Meet
the Composer and Concert
Julian Anderson, Magnus Lindberg, Esa-Pekka
Salonen, Simon Holt, Mauricio Kagel
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group – Sakari
Oramo and Esa- Pekka Salonen, Rolf Hind (piano) Anu Komsi (soprano)
It is common place to expect a
degree of self congratulation by the organisers of pretty much any contemporary
music festival these days, a veiled acknowledgement of an achievement
often all too sadly pulled off against the odds of audience attendance
and financial backing. It was perhaps no surprise then that Floof!’s
Saturday afternoon "meet the composer" platform, chaired by
Radio Three controller Roger Wright, commenced in just this way. Yet
on this occasion his comments were surely justified, a provincial festival
drawing together some of the world’s leading compositional talent and
masterminded by Sakari Oramo with, I suspect, a liberal dose of assistance
from CBSO composer in association, Julian Anderson. Even more extraordinary,
a festival that spanned four days with three concerts by the CBSO themselves
in Symphony Hall and one in the nearby CBSO centre by BCMG. A reason
for self congratulation indeed.
The composer’s forum drew together
Anderson, Holt, Lindberg and Salonen together with Jonathan Harvey and
Frenchman Philippe Schoeller, all of whom were represented by performances
during the festival. It takes considerable skill by the chairman to
steer a forum such as this through a series of interesting and useful
topics. All too often round the table sessions can descend into utter
monotony as a result of mundane subject matter, apparently disinterested
composers, equally uninvolved audiences or (total disaster!) all three.
Fortunately Roger Wright put up a manful performance aided by an audience
that were reasonably keen to question and composers who ranged from
typically forthright in Salonen, to informative and interesting in Lindberg
and Anderson, to quietly authoritative in Harvey and quiet altogether
in Holt who made little contribution but probably did himself little
harm in a self effacing kind of way.
The discussion ranged from the
old chestnuts of programming and audience statistics (nothing new there)
through the lack of female representation on the panel, a legitimate
point raised by a female composition student from Birmingham University
and taking in performance funding and composer’s financial considerations
stemming from commissions along the way. What failed to materialise
was any serious individual comment from the composers about the music
itself. This was something of a shame for Salonen, Lindberg, and Anderson
particularly are more than articulate when prompted. There was, nevertheless,
plenty to occupy around an hour and a quarter of conversation without
any awkward silences!
The Saturday evening concert centred
on four of the composers present, together with Argentinean born Mauricio
Kagel. The afternoon conversation had, at one point, veered towards
the question of pre-concert talks and composer introductions and here
the audience were lucky to have input from all of the composers represented
with the exception of Kagel, whose work was openly discussed by Anderson
and Oramo. It was Anderson who took to the stage first to discuss his
Alhambra Fantasy giving an articulate and amusing account of
the work coupled with his admission that he had actually never been
to the Alhambra Palace before or since. The work is a natural concert
opener, exuberant, energetic and teeming with invention. Interestingly
Anderson mentioned that the work was an attempt to compose entirely
intuitively, working from bar to bar with no preconceived structure
in mind yet in performance the work binds together impressively with
snatches of melody recurring throughout the opening section before a
quite magical transformation into the atmospheric middle section. Oramo
conducted BCMG with an energy entirely appropriate to the work. Superbly
coloured, imaginative and virtuosic Alhambra Fantasy confirms
yet again Anderson’s unquestionable status as one of our leading younger
generation talents.
Magnus Lindberg’s Twine
for solo piano was perhaps the most difficult of all of the evening’s
pieces to access on a first hearing. Rolf Hind gave a performance of
impressive control and dynamic sensitivity, allowing the silences around
which the piano lines "entwined" themselves to speak with
telling effect. Lindberg explained beforehand that Twine, written
in 1988 following a period of serious illness in hospital, was an important
piece in the future development of his music, although to place it in
its true context alongside the major orchestral canvasses that followed
would take serious academic study I suspect.
There must have been considerable
interest as to where Esa-Pekka Salonen found the title of his work,
Floof! (subtitled Songs of a Homeostatic Homer). The answer lies
in the book The Cyberiad by the Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw
Lem and revolves around man’s invention of a poetry machine. The composer
gave an illuminating, somewhat tongue in cheek introduction to a work
that proved witty yet perhaps the most overtly avant-garde piece of
the night, scored for coloratura soprano and an ensemble of clarinet/contrabass
clarinet, cello, piano, synthesiser and percussion. Salonen draws an
extraordinary range of effects from the group but even more so from
the soprano, Anu Komsi (Oramu’s wife, by coincidence) who coughs, splutters,
expostulates and grunts her way through the machine’s attempts to make
sense of its instructions. Without question, Komsi was the star here,
singing a work of considerable complexity from memory with the utmost
confidence and some delightful facial expressions.
Simon Holt’s eco-pavan
of 1998 is essentially a study in "echoing", the unlikely
but effective ensemble of bass flute, heckelphone, harp, cimbalom and
percussion, shadowing the material of the solo piano part, played with
characteristic sensitivity by Rolf Hind. The result is perhaps not entirely
conventional in terms of what one would expect from Holt but proved
memorably atmospheric, tantalising the ear with crystalline colour and
delicate, fragile textures.
Completed in 2001, Mauricio Kagel’s
Double Sextet is a far cry from his trademark music theatre works,
being striking in both its originality of invention and sound. The scoring
for six woodwinds and six strings omits clarinets and violas and creates
an ensemble very much of Kagel’s imagination in which he employs a strict
economy of means utilising only two metres throughout, 2/4 and 3/8,
each of which are allotted different musical material. Parts of the
work are propelled by ostinato like rhythmic figures whilst the language
is perhaps closest to the neo-classical and in particular Stravinsky.
As interesting as parts of it were, there was a feeling that the economy
of means was stretched a little far by its twenty-five minute length.
Concerts outside London featuring
the kind of diversity of contemporary music on offer here are still
all too rare and it is to be hoped that Oramo’s hint during the afternoon
forum that the festival may be repeated in 2005 is allowed to come to
fruition.
Christopher Thomas.
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