Chris Swithinbank

I made this record­ing of birds in my gar­den at dawn on 22 April 2010. It was part of a whole heap of field record­ings that I am only just sift­ing through. I’m afraid I can’t tell you what type of bird it is; I only ever spot black­birds, mag­pies and, more re­cently, the oc­ca­sional robin, but I don’t think it’s any of those.

Help your­self to a down­load, but please keep to this Cre­ative Com­mons Li­cense. Apolo­gies for the alarm clock at 1’55”.

It is fairly rare to come across a pro­gramme that forms a clear, co­her­ent unit with­out re­sort­ing to gim­micky themes or ten­u­ous as­so­ci­a­tions. So it was pleas­ing to hear the un­ob­tru­sive logic that bound to­gether the LSO’s Sun­day-evening pro­gramme at Bar­bi­can Hall of Bach (arr. We­bern), Lachen­mann and Brahms, a pro­gramme ap­par­ently con­ceived by pi­anist Mau­r­izio Pollini, which can only count as yet an­other tes­ta­ment to his re­mark­able mu­si­cian­ship.

We­bern’s arrange­ment of the Ricer­car a 6 from The Mu­si­cal Of­fer­ing drapes Bach’s music with a richly Vi­en­nese sense of colour and, under the di­rec­tion of Peter Eötvös, at times seemed to lilt and hes­i­tate in an al­most Ro­man­tic fash­ion. How­ever, far from sink­ing into a blur, We­bern’s or­ches­tra­tion pro­duces a ter­rific clar­ity as the lines pass from in­stru­ment to in­stru­ment, the al­most hy­per­ac­tive coloura­tion re­cedes from the fore­ground re­veal­ing the in­tri­cate con­tours of an older music. This is fiendishly hard music to play. In­deed, it made one won­der whether it might even be more dif­fi­cult in some ways than the tim­bral com­plex­i­ties and ex­tended tech­niques of the Lachen­mann it pre­ceded. To en­sure a line sounds as one as it jour­neys through the ranks of play­ers re­quires phe­nom­e­nal en­sem­ble play­ing and, while the LSO’s play­ers could not al­ways quite muster the unity this needs, they ac­quit­ted them­selves ho­n­ourably.

Lachen­mann’s Dou­ble (Grido II) is a work for string or­ches­tra pre­miered at the Lucerne Fes­ti­val in 2005. It builds upon the frame­work of his Third String Quar­tet ‘Grido’ (2001), ex­pand­ing ges­tures and thick­en­ing tex­tures, but ad­her­ing sur­pris­ingly closely to its cham­ber-sized model. Strangely, the in­creased forces lacked some of the phys­i­cal in­ten­sity that a string quar­tet can muster. The dou­blings pre­sent here tend to can­cel out some of the more del­i­cate coloura­tions and bow po­si­tion vari­a­tions that are per­cep­ti­ble when per­formed by a sin­gle in­stru­ment. Acousti­cally, the dou­bling of pitched sounds has a much greater ef­fect than the dou­bling of un­pitched sounds, weak­en­ing the im­pact and, at cer­tain points, the struc­tural im­por­tance of cer­tain un­pitched and ‘noise’ el­e­ments, es­pe­cially the tear­ing waves of scratch­tones that form a cli­max mid-way through the work. Cer­tain pas­sages with min­i­mal pitch vari­a­tion, en­livened in the string quar­tet ver­sion by sub­tleties of sound, also seemed slightly aim­less.

Per­haps it is fool­ish to com­pare the large with the small scale, but it seems dif­fi­cult to avoid. How­ever, the above ex­cepted, this music has great beauty to offer and the LSO strings played it very well in­deed. Hav­ing com­menced work with Lachen­mann in per­son in April, they demon­strated com­mit­ment, sen­si­tiv­ity and un­der­stand­ing of a piece rid­dled with mo­ments of acoustic bril­liance and in­ven­tive­ness, only the oc­ca­sional clat­ter of a hastily re­moved wooden mute dis­turb­ing the well-held at­mos­phere. In his pro­gramme note Richard Steinitz in­di­cated how shock­ing it is that this per­for­mance was the first of Lachen­mann’s music by a British sym­phony or­ches­tra other than the BBC. For that to be the case — al­most 40 years after the pre­miere of his spec­tac­u­lar early or­ches­tral work Kon­trakadenz and with more than a dozen other or­ches­tral, con­cer­tante and large en­sem­ble works writ­ten since — is an un­for­tu­nate sit­u­a­tion, most of all for British au­di­ences.

The con­cert ended with Brahms’s Piano Con­certo No. 1 with the evening’s mas­ter­mind, Mau­r­izio Pollini, at the key­board. Pollini is a pi­anist of great del­i­cacy and re­straint — see, for ex­am­ple, this video of him play­ing Chopin in a man­ner quite un­der­stated yet af­fect­ing — and this was ev­i­denced in won­der­ful fil­i­greed mo­ments in the first move­ment, which he let flower ef­fort­lessly into weight­less clouds. Slight weak­ness of sound at times sug­gest that, at 68, Pollini’s best years may sadly be be­hind him, but de­spite that and a fair few scrappy cor­ners, there was great in­ten­sity in his play­ing. The fi­nale was de­light­ful, full of good hu­mour and even joy. Add to that the vigour with which the or­ches­tra ap­proached this more fa­mil­iar reper­toire and the re­sult was far from un­en­joy­able.

The LSO thought­fully offer the pro­gramme notes for this con­cert for down­load here (PDF).

You can now hear record­ings of Tues­day’s per­for­mance by Va­ganza of Mikrokonz­ert: I Swear I Saw the Sun Falling and Psap­pha’s pre­miere of Wege & Wald­stille back in April over on my Band­camp page.

Alice Pur­ton with new music en­sem­ble Va­ganza will give the sec­ond per­for­mance of my micro cello con­certo Mikrokonz­ert: I Swear I Saw the Sun Falling at the Royal North­ern Col­lege of Music on the evening of Tues­day 8th June. The con­cert is part of a two-day fes­ti­val cel­e­brat­ing the music of Alexan­der Goehr and also in­cludes new works by Tom Coult and David Cur­ing­ton as well as Sing, Ariel by Goehr him­self.

Of­fi­cial list­ing