Jubilation - The Music Of George Benjamin, Southbank Centre, 12/05/12 - 13/05/12

I was at the Southbank Centre last weekend for Jubilation, their two day event celebrating the music of British composer George Benjamin. I didn’t make the concert in the Purcell Room featuring some of his chamber works but was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall to see the London Sinfonietta play three of his pieces alongside two works by György Ligeti.

The concert began with Melodien by Ligeti. It certainly contained some key Ligeti characteristics although sounded not quite as dense as pieces like Atmospheres. The music seemed to swell from the stage, advancing and receding almost as if under the control of some kind of strange, invisible tidal force. It was followed by Flight, Benjamin’s 1976 piece for solo flute. It was performed tonight by Michael Cox. The programme notes spoke of how Benjamin was inspired to write it after seeing birds flying over the Swiss Alps and it successfully recreated the movement and patterns associated with bird flight. With the sharp variations in pitch and speed it seemed to present itself as a companion piece to Olivier Messiaen’s attempts to replicate the sounds of birdsong (apt, given that Messiaen was Benjamin’s teacher in the 1970s).

Antara for chamber ensemble and electronics closed the first half. Like much contemporary classical I found it to be resolutely ‘head music’ in its structural complexity but the appearance of brass and percussion later in the piece really exerted a physical force. It was also rare in being a rare (only?) example of the panpipes sharing the stage with the more familiar instruments of the orchestra. I had doubts whether it would work beforehand but against some odds they were incorporated into the soundworld with some ease. Once finished, Benjamin stood from his seat in the stalls to take the applause of the audience.

After the interval came Ligeti’s Horn Concerto. I had only heard his string-based music prior to this concert and I found this to maybe not quite have the same dense opacity as some of these, almost sounding lighter and simpler although the last three movements provided moments of starkness.

The final piece played tonight was Benjamin’s Duet for piano and orchestra. In some ways I found it one of the more orthodox pieces heard over the weekend. The piano and orchestra seemed to enjoy a kind of respectful co-existence (aided by the sound of the harp), until the latter eventually reasserted its dominance towards the end.

I was back at the Southbank Centre the following night to see the Philharmonia Orchestra play more music by the same two composers at the Royal Festival Hall.

The opening piece - Benjamin’s Jubilation for orchestra and mixed children’s group - was a strangely muted, stop-start affair (especially so given the size of orchestra on stage). The following piece, Ligeti’s Double Concerto for flute and oboe fared better. Whilst talking to Gillian Moore ahead of the concert Benjamin described it as sounding as if played in slow-motion and underwater, both of which I’d agree with. It seemed to settle over the stage, slightly inscrutably, like a thinly dispersed mist. I enjoyed Benjamin’s Palimpsests for orchestra more, its compacted orchestral fluctuations and ominous sounding brass combining to great effect. The meaning of the title of the piece found clear corroboration in the music, especially in the layering of sounds.

Ligeti’s mesmerising Lontano opened the second half and invoked real suspense and mystery, sharing a similar stillness to the earlier Double Concerto. The show ended with Benjamin’s Ringed by the Flat Horizon, probably my favourite piece of the weekend. It seemed to epitomise his music - powerful and exacting without ever being wilfully difficult. Benjamin wrote it after seeing a photograph of a thunderstorm taking place over the New Mexico desert. This developed into a desire to produce a piece of music to suitably capture the tension of such an occasion. The replication of thunder and lightning on the double basses in particular was superb, and along with the orchestra conveyed some real moments of turbulence. As a piece it undoubtedly belongs to the world of contemporary classical although seemed to speak in its own distinctive language.

It may not have been quite equal to previous weekends dedicated to Edgard Varèse or Arvo Pärt, nor quite as all-encompassing in scale as the year-long celebration of Olivier Messiaen but still featured some excellent playing and some memorable moments. It was just a shame that the RFH was only half full and that many inside the hall during the first half of the concert seemed think it was fine to cough and shuffle their way through it. Such disappointments seemed in keeping with the slightly pessimistic tone struck by Benjamin in an interview with the Guardian. It was a shame – the music and performances this weekend really deserved better.

London Sinfonietta: Xenakis – Architect Of Sound, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Saturday 2nd April 2011

In ‘The Rest Is Noise’, his wonderful book on classical music in the twentieth century, music critic Alex Ross includes a comment from Iannis Xenakis about his music.

“The listener must be gripped and – whether he likes it or not – drawn into the flight path of the sounds, without a special training being necessary. The sensual shock must be just as forceful as when one hears a clap of thunder or looks into a bottomless abyss.”

The physicality hinted at in the above quotation was on full display in the concert by the London Sinfonietta on Saturday evening at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which attempted to show the influence that architecture played in the music of Xenakis. His avant-garde, unashamedly intellectual music can be heard frequently in the concert halls of London and is still an undeniably relevant force in the musical landscape of today. The Southbank Centre dedicated two days of their current Ether Festival to the work of this visionary musical figure.

This concert focused on three of his chamber pieces and one of his electroacoustic compositions. The first piece played was ‘Eonta’ for piano and brass quintet. It began with pianist Rolf Hind playing irregular, complex patterns on the piano, his hands darting back and forth across the keys as he tried to recreate the challenging lines that had originally been created by Xenakis on a computer during the 1960s (this compositional technique demonstrated Xenakis’s interest in the mathematical theory of stochasticism, which revolves around probabilities and randomness).

Some moments later the brass quintet supplied a dissonant, jarring backdrop to the piano. Throughout the piece the quintet moved their positions on stage on five occasions. By the end all five were playing whilst walking individually around the stage, the seemingly random directions they chose coming across as a visual representation of Xenakis’s interest in stochasticism. The polarised blocks of sound gradually began to overlap and intertwine, before ultimately merging together.

The second piece was ‘Kottos’ for solo cello, performed tonight by Tim Gill. He began by playing a series of deep, grinding, abrasive notes. As the piece unfolded, the sound became more contorted and stretched. In some ways it seemed to resemble a cello sonata that had been left to corrode and disintegrate over a long period of time.

The final chamber piece performed this evening was ‘Phlegra’ for small ensemble, arguably being the best example of Xenakis’s meticulous sonic constructions. Sharp, sliding strings were aggregated with exacting, stringent brass. As with a lot of his musical compositions this was heavily inspired by Greek mythology. The programme notes spoke of the “melodic arborescence” of the piece.

After the dense, pressurised, smaller compositions of the first half the second half contained one extended piece, ‘La Légende d'Eer’ for electroacoustic tape. The stage was empty, lit only with an unchanging crimson/orange light. It began with a simple fluctuating frequency, suggesting a kind of microtonal, electronic birdsong (in some ways recalling the music of Xenakis’s teacher, Olivier Messiaen). It then grew into a sprawling, pulsating sea of electronic sound that resonated around the hall. Industrial, mechanical noises were integrated alongside esoteric, abstract disturbances to absorbing effect. By the close, the music had returned to how it started, minimalistic high frequencies, then silence.

Ostensibly ‘La Légende d'Eer’ sounded more ‘contemporary’ compared to the earlier chamber compositions. Yet, paradoxically it was maybe not as radical as these chamber pieces, due to the familiarity and preponderance of dark ambient/drone/experimental music released by labels such as Miasmah, Touch and Type. 

However, the showcasing of both styles, brilliantly performed by the London Sinfonietta and conducted by André de Ridder, proved that the brutal, visceral music of Xenakis should not just be listened to but should be felt and experienced in full.

Back in 2009 I also saw the BBC Symphony Orchestra play a programme of music by Xenakis at the Barbican. You can read my post on that concert here.

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.