Music

BBC SSO/Volkov: Tectonics

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

THE two-day immersive experience that is Tectonics is now clearly an established part of many people’s musical year to judge by the attendance at 13 hours of challenging experimental music, co-curated by conductor Ilan Volkov and promoter Alasdair Campbell.

Other commitments meant my Saturday included only the first of the new works played by the BBC Scottish, while my Sunday was almost exclusively work featuring the orchestra. As Volkov told Kate Molleson on BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show (which will be broadcasting highlights this coming weekend), it is the involvement of the SSO, and the huge canvas it affords the composers, that makes the event distinct.

Amsterdam-based Dundonian Genevieve Murphy made use of the winds, brass and percussion from the band alongside her own performance skills and Brighde Chaimbeul on small pipes in the weekend’s first world premiere, Calm In An Agitated World. With the composer making her entrance into the Old Fruitmarket pulling a length of recording tape over the play-back head of an old reel-to-reel machine before delivering her own narration, there was a lot going on in the piece, and whether it amounted to more than the sum of its parts as a piece of music is debatable, but it was certainly a memorable event.

They same caveat might be attached to Juliana Hodkinson’s All Around, which fully colonised the Grand Hall, from the stage to the foyer, the following afternoon. A sequence of exchanges, with players in the balcony and roaming the aisles, it was as much about the environment as the notes. As the horns echoed one another in a possible nod to Wagner, and the string players rattled cups and saucers in a reference to more intimate chamber music, it was also about what an orchestra can do, though rarely all of it at once.

Mauro Lanza’s Experiments in the Revival of Organisms was perhaps, paradoxically, less experimental, but more musically successful - assured orchestral writing that began with small regular pulses of treble noise and worked through a fuller sound back to abstraction again.

The Sunday afternoon programme ended with the premiere of Martin Arnold’s The Gay Goshawk, with Angharad Davies and Sharron Kraus performing the source ballad underscored by Arnold’s environmental orchestration, in what live art would term a durational performance.

His fellow Canadian Sarah Davachi provided the rather pithier finale to Sunday’s orchestral bill of fare with her new work, Oscen. Here was an exploration of evolving tones and textures, learned from her work with keyboards and found sounds, applied to the luxury of a large ensemble of musicians with obvious depth of understanding to produce the most seductive results.