Prom 36: the London Philharmonic Orchestra play music from 2001: A Space Odyssey

This evening’s Prom featured three works from Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, also marking this year’s Ligeti centenary. The shrewdly chosen programme saw a remarkable spectrum of orchestral and choral colours from the London Philharmonic Orchestra, creating an intensely immersive experience for this sell-out performance. 

Ligeti’s Requiem, written just a few years before Space Odyssey, is perhaps the most distinctive of any work in the genre. Relatively short at 29 minutes, it simply adopts a four movement structure (Introitus, Kyrie, Dies Irae, Lacrimosa) in a profoundly tormented representation of the Requiem mass. Though scored for idiosyncratic orchestral forces, including celeste, harpsichord and the huge contrabass clarinet, it is the choral singing which is most unique n Ligeti’s writing, seeming to hover timelessly without an anchor in any identifiable home key.  

The massed choral forces of the Edvard Grieg Kor, the London Philharmonic Choir and Royal Northen College of Music Chamber Choir combined to great effect. The Requiem began with a barely perceptible murmur, almost impossible to pinpoint within the ranks of singers, before the most gravelly “Exaudi” from the second basses. The choral sound, laced with heavy vibrato and careful attention to the text (most of all in the dread hush of “Mors”) was supremely confident in the alarmingly difficult writing; for this, the chorus masters must be credited for preparing such a complex work so carefully. Soprano Jennifer France and mezzo Clare Presland were strikingly animated in conveying their tormented anguish in the third movement, France in particular reaching out to the audience among the tumult of her dizzying high notes. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything quite so distressing in a concert hall. 

Ligeti continued after the interval, with the Edvard Grieg Kor weaving a shimmering tapestry of silvery pianissimo in the 16-part Lux Aeterna. As the house lights dimmed to near darkness with Edward Gardner spotlit on the stage, he turned to his left to face the choir high in the auditorium behind the first violins, bathing the hall In the delicate, ethereal beauty of Ligeti’s writing, shattered only by the regrettable blare of a house walkie-talkie. 

More familiar footing was found for Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, where Gardner’s tempi generally favoured a fluid sense of forward motion. While there was the occasional lapse in ensemble, there was also considerable beauty to be admired amid the rollicking climaxes. The glossy string playing for the Hinterweltlern glowed with indulgently rich vibrato, while elsewhere the woodwinds chattered their way through intricate, flighty figures. Particularly memorable were the richly characterised bassoon and clarinet solos, to whom Gardner gave ample room for individual colourful expression. The sense of forward fluidity continued in the Tanzlied, where some superb solo violin playing was woven around exaggerated pauses and rubato. It was hard not to hear Ligeti again in the work’s darkly ambiguous ending, closing a Prom which was in turn distressing and exhilarating.