Originally planned to be an Aldeburgh Festival programme of two halves, with the UK premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Aiōn paired with Mahler’s First Symphony, a late decision was made to honour the recent passing of Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023), by opening the BBC Symphony Orchestra's programme with her Ciel d’hiver. At only ten minutes, this is an arrangement of the second movement of her 2002 orchestral work Orion.
Happenstance meant that Hannu Lintu had stepped in, whose previous experience conducting Thorvaldsdottir’s work was intricately emitted through his sensitivity in detailing its evocative landscape, the orchestra melding easily under his instruction. A fragmentary melody passes fleetingly through piccolo, violin, clarinet, oboe and muted trumpet, framed within a boundless, unsettling shifting texture. Underpinning this, is an unanswered invocation to the constellation Orion. In the programme note “the work captures the immensity of the winter sky, evoking the slow drift and interplay of the stars across the vast depths of winter night”. Playing with restraint and subtle majesty befitting this ode to Saariaho, who across her life worked in step with her time, the BBCSO delicately observed this, the composer’s own last voyage.
Where Saariaho’s Ciel d’hiver opens territory outwards, sketching a question out toward an unknown expanse, Thorvaldsdottir declaims large swathes of newly unearthed and captured sonic mass, gathering these in. Aiōn is a big work, an excavation of space, through which we are buffeted from one kaleidoscopic textural prism to another. The composer has attempting to survey the passage of time in this work, exploring its dimensions. Using in different measure large-scale to micro-measure, passing sporadic focus between percussion, breath and symphonic gesture, we are set free from usual metric bounds. Journeying through sound, sweet shards of gestures are glimpsed, slipping briefly by, then recoiling back to the immensity of textural mass. Its close overwhelms the senses, any structure we had hitherto pieced together, splintered in its mass. A sonic tsunami from centre stage enveloped, subsuming the audience in Snape Maltings both volume and its final flourish. The work retreated, leaving an expanse of silence trembling in its wake.
After the interval, Lintu concluded the programme with a full and fine rendition of Mahler’s First Symphony. Equal to, and judged well, in reflection of the entire programme in its fullness, the BBC SO executed this work with astonishing and full concentration, considering the heat of the June evening and the pitch of the previous works on display. Snape Maltings is very much a persuasive venue, a cultural gem with its foot firmly on the creative pedal, the scale of the ambitious programme echoing Britten’s original ambitions for this festival.
