Honouring a talent whose life was cut tragically short

Classical

London Sinfonietta Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1

★★★ ★★

John Allison

Nearly 40 years since his death, the Quebecois composer Claude Vivier retains something of his cult following. Admittedly, this may be a posthumous phenomenon, since at the time of his grisly murder in Paris in 1983 his distinctive music was not yet that widely appreciated.

If his star has dimmed a little in recent years, there is every chance that this concert by the London Sinfonietta under Ilan Volkov − the opening event of a weekend series celebrating Vivier at the Southbank Centre − will have won the composer new friends.

This well-designed programme was framed by two of Vivier’s works works from his 1980 breakthrough year. The distinctive timbre of his music was there in the opener Zipangu. A piece for strings, it is a tense soundscape; playing without any vibrato cushioning, the upper strings pull away from the drone of the lower strings. Putting pressure on their bows, the musicians dig in before a wall of sound splinters.

From this point on the music − even while unfolding in clearly contrasted sections − remains in a state of flux, and Volkov shaped it impressively. Gathering up its disembodied voices for one final burst of energy, he drew it to a questing close.

Two aspects of Vivier’s autobiography are seldom far from his music: his homosexuality and the fact that, having been put up for adoption, he never knew his birth mother. He described Lonely Child, his piece for soprano and chamber orchestra, as “a long song of solitude”. It is actually quite concise, despite such Mahlerian suggestions at the beginning as a tolling bell and funeral tread.

Claire Booth was the ethereal soloist, bringing a feeling of incantation to the vocal line, often shadowed by the orchestra. Everything is stopped in the middle of the piece by several blows of the bass drum, before the text invokes Tadzio, the boy in Death in Venice.

Specially commissioned to go in the middle of this programme and given its world premiere here, The Seeds of Solitude by the Canadian composer Nicole Lizée consists of three short films with live musical accompaniment. A layer of sound design is already built into the video, but most of the music is supplied by the ensemble. Next to Vivier’s work, Lizée’s postmodern atmospherics lowered the musical temperature a tad. But in dealing with such themes as paranoia, insomnia and communicating with the dead, her Seeds of Solitude

seemed true to the spirit of Vivier.

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