London Sinfonietta/Benjamin - Boulez, 5 October 2025

 

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Mémoriale; …explosante-fixe…

Michael Cox (flute)
Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble

Sound Intermedia (sound projection)

London Sinfonietta

George Benjamin (conductor)

Pierre Boulez’s centenary celebrations are far from over. Here, the opening concert of the London Sinfonietta’s 2025-26 season presented the complex relationship between the 1985 Mémoriale, written in memory of flautist Laurence Beauregard, and …explosante-fixe…, initially a Stravinsky memorial, which both furnished material for Mémoriale and, in its final form, of 1993, written once technology permitted, in turn drew on the earlier (and later) work. 

First came the shorter Mémoriale (following an introduction to the composer in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer by Jonathan Cross and Gillian Moore). Knowing …explosante-fixe… better – also having heard it more recently, at this year’s Salzburg Festival – I immediately began to notice and reflect on the differences and points in common, perhaps most obviously that Mémoriale is very much a piece for solo flute and small ensemble, whereas the later work seems increasingly to derive its larger ensemble, not only electronics, from a flute at its physical and conceptual centre. It sounded akin to a flute concerto in miniature, Michael Cox here and later the expert soloist, euphonious, virtuosic, and much more. Boulezian proliferation was experienced as vividly as anyone might imagine, perhaps more so, surrounding, ornamenting, and in turn shaping an unmistakeable, almost Classical line at its centre, albeit very much haunted and inspired, like so much of Boulez’s music, by Debussy. 

There followed an enlightening discussion between Moore and, first Andrew Gerzso, with whom Boulez worked on the realisation of …explosante-fixe…, among other works, followed by George Benjamin, who would conduct the work this evening, armed with players of the London Sinfonietta and their side-by-side Royal Academy Manson Ensemble colleagues to illustrate with musical examples. Gerzso clearly explained Boulez’s dissatisfaction with earlier attempts to integrate acoustic and electronic music, needing ‘score-following’ technology such as he first heard in Philippe Manoury’s Jupiter, so as to avoid the players’ enslavement to the tape. Boulez’s longterm interest in music as commentary upon itself, multiphonics, the airiness of ‘Aeolian’ sounds, the importance of Paul Klee, and much more were rendered vividly comprehensible. Benjamin in turn attended to the work’s musical content and form, Boulez’s melismatic writing but one of many telling links between the two commentaries (as, one might say, in his composition too). 

For …explosante-fixe…, Cox was joined by co-soloists Karen Jones and Sofia Patterson Guttierez. Whether it was the particularity of performance, that particularity integral to Boulez’s use of electronics, the contextualisation afforded by prior discussion, or something else, much sounded strangely, if hardly surprisingly, post-Stravinskian, flute lines included. The Rite of Spring can rarely have seemed so present, so haunting. Benjamin imparted an urgency to the opening perhaps greater than I have previously heard, instigating a frenetic, delirious outpouring of sound. He soon relaxed, though, in a notably fluid reading, enabling éclat to transform itself into sensuality, both of course hallmarks of Boulez’s music. In composer, conductor, and players’ bending of time, rubato and performance seemed reborn before our ears. I was struck anew by the nerviness of some of the string writing and its proliferating consequences, but equally later by exquisite, frankly erotic longing. All manner of other detail emerged as if for the first time: perhaps, in some cases, it was. Electronics assumed their rightful role as another section, here almost in place of percussion though that need not be so, of the organism we know as the orchestra. In its three-movement form, the ‘modern classicism’ (Arnold Whittall) of this phase in Boulez’s career courted comparison with Mozart: a sinfonia concertante reimagined. The clarity Benjamin brought to the score would surely have impressed the composer himself. It was difficult also not to feel that melancholic, even elegiac quality to the close, as all returned to E-flat (Es/S for Stravinsky), might have moved him as it did us.

LSO Chamber Ensemble et al./Pascal - Boulez, 27 January 2025

Milton Court

Initiale
Messagesquisse
Dérive 1
Sonatine for flute and piano
Anthèmes 2 for violin and live electronics

Benjamin Marquise Gilmore (violin)

David Cohen (cello)

Gareth Davies (flute)

Joseph Horvat (piano)

Sound Intermedia

LSO Chamber Ensemble

Guildhall School Cellos

Maxime Pascal (conductor)

The Boulez centenary celebrations are underway. If London’s – and much of the rest of the world’s – response so far looks more muted than one might have hoped, something is better than nothing and there is all the more reason to cherish what we have. Following an afternoon symposium (oddly timed on a Monday, when most of us must work) the Barbican Centre offered an excellent chamber concert of five works, from LSO musicians and friends, directed where appropriate by Maxime Pascal.

What could have been better as an opening than the 1987 brass fanfare Initiale, which I had last heard at the opening of Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal thirty years later? Although Milton Court lacks a ready possibility – at least unless electronics are employed – for the Gabrieli-like spatial element deployed in Frank Gehry’s Berlin hall, the LSO players’ balcony elevation nonetheless signalled development of our concert expectations beyond Boulez’s ‘museum’ of the musical past. Metrical complexity, rubato implied through exactitude, was there from the off. More kaleidoscopic and varied in mood than your typical fanfare, its cascading, proliferating echoes of Répons helped establish aural expectations for what was to come.

Messagesquisse was given by David Cohen and six cellists from the Guildhall School (Gabriel Francis-Deqhani, Kosta Popovic, Nathaniel Horton, James Conway, Theo Bently Curtin, and Seth Collin), conducted by Pascal with properly Boulezian precision and commitment. I was again intrigued and delighted by the tricks music could play on my perception—or perhaps the other way round. Initially, I could have sworn one cello was not playing, only to see and then hear that it was, at a pitch I had mistakenly thought another was: a smaller-scale sense, perhaps, of that sense of spatial magic squares that would so inform a later masterwork such as sur Incises (via, perhaps, common inspiration ultimately in Les Noces). Brimming with melody, impassioned of mood, harmonically compelling: it was everything Boulez is, and everything his detractors would say his music is not. Dynamic contrasts and all manner of other post-Beethovenian dialectics abounded in ‘organised delirium’. Contagious proliferation of a single line suggested at times a very French inheritance in the music of the clavecinistes. At times, I even thought of Nono. And what performances these were, reminding any who might need it of the crucial role of performance in Boulez’s music.

The shifting transformations of Dérive 1 proved an similar yet different delight, music spiralling before our ears in a mesmerising tour of aural pleasure. The temptation was to ask for more, which of course we should eventually have in its successor, Dérive 2. This music, though, spoke for itself, no mere precursor but a masterwork of proliferation in its own right.

The Sonatine for flute and piano received an outstanding and confounding performance from Gareth Davies and Joseph Havlet. No one would dispute the work’s allure, yet the array of elements in its first movement that might – just might – have to them something of the more neoclassical Schoenberg (and Debussy) seemed more than ever to rejoice in the necessity of internal and eternal explosion and destruction. It might not sound quite ‘like’ the Second Piano Sonata, but the Sonatine’s progress suggested ever closer kinship, emotionally and intellectually. Here, it felt, was instantiated a post-Notations world of infinite possibility.

Last up was Benjamin Maruise Gilmore with Ian Dearden and Jonathan Green of Sound Intermedia in Anthèmes 2. Its world of violin and electronics sounded, like much else, both old and new: not so very different from Messagesquisse or other works with solo and double/shadow, and yet… Echoes expected and unexpected beguiled and surprised as music from plainchant to Messiaen and beyond ricocheted around us. Indeed, an unsuspected harmonic sweetness suggested what remain less acknowledged lessons learned from Boulez’s teacher. As waves of sound lapped upon our consciousnesses, it was Debussy’s La Mer, endlessly transformed, that next suggested itself as fons et origo; that and, of course, the composer’s own endless imagination. The museum lives and develops; so do music and performance history of Boulez, one of its newer recruits.

Violet, Music Theatre Wales, 23 June 2022

Hackney Empire

Violet – Anna Dennis
Felix – Richard Burkhard
Laura – Frances Gregory
Clockkeeper – Andrew MacKenzie-Wicks

Jude Christian (director)
Maya Shimmin (assistant director)
Rosie Elnile (designs)
Cécile Trémolières (costumes)
Jackie Shemesh (lighting)
Adam Sinclair (animation)
Jasmin Kent Rodgman (bell sound design)

Sound Intermedia (sound design)

London Sinfonietta

Andrew Gourlay (conductor)

Completed in late 2019 and scheduled to premiere in the lost year of 2020, Violet, an excellent new one-act opera by Tom Coult and Alice Birch finally had its first performance earlier this month in Aldeburgh. Jude Christian’s production for Music Theatre Wales has now reached, for one night only, London’s Hackney Empire, under the Royal Opera House umbrella. In a pre-performance talk, Coult recalled his fears during that terrible intervening period that his first opera would prove a white elephant, that it would never be seen, that the companies involved would go bankrupt, and so on. Whilst I am sure it will be no comfort, the greater hunger so many of us feel for live performance following its enforced suppression may well have resulted in a more warmly appreciative reception. At any rate, a large as well as enthusiastic audience greeted Violet’s London premiere, current transport difficulties notwithstanding. 

Time is, quite literally, of the essence here. It is the first word we hear; it haunts libretto, score, and stage action; we experience the dark side of both its regularity and what might happen, were it to malfunction. The overarching concept is of a world in which, suddenly and without direct explanation, each day an hour is lost; the number of the day (increasing) and the number of its hours (decreasing) displayed by the somewhat mysterious Clockkeeper. It is surely not for nothing that the clock resembles a gallows, nor that Violet’s husband Felix, the stunting, repressive conventionality of whose domestic regime seems to mirror that of society at large, ends up being hanged from it. There are prospects of liberation, or at least rebellion: depressed and holed up in her time-regulated household, Violet grasps the possibility of being different, even of living. But all the while, time is lost—and crucially, one hears that musically, in the contest of narrowing and widening horizons. Like a temporal concertina, the frame is clear, but within that framing, when possibilities are presented, stylistic variety asserts itself. Birch’s precise yet open language is not so much mirrored as complemented, expanded upon, by Coult’s score. That is to say, this is (on my terms, anyway) a real opera, not a mere play set to music. 

A thirteen-strong London Sinfonietta ensemble, directed with sympathy and understanding by Andrew Gourlay, ensured that conventional and less conventional instruments (e.g. pitch pipes, dog clickers, and kalimba, as well as prepared instruments and different tunings for strings) combine, associate, and dissociate with a combination of clockwork precision and ominous disarray such as characterises the work ‘itself’. The work is introduced and punctuated by passages of electronic music, based on bell sounds (tolling, pealing, or something else?) on which Coult collaborated with Jasmin Kent Rodgman. What, in abstracto, might seem obvious musical devices—perhaps they are, yet so what?—such as prolongation and other transformation of musical material as time runs out make their point frighteningly well. Coult writes evocatively of the music becoming ‘more desiccated, frayed, curdled’; that is very much what we hear.   

Christian’s staging, focused straightforwardly on Violet’s kitchen and the clock, tells the story intelligently and, again, openly. We are never told what to think, but we are supported in doing so. Cécile Trémolières’s costumes breathe the same air of restriction, yet never constrain us to a particular time or place. Transformations in Violet’s mood are milestones—or perhaps not, since nothing is averted. Anna Dennis’s assumption of the title role is authoritative: assured and again suggesting ambiguity in what we might make of it. Although an announcement was made concerning Burkhard’s recovery from illness, one would not have known. His dark yet subtle malevolence was part and parcel of that created by composer and librettist. Frances Gregory’s Laura hovered tantalisingly between escape and capitulation, similar to Violet, yet different. Andrew MacKenzie Wicks gave a striking performance of the acts—and non-acts—of the Clockkeeper, keeping his cards properly close to his chest. 

There are hints that the catastrophe is in part environmental, but that is not the principal point and may not be the cause. For time runs out as cruelly as it governs our ‘normal’ lives. A final scene frames and intensifies our response. A mediated world of banal quiz shows, time again at a premium, and military conflict, likewise, plays out: that ‘out’ as crucial as in the prior action. There is a political point here; indeed, there are several. It is up to us, though, to divine what it is, what we should do, how we must change. Like Violet emerging from her depression, then; and yet, if such would be the outcome, what might be the point? The hope we lost in 2020, the hope we should have heard in Fidelio, had it and Beethoven not been silenced in his anniversary year, become ever more distant. Late capitalism becomes ever later; the very automation that should afford us greater leisure, even greater freedom, continues to benefit not the many, but the few. Redistribution of wealth, of time, of hope must wait, although—as in the scene when Felix tries to glean from the Clockkeeper just what is going on—no one tells us why.

BBC Proms (8) - BBC SSO/Volkov - Lewis and Beethoven, 26 August 2021

Royal Albert Hall

George Lewis: Minds in Flux (world premiere)
Beethoven: Concert Aria: ‘Ah! perfido’ op.65
Beethoven: Symphony no.2 in D major, op.36

Lucy Crowe (soprano)

Damon Holzborn (computer software design/realisation)

Sound Intermedia

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Ilan Volkov (conductor)

This year’s Proms premieres—those I have heard, anyway—have been a mixed bunch: professional enough, yet often safe to the point of anodyne, having one long instead for something decidedly ‘new’ from the repertoire, be it Haydn or Ligeti, Machaut or Schoenberg. George Lewis’s Minds in Flux, however, was the real thing: music with something to say, some point to it beyond fulfilling a commission, whether or not that ‘something’, that ‘point’, remains elusive to verbal expression. It was, dare I suggest, an Albert Hall work too, making full use of the notorious space and acoustic, not so as to be enslaved by it, but rather to create new space within and beyond it, by virtue—not unlike Stockhausen—of electronic means. From its opening, electronic sounds surrounding us, woodwind and their electronic shadows, progeny, Doppelgänger echoing across the hall like gulls, reference points proved but the starting point for music both familiar and unfamiliar. A Stravinsky-meets-jazz chorale, a song, a dance, a moment of rage, a moment of consolation: here was a sonic cornucopia always in flux, the product of minds in flux. If Mahler wanted a symphony to contain everything, a whole world, Lewis seemed to say: there are many more worlds; there are silenced voices too in our colonised world. Let us hear them; let us consider them. It was ominously inviting and invitingly ominous. Perhaps it referred, perhaps not; above all, it played and invited us, our minds and bodies, to play. Charles Ives, I fancied, might have understood this strikingly intelligent, strikingly democratic invitation.

Lucy Crowe joined the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov for Beethoven’s concert aria, ‘Ah! perfido’. It was an almost equally intense reading, dignified in its post-Mozartian, slightly neoclassical way, alert, like Lewis’s work and the performance we had heard of it, to musical shadows too. Strikingly sincere, Crowe showed us that any doubts we might have to the verse (Metastasian recitative, followed by an anonymous aria text) are our problem, or other performers’, not intrinsic. Well supported and, where appropriate, directed by Volkov, Crowe rightly took her time then, rightly, erupted. Here was Beethoven on a grand scale, with passages of moving intimacy both contrasted with and necessary to that scale. 

The Second Symphony followed, in a performance of many virtues, particularly during its second and fourth movements, yet one which never quite addressed that necessary Beethovenian question: what does this mean to us? Again, an answer need not, arguably cannot, be verbal, yet Beethoven’s humanism demands something. The introduction to the first movement was alert and detailed, characterised as elsewhere by fine playing from the BBC SSO. Volkov never quite pinned down a basic pulse, though, with the consequence that it sounded restless rather than expectant, a collection rather than a chain of ideas. The main ‘Allegro con brio’ was better: occasionally hard-driven, yet essentially permitted to speak for itself and all the better for it. If it lacked inevitability, that was more apparent in the ‘Larghetto’, heard also with a keen sense of the music’s sheer loveliness. There was darkness to its heart, too, speaking of and through dialectic necessity. The scherzo was again driven hard, distant rather than immediate. Its trio was well pointed, if slightly lacking in flow. Volkov captured very well the difficult balance at the onset of the finale between quirky incident and onward propulsion. If it was good natured, it had bite too.

Passion, Music Theatre Wales, 13 October 2018

(sung in English)

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Images: Clive Barda
Jennifer France (Her) and National Dance Company Wales

Her – Jennifer France

Him – Johnny Herford

Dancers – Cyril Durand-Gasselin, Nikita Goile, Ed Myhill, Julia Rieder, Malik Williams, Queenie Maidment-Otlet

Michael McCarthy, Caroline Finn (co-directors)

Simon Banham (designs)

Joe Fletcher (lighting)

EXAUDI

Sound Intermedia (sound design, after original concept by Thierry Cudoys)

London Sinfonietta

Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)

Ten years ago, I saw one of the first performances of Pascal Dusapin’s Passion at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. Now, Music Theatre Wales and National Dance Company Wales give the opera its first United Kingdom production – in an English translation by Amanda Holden from the original Italian: the first time, I believe, that a Dusapin opera has been performed in translation. (I shall admit to a slight disappointment that it was not in Welsh: maybe next time.) The premiere took place two nights earlier in Basingstoke; I saw this resourceful, imaginative dance staging at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Titles might not have been a bad idea, but there is always something to be said for making an audience listen, or at least encouraging it to do so. (There was, alas, some extraordinary distracting behaviour from a few bad apples on this occasion, one woman near me aggressively scratching herself like an alley-cat throughout, another apparently running a tombola from her handbag. Such highly distracting goings on did not appear to be part of a directorial Konzept; perhaps, however, I was missing the point.)

Dusapin’s Orpheus or rather Eurydice, opera, the lovers abstracted to Her and Him, Lei and Lui, with shadowing support from ‘The Others’ (Gli Altri), takes its place in perhaps the most venerable of all operatic traditions. Orpheus, son of Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry, and, according to some tellings of the legend, Apollo’s too, tamed animals, even charmed Hades itself, through performance on his lyre – here suggested, yet perhaps not merely to be identified with, the oud, Rihib Azar’s part and performance evocative, generative, and questioning towards the close. Orpheus’s purview – and that of Greek mousikē more generally – was greater than what we, in an age cursed by specialisation, might consider to be ‘music’: he was poet, enchanter and prophet; he communicated the qualities of all the Muses through his identity as a musical performer. Where, however, is Eurydice in all that? As ‘traditional’ a supportive figure, a victim, as ever? Here she is granted, or better she assumes, newfound agency. As Dusapin, quoted in the progamme, put it: ‘I sincerely wanted to do something with this myth, and yet I wasn’t really attracted to a story where a woman dies, engulfed by flames, sacrificed by the stare of an impatient man … So I thought: “What if the woman knew? And what if she suddenly decided not to go back towards the light?”’ Just as composers from Monteverdi to Birtwistle have retold, remade the myth in the light of their own concerns, the concerns of their times too, so have Dusapin and a splendidly integrated team of performers.

Johnny Herford (Him) and National Dance Company Wales

Worthy successors to the not inconsiderable team of Barbara Hannigan, Georg Nigl, Ensemble Musicatreize, Ensemble Modern, and Franck Ollu, Jennifer France, Johnny Herford, EXAUDI, the London Sinfonietta, and Geoffrey Paterson offered an outstanding musical performance, ably shadowed, incited, and criticised by a fine team of dancers. One had little doubt that the Sinfonietta and Paterson were not only presenting what one was ‘supposed’ to hear, but in the emphatic sense performing it, bringing it into life and revealing its form in the dramatic here and now. Comparisons make little sense in the case of an artist such as Hannigan; perhaps they do far more rarely than many of us would care to admit. France’s performance had us believe in this particular Eurydice, her particular concerns and ‘character’: what could be more feminist than that? Herford cheerfully yet wistfully consented to and furthered a remodelling of Orpheus’s role that leaves us all the richer. With none of Nigl’s sometimes disconcerting idiosyncrasies, he – as indeed did the rest of the team – suggested that we are all the richer for this recent chapter in the progress of the myth. A subtly raucous – yes, that is intended – duet between trombone and oboe; a recognisably celestrial yet menacing glimpse of heaven; a (false?) witness of the clavecin ‘past’; an approach to an expected final unison that proved not to be such at all: these and many more such moments attested to the fleeting quality of memory, the necessity of multiple standpoints in and of the present.

Prom 65: BBC SO/Bychkov - Ravel, Berio, and Stravinsky, 31 August 2018

Royal Albert Hall

Ravel: La Valse

Berio: Sinfonia

Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

London Voices (chorus master: Ben Parry)

Ian Dearden, Sound Intermedia (sound projection)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Semyon Bychkov (conductor)

A richly allusive programme and performance, this. With any artwork – even, one might say, with anything at all – we all bring something different to it and take away something different too. With Berio in meta-mode, that becomes still more the case, in Sinfonia at least as much as in, say, La vera storia. (Will someone please, please stage that – or indeed any of the composer’s operas? The closest I have come was a wonderful performance of Laborintus II in Berlin from Simon Rattle et al.) Both La Valse and The Rite of Spring are quoted – allusively and/or elusively? – in Sinfonia, of course, but that is perhaps not really the point; or at least it was not for this particular listener on this particular occasion. I was led to think what ballet and opera might be or have been, what their relationships might be or have been, how they relate to the ‘symphony’ or sinfonia, and indeed to that thing, that practice, that whatever-and/or-however-we-want-to-think-of-and/or-experience-it we call ‘music’.

La Valse opened de profundis, as a companion to the yet-to-be-heard Rite: highly, ominously rhythmic, waltz fragments and later waltzes (?) themselves evolving. Much was seen, or rather heard – although somehow I fancied I saw things here too, in a ballet of the mind – as if through a kaleidoscope. The business of the senses, as of the mind, is messy, contradictory. Semyon Bychkov and the BBC Symphony Orchestra imparted unease as much through variegation of colour as rubato or harmony. There was often, not always, a mechanistic quality: paradoxical perhaps, given the apparent freedom of the waltz(ing), yet in keeping with the dialectics at work in the rest of the evening’s programme. Such, after all is this work, that conflict conveyed with disturbing magic in this performance.

The darkness of the opening chord of Sinfonia seemed, in context, to relate to the opening of La Valse. Voices entered, rendering – to use an appropriately Berian term – the music ‘lighter’ perhaps, or at least differently mysterious. Then they were off. Words from Claude L­évi-Strauss – I do not think we should say this is Lévi-Strauss him- or itself, or should we? – emerged, individual voices emerged: from the mass and vice versa. Words and sound, words’ relationship with sound, with instruments, and so on: all this and more was not just what we were led to think about; it was what we experienced. It was music. How ‘symphonic’ it was or should have been really depends entirely upon definitions: not an interesting game, really, save for the analytical philosopher – who, tellingly, will rarely have anything to tell us about music.

The name, the sound of Martin Luther King came together, like the musical forces as a whole, in the second movement. Points – however understood – of precision, of incision, not least from piano and brass seemed to gain meaning against the backdrop of a more mysterious ‘mass’, again however understood; and vice versa. Deconstruction was not only our lot, our necessity; it was our joy, our freedom, our music. Beguiling yet menacing, the wonderland of the third movement, like its Mahlerian bedding, asked us: what does this mean, where are we heading, perhaps even who cares? And of course, it told us: ‘keep going’. Interplay between voices and instruments, as well as their differentiation, seemed especially apparent in this performance. ‘Thank you, Mr Bychkov’: from which the fourth movement flowed, a tributary perhaps, or even a tribute, as if Mahler’s ‘O Röschen rot,’ yet not, emphatically not. This and the fifth movement sounded, as indeed the performance had increasingly, retrospectively as a whole, as if an instrumental, vocal, electronic madrigal reborn, both consciously and unconsciously. The opening to the latter, with its piano, flute, and soprano trio, seemed to incite a rejuvenation or better a reinvention of the work’s earlier musical worlds in both unity and dissolution.

Again in context, the multifarious woodwind lines of The Rite of Spring’s opening sounded as if a response to Berio. Wilder, I think, even now: testament to a performance that refused to treat this totemic work as a glossy ‘orchestral showpiece’. It was never, ever slick, constantly ratcheting the rhythmic and harmonic tension. Given Stravinsky’s method, ‘developed’ is probably the wrong word, yet Bychkov heard and projected it as a single, vivid narrative that yet gave space and voice to its individual scenes. Motivic insistence and transformation rightly did much of the work, grinding of ritualistic gears lacking nothing in force, willpower, and fatal inevitability, such affinities and conflicts readily evoking parallels in the previous two works on the programme. ‘The Sacrifice’ began as if a second act to a wordless opera; in a sense, it is: a new world or at least a new standpoint that only makes sense in reference to its predecessor. (Might one not say the same of movements of a symphony, or a sinfonia?) There was strangeness here that was anything but appliqué: no effort to be different, no effort to impress. Perhaps the challenge of playing the Rite today is actually to play it as music. Perhaps the same might also be said of the challenge of listening to it and indeed to any music.

Gould/London Sinfonietta/RAM Manson Ensemble/Lischke - Boulez and Stockhausen, 5 December 2015

Royal Festival Hall

Boulez – Dérive 1

Boulez – Anthèmes 2
Stockhausen – Hymnen: Region III

Clio Gould (violin)

Sound Intermedia

Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble

London Sinfonietta

Wolfgang Lischke (conductor)

 

It is with great sadness that I find this Boulez anniversary year drawing to a close. What a year it has been, with magnificent performances of the composer’s œuvre across Europe (it would seem far less so in the United States, the New York Philharmonic’s silence unforgivable). Those wishing to programme Boulez’s music should now have every justification they need: a wealth of performers possessed of both passion and excellence, and large audiences, hungry to hear more. (That goes for so much post-war New Music, which, bizarrely, I suppose we can still just about call this repertoire.) Yet I fear that silence will resume come 2016, the most reactionary in the audience – who, for some reason, seem always to have most say – breathing a sigh of relief that they can safely return to wall-to-wall Rachmaninov.

 

Let us hope not and let us do what we can to ensure not. The London Sinfonietta’s performances here were as excellent as one might have expected, arguably still more so. Not least of my musical epiphanies this year was the moment when Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra finally had Dérive 2 click into place for me. What had puzzled me – and what some friends had disdained as unworthy of the composer – stood revealed as the masterpiece Barenboim had claimed. Dérive 1, which I do not think I have heard performed this year otherwise, worked beautifully as an ‘overture’. Boulez’s writing, the Sinfonietta’s playing, and Wolfgang Lischke’s finely-judged direction drew one in: had one lose oneself again in material from Répons and Messagesquisse. What one might, I suppose, call developing variation – Boulez’s fabled Brahms-scepticism notwithstanding – manifested itself with equal clarity and warmth, almost as if we were hearing it from the composer himself. The six chords ‘derived’ from SACHER worked their magic: melodic, harmonic, structural. One felt – as well as knew intellectually – the processes, in an intriguing dialectic between Stravinskian clarity and Debussyan ambiguity, at work, and longed for more, indeed for Dérive 2.

 

Clio Gould’s performance of Anthèmes 2 with the ever-excellent Sound Intermedia was quite outstanding, immediately rendering irrelevant any doubts about the suitability of the venue. Again – and perhaps this was a consequence of a good few performance opportunities throughout the year – connections with other works manifested themselves, but they were of secondary importance when compared with the confidence, virtuosity, and musicality with which Gould performed this indispensable work. It sounded and resounded with all the musical drama and depth of a solo violin work by Bach. In fact, the great D minor Chaconne came to my mind, relevantly or otherwise, as an unacknowledged progenitor. Light and shadow, concision and proliferation, harmony and counterpoint intellectual and emotional drama: all of these and many more combined in ways that seemed created almost on the spot, in order to offer the most ‘compleat’ performance I have heard of the work. The humorous, throw-away ending remains as splendid as ever.

 

Stockhausen probably does even less well than Boulez in performing terms. The last big opportunity I had was the unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime (I fear!) production of Mittwoch in Birmingham. Opera companies across the world should unite, having nothing to lose but their insipid – at best – bel canto chains; instead, Licht languishes unperformed as a whole, anywhere, ever. With this performance of Region III from Hymnen, we heard and again felt just a little of what we were missing. I must admit that I will sometimes approach some of Stockhausen’s pronouncements on his music with a little scepticism. (Surely not?!) However, words from the composer on process and on what I think we can call meaning, words I only read afterwards, seemed to me very much to tally with another fine performance, members of the London Sinfonietta now joined by inspired and inspiring musicians from the Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble. ‘National anthems,’ Stockhausen claimed, are the most familiar music imaginable. … When familiar music is integrated into a composition of unknown, new music, it is possible,’ and here it certainly seemed accomplished, ‘to hear especially well how it was integrated: untransformed, more or less transformed, transposed or modulated. The more self-evident the what, the more attentive one becomes to the how.’ (Think, for instance, of Webern’s and Schoenberg’s Bach transcriptions.) Yet, equally importantly, ‘national anthems are more than national anthems; they are “charged” with time, with history – with past, present and future. They accentuate the subjectivity of people in a time when uniformity is all too often mistaken for universality.’ An intriguing, provocative thought, but not just a thought: there seemed in performance to be genuine experience, through those musical processes, of that thought. Objets trouvés took on or, better, continued lives of their own, somewhere in between integration and transformation. We asked what their relationship to us was, had been, might yet be. Insofar as I could tell, the musicians seemed to responding aurally as well as to what was written for them; I do not know the work well enough to be sure. What I can be sure of is that the performance convinced me, and again left me wanting to hear more. Next time, let us hope, more than a single Region, but many thanks indeed are due to the London Sinfonietta for this opportunity, splendidly taken!

The Stockhausen performance was recorded by BBC Radio 3 to form part of its broadcast quadrophonic sound premiere of Hymnen on New Year’s Day, 2016. It is described as being part of its ‘New Year New Music focus’; I suppose we should disregard the unloveliness of the phrase and be grateful that Radio 3 still broadcasts such music at all.

 

London Sinfonietta/Volkov: James Dillon, Stabat mater dolorosa, 21 January 2015

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Stabat mater dolorosa (London premiere)

BBC Singers
London Sinfonietta
Sound Intermedia
Ilan Volkov (conductor)

James Dillon’s ‘cantata’ – his own description – Stabat mater dolorosa had its first performance at last November’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival; this was its London premiere. Co-commissioned by the HCMF, BBC Radio 3, and Casa da Musica, Porto, it is quite unlike any ‘setting’ of the poem I have heard, despite the surprising direct quotation from Pergolesi that surfaces some way through its hour-and-a-quarter duration. Why the inverted commas? Only some of the poem is set; apparently, Dillon went so far as he felt able and then stopped. Perhaps more importantly, the text is not always readily audible; more than once, I thought of Nono’s Il canto sospeso, and indeed of Stockhausen’s (misplaced?) criticism of it in Die Reihe: the effect seemed somewhere between Nono’s intention and Stockhausen’s reception, albeit with a far greater sense of restraint. However, there were times when the text was readily audible, for which considerable praise should be offered to the BBC Singers.

The background ‘chatter’ of ancillary texts is deliberately not perceptible in its detail, presenting an interesting comparison and indeed synergy with the relatively sparing use of electronics. Picasso’s idea of the ‘weeping woman’ melds with the philosopher Julia Kristeva’s Héretique de l’amour, a text in which she considers the Stabat mater in relation to her experience of child birth and her thoughts upon the Virgin Birth. (I am relying on Dillon for that information, since I have yet to read any Kristeva.) Rilke’s Visions of Christ and Donne’s A Valediction of Weeping are also present. We only know that because we are told. Does that matter? I am instinctively suspicious (reactionary that I am?) of conceptual art, but in this case, I really could see no harm, nor could I hear it, in a little background – in more than one sense. The idea of a ‘canonical’ text, a term Dillon used more than once in a brief post-concert discussion, being mediated by later writing is after all difficult to avoid in any non-fundamentalist consideration of texts as developing works.

The score really does, rather to my surprise, come across as a reimagining of a Baroque cantata. One senses something akin to ritornello form and sub-divisions not entirely dissimilar to those of the old ‘cantata mass’. (Perhaps incongruously, perhaps not, it was Haydn’s post-Baroque Missa Cellensis in honorem Beatissimae Virginis Mariae that sprang to my mind both during and after the event.) Picasso’s ‘weeping machine’ and what one might think of its predecessors in earlier Spanish painters such as Murillo also featured strongly in my initial response. To quote the composer, whom I read afterwards, ‘Picasso’s strange but fascinating metaphor of a “weeping machine” becomes a central image in the work, whereby I cast the mechanics of mourning as a slow machine, a music which unfolds in slow motion.’ That ‘slow motion’ might take some getting used to, but actually one’s ears adjust – or at least mine did – reasonably quickly. There are moments, passages of considerable beauty, not entirely unlike Baroque obbligati. Various instrumentalists from the splendid London Sinfonietta took their opportunities to shine, without any hint of standing out too boldly. Alastair Mackie’s trumpet lingered especially in the memory. The caesuras challenged too, but productively: there still seemed to be an overarching modernist structure, rather than a mere post-modernist assemblage for us to make of what we would.

The work clearly requires more than a single listening, so I am reluctant to say much more, but I have little doubt that such listening would be well rewarded. Insofar as I could tell, Ilan Volkov directed his forces with remarkable sympathy and understanding. The London Sinfonietta has long excelled in such repertoire; long may that excellence continue.

 

Luca Francesconi: Quartett, Royal Opera, 18 June 2014

Images: ROH/Stephen Cummiskey

Linbury Studio Theatre

Marquise de Mertueil – Kirstin Chávez

Vicomte de Valmont – Leigh Melrose

Soutra Gilmour (designs)

Ravi Deepres (film)

Bruno Poet (lighting)

Serge Le Mouton (computer music design)

Julien Aléonard (recording, editing, mixing of choir and orchestra at La Scala)

Sound Intermedia
London Sinfonietta
Andrew Gourlay (conductor)

Luca Francesconi has been commissioned to write a new opera for Covent Garden, due for performance, alongside three others, in 2020: a development which marks a long-overdue departure from the parochial practice of only or mostly commissioning British composers. Six years is a long time for us to wait, but this performance of Quartett, premiered at La Scala in 2011, whetted the appetite.

 

Moreover, Francesconi, in a Guardian interview with Tom Service, certainly whetted the appetite for Quartett itself: ‘Don’t dare to come if you can’t accept that you need to analyse what you do and who you are.’ Sadly, as we shall see, certain members of the audience predictably failed to take note. ‘This piece is violent, it’s sex, it’s blasphemy, it’s the absence of mercy. The only two characters in the opera are the definition of cynical, they have made a pact that they don’t have to love any more. Love and sentiment are banned, the only thing that’s left and that matters is a kind of chess game with people’s souls and bodies.’ In this opera, the composer’s own libretto based upon Heiner Müller’s play, itself freely inspired – as you will probably now have guessed – by Les Liaisons dangereuses, you may ‘face the reality of how dried up your heart is, how little space there is in your feelings for anything that doesn’t come from being self-defensive, from being totally scared by the world.’ As usual, some of our esteemed newspaper critics failed to take note. The ‘real last message of the piece [is] that we can no longer hide our problems – and that we shouldn’t.’

 

Bold words indeed. Does the opera live up to them? For the most part, yes, both as work and as performance. Francesconi is more readily associated with Berio than with Nono, and rightly so; but here, one feels a certain degree of technical and spiritual kinship with the latter too. If there is little or none of the extremity of Nono’s writing, and the use of electronics proves nothing in particular, there is perhaps something of Nono’s insistently humanistic drawing in, of that embodiment within the work of the imperative ‘to listen’, even, on occasion, of those searingly beautiful post-Webern angular melodies. Without wishing to reduce a distinguished composer to a sum of ‘influences’, but simply to try to place him, it is nevertheless Berio’s love of games and the juxtapositions that come with them, which seem more apparent. That is hardly surprising, given that we are, as Francesconi observes in a programme interview, ‘living a whirling, virtuosic game of masks, impossible to understand, which push the boundary between reality and acting. This is Theatre for Müller as it was for Shakespeare: the possibility of staging one vision of the world and its opposite.’ Undeniably Teutonic dialectics present themselves, then, but with a somewhat different voice, more ‘Italianate’ in both a traditional and modern sense, than, say, Hans Werner Henze, always so eager to adopt the spirit of the Mediterranean, would ever be permitted by his German inheritance fully to assume.

 

 

Form is both readily apparent and slightly beyond our grasp: just as it should be, one might say. One senses the different musico-dramatic imperatives of the different scenes, or at least sections, of this one-act work, just as one does the palimpsest of voices: ‘real’, instrumental, electronic memories and presentiments. Sometimes the language comes (perilously or self-confidently?) close to tonality, but why should it not, the composer apparently perfectly clear that he has something or some things to say, and that he knows how to say them? There is development in the sense of ebb and flow, but also in the tragic – or should that be tragi-comic? – route taken to the death of the Vicomte de Valmont and the subsequent ‘waiting’ of the Marquise de Merteuil. Francesconi’s ear for blending live and electronic music, for the shifting boundaries between them, for the ways in which one might emerge from the other, is not only impeccable, but beguiling and, crucially in this context, seductive. For it is music, above all, that wins through, as it always will in successful opera, be it Così fan tutte, Parsifal, or Die Soldaten. ‘Cinema,’ as Francesconi points out in his programme interview, ‘is only a facsimile, it’s not happening here and now. … Music is the alchemy that triggers’ the ‘miracle’ of theatre, of what happens ‘in real time’. The interaction between what is ‘live’ and what is not perhaps further problematises, indeed dramatises, such tension, rendering it all the more productive.

 

John Fulljames does an excellent job in the difficult space of the Linbury. Presented more or less ‘in the round’, the opera is able to draw us in spatially as well as musically – though of course there is a strong spatial element to the electronics in any case. A post-apocalyptic element features strongly, but with a ‘play’ that is darkly redolent of Beckett, not of unmediated desperation. Human beings, however deprived and depraved, will continue to play, to create: such is a corner-stone of politics and æsthetics not only from Schiller onwards, but from as far back as we can trace, indeed from Creation itself. All elements of the staging are tightly integrated – not only with each other, but with work and performance.

 

Andrew Gourlay led an incisive performance from the London Sinfonietta. Certainly those qualities of the score I mentioned above came across with penetrating clarity and seductive suggestion. Kirstin Chávez and Leigh Melrose sang on this, the first night; Angelica Voje and Mark Stone will appear in some of the subsequent performances. Chávez and Melrose offered outstanding performances, musical and dramatic commitment shown to be quite as one, frenzied abandon and cool reflection inciting one another in the increasingly self-sufficient imperative of the characters’ role-play. This was not Müller as such, but it was something he might have appreciated; as Francesconi, it would be very difficult indeed to match. Vocal and dramatic range stretched themselves as required, towards but never beyond breaking point.

 

After such a performance, I try to write something as quickly as possible, but various commitments made that impossible on this occasion, by which time I had already been made aware of typically uncomprehending newspaper ‘reviews’. One might have hoped that the writers would have learned something from their humiliation in the recent Rosenkavalier debacle, but no, the usual suspects have breezily paraded their ignorance of Francesconi, of Müller, of music and indeed of culture in general. What would it take, one wonders, for newspapers to decline a review, if the likes of this and this, are deemed fit for publication? At least we have that interesting interview with Tom Service. Perhaps, though, in the cases of the ‘critics’ from The Independent and The Daily Telegraph, sub-editors have, for once, done their jobs. Headlines – ‘A shameful waste of money…’ and ‘Generic wittering’ – may best be understood as useful comment upon the reviewers rather than the works. Let them stick with Donizetti; the rest of us will try to engage with opera as a living art-form. Who knows: we might even succeed? Francesconi seems to have done so.

 

Currie/Hodges/Summers/Aurora Orchestra/Ollu et al. - Stockhausen and Boulez, 5 October 2013

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Stockhausen – Gesang der Jünglinge

Stockhausen – Kontakte

Boulez – Le Marteau sans maître

Sound Intermedia

Colin Currie (percussion)

Nicholas Hodges (piano)

Hilary Summers (contralto)

Members of the Aurora Orchestra

Franck Ollu (conductor)

 

Not for the first time, a concert of post-war avant-garde music showed what a thirst there is to hear music from this scandalously neglected area of the repertoire performed. The Queen Elizabeth Hall was sold out, a friend of mine having bought just in time one of the last remaining tickets. Whatever the reasons for not performing this music might be, lack of interest and demand is certainly not one. Whilst some of the selections for the Southbank Centre’s Rest is Noise season have to my mind been baffling – take, for instance, the wildly exaggerated importance soon to be ascribed to the tedious outpourings of minimalism, ‘holy’ and otherwise – the only regret here is that we could not hear more from a period whose music remains at least as bracing, as vital, as it did when first written and first performed. Indeed, as some though by no means all orchestras and halls fall back upon crowd-pleasing aural junk food as their token ‘modern music’, it becomes all the more necessary to hear, as it were, the real thing: Neue Musik, be it Stockhausen, Lachenmann, Schoenberg, or Bach.

Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge proves a quickening experience every time one hears it. We have lost the shock value of a piece of ‘merely’ electronic music; that will probably never return. But we have gained the ability to hear such a piece as a repertoire work, a classic, with both the advantages and dangers that entails. This time around, I was taken anew by the sense, early on though not only early on, of seeming aurally and of course spatially the very company of heaven. Stockhausen’s music might not sound ‘like’, say, the Sanctus from Bach’s B minor Mass, but the effect, the experience might not be entirely different. The flames of the text’s fiery furnace (Daniel 3) flickered as bright as ever, perhaps still more so; I could certainly feel the heat. Later, it was as if we were approaching the sanctuary, or a sanctuary, itself, whatever that might be. Musical? Divine? Were there already premonitions of the cosmogony of Licht? The composer’s heterodox Catholic mysticism seemed almost as strong as that of Messiaen; so, of course, did his technical radicalism.

 

It was salutary to be reminded by Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s informative programme notes that Shostakovich denounced Stockhausen as a representative of ‘decadent capitalist culture’ at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The multifarious disciples of the latter-day St Dmitri would do well to remember that aggressive æsthetic attacks were far from the sole province of the avant-garde. Stockhausen, who began work on Kontakte in the same year as Shostakovich’s attack, was better advised to respond with a work whose compositional riches dwarf anything the Soviet composer could have dreamed of, though a little more than twenty years later, Helmut Lachenmann’s ‘Open Letter to Hans Werner Henze’ would deal with more or less the same issue:

 

Can there be a more presumptuous and, at the same time, ignorant programme than the propagation of a “human art” (in contrast to the up-to-now inhuman ...) and then the claim to be composing ‘finally, again, for the public’? For whom then were Nono’s Il canto sospeso, La terra e la campagna, Stockhausen’s Gruppen and Kontakte, Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître, Berio’s Epifania and Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra composed? Reproaching a hermetically sealed music for insiders only repeats the favourite excuse of a public which runs for cover when faced with works like those just names. It runs because it is more affected by the emotive power experienced in these works than it is entertained by the emotions of the collected neo-symphonists.

 

At any rate, dspite a barbaric intervention of premature applause – Soviet methods for dealing with such behaviour might usefully be employed here – Nicholas Hodges, Colin Currie, and Sound Intermedia unleashed a dazzling display of virtuosity that was yet entirely at the service of Stockhausen’s endlessly restive imagination. Even a mobile telephone call for once seemed almost to blend with the array of percussive and electronic sonorities. As with any work worth its salt, one experiences different facets and listens in different ways on different occasions. I was struck here by the contest between what one might characterise as dialectical opposing forces: stillness and hyper-activity, peace and violence, attack and aural reconciliation, intimacy (think for instance, of the almost vocal duet between piano and xylophone) and swarming, swirling, all-enveloping extroversion as electronics and ‘conventional’ instruments enhance the capabilities of each other and indeed of the audience itself. Above all, there was a true sense of the opening up of possibilities, the greatest legacy of a ‘Darmstadt’ that could not have been further removed from that of doctrinaire caricature. (It was almost quaintly ‘retro’ to see a couple of people walk out.) Above all, we were reacquainted with a composer whose sheer inventiveness places him with Haydn.

 

For the second half, Hilary Summers joined players of the Aurora Orchestra under Frank Ollu for what perhaps continues to be the emblematic musical work of the 1950s, Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître. For Boulez, the high watermark of total serialism has already passed; as our distance from its origins increases from its origins, we increasingly seem to perform and to hear the work as much as a labyrinthine extension of Schoenberg and Berg, towards whose nostalgia the young(ish) Boulez felt more than a little suspicion, as to Webern’s crystalline purity. The difference of the sound world from anything we had heard from Stockhausen was immediately apparent. So indeed was every aspect of the compositional ‘voice’: again, an indication that there could have been nothing doctrinaire about the composers’ explorations. Exactitude and ‘expression’ were revealed as sides of the same coin, that old Schoenbergian – or indeed Bachian – coin of freedom and determinism. The players, amongst whom we should count the unmistakeable contralto of Summers, revelled in a seemingly limitless array of instrumental combinations. Though there were occasional, quite understandable, instances of hesitancy, for instance in ‘Commentaire II de “Bourreaux de solitude”,’ this was in most respects a commanding performance, those hangmen of solitude uncovering memories, fleeting, perhaps even imaginary, of Ravel’s ‘Le Gibet’ from Gaspard de la nuit, the second ‘commentary’ perhaps the most mesmerising of all. In keeping with the general theme of exploration, new worlds seemed to open up in the double of ‘Bel difice et les pressentiments’. Strands may have been brought together, but immediately they suggested, in true serialist fashion, new avenues to follow. As we know, this work was in many ways just the beginning – both for Boulez and his confrères.

 

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.