Wednesday evening’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra concert was a celebration of some of the more pioneering 20th-century music from the USA. All of them exhibited a powerful sense of enthusiasm with regard to ideas, though the way these ideas were presented could hardly have been more different.
At one end of the continuum was Gershwin who, in Rhapsody in Blue, could hardly have been more single-minded, focusing on his catchy themes with an obsessive zeal. Unsurprisingly placed at the end of concert, after three much more challenging works, there was something startling about its clarity of ideas. Ilan Volkov and soloist Stewart Goodyear responded with absolute gusto, Goodyear in particular never looking away from the keyboard as he delivered rapid-fire salvos and sweeping lyrical bursts. Volkov adopted a mood akin to that of runaway cartoon music, dancing around the instrumental fireworks (orchestrated, it should be remembered, by Ferde Grofé, not Gershwin) and giving a distinct Hollywood lustre to the big central tune.
Frank Zappa’s Bob in Dacron and Sad Jane are two works (here conjoined) originally conceived as part of an elaborate ballet performed by the LSO in 1983. Bob in Dacron displays a curious equilibrium in which strictness of tempo is matched by fluidity of ideas. Volkov made this akin to a rotating mobile, seemingly going nowhere until a sequence where Zappa’s indebtedness to Varèse (from whom he borrows rather too heavily here) acted to liberate things. Thereafter, everything was more free, flexible and, finally, playful, the CBSO revelling in rhythmic complexities emerging through the texture. Sad Jane was interpreted as its low-key lyrical counterpart, languid and melodic, becoming a series of angular conversational exchanges between sections of the orchestra, gentle propelled along by the drum kit.
More compelling – and by far the most radical music of the evening – was George Lewis’ Memex, a work that Volkov himself premiered ten years ago. Taking inspiration from an eponymous hypothetical device conceived in the 1940s (intended to extend the memory – hence “memex” – via linking the mind to vast corpora of information), Lewis’ music was similarly vast and multifaceted, making clear in its opening minutes that it would encompass extremes of scale. The plethora of ideas here was overwhelming, inhabiting a highly unpredictable sound world where periods of dense or convoluted material were balanced by periods of restraint, filigree, weird counterpoint and sparse clarity. Volkov and the CBSO made all of this stunningly transparent, making the most of Lewis’ strange and striking timbral combinations, veering between subtle delicacy and pure wildness. The narrative was inscrutable, but it was thrilling to be in the midst of it all, mesmerised as the orchestra was gradually revealed as a huge, continually shape-shifting organism.
The most dazzling, and audacious, display of ideas came in the oldest work on the programme, Ives’ Three Places in New England. Can it really be over a century old? They made the opening movement a wondrous combination of Impressionism and Ambient – the CBSO strings have rarely sounded so gorgeous – always at a liminal point between allusion and abstraction, moments of tangibility seemingly the product of accidental coalescences. Its character was similarly liminal, balmy and sleepy yet with a palpable internal energy. The central panel was rendered a glorious mash-up of tunes – practically postmodern when modernism had barely been established! – insanely exuberant, all joy and mischief simultaneously. The closing Housatonic at Stockbridge could not have been lovelier, a ghostly, tremulous string vapour with hymn-like wisps floating as if caught on the wind.
