BBC SO Volkov, Hodges, BBC Singers, Barbican 22 Jan 2013

Grisey: Mégalithes

Dufourt: On the Wings of the Morning

Boulez: Cummings ist der Dichter

Beethoven: Symphony No. 7

BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Singers

Ilan Volkov, conductor

Nicolas Hodges, piano

Even by BBCSO standards, Grisey’s Mégalithes is a whacky concert opener. The horn section sits around the front of the podium, facing away from the audience, and the rest of the brass section is distributed around the auditorium, providing antiphonal effects that bounce around front to back and left to right. It’s an early work, dating from 1969, when Grisey was still a student of Messiaen and the Paris Conservatoire. There’s no spectralism as such here, but all of the musical preoccupations that we now identify with that school are very much in evidence. Performance techniques are “extended” to say the least, and the pitch content of the music is the last of the composer’s concerns. Instead, he has the brass players create all manner of semi-pitched and unpitched effects with their instruments. But radical as the sounds are, the linear structure of the music is surprisingly conventional. The antiphony is clearly discernible, with a sound effect – slapping the mouthpiece to create a pop, say – proposed in one corner of the hall, then repeated in another corner with some slight elaboration added. And the music builds to climaxes through gradual crescendos and increasing weight of texture then ebbs back to a state of repose. Compared to the structural obscurity of Grisey’s mature work, this piece proceeds with the formal clarity of a Haydn sonata.

Next came the Dufourt concerto, and that was whackier still. Actually, concerto is the wrong word for this piece, which carries the title On the Wings of the Morning. It may be an extended work for piano solo and orchestra, but it continually resists all of the gestures and rhetoric that characterise the form. It’s a new piece, written in 2012 and this evening receiving its UK premiere, and it is very much in the spirit of the spectralist movement. In fact, Dufourt is responsible for the term “musique spectral”, although he seems more like a disciple of that movement’s leaders than a trend setter himself. The music here is all about inscrutably complex and gradually shifting textures. The large string section rarely settles on a stable pitch, instead moving around in tremolo glissando in a constantly shifting web of sound. The winds are all engaged in various extended performance techniques, at least as many as in the Grisey, although this time the resulting sounds are usually pitched. Against all this Nicolas Hodges pounds away at the piano keys. He’s usually half obscured by the orchestra, but that is clearly deliberate, and only occasionally rises to the surface with some emphatic fortissimo gesture, usually at the top of the keyboard. Despite the breadth of this work, the piano part is surprisingly sporadic, mostly consisting of short snatches of highly articulate music, each followed by a couple of seconds of silence before the next begins.

Against all the odds, the work seemed to have a nominal three movement structure, with a quiet, slow interlude between the vast, monolithic opening and closing sections. The performance seemed a little vulnerable here, as if the greater scrutiny the sparse textures afforded allowed us to hear the individual players wrestling with their obviously impossibly hard parts. No such problems for Nicolas Hodges though; he was his usual unflappable self, sitting attentively but relaxed at the piano, seemingly oblivious to the speed at which his hands were moving around the keyboard and the violent extremes of sound that they were producing. It’s a fascinating piece, and the colours and textures that make it up are endlessly engaging, but it could do with more imaginative structuring. The incessant tutti that makes up about the first half of the work clearly has much going on inside it in terms of gradual evolution of texture and harmonic colour, but when it subsides into the quiet central section, the music up to that point is remembered as just a barrage of sound, its details lost to all but the most attentive.

Cumming is der Dichter continued the French modernist theme. The BBC Singers joined a reduced BBC SO and demonstrated their unquestioned skill in this, their core repertoire. The sheer competency of the performers, combined with Volkov’s reluctance to push the more overt sections, made this a technically accomplished but slightly comfortable reading. On the regular occasions that Boulez whips up a storm (albeit usually a very brief one) in the instrumental parts, the drama seemed to be over before it had started. The BBC Singers didn’t benefit from being brought to the middle, rather than the back, of the stage. It meant they were deprived of the amplifying effect of the back wall, reducing both the volume and the detail of their contributions.

Why tack Beethoven Seven onto the end of a concert like this? If it was intended to get bums on seats then it failed. If, on the other hand, it was meant as a balm for our by then much bruised ears, then perhaps it did its job. This wasn’t a particularly distinguished performance - the symphony was no doubt at the bottom of the list of rehearsal priorities – but it was a lot of fun. Volkov hadn’t done much to unify the phrasing within or between sections, nor was the balance particularly impressive, but he was clearly enjoying himself. He had a big smile on his face throughout the first movement, and that feeling was infectious, spreading to all the players in the orchestra. It was all a bit rough around the edges, and there were one or two quite serious ensemble problems, especially between the strings and winds in the development of the first movement. It had redeeming features too, the incessant drive of the finale was impressive, and the symphony ended well (although the first two movements didn’t). A fun rendition, but even from the opening bars there was a feeling that the main substance of the evening was behind us, and that the Beethoven was not so much a grand conclusion to the performance as an undemanding epilogue.

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and can be heard online until 29 January at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03q5hb4

 

BBC SSO Volkov Takemitsu Ligeti RFH 28.11.13

Takemitsu: Green, Marginalia, I Hear the Water Dreaming
Ligeti: San Francisco Polyphony, Violin Concerto
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ilya Gringolts (violin), Ilan Volkov (cond)

Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra have long been a powerhouse combination for Modernist music. Some petty politics, now long forgotten (hopefully), led to his standing down from the top job with the orchestra in 2009, and he is now their Principal Guest Conductor. That has made concerts like this one rarer, which is a shame, because they are always worth catching. Volkov and the BBC SSO seem to revel in the sheer complexity of the music he presents them with. The chemistry between him and the players is ideal, and although he clearly rehearses and coordinates with discipline and rigour, they are still able to make the results sound spontaneous. Even more impressively, the orchestra plays this music like they mean it. Not so long ago, most symphony orchestras playing Modernist music did so with the attitude “We just play this, it’s not our fault how it sounds.” These days such performances are rare, and the engagement of rank and file players to the Modernist cause is due in no small part to the passion and commitment of conductors like Volkov.

The concert was devoted to Takemitsu and Ligeti, an indulgence that could only make sense in the context of a large-scale festival of 20^th-century music. The works were well chosen, most on the borderline between the familiar and the obscure: Volkov was clearly keen to give some of the more neglected works by the two composers an airing. He was wise though to place Takemitsu first, as the Japanese composer’s contribution would have paled into insignificance if heard after the Ligeti, especially the latter’s Violin Concerto, the one undisputable masterpiece here.

The three Takemitsu works came from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and offered an outline of his stylistic development over those decades. Green, composed in 1967, finds the young composer in the process of reconciling his engagement with Japanese music with his love for Debussy. It’s a frustratingly short work – even at this early date his discourse is expansive – but the snapshot that this six minutes of music gives is a clear indicator of what was to come.

Of the three Takemitsu works, the most distinctive and the most accomplished was the 1976 Marginalia. Takemitsu is now committed to exploring the traditional music of his homeland, and more confident about referencing Debussy in his textures. The allusions to traditional Japanese instruments is particularly interesting, temple gongs from the percussion section and shakuhachis from the flutes. And how does Takemitsu get the two harps to sound like shamisens? Metallic objects against the strings must surely be the answer; a technique borrowed from Berio, but a sound that comes straight from the Japanese imperial court.

I Hear the Water Dreaming is a piece for flute and orchestra, the soloist here Adam Walker. His tone is sweet but focussed and his musical manner unimposing, which is ideal, as Takemitsu is never in the business of writing bravura concertos. Finely balanced orchestral textures helped this work to achieve its desired effect. Given the time and effort that the following Ligeti scores clearly required in rehearsal, it is difficult to tell how much attention the Takemitsu received. Volkov’s conducting style was quite stiff, and he seemed always to be focussing on the beat and on synchronising the parts. In fact, one or two entries sounded frayed, so perhaps he was right to keep the orchestra on a short leash.

Even by Ligeti’s standards San Francisco Polyphony is an intense experience. As the title suggests, the sheer amount of material that is presented simultaneously makes this a piece that you need to take in several different ways at once. In fact, the complexities stretch beyond the counterpoint and into the timbre and orchestration. The polyphony comes in waves and the more layered passages are interpolated by homophonic “refrains”. Here, the basic texture is a dry, brittle string sound, harmonically complex, and involving multiple harmonic effects. The large string section of the BBC SSO totally nailed these passages, and they were the key to the performance being as successful as it was. Few orchestras or conductors have the nerve to programme San Francisco Polyphony, such are the difficulties it poses, but Volkov and his BBC SSO players demonstrated this evening that they’ve got what it takes.

Ligeti’s Violin Concerto poses the additional problem of finding a soloist willing to take on what must be one the most demanding solo parts in the repertoire. In fact, many violinists have been willing to accept the challenge since the work was completed in 1993. As a result, the work has generated a diverse performance tradition over its 20 years in the repertoire, with some violinists stressing work’s Classical/Modernist austerity and others delving deeper into the Romanticism of its Hungarian folk roots. Ilya Gringolts is in the former category, but that’s not to say that his interpretation lacks colour or imagination. He’s got all the notes under his fingers, and that’s no mean feat in itself. But he’s more interested in the complex artificial harmonic passages of the outer movements than he is, say, in the folk song of the second. The orchestra again rose to the many challenges Ligeti posed. The small ensemble was arranged into two arcs around the soloist, the stings (tuned to a range of pitch standards and conventions) on the inside and the winds outside. The woodwinds really shone in the concerto. Flautist Rosemary Eliot has a rounder, warmer tone than Walker, the better to complement the gritty focus of the violin sound. Like her colleagues, she was also required to play other instruments, in her case the recorder and ocarina. The ocarina chorales in the second movement could have been more carefully tuned (seriously!), but the balance in the ocarina and recorder playing, which can’t have been easy for anybody, was very finely judged.

With this concert, The Rest is Noise has done its duty by Toru Takemitsu, an important if marginal figure in the history of 20^th-century music, and one whose contribution was appropriately acknowledged through the half a concert he was devoted. Ligeti, on the other hand, would seem to deserve more, and even with the LPO’s Lontano a few weeks back and the Philharmonia’s 2001 live screening before that, it is easy to still feel that his towering influence has been neglected. In fact, he’s just one of many Modern masters who must vie for precious space in programmes as the festival progresses, and there are surely many figures, just as worthy and notable as him, who will get even less of the attention they deserve. Just goes to show – it was one hell of a century.

This performance was recorded by BBC Radio 3 and will be broadcast on 18 January and 8 February 2014.