much celebrated.

Pavilions: New Music Show 2 - London Sinfonietta/Brabbins, 5 November 2011

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Charlie Piper – Insomniac (world premiere: London Sinfonietta commission)
Dai Fujikura – Double Bass Concerto (world premiere: London Sinfonietta commission)
Steven Daverson – Elusive Tangibility III: ‘Clandestine Haze’ (United Kingdom premiere)
Iris ter Schiphorst – Zerstören (United Kingdom premiere)
Francisco Coll – Piedras (United Kingdom premiere)


Across the River Thames from the Queen Elizabeth Hall lies the Palace of Westminster, whose rescue from Guy Fawkes’s incendiary project some care to celebrate on 5th November. (Many of the rest of us wish there were a similarly elegant solution to rid ourselves of our venal, careerist political class.) The London Sinfonietta offered fireworks of its own, in the second of its Pavilions concerts: five United Kingdom premieres, of which two were also world premieres. Alas, I missed the earlier concert, which had presented no fewer than five world premieres of short works by James Olsen, Shiva Feshareki, Edmund Finnis, Tim Hodgkinson, and Isambard Khroustaliov.

It seemed to me that perhaps the strongest and certainly the most winningly suggestive piece was the third in Steven Daverson’s six-part Elusive Tangibility series, ‘Clandestine Haze’. The cycle is intended to treat with things that can be seen yet not necessarily touched: in this case, an ephemeral clandestine haze, such as might be evoked by the flickering of a candle. Written for alto flute/bass flute, bass clarinet/contra-bass clarinet, trombone, percussion, viola, and cello, it emerged as a fascinating study in shifting timbres and subtleties of motion, with the occasional surprise, which therefore truly registered. There is some use of extended techniques, for instance the breathy bass flute. This is a highly accomplished, even beguiling work of contemporary Klangfarbenmelodie: I especially liked the resonance – if only within my own imagination – of the trombone’s later line, as if a modern refugee from the spiritual land of Webern.

Francisco Coll’s Piedras (‘Stones’) was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association. Written for flute, oboe, clarinet/bass clarinet, bassoon/contrabassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, harp, piano, and two percussionists, it concerns itself, according to the composer, with a dualism that has long interested him between the stable and the unstable, partly derived, as is often his practice, from inspiration in the visual arts. The opening material, both in writing and performance (the London Sinfonietta under Martyn Brabbins), is lively and incisive, full of glittering sonorities, eventually transformed into more dream-like material: a Romantic horn call especially evocative here. Distinction between the two types of material is not, however, absolute: for me, some of the most striking music was to be found in the liminal zones of transition.

The first performance of Charlie Piper’s Insomniac opened the concert. A work in three movements, it concerns itself with three different states in another liminal zone, that between sleep and wakefulness, and is written for flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet/bass clarinet, soprano saxophone, bassoon/contrabassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, percussion, piano, harp, string quartet, and double bass. Throughout one senses a heartbeat, but varying context enables, even compels, one to hear and to respond to it differently. Jagged rhythms remain a constant in the first movement, whatever the Stravinskian changes of metre and gradual shifts in instrumentation. Slowly shifting harmonies lull in the second movement, inspired by Piper’s period of almost continual sunlight in Gotland. Externally induced insomnia – a neighbour’s party, for instance – provides the idea for the final movement, almost a concertante piece for aggressive trumpet, with a prominent role for double bass too.

Iris ter Schiphorst’s 2005-6 Zerstören was the only piece to employ electronics, alongside an ensemble of flute, oboe, clarinet, contrabass clarinet, contrabassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, piano, percussion, sampler, string quartet, and double bass. One sensed a sound-world for the modern city, the world of the motor car, yet it was not always clear, at least to me, what lies beneath that sonic surface. Perhaps further hearings would reveal more.

Dai Fujikura’s double bass concerto received its world premiere, Enno Senft the soloist, the Sinfonietta’s forces comprising flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet/bass clarinet, two horns, two trumpets, two percussionists, three violins, and two violas. It certainly proffered ample scope for Senft’s virtuosity: most impressive indeed. I was less convinced by the musical substance, heightening the doubts I felt earlier this year at the premiere of his Flare, for string quartet. For most of the time, the soloist employs pizzicato, turning to his bow towards the end. The initial material, according to the programme note, draws upon kinship with the ‘Shamisen’, a Japanese guitar-like instrument. The technique is certainly guitar-like and there is very much an ‘Oriental’ tinge to the music, a little too obviously so for these ears. Some material echoes Messiaen, again a little too obviously. For all the claims concerning new solo techniques, however, the writing is not that unconventional, whether in the many – too many? – slides in the writing for ensemble strings or the inevitable soloist resort to harmonics at the end, the latter sounding born of a perceived need to tick a box. There is some rather soft-edged neo-Romanticism to be heard too. Still, if this piece emerged a little too eagerly fashionable, it was a pleasure to experience six new works in predictably committed performances.