Three world premieres and a modernist classic would once have been standard fare for the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Sinfonietta. Those days are gone, and the London Symphony Orchestra deserves every credit for its spirit of adventure. Founded 20 years ago by Lady Panufnik, and now supported by the Helen Hamlyn Trust, the LSO’s annual project to commission and present the work of young composers shows every sign of rude and continuing health.
Gilufim – the Hebrew word for ‘carvings’ – made a bright start. The Israeli-born, London-resident composer Omri Kochavi used his allotted five minutes shrewdly, outlining a clear form and a hypnotic melody, led by marimba and offset by some microtonal accompaniment which perhaps redundantly weakened the sense of a firm tonal centre in (at a guess, without sight of the score) A major. A teasing pause, then a quick wind chorale up a tone in a blaze of B major, and we were done, leaving behind the impression of sharply etched lines and an orchestra briefly transformed into a woodworker’s atelier.
At double the length, mostly double the volume too, Sasha Scott’s Sly made a more diffuse impact. In a gradual accumulation of force if not momentum, there was little beyond the clusters and slides of its filmic introduction that spoke with a vocabulary enlarged from the age of Mahler, or the Minimalist retread of that era accomplished 40 years ago now by John Adams in Harmonielehre.
The hall was largely full with the ranks of new-music enthusiasts apparently swelled by fans of the pianist Seong-Jin Cho, and the billing of the concert as the final event in the Barbican’s K-Music Festival of Korean music. Donghoon Shin had written a new 35-minute concerto with his fellow countryman in mind, and Seong-Jin Cho brought his trademark, pointillist care for tone and understated virtuosity to a score which, frankly, could do with all the help it can get, as well as a red pen.
Embracing the 19th-century identity of the piano through the prism of Schumann is one thing, but comparisons between source and output can quickly become invidious. A blatant rewrite of Prokofiev’s cadenza for his own Second Piano Concerto was only the most egregious example of Shin’s pastiching in a work which failed to emulate its models in their pursuit of an evolving conversation or conflict between soloist and orchestra. One tended to accompany the other, at least until the manic finale, which ran through a figure from the central movement of Schumann’s solo Fantasie like a set of frantically worked worry beads before a big, Rachmaninov-like sign-off.
The LSO had done well to secure the services of Maxime Pascal, who led them unflappably through a long and complex first half. Where he really showed his mettle was after the interval, in a nigh-perfect account of the Rituel composed by Pierre Boulez in memory of his friend and fellow composer-conductor, Bruno Maderna. On the podium in performance, a conductor of Rituel appears to do little more than cue the eight distinct instrumental groups, as they enter in solemn and mournful heterophony, at once formal and unpredictable, like groups of mourners heading towards a grave, each with their own private pain to bear.
Pascal made quite free with these cues in the first half, before tautly drawing together the percussive dialogue of the second, raising tension across a half-hour of raw, Mahlerian intensity. The evidence of scrupulous preparation was in the poise and coordination of the LSO players as they crossed paths and rhythmic patterns. Anyone who has not seen Pascal in opera – including Messiaen in Bucharest, Martinů in Salzburg and Stockhausen in Paris – could be left in no doubts as to his gifts and musicianship.
