Presenting three world premieres might be a daunting task for any orchestra, but the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Vimbayi Kaziboni, took this in their stride on Friday at Manchester International Festival. Together with pianist Ralph van Raat and contralto Jess Dandy, the orchestra were solid throughout, working with the soloists deftly. MIF, together with the BBC Philharmonic, are to be commended for their commitment to commissioning new music for orchestra.
Each piece engaged in some way with the natural environment. The standout work was by Irish composer Ailís Ní Ríain. The Land Grows Weary of its Own did much to capture the environmental unease present this summer (according to the UN, the week ending 7th July was the hottest on record). The piece is concerned with birdsong, but Ní Ríain is deaf/hard of hearing. With birdsong not within the composer’s audible range, the music imagines what birdsong is like – in an additional context of ever-increasing pressure from destruction of habitats and global heating.
After beginning with rich, dissonant glissandi in brass and strings, and almost naïve melodies in the flutes, the music eventually fragments. Repeated tolling from a bell plate leads to a culminating layered glissando across the whole orchestra, a kind of sonic decay unlike almost anything I have heard. Concluding with bird call whistles played by musicians throughout the orchestra, the piece was greatly emotionally affecting.
John Luther Adams’ work Prophecies of Stone was also premiered, with pianist Ralph van Raat. Divided into four movements, the piece is mostly uniform in material, the movement divisions seeming largely superficial. The subject matter is the Alaskan mountains – movements have titles like Among Red Mountains and The Stone People Who Live in the Wind. Living for many years in Alaska, much of Luther Adams’ work is inspired by the surrounding landscape.
With an unhurried and sometimes frozen pacing, the atmosphere verges on the romantic. The music is dominated by stacks of fifths and diatonic clusters, reminiscent of the mid-century harmony of Copland and Thomson. These mountains sound distinctly North American.
It seems Adams was mostly concerned with depiction and veneration. I struggled, in the end, to figure out what he was really intending to “say” about these environments: that we are insufficiently impressed by them? That we need to venerate them more? Such aesthetic positions seem a little superficial, but I had difficulty in detecting much beyond this.
The last piece on the programme was one of the most baffling and infuriating pieces I have ever heard. The soloist, Jess Dandy, is clearly an outstanding contralto, but no one could rectify the aesthetic disaster of Alissa Firsova’s Spell of Creation: A Symphony in Four Songs.
For some reason, the composer had decided to base her work on Charles III’s little-known and little-read 2010 book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, which lays out the then-Prince of Wales’ peculiar aristocratic eco-conservative ideology. If Firsova had explicitly decided to mirror the incoherent self-importance of Charles’ philosophy, then she succeeded. The composer was willing to push the music to absurd levels of grandiosity: within five minutes she had already got out the giant hammer usually reserved for Mahler Six.
A few minutes later in the first movement, the composer attempted a musical passage of maximum tenderness, reminiscent of Strauss’ Four Last Songs, but with little necessary sense of emotional pacing. The second movement’s setting of Blake was often inaudible beneath a presumably semi-ironic Scherzo. The third movement set an antiquated text from Tennyson, in overbearing fashion; and the last movement set one of the worst pieces of doggerel I have encountered in an orchestral context, a text newly commissioned for this work.
Letting loose as many facile orchestral tricks as possible, this was a work ultimately impossible to take seriously. Kitsch, pompous, poorly structured, lacking in self-control or self-awareness, and entirely aesthetically empty, I was glad when it was over.
