Varese reveals his sultry side
BBC Symphony Orchestra/edgard Varèse
As contemporary classical music keeps changing with bewildering speed, so our grasp of the whole picture of modern music starts to become shaky. That’s why the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Total Immersion series is so valuable. The day-long immersion in the music of a single composer helps us to keep our cultural bearings. That’s particularly true when – as was the case on Saturday – the composer is Edgard Varèse, one of the giant figures of early musical modernism.
Varèse is especially in need of a helping hand. He was fired up by the modern world of skyscrapers and science and machines, and dreamed of a “music of the future”, using new undreamed-of instruments. What actually survives from these visions is a mere 15 or so pieces, some for small forces, some for huge orchestra, some including electronics and voices. Most of them are rarely played, some never. At the weekend we heard all of them. What the day taught us is that there’s a lot more to Varèse than pitilessly dissonant evocations of the modern world in earsplitting brass and percussion. There was plenty of that, to be sure, and by the end of the day my ears were starting to ring. But there is also a sultry, nocturnal side to Varèse, which emerged in the afternoon concert from the Guildhall New Music Ensemble. Soprano Harriet Burns struck just the right tone of tremulous excitement in Offrandes, a setting of erotically surrealist poetry, the ensemble and conductor Geoffrey Paterson touching in a nocturnal soundscape behind her.
In the evening concert from the BBC Symphony Orchestra, we caught the mystical side of Varèse in his last work, Nocturnal of 1961. The basses of the BBC Singers growled a prayer in some unknown language, while soprano Allison Bell seemed to be in a trance, invoking a crucified deity. Throughout the concert one could sense conductor Sakari Oramo seeking out the music’s emotional variety. The unexpected dance in Arcana seemed unusually chirpy, the humorous moments in Tuning Up and in the giant orchestral piece Amériques stood out loud and clear. When later in the same piece a long horn melody appeared, floating between giant string chords, one felt the glamour and mystery of a nocturnal cityscape.
The output of Varèse may be tiny, but it was the expression of a great soul, to which this Total Immersion day paid the most eloquent and heartfelt tribute.