Music

BBC SSO

City Halls, Glasgow

Catherine Robb

four stars

Once again the BBC SSO revealed themselves as experts in new music in this concert of Radio 3's Hear and Now strand. To start what seemed like a long evening filled with UK premieres of complex music, Frank Bedrossian’s Itself introduced an exploration of excess and distortion. The result of this was a strange, utterly intriguing dense carpet of timbre, almost as if white noise was being amplified and listened to with obsessive intent. Within that cloudy haze emerged moments of clarity and structure, recognisable chords and harmonic progressions, so that the textures became sounds, and the sounds became textures.

Johannes Schöllhorn’s Twilight Butterflies similarly explored the boundaries of sound in five short fascinating movements, the highlight of which was number three, with spots of sound from each instrument being passed around the orchestra, sometimes just one note at a time. A move from the audience (a cough, chair squeak) made it seem that we were, inadvertently, part of the music too. Finishing the first half was Rebecca Saunders’ Traces, which succeeded in portraying the natural flow of the composition process as an open space for music to grow organically. Even the fierce climaxes refused to feel forced.

The second-half began with Anne Cleare’s ‘phosphors (… of ether)’, which aimed to depict three independent and contrasting sound ‘islands’. However, those islands were very similar and lacked coherence, using the usual suspects of extended technique and harmonic dissonance. To close was another of Saunders’ works, Alba, for solo trumpet and orchestra, a musical interpretation of extreme white light, lyrical but also wonderfully bold and frustrated. Soloist Marco Blaauw found a way to perform with conviction whilst making the weirdest, most curious noises come out of his instrument. Fantastic.