A delightfully witty, feather-light confection of musical styles
BBC Symphony Orchestra Barbican
The BBC Symphony Orchestra launches its season a little later than the other London orchestras, unsurprisingly, as it needs a break after the huge labour of the Proms. This concert showed the orchestra in fine fettle, with a programme that offered a pleasing display of virtuosity from individual players, as well as showing off the brilliance of the whole.
At its heart was an ambitious recent piece by Mason Bates, who when not busy being one of America’s most successful composers becomes DJ Masonic, “thrilling audiences with his startling blend of electronic dance music and post-classical rave”. One might have guessed that dual identity from his
a big-boned orchestral suite in 11 linked movements. It portrayed various fantastical beasts culled from Jorge Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, placed against a backdrop of a nocturnal forest, shot through with bird calls and insect tics and a sense of menace and magic. First on the scene was a sprite, which seemed more a denizen of a club than a forest. Its music was basically a curling riff tossed from one solo violin to the next, and then to other string players dotted among the percussion.
That pointed towards pop, but Bates contains a whole menagerie of musical styles with him, as the piece revealed. Nymphs had a wide-open-spaces feel that veered close to Copland, clarinettists Richard Hosford and Emma Burgess sustaining a ribbon of perfectly even running sounds that would be easy to make in the studio, and actually seemed easy in their hands, but surely wasn’t. The Á Bao a Qu, a serpent which busily ascends and descends a tower, was portrayed in sinuous forward-and-backward waves of harmony that pointed towards Quincy Jones as much as Ravel. The Gryphon launched off with Glass-like repetitions, but soon danced off in a new direction. It’s a sign of a strong composer that he can reveal his influences so cheekily, and in any case the individuality of Bates’s voice was never in doubt, especially in Sirens, a beautiful tissue of transparent harmonies in shimmering vibraphone and strings.
In all, it was a delightfully witty, feather-light confection that never flagged in its 35-minute duration, thanks partly to the deft pacing of conductor Cristian Măcelaru.
Then came something that should have been at the opposite pole of massive solidity and assertiveness. Beethoven’s Emperor Piano Concerto is often referred to as “Olympian”, and great performances, like the one I heard from Paul Lewis some weeks back, tend to bring out that quality.
Pianist Jeremy Denk brought the piece down to a human level – a very modern human at that, full of hesitations and doubts. His sound almost disappeared in the quieter passages, but then it would burst out in full force, as if to say, “no, damn it, I really am confident!”
It didn’t always come off, partly because Măcelaru and the orchestra were more conventionally Olympian. But when it did, Denk’s interpretation was both beautiful and moving, in an unusually intimate way.