Like toe-curling parents at a teenage daughter’s disco
London Symphony Orchestra Barbican, London EC2
Orchestras are naturally rather staid beasts, but sometimes they’re gripped by a desire to show they can be groovy. The results tend to be excruciating, like parents dancing badly at their teenage daughter’s party. This concert from the London Symphony Orchestra was a particularly toe-curling example.
The warning signs were there in the programme notes, where the concert’s conductor Kristjan Järvi compared his own piece, Too Hot to Handel (geddit?), to the moment “when the motoric beats of electronica meet Baroque music, it’s like Radiohead that segues into Handel...” Wicked!
Järvi’s work was part of the evening’s mash-up of American minimalism and Baroque music, with the LSO beefed up by the addition of electronic keyboards and bass guitar. Three of the pieces were unashamedly based on borrowings from Baroque music – Järvi’s, which lifted whole movements from Handel’s Concerti Grossi, and two from composer Charles Coleman based on Handel and Bach. Alongside them were Philip Glass’s recent Piano Concerto No 3, and a brand new concerto specially written for the orchestra by Steve Reich, entitled simply Music for Ensemble and Orchestra.
This fusion of eras made a certain sense. The insistent repeating patterns of Bach and Handel can seem like the repetitions of minimalism, at a distance, but all Järvi and Coleman achieved by mingling them together in their pieces was to show that they’re worlds apart. As were the modest talents of Coleman and Järvi, when compared to Bach’s and Handel’s genius. The movements from Coleman’s Bach Inspired that simply draped Bach’s notes in grand orchestrations were pleasant enough, in a way oddly reminiscent of those old-time arrangers of Bach such as Thomas Beecham, only not so skilful. But Coleman’s own Reich-like repeating grooves sounded terribly lame beside them.
Even worse was Järvi’s 13-movement suite, an exasperatingly indulgent layering of Handel’s music over would-be funky bass licks, tricked out with percussion. You can’t just take a Baroque dance with a fast rate of harmonic change and stick a slow pop-flavoured bass underneath. The result is pure nonsense, in the strict sense of the word. Composing just isn’t that easy.
Glass’s piano concerto was exasperating in a different way. It began slow and got slower, and all the heartfelt expressivity of soloist Simone Dinnerstein couldn’t lift Glass’s limp little repeating phrases out of banality. Fortunately Reich’s new concerto saved the evening from being a total dud. The performance wasn’t triumphant: there were serious problems of balance, with the solo strings drowned out by the electronic keyboard, and the rhythms weren’t as razor-sharp as they needed to be. But the music’s delightful dancing wit, and the moving, almost ritualistic calm of the slow movement shone through.