The Barbican’s ‘Making America’ season has landed at a time peculiar in modern history wherein the USA finds itself on the back foot. The second in the honestly-not-trolling series continued with an immigration-makes-the-nation theme, with all three pieces on the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s programme rich in the multiplicity of world narratives that have created America’s ever-evolving story.
Billy Childs’ Diaspora, his concerto for saxophone, here receiving its UK premiere, is structured around three poems articulating Black American experience. Motherland, inspired by Nayyirah Waheed’s Africa’s Lament, opens with an uplifting soprano saxophone solo – a song with the breadth and freedom of landscape that, although it is meant to evoke an African utopia, is reminiscent of the New World hope of Copland, especially when joined with busy pizzicato and call and response birdsong motifs in the wind. Broad swathes of colour emerge from the lower strings as the texture becomes more emotionally complex as the song melody continues to drive through, so that eventually Child’s optimistic first movement sounds like Shostakovich might have without the paranoia.
Everything changes as If We Must Die crashes in with the bass drum hammer-of-fate style, and the second movement, based on the poem by Claude McKay, is dominated by brutal percussive repetition, including whole forearm piano clusters, to evoke the horror of slave ships. A 12-tone saxophone theme voices a rising sense of panic and despair. Hope returns as piano and alto sax begin the third movement in an uplifting hymn tune – with some glorious blues rolls – inspired by Maya Angelou’s And Still I Rise. The sense of freedom we heard in the first movement returns, supported by a gently defiant rhythm that gathers strength and becomes a steady march as the soprano sax winds and wiggles its way joyously into the stratosphere.
Also making his UK debut, saxophonist Steven Banks made the demands of Childs’ eclectic writing, particularly the virtuosic cadenza passages, look effortless. His technical dexterity, his creamy, lyrical tone and a wistful encore to boot (the second movement of Saint-Saëns' Oboe Sonata) – had audience queuing in the interval for his latest album.
Ray Charles and reincarnation are the inspirations for Du Yun’s Hundred Heads, originally commissioned by the Seattle Symphony. The title refers to the fate of a crotchety Buddhist monk, Kapila, who calls people who make mistakes “donkey-head” etc, and is punished with a life as a sea monster with many more heads than he knows what to do with. Those many heads appear in Du Yun’s piece as karmic reiterations of Charles’ best-known tunes. A repetitive, tightly chromatic circular theme throughout the orchestra and Doppler-effect brass motifs build the dense city-scape of Seattle: when the momentum breaks through it’s like a whole building walking towards you. Half-heard snatches of jazz, such as wah wah trumpets or languid piano riffs, drift up as if from basements towards the busy pavement. It was a big night for the celesta, tasked with twinkling against a backdrop that’s both heavy swamp and frenetic construction.
John Adams’ monumental Schoenberg-infused Harmonielehre completed this programme celebrating the sound of America’s relentless reinvention, with the full forces of the BBC Symphony absolutely terrific under the command of Elena Schwarz. A flashy conductor is the last thing anyone wants or needs for Adams’ complex and demanding symphony, so it’s as well that Schwarz’s style is characterised by pinpoint attention to detail, unshakeable control and a visibly good-humoured, reciprocal rapport.
