BBC Symphony Orchestra, Barbican, review: a night of tough, uncompromising music
If you’re in search of cheerful or consoling music for the lockdown, the BBC Symphony Orchestra is maybe not the orchestra for you. Its new season offers the kind of challenging programmes that have always been its speciality. Which is a comfort in itself, as it’s a sign that the lockdown hasn’t entirely colonised everyone’s minds.
Last night’s concert, video-streamed from the Barbican and led by the orchestra’s Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo, was a case in point. It took one of Joseph Haydn’s best but least ingratiating symphonies, full of sharp angles and bleakly tragic feelings, and placed it between two recent pieces, both puzzling and strenuous in their different ways. The first of them, a piece for 16 solo strings, came from Anna Clyne, a British composer who’s made her home in the USA – a natural move as her music has the full-throated, turbo-charged orchestral energy that American orchestras appreciate.
Clyne’s fondness for glowing major-key harmonies was evident in this early piece, but it also showed a rare delicacy of feeling. Entitled Within Her Arms, it was inspired by the shock of receiving the news of her mother’s unexpected death, and seemed at first to be a record of the emotional numbness such terrible news would bring. A tiny descending phrase, handed reverently by one solo player to another, gradually lofted upwards as if tracing the departure of a spirit. But this movement was constantly cut off, just as the music was about to blossom into radiant affirmation. Whether this was an acknowledgement that the spirit had indeed departed, or just the brute fact of death reasserting itself, was hard to say. Perhaps that was the point.
After all that tentativeness the emotional turbulence and distress of Haydn’s 49th Symphony (known as La Passione) almost came as a relief. The slow first movement began as cold and grey as the sea at dawn, Oramo coaxing just a touch of warmth when the music turned briefly to the major key, soon suppressed. The minuet had a gaunt but affecting dignity, and the finale a mixture of fury and desperation.
So far so good – but then came the evening’s major piece, which turned out to be a major puzzle. Accused, by eminent Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg, is a set of dialogues between three prisoners and their interrogators, each drawn from a different historical era. In each case, whether it’s a French Revolutionary tribunal, the East German “Stasi” or an American interviewer, the dice are clearly loaded against the accused, who squirms and wriggles to avoid self-incrimination. Finnish soprano Anu Komsi had the incredibly difficult task of impersonating both sides of the dialogue, while negotiating Lindberg’s leaping and often stratospherically high vocal lines. The problem was that any possibility of empathy with the three victims was snuffed out by the unremitting textural and harmonic richness of Lindberg’s score, which never allowed for any emotional light and shade. I had to admire Komsi’s incredible virtuosity, but at the end was left wondering exactly what the point of it all was.
