The London Sinfonietta under Martyn Brabbins gave a concert on Tuesday last at the Queen Elizabeth Hall that focused on the music of Thomas Larcher, a relatively young (b. 1963) Austrian composer whose strong standing in central Europe is not matched in Britain, though as evidenced by this concert things seem to be changing in that respect.
Larcher's music seeks a sort of compromise between spectral concern with timbre (and the related concern of generating shape out of musical colour), non-hierarchical strategies of tonality, and an unabashed sense of rock dynamics that often creeps in at crucial points of climax.
It is just the sort of middle ground approach that many composers seem to be now evincing, from Thomas Adès, to Brett Dean, to Johannes Maria Staud, and the music that results can often be very engaging, dealing as it does with the tension between narrative and fragmentation. Larcher's music trades in these sorts of themes very well, though at times less convincingly than it might, as we shall see.
The concert began tellingly with a piece composed by Toru Takemitsu as part of his series of ‘rain' works, entitled Rain Coming, which was selected by Thomas Larcher.For chamber orchestra with prominent alto flute part, it is a work whose whole being derives out of the sort of play of colour and motive typical to Debussy, and to Larcher. It was given an initially hesitant performance from the ensemble- music with such starkly defined paragraphs of sound such as this should be precisely unified at entry and exit- that grew into itself, to finally appear sensuous, and fluent. As soon as it left the middle frequencies in which the music is concentrated for the first half- an exit announced with assurance by the pianist with a stentorian low note-the performance soared, and the rich colour of the composer's world become readily apparent.
Following this was the presentation of the major work of the evening, the world premiere of Larcher's new song cycle written for Matthias Goerne on fragments of text by Ingeborg Bachmann, Die Nacht der Verlorenen. The cycle all flows as one body of music, though the six parts are clearly divided, and its subject is an unrelentingly stark consideration of isolation and abjection in the face of illness, and death. The music displayed well the rich ear of its composer-Matthias Pintscher seems to have a modern rival for delicacy and power of orchestral effect, as heard in the evocative mix of button accordion and high string harmonics throughout, the damped piano in the fifth part, or the evocative low sonorities of brass, piano, voice and strings in the third. There was also a keen willingness to articulate, and deepen, the despair of the text; the thrusting climaxes of the second and fourth parts enriched the anguish and anger of the words, whilst the mancado effect of the conclusion brought out the entire resigning clamour that can attend death.
The performance was almost unbearably powerful at times, though it was not without its problems. Brabbins brought out very well the recurring transition into a sort of classical stateliness at points of tonal reminiscence (as if the spectre of Schubert was not already overbearing; the composer wilfully names the semiotic significance of the work at these points). Sharp attendance also was paid by the musicians to the diverse colours of the score, and Brabbins showed great skill in steering the ensemble bewitchingly through the detailed dynamic and phrasal intricacy of the music. Goerne's usually rich baritone began haltingly- it was if he was unsure of his line, so clearly was he counting beats and struggling with intonation. But by the third part, where his line lies low as a foghorn, he had attained a sort of fluency. He was regularly inaudible, but this mattered little as we got into the heart of the piece; by then he had created a figure of convincing dereliction, and trembling awe.
Larcher's works in the second half struggled to live up to the majestic billing of the song cycle in the first. After a quite charming conversation with Fraser Trainer, Larcher gave a performance of his piano work Antennas....Requiem for H, which consists of three very short abstract soundscapes. Playing solely under the lid of the instrument, Larcher used various stones and plastic devices on the strings of the piano to build up a web of different sounds, which he made polyphonic by leaving some of the items wobbling away, as he left to attend to the others. There was an engaging chaos to the performance-one with unmistakable suggestions of Fluxus approaches to pianos and other instruments in the past-and Larcher just about managed to wrestle some sort of line and logic out of his busy movements around the music object/space. Echoing micropolyphony at times, acousmatic sound art at others, the quiet eulogies proved guileless enough to be charming. After a performance of Takemitsu's Tree Line that worked around its intricate colours and its swooning shape with a great deal of skill and sensitivity (the offstage cries of the oboe at the conclusion were especially effective), Larcher''s piano concerto Böse Zellen received its UK premiere. With the composer at the piano, the piece began inimitably with a metal-on-metal glissando, achieved by running a large steel ball along the strings of the piano whilst depressing some of its keys (the effect was nice, but the fuss made over it in the onstage interview would make you wonder if Trainer or Larcher had ever heard a slide guitar).
The work then proceeded with a strangely facile texture of heavily damped piano (some of the strings had been prepared in advance), and noticeably springy orchestra. The soloist's part was very muted in the early stages, thus proposing some sort of negation of the romantic ideal of soloist as lone hero, but this sort of aesthetic austerity was soon supplanted by an unconvincing move into minimalist and swarming writing for piano, and slightly derivative orchestral effects. The piece lacked at its heart a sense of a meaningful, or at least an engaging, dialogue between ensemble and pianist, despite Brabbins best efforts in this performance. The lack of originality of idea and structure was surprising for such a clearly talented composer. The frequently inaudible piano writing that accompanied the climaxing ensemble was more evidence of poor, poor planning.
Some unabashedly bare low-end writing in the strings served well to ratchet up the tension near the end, and the performers did at least build up a good head of steam in the last pages before a firm, resolute, and effective resolution at the end. The work could not, however, recover from the holes that clearly lie in its construction; one would hope that the earlier song-cycle or the short piano pieces are a more accurate indication of the composer's talent than this concerto. This, then, was a curiously uneven concert in which a relatively new Austrian musical voice announced its insight, its eccentricity, and, perhaps, its inconsistence.
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