by BBCSO/Brabbins, Barbican ★★★★☆
The centenary this year of the birth of Luigi Nono is not as widely celebrated as the radical Venetian composer deserves, although the challenges of any such undertaking are easy to see. A few decades ago, the BBC Symphony Orchestra might have devoted a weekend of its famous annual composer monographs to exploring Nono’s music, but instead of those three-day festivals it now offers individual days of Total Immersion: as however, it is. still away from an all-Nono event, instead being packaged as part of an Italian Roots program featuring four composers.
If that is anything like the full immersion education, Sunday’s events were excellent programs. Nono and two other composers born in the 1920s, Bruno Maderna and Luciano Berio, were brought to light alongside the slightly older Luigi Dalapiccola. Through the film, a concert by Guildhall School musicians and talks by Jonathan Cross (professor of musicology at Christ Church, Oxford) and Harriet Boyd-Bennett (associate or music professor at Nottingham University), the day offered a rare exploration of the greats who shaped Italian music after the second World War.
Theirs was a political life, and they were socially and musically radical. But no one was more politically involved than Nono, whose Canti di vita e d’amore was at the heart of the BBCSO’s main concert of the night. All of Nono’s works are a reaction to human suffering, but all of his music ends with some kind of hope. The first of these three orchestral “songs” commemorates Hiroshima and opens explosively; featuring four timpani and a host of other heavy hardware, the burden is orchestral but the excellent soloists Anna Dennis (soprano) and John Findon (tenor) held their own. Dennis was particularly intense in the unaccompanied middle movement bringing out the Algerian resistance and Findon enthusiastically joined him in the final love song.
Another highlight was an opportunity to hear music by Maderna, a great figure of Italian modernism and indeed a former guest conductor of the BBCSO. His Oboe Concerto No 3 (1973) was his last work, and perhaps allows us to hear his soaring textures as a valedictory. However there is a fun opening with the oboe solo bringing out the high notes in a neater way at the end. Nicholas Daniel was excellent, embracing the energetic fantasy of the work, and the orchestra’s shimmering sea of a thousand points was beautifully controlled by conductor Martyn Brabbins.
For his opera Ulisse, Dallapiccola’s Three Questions With Two Answers is a grand orchestral accompaniment that has its own resolution despite an unanswered final question. A bit serious, perhaps, it still amounts to a sneeze in its most lyrical and Italian way — all the composers involved were connected, in one way or another, to the opera house.
Berio could hardly be represented without one of his solo Sequenzas (here Sequenza IXc, an arrangement for bass clarinet, with a particularly sonorous performance by Thomas Lessels) or his famous Sinfonia. Radical in 1968, the Sinfonia in some aspects has not aged well, but it flowed strongly under Brabbins. His centerpiece, a reworking of the scherzo from Mahler’s Second Symphony and several other musical landmarks, is consistently brilliant and drew a tour de force from the BBC Singers. JA
This concert will be broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on 1 July, and will be available for 30 days on BBC Sounds
Music Festival Game, Southbank Centre ★★☆☆☆
Friday night brought an extraordinary crowd to the Royal Festival Hall. Crowded around the bar was a group of vaguely friendly looking half-human medieval creatures. I had a nice chat with a High Elf Rogue, a Githyanki Fighter and a Drow Paladin, all sipping healthy fruit juices. I haven’t seen so many pointed ears since David Attenborough’s documentary about desert foxes.
These people dressed as characters from the video game Baldur’s Gate 3 were there for the Game Music Festival, a day-long celebration of what is fast becoming one of the most heard genres of music in the world. You’d think there would be a range of composers at such a festival, but – for reasons the music had no excuse for – each of the two concerts was focused on one composer. First, the Argentinian Gustavo Santaolla, composer of the score for the dystopian horror fest The Last of Us, and later the Bulgarian-born Borislav Slavov, who scored the neo-medieval game Baldur’s Gate 3.
At least the earlier concert focused on The Last of Us had the benefit of some showable songs. Santaolalla was a singer-songwriter in various rock bands in the 1970s, and although now gray and frail (he had to be supported while jumping on stage) he found the energy to belt out some sentimental ballads out on his guitar. He even played heavy blues rock at one point, which must have been completely alien to the young crowd but they loved him nonetheless. The “atmospheric” moments between the songs couldn’t have been better: single notes going on, queasy string slides, “doomy” thudding rhythms on the drums.
Slavov’s music for Baldur’s Gate 3 showed a very different world of dangerous quests through castle mountains. Two sopranos, Mariya Anastasova and Ilona Ivanova, sang a few songs in wan, androgynous voices that were just right for their vaguely Celtic “long, long ago” quality.
In between these were chugging, dark “let the battle begin” type numbers, and big heroic pieces reminiscent of the vast landscapes fit for daring-do actions. They were painted in the kind of soaring horns and massive simple harmonies known from John Williams film scores, but without any of the variety needed to make simplicity interesting. The phrases were being repeated literally all the time, so instead of gathering energy the melodies stopped when they ran out of steam.
The Philharmonic Orchestra could play such four-square stuff in their sleep, but they carried on so well that this kitsch-fest seemed almost enjoyable at times. IH
