Will Dutta, Max de Wardener & Plaid, Purcell Room, 24/04/10

I’m a little late in blogging about this but on Saturday I was at the Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre to see Will Dutta, Max de Wardener and Plaid play a show as part of the Ether Festival (my 6th concert of a very good festival). Multimedia had played quite a big role over the course of the two weeks and it did so tonight also, on this occasion Quayola providing the visual projections.

The show featured various collaborations between Dutta (piano) and de Wardener & Plaid (live electronics). The collaboration between Dutta & Plaid that closed the show was the most successful, Messiaen-like piano allied to glistening electronic chords and beats. During the collaborations various strands of colour flowed horizontally across a black screen, changing form and mutating in response to the music, eventually morphing into geometric shapes.

In between these pieces, Will Dutta also performed a series of solo piano compositions by John Adams, Olivier Messiaen and Erik Satie. The pieces by Satie were characteristically contemplative, the Messiaen typically colourful. Although undoubtedly beautiful (and played very impressively from memory by Dutta) they seemed to stand separately from the collaborations, making for a slightly fragmented, stop-start show. In the programme notes Will Dutta spoke about connecting the different genres of classical, electronic and dance music but tonights' show seemed to showcase these individually as opposed to a cohesive set. Even the visuals felt strangely separated and distant.

The evening also featured a screening of ‘Strata #3’, a collaboration between Plaid & Quayola. Visually, it was quite an interesting piece. Three-dimensional triangular shapes float inside an art gallery and then begin to interact with a painting. Gradually the shapes became part of the painting, slowly altering it before it is finally totally represented as a digital three-dimensional landscape. Plaid’s contribution was a lush, ambient electronic soundtrack.

Will Dutta came back on stage to play a sublime version of ‘Avril 14th’ by Aphex Twin as an encore.

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 Philharmonic Orchestra, Turnage/Glass/Gorecki, Royal Festival Hall, 17/04/10

Sandwiched in between two nights featuring the music of Edgard Varese was a concert at the Royal Festival Hall by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The programme featured the UK premiere of 'Texan Tenebrae' by Mark-Anthony Turnage, the European premiere of 'Violin Concerto 2 - The American Four Seasons' by Philip Glass and 'Symphony No. 3 - Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs' by Henryk Gorecki. The concert was part of the excellent current Ether Festival.

Turnage's short piece was inspired by the opera he is currently writing and was a punchy composition, featuring moments of percussive punctuation and a subtle, jazz underscoring courtesy of the inclusion of two saxophones within the ranks of the large orchestra.

I thought Glass' 'Violin Concerto 2' began in restrained style, sounding quite moderate (possibly due in part to the exclusively string-based, smaller orchestra that the piece was played by). During the pre-concert talk conductor Marin Alsop mentioned how the piece referenced certain Baroque music, and whilst not really being sufficiently knowledgeable to comment fully I could see what she was alluding to. Signature Glass threads of repetition slowly revealed themselves. Each movement opened with a shorter 'prelude' of solo violin from long time Glass associate Robert McDuffie which gave the concerto a slightly unusual feel. The thrid and fourth movements saw the pace quicken with weaving violin lines and some ascending, accelerating orchestral passages. Very Philip Glass. The piece ended with a virtuosic violin sign-off. In the concert programme Glass explained how the four movements were not assigned a particular season, it being left up to the listener to interpret them in their own way. It is almost an impossible task but my very loosely-based interpretation would be that it went Autumn-Winter-Spring-Summer. The apparent coldness and relative serenity of the second movement evoked a wintery landscape, whereas the last two movements seemed to contain more in the way of musical regeneration and warmth.

Tonight's concert was supposed to have ended with the premiere of Gorecki's 'Symphony No. 4' but due to ill health he was unable to finish it. Slightly worryingly, during the pre-concert talk Marin Alsop revealed she didn't think it would ever be completed. That would be an enormous shame if true. To see which direction Gorecki would go next in his symphonic writing would be fascinating. His 'Symphony No. 3 - Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs instead closed tonight's concert. It was dedicated to the victims of the recent Polish aeroplane crash. During the pre-concert talk Marin Alsop also revealed that soprano Joanna Wos had travelled from Poland to London by car (over a twenty hour journey) due to the ongoing disruption of flights due to the Icelandic volcano ash cloud.

The symphony is generally considered to be one of the most moving pieces of music, especially given its historical and social context. It might not be a symphony in the traditional sense but it certainly is symphonic in scale and magnitude.

There is not much to say that hasn't already been said before - it is a slow-building, mournful, elegiac, spiritual piece full of soaring orchestral waves and minimalist purity. As the piece progresses it seems to get enveloped in a sense of the eternal. Lyrically it is dark and quite upsetting. The programme notes referred to how it could be seen as three responses by females to death, and I have also heard it being called a meditation on separation (the first and third movements coming from the perspective of a mother separated from her child, whereas the second movement is the prayer from a yound girl, separated from the world). If you want to read a more detailed explanation of the piece you can find it here. Tonight it sounded profoundly beautiful and overpoweringly sad, the vocals from soprano Joanna Wos being particularly moving and poignant (despite the endless coughing from members of the audience during the piece - why can't people control this?)

After leaving the hall I moved downstairs to the Clore Ballroom to see Piano Circus play a fantastic post-concert show of layered, intertwining, cyclical keyboard pieces. The six keyboards were arranged in a circle on the ballroom floor and they played 'Log, Line & Loud' by Graham Fitkin and '6 Pianos' by Steve Reich (and possibly other pieces). Their sound had shades of minimalism but was also quite aminamed and compelling, and reminded me of the great Penguin Cafe Orchestra in places.