A night of tough, uncompromising and slightly puzzling music
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Barbican, London EC2
If you’re in search of cheerful or consoling music for the lockdown, the BBC Symphony Orchestra may not be the orchestra for you. Its new season offers the kind of challenging programmes that have always been its speciality. Which is a comfort in itself, as it’s a sign that the lockdown hasn’t entirely colonised everyone’s minds.
Friday’s concert, streamed from the Barbican and led by the orchestra’s chief conductor, Sakari Oramo, was a case in point. It took one of Joseph Haydn’s best but least-ingratiating symphonies, full of sharp angles and tragic feelings, and placed it between two recent pieces, both puzzling and strenuous in their own ways. The first, a piece for 16 solo strings, came from Anna Clyne, a British composer who has made her home in the US – her music having the full-throated, turbocharged orchestral energy that American orchestras appreciate.
Clyne’s fondness for glowing majorkey harmonies was evident in this early piece, but it also showed a rare delicacy of feeling. Entitled Within Her Arms, it was inspired by the shock of her mother’s death, and seemed at first to be a record of the emotional numbness such terrible news would bring. A tiny descending phrase, handed reverently by one solo player to another, gradually lofted upwards as if tracing the departure of a spirit. But this movement was constantly cut off, just as the music was about to blossom into radiant affirmation. Whether it was an acknowledgement that the spirit had indeed departed, or just the brute fact of death reasserting itself, was hard to say. Perhaps that was the point.
After all that tentativeness, the emotional turbulence and distress of Haydn’s 49th Symphony (known as “La passione”) almost came as a relief. The slow first movement began as cold and grey as the sea at dawn, Oramo coaxing just a touch of warmth when the music turned briefly to the major key, soon suppressed. The minuet had a gaunt but affecting dignity, and the finale a mixture of fury and desperation.
So far, so good – but then came the evening’s major piece, which turned out to be a major puzzle. Accused, by eminent Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg, is a set of dialogues between three prisoners and their interrogators, each from a different historical era. In each case, whether a French Revolutionary tribunal, the East German Stasi or an American interviewer, the dice are loaded against the accused, who wriggle to avoid self-incrimination. Finnish soprano Anu Komsi had the difficult task of impersonating both sides of the dialogue, while negotiating leaping and often stratospherically high vocal lines. The problem was, any possibility of empathy with the three victims was snuffed out by the unremitting textural and harmonic richness of the score, which never allowed for any emotional light and shade. I had to admire Komsi’s virtuosity, but was left wondering what the point of it all was.