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Towards the unknown

London
Royal Albert Hall
08/17/2001 -  
György Ligeti: Requiem
Igor Stravinsky: Violin Concerto
Béla Bártók: Concerto for Orchestra

Caroline Stein (soprano), Charlotte Hellekant (mezzo-soprano)

Thomas Zehetmair (violin)

Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)

BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Voices

One of the entertaining subcurrents in this year's Proms is the performance nominally within other strands of all of the works used in Stanley Kubrick's 2001. The Kyrie from Ligeti's Requiem was probably by far the least familiar of these when the film first came out, though it has become anthologizable as a result. The Kyrie is an evocation of the chaos and ennui of hell, from which the chorus begs God for mercy; Kubrick's reading of it as a depiction of the complete otherness of possible life beyond earth works just as well from the human, even English-language, centred view of the universe shared by the film's audience. The rest of the Requiem is similarly dislocated, pushing the received forms of the movements to remote extremes: the voices and instruments are sent to the edges of their capabilities, and all the rules of musical rhetoric are abandoned for contrasting but monolithic sound-worlds for each movement.

The BBC Symphony Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen contributed almost imperceptibly, and so perfectly, to a performance that was rightly dominated by the voices. London Voices and the two soloists sounded admirably inhuman.

The other two works on the programme were linked to Ligeti's by the theme of exile: both Stravinsky and Bártók had left their native lands when they wrote them. Stravinsky had only just begun his life as an emigré, which ended reasonably comfortably as part of the international musical establishment in California. Bártók was close to the end of his life when he left his native Hungary at the Nazi invasion, and the commission for the Concerto for Orchestra perhaps literally saved his life for a year or two when he was seriously ill in New York. (Ligeti also left Hungary, for West Germany when the Soviets invaded in 1956.) Both works, like Ligeti's, rework classical forms: Stravinsky's is a baroque violin concerto, Bártók's an original synthesis of a romantic symphony and a concerto grosso, where individual players throughout the orchestra have show-piece solo passages. Thomas Zehetmair and the BBC Symphony Orchestra brought out the gleaming clarity of the Stravinsky, and the orchestra finally had, and took, its chance to shine in the Bártók, a Proms favourite.

Esa-Pekka Salonen, the conductor on Friday, also featured as a composer two days previously. He is also an emigré, though a totally voluntary one, in Los Angeles, and his new work Foreign bodies (receiving its UK premiere) had some of the New World excitement of Varčse,'s Ameriques combined with an apparently rough-and-ready physical vigour that rejected conventional form altogether.

The day before that, on Tuesday 14 August, there was an evening of Hollywood film music. This was composed mainly by immigrants from two waves, the descendants of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century arrivals who had become thoroughly American by the heyday of Hollywood, and those who fled Nazi or Soviet persecution in the 1930s. The veteran composer Elmer Bernstein conducted the BBC Concert Orchestra, but, alas, they clearly hadn't had the rehearsal time, or perhaps the experience in the relevant musical styles, to perform nearly as well as the orchestras that played the movie soundtracks. And somehow The Adventures of Robin Hood without Technicolor wasn't right, while High Noon without the terrified streets in the town in the middle of the desert somehow sounded sociable and Irish. Only the cracking animal spirits of Rawhide (part of the same suite arranged by Tiomkin to celebrate LBJ's Texan origins) really hit the spot.


H.E. Elsom

 

 

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