Modern magician meets an old master – with dazzling results
Proms
BBC Sso/volkov
Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 ★★★★★
One of the most important commissions at this year’s Proms, George Lewis’s new work Minds in Flux will probably prove the most imposing. It’s not only a substantial 30-minute score but a piece that deliberately takes on the vast spaces of the Royal Albert Hall: mixing orchestral forces with digital electronics, it actually harnesses all the surfaces in the auditorium rather than (as so often in his acoustic) fighting against them.
Turning 70 next year, Lewis counts among America’s senior composers, and has long been a pioneer of experimental music. He has also always been politically engaged in his writings about the “creolisation” of classical music: he speaks from experience, then, when he describes Minds in Flux as a “sonic meditation on what processes of decolonisation might sound like”.
But though this brilliantly performed premiere, given by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov with sound realisation by Damon Holzborn and Sound Intermedia, certainly lived up to the “flux” of the title, Lewis’s actual programme would have been difficult to discern without that signpost. It’s hard not to think of Penderecki’s music for his famous Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima – abstract before the composer added the emotive title. Lewis may be imagining the future, but his work is in some ways a journey back to a past era of musical modernism. Lewis also quotes the great Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, yet for all the evocation of anxiety the soundscapes are frequently aweinspiring. Opening from a cosmic rumble, answered by lonely shrieks, the score takes off in all directions, and with the orchestral principals mic’d up their sound is thrown around the hall. Textures are often busy – and the playing virtuosic – even when the basic pulse feels slow, and the music becomes more energised before disappearing into quiet convulsions. A champion of the new and challenging, Volkov conducted with authority.
Pairing new music with an all-beethoven second half, Volkov made the case for Beethoven as always sounding modern. Even though the concert aria “Ah! perfido” looks back in a way, drawing its recitative from the 18th-century poet and librettist Pietro Metastasio, there was nothing old-fashioned about its raging at a faithless lover – or about this performance, with soprano Lucy Crowe finding heartfelt depth and singing with glowing, incisive attack.
The accompaniment was lean and alert, a mood carried over into the Second Symphony, in which Beethoven wrangled in the most upbeat way with his growing awareness of encroaching deafness. Volkov drove his responsive players towards a blazing and affirmative close.
Hear this Prom for 30 days on the BBC Sounds app. Proms tickets: 020 7070 4441; bbc. co.uk/proms