National Youth Orchestra, Varèse 360 (3), Ether Festival, Royal Festival Hall, 18/04/10

After leaving the QEH I quickly headed over to the RFH to see the National Youth Orchestra play the final concert of the Varèse concert. Apparently it was the NYO’s largest ever orchestra – 170 members on stage, including 19 percussionists. It took them almost 10 minutes to all get on stage. The concert featured Varese’s two large scale orchestral pieces ‘Arcana’ and ‘Amériques ’.

They began with ‘Tuning Up’ a piece based on the usual sound of an orchestra tuning up, only magnified and embellished and recast as a mass of orchestral sound. They played without a conductor and during changed seats, exchanged instruments and swapped scores. I guess it was their attempt at imposing their youthful high spirits on the concert. Very much Varèse packed into five minutes.

‘Arcana’ is one of my favourite Varèse pieces and sounded charcateristically turbulent tonight. James Murphy in the programme notes made some excellent comments on the piece’s cinematic qualities. Performed under glowing red lights it sounded fiery and incendiary. In the pre-concert talk Malcolm MacDonald referred to how Varèse talked about his music being like “beams of sound”, an apt description for this piece.

‘Nocturnal’ opened the second half and sounded like something out of a grainy, black and white horror movie. A choir growls about “belonging to the night” and “shadows of death” whilst a soprano shrieks about crucifixion. Quite noir-ish and very different to his other pieces.

The original, unedited version of ‘Amériques’ followed. I had seen the LSO perform a slightly different version at the Barbican in 2008. Inspired by Varèse’s relocation to New York at the start of the twentieth century, it can almost be seen as a vast, sonic portrait of the city, with all the associated minutiae. An urban feel permeates the piece, with skyscraping orchestral moments and neon-lit, raucous harmonies rising to prominence throughout. More brilliant playing from the NYO.

The NYO came back on stage to play ‘Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune’ by Debussy, a piece that inspired Varèse to become a composer.

London Sinfonietta, Varèse 360 (2), Ether Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall, 18/04/10

I was back at the Southbank Centre on Sunday afternoon for the final 2 concerts in the Varèse 360 series. The London Sinfonietta performed a selection of his shorter pieces in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Earlier in the afternoon I went along to a fascinating pre-concert discussion on Varèse. 

The concert was quite similar to the first show on Friday, all pieces being quite brief and consisting of primal, compacted rushes of sound. In particular ‘Hyperprism’ and ‘Octandre’ both fell into this category, perfectly condensed sonic excursions. ‘Un Grand Sommeil Noir’ and ‘Offrandes’ featured a female vocalist.

‘Poème électronique’ was played into the QEH through speakers as the orchestra retired from the stage. As the stage was left in darkness a selection of abstract visual imagery was projected on to the three rectangular screens. I have since read some mixed reports but I thought it allowed you to focus on listening to the music and was pretty non-intrusive. The images of scientific drawings and mathematical formulae seemed to emphasise the precision with which Varèse constructed his music. It was the first purely electronic piece of the weekend and sounded esoteric and exciting, even now sounding quite futuristic and otherworldly. God knows what people thought when they first heard it in the 1950s.

‘Intégrales’, one of his best pieces I think, closed the concert. It felt like one of his most ‘complete’ compositions, full of clashing percussion and hectic, dissonant brass. Although performed entirely on instruments it did almost sound electronic and digital in places and can possibly be seen as a precursor to modern electroacoustic music. A good example of what Malcolm MacDonald during the pre-concert talk had called Varèse's "gloriously scolding music". The concert may have only been just over 45 minutes in length but you got the impression that the music played really was pushing the orchestra to its limits.

The full programme was:

Hyperprism

Un Grand Sommeil Noir

Octandre

Offrandes

Poème électronique

Intégrales

London Sinfonietta, Varèse 360 (1), Ether Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall

The opportunity to totally immerse yourself in one of the excellent festivals organised by the South Bank Centre is an experience I always find very rewarding and satisfying (most recently the case with the year long festival to celebrate the centenary of Olivier Messiaen). Therefore, I greeted the beginning of the Ether Festival this week with a high level of anticipation.

As part of this year's festival the complete works of pioneering composer Edgard Varèse was to be performed over the course of a weekend. I was at the QEH on Friday to catch the first of the three planned concerts. 

The excellent London Sinfonietta were performing and they opened up with 'Ionisation', a succinct, heterogenous piece of percussion which sounded almost mechanical in timbre. Some of Varèse's trademark siren wails provided an extra dimension. The scientific inferences of the title reflect the precise, ambitious sound of the piece and the notes in the programme talked of the "pounding industrial soundscapes". It was an accurate description, although this suggested a contemporary sound, whereas I thought they seemed to be soundscapes from an unplacable, distant era. 

The abbreviated, insistent solo flute of 'Density 21.5' soon followed. The organised bursts of sound of 'Dance For Burgess' was performed next and displayed yet more in the way enjoyable, refreshing brevity (a theme that would reappear throughout the concert). 'Ecuatorial' was the final piece played before the interval, and proved a complex, striking assembling of brass, percussion, piano and vocals. A brilliant, condensed orchestral horizon.

'Étude pour Espace' opened the second half and was a vast and varied collage of aggregated choral and orchestral sounds. 'Déserts' closed the concert and was by some distance the longest piece of the evening. It presented itself as a series of deconstructed, miniature sound-worlds where intricate orchestral episodes were brilliantly aligned alongside stark, distorted electronic tape reels (the first piece tonight to explicitly feature his experimentation with early electronic music). Abstract visual imagery was simultaneously projected on to three large rectangular screens on the QEH stage and walls. The video began with what appeared to be dark, mysterious sub-tidal motions. These were gradually replaced by images suggesting vapour-trailed skylines, finally ending with still, blurred quasi-alien landscapes. Very atmospheric. 

The music was unashamedly cerebral but never cold and seemed to show Varèse to be more accessible than some of his twentieth century contemporaries such as Xenakis, Stockhausen etc. 

An excellent start to the series.