Scottish Ensemble: Babel
Venezuela is in turmoil. To us, it’s a disturbing nightly news bulletin. To Gabrielo Montero, it’s a personal catastrophe in which “the forces of criminality, barbarism and nihilism” have engineered the total collapse of her native land. If the pianist-composer is outspoken in her vilification, it is directly through her music.
The latest vehicle of her frustration is Babel, a work (this was the European premiere) that drives from the heart and forms the centrepiece of the Scottish Ensemble’s current tour programme of the same name. Babel was famous, of course, for the inability of its inhabitants to communicate, despite their constant babbling.
Montero expresses that conflict in music for piano and string ensemble that is essentially improvisatory in character, the firm, questioning melody of the outer sections offset by the macho freneticism of the centre spread. There’s a lot of attitudinal Bartok in the mix, and slithery allusions to jazz that soften the sentiment. Sincerity oozed from this engaging performance.
Friday’s entire programme paid homage to composers either subject to, or affected to varying degrees by, repression, a theme amplified visually by simple, theatrical use of two large see-through mobile screens that variously encaged the players, divided them, or, as in Montero’s Babel, provided a surface for moving images, even a politically slanted reference to Dante’s Inferno.
With such slick physicality in the presentation, this uninterrupted sequence of Shostakovich, Glass, Vasks and Messiaen emphasised the power of music to say what can’t always be said.