United Kingdom Pärt, Tan Dun, Lutoslawski: Colin Currie (water percussion), London Philharmonic Orchestra / Hannu Lintu (conductor). Queen Elizabeth Corridor, London, 29.3.2025. (CK)
Pärt – Symphony No.1 (Polyphonic)
Tan Dun – Water Concerto
Lutoslawski – Symphony No.3
With Finnish conductor Eva Ollikainen indisposed, it was lucky that her compatriot Hannu Lintu (admired right here by John Rhodes for his Saariaho and Nielsen with the London Symphony Orchestra solely three days earlier) was available to tackle this difficult London Philharmonic Orchestra programme, and to take it on unchanged. It additionally proved transfer to carry out the live performance within the Queen Elizabeth Corridor moderately than the Royal Pageant Corridor – smaller and extra intimate than its imposing neighbour and higher suited to the piece which most individuals within the viewers had come to listen to and see. The lights had been low; every participant’s music stand was illuminated.
Tan Dun’s music will be each hypnotic and thrilling: I bear in mind the impression of his breakthrough rating for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a range from which was performed by China’s Shenzhen Orchestra on their UK tour final yr. His Water Concerto is devoted to Toru Takemitsu, and it was Takemitsu who the music delivered to thoughts – each for the significance of visible theatre (bear in mind these huge colored ribbons in From me flows what you name Time?) and for the stretches of musical uneventfulness (it may need appeared an extended 27 minutes to a few of the orchestral gamers). Most of us within the viewers had been gripped much less by the music than by curiosity about what Colin Currie and his two assistants had been going to do subsequent.
That isn’t a good distinction, for the reason that piece shouldn’t be about music, however about sounds and the way we take heed to them. And what sounds! The piece started with Currie behind the corridor, the opposite two gamers on the stage at excessive left and proper, taking part in waterphones – devices that maintain water, with metallic prongs which can be bowed and amplified with magical impact. We might have been on Prospero’s island, enchanted by Sounds and candy airs, that give delight, and damage not. Every of the gamers had a big glass bowl (Currie had two), during which numerous objects had been dipped (together with palms, producing an amplified splashing). The floor of the water grew to become the pores and skin of a drum as Currie attacked it with an upended glass in every hand; the sound of small gongs bent out of true as they had been immersed; an extended glass tube, tapped on its rim, produced totally different notes in accordance with its depth within the water. And so forth.
The orchestra? The strings slid round, coiling and uncoiling like a sleepy snake. Brass gamers tapped their devices or blew by their mouthpieces. A cello had a schmoozy solo. A clarinettist performed a loud kazoo. As a change, Currie made air noises with swishing chopsticks or went off to play a marimba in entrance of the heavy brass. The soloists’ rhythmic patterns had been typically extra attention-grabbing than the sounds themselves: broadly separated on stage, their unanimity in synchronising advanced rhythms was maybe probably the most spectacular facet of the efficiency.
Celestial doodling, I jotted because the piece started: however then I began to actually pay attention. It’s fairly an expertise, and no reward will be too excessive for Currie and his two unnamed colleagues. It was embedded between two symphonies from the second half of the 20 th century, Estonian and Polish, each written beneath situations of Soviet oppression, each carried out by Lintu with aptitude and authority. He’s a really tall man, a commanding determine; and along with his left hand signalling to the gamers excessive over his head – because it regularly was – he’s taller nonetheless.
Arvo Pärt wrote his First Symphony earlier than he was thirty, impressed by musical processes and influenced by the Second Viennese College. It’s a twelve-tone work, not too horrifying, however presumably disturbing for many who love the Pärt of Spiegel im Spiegel. The primary motion, Canons, sported some attractively angular lyricism and a few positive writing for the pair of horns; within the second, Prelude and Fugue, the horns once more caught my ear, as did a jolly part that includes syncopated pizzicatos from the strings and chirruping woodwind, and a extra sinister episode of darkish sounds from clarinet and bassoon over cellos and double basses grubbing away at an advanced rhythm.
The ultimate work was an unquestioned masterpiece. Lutoslawski needed to discover his personal means into writing a symphony. Together with his Third he discovered a kind that labored for him – two actions, performed with no break: the primary preparatory, laying out his supplies, the second a totally developed musical argument. In contrast to Shostakovich, Lutoslawski’s composing was sealed off from the general public occasions of his time: but it’s laborious to not hear the terse, hammering four-note motif with which it begins and ends as an iron fist, a modernised, even mechanised model of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth.
The opening motion – flying rags and shreds of themes – has a preparatory, at instances tentative high quality. Pizzicato double basses sign the start of the second motion: a stumbling march spreads by the strings. There may be magnificence and barbed wire: the extra the ache and rigidity appear to develop, the higher the sweetness. And when the four-note determine crashes in for the final time, it appeared – no less than, on this positive and exponentially intense efficiency – extra like an achievement, an arrival than a door slammed within the symphony’s face. Lintu and the LPO had been magnificent.
Chris Kettle
