Tempo 60:238 First Performances

62 Tempo 60 (238) 62–73 © 2006 Cambridge University Press DOI: 10.1017/S0040298206000337 Printed in the United Kingdom London, Barbican: Aho’s Clarinet Concerto showing-off seems instead like an anxious attempt to escape a new mood of introspection. Concertos for instruments that 19th-century After the soloist has listened to a solo flute and composers wouldn’t have touched with a violin dark-shadowed patterns from brass with Harmon bow have become so much the norm that no-one mutes, he is left alone to make quiet tremolando gives a second thought to those for tap-dancer patterns. These, although they soon develop into (grace à Morton Gould), two timpanists (Philip a prestissimo virtuosic display of Fröst’s superb Glass) or even Kalevi Aho’s own recent foray into technique (in the second movement cadenza, the rare – but not unprecedented – repertoire of following attacca), never stray far – with their the contra-bassoon, premièred just a few months expressive crescendos and decrescendos, their ago. painful oscillations of mood - from something Aho’s stated aim is to write a concerto for more than mere display. ‘almost every instrument in the orchestra’ and Although he is only 57, Aho cuts an adding to recent efforts for tuba (2001), flute enthusiastic but slightly conservative figure in (2002) and double bass (2005) is his 2005 work for interview. The spiky con brio third movement clarinet and orchestra, which received its first shows some distinctly tried and tested virtues. performance by Martin Fröst, who commissioned The themes, both for the clarinet and orchestra, it, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under are short and well-defined. The writing for solo Osmo Vänskä on 22 April. Despite a suspicion instrument, while taxing, is idiomatic and allows that Aho’s motivation might be to create yet more the soloist to show off his considerable odd sounds on out-of-the-way instruments, the interpretative skills without struggling with new concerto is a triumph for more conventional extraneous effects. Finally the orchestral material reasons.1 Contemporary concertos for clarinet is not simply filling before the soloist’s next often reach for multiphonic techniques to portamento-filled run, wonderful though these supplement the instrument’s natural tendency to are: it is dramatic in its own right. quick running passages, jazzy riffings and soulful The quality of writing in the fourth movement musings in its lower register. Aho’s new concerto adagio is even more impressive. After horns and features all of the above. Its strengths, however, trumpets have left us in a lowering landscape, stem from the absence of the merely innovative reminiscent of middle-period Mahler, the and the composer’s sticking to almost-classical soloist’s contribution, weaving an unbroken dolce virtues of variety, drama and memorability. line against harp and vibraphone, hardly seems to The 30-minute piece has five movements, each be a vehicle for the clarinet at all. Think of this with an Italian tempo-marking. The work is itself rather as a symphony’s slow movement for which titled ‘Concerto per clarinetto ed orchestra’ so any contemporary composer would have been clearly Aho’s drawing on classical models is not happy to take such advantage of a solo clarinet’s accidental. In the first movement, marked contribution of grace and melancholy. tempestoso, the soloist’s ‘strike high, loud and then There are multiphonics in the weird misterioso run’ approach, while the orchestra hits back with last movement, but the vibraphone is back; sudden quaver-length chords, soon changes. As together with Harmon-muted pp low brass it violins come in high in their register, molto again creates an atmosphere where the ‘broken’ espressivo, what sounded like the soloist’s joyous over-blown sound from the soloist is redolent of struggle, even defeat in the soft diminuendo closing bars. There is no need here to have ended triumphantly, calling for our attention, just as the work began. Our interest has more subtly been 1 The Flute Concerto, by contrast – released last year on BIS won. In only half an hour Aho has traversed a CD1499, with Sharon Bezaly, the Lahti SO and Vänskä again – range of soundscapes with such finesse that the shows mostly why there haven’t been more flute concertos. whole concerto is an absolute triumph. The instrument is too unimposing to act as a foil for the orchestra and its familiar breathy, dreamy restraint makes for a work that that gets bogged down in its own wistfulness. Robert Stein 63 London, Barbican: Salonen’s ‘Wing on Wing’ the front of the balcony, provoking an explosive response from the orchestra, the voices wailing Esa-Pekka Salonen’s music has followed the same from either side as they climb to the very top of trajectory as that of his close friend Magnus their register. The sampled fish sounds swirl Lindberg, abandoning the emphatic modernism across the hall (the Plainfin Midshipman, of their early works in favour of a much more Salonen’s note proudly reveals, sings an E pronounced role for tonality. But where Lindberg natural), giving the sopranos just enough time to has married the harmonic purposiveness of regain the stage (they must be grateful for classical tonality with the myriad timbral performances in small halls) where they spin out a resources of modernism, producing both cruelly high ecstatic line, first in unison and then procedures and textures of considerable antiphonally. The orchestral textures here – as complexity, Salonen’s recent orchestral scores often elsewhere – are full, rich, even over-loaded: have an assertive, luminous tonal confidence that much of the detail is impossible to hear. What seems to state ‘problem solved’ – even if it does so promises to be a dance-finale now builds up from in kaleidoscopically rich colours. His Wing on the orchestra, urged on by exciting brass riffs and Wing (2004), an orchestral fantasy which received rising woodwind figures, the freewheeling its UK première at the hands of Jukka-Pekka polyphony directly reminiscent of the opening of Saraste and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the Matthijs Vermeulen’s Fourth Symphony. But it’s Barbican on 12 May, is a tribute to the architect ain’t over till – on this occasion – the two small Frank Gehry: Salonen’s programme note explains ladies sing, and architect and fish return to lay that ‘wing on wing’ is a sailing term (for a sail- Wing on Wing to rest. formation presenting maximum sail-area) which In spite, though, of the obvious excellence of Gehry uses as a metaphor for his Walt Disney this performance (and relative familiarity with the Concert Hall in Los Angeles – the home, of recording on Deutsche Grammophon DG002889 course, of Salonen’s Los Angeles Philharmonic 477 5375), I’m not yet sure that Wing on Wing is Orchestra. The composer further explains that quite the sum of its parts. The orchestral writing, Wing on Wing, using ‘metaphors of water and of course, is utterly confident and polished, as wind’, incorporates ‘the weird sampled sound of one you’d expect from a composer who is also a fish from the local waters of Southern California one of the most technically assured of today’s – the Plainfin Midshipman – as an instrument’, as conductors. But – unlike earlier Salonen scores, also Gehry’s ‘sampled (and modified) voice here not least the L. A. Variations of 1996 or the and there’. Among the ‘other unusual colours’ are Bacchanalian Foreign Bodies of 2001 – there seems two coloratura sopranos – here the sisters Anu to be no real musical purpose behind the work and Piia Tomsi – ‘sometimes as soloists, itself, other than Salonen’s enjoyment in flexing sometimes as instruments among the others’. By his musical muscles, nor a distinct harmonic pairing them at the outset with contra-bassoon voice: I would recognize a Lindberg orchestral and contrabass clarinet Salonen hopes to ‘create a piece from a bar or so, but I doubt I could say the new kind of hybrid instrument, a sci-fi fantasy of same of Salonen – other, perhaps, than from the a union between humans and machines’. At sheer luxuriance of the orchestral writing. Maybe various points, speakers and the scurrying the musical purpose of Wing on Wing is also none sopranos extend the music into the auditorium. other than the explicitly verbal one: it pays good- Cast in a 24-minute span and, the note says, ten natured tribute to Frank Gehry. There are worse sections (the divisions were not always reasons for writing a piece. perceptible to the ear), Wing on Wing begins with Martin Anderson the sampled sounds and the two sisters antiphonally cantillating a folk-like figure, their high lines in stark contrast with the dark and low woodwinds. As the sopranos leave the stage to London, Guildhall School of Music: dash outside the hall, busy string figuration takes Contemporary Israeli Composers over and a storm blows up and dies down again, in orchestral writing of machine-like neatness and A world première by one of Israel’s foremost precision. Gehry’s sampled voice returns before senior composers, Yehezkel Braun, and UK the cantillation figure gently spreads across the premières of music by four generations of Israeli ruminative ensemble in easy-going heterophony composers, played by a superb young Israeli – is this nature-painting? Salonen (afraid of ensemble Meitar, regaled an audience at the rousing invasive thoughts of Sibelius?) doesn’t say. Guildhall School of Music and Drama on Monday The sopranos now intone their cantillation from 27 March. The event formed the climax of a 64 concert tour by Meitar to Europe and with fine focussed tone and clear diction, the two Scandinavia, which in the UK included three slow songs leading to a playful third song, and a concerts at the Jewish Museum, London, Spiro slow ostinato-accompanied fourth.

Load more