Simon Wills describes his new work as a concertante ballet in 11 scenes. Written for BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s principal trombone, Donal Bannister, and perhaps with a nod to his Dublin origins, it is entitled Nora Barnacle Assumes Command, ostensibly referring to the meeting of James Joyce and his muse and mentor Nora but the piece is completely abstract, said Wills.
With the composer himself conducting, the work began with the solo trombone intoning the Irish ballad, Oft in the Stilly Night – mentioned in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Bannister’s velvet sound established the work’s essentially lyrical feel and soloist and different instruments of the orchestra danced – metaphorically – around each other, though in one interlude Bannister actually joined the audience to listen to the orchestra. It seemed an irony that the balletic nature of the score – tinged with melancholy, but also with capricious elements – should often have conjured the figure of Joyce and Barnacle’s daughter Lucia Joyce who was a gifted dancer before mental illness meant her life took a tragic turn. It is an engaging enough work but, at 40 minutes, rather too discursive and overindulgent.
The rest of the evening was conducted by Geoffrey Paterson, who brought a bracing vigour to Gabriella Smith’s Tumblebird Contrails, a Kerouac-inspired title. Relating to the Pacific coast at California’s Point Reyes, Smith evokes the wonder of the soundscape, the water and the whirling birds. When this 2014 piece was played at Stockholm’s Nobel prize concert a year ago, Smith’s impassioned speech explained her commitment to fighting the ravages of the climate crisis: after a day of torrential Storm Darragh rain, this performance made its necessary point.
Charles Ives’s First Symphony took us east to the Atlantic, composed when the young Yale student was still hidebound by the academic requirements of Europe and late Romanticism. But Paterson ensured that this was about more than spotting influences – Tchaikovsky, Dvořák and Wagner – and achieved a vivid flow. Only in the last two minutes, when three percussionists finally step up to contribute to a wonderful clamour does something of the future, radical, all-American Ives emerge. It was tantalising.
• Available on BBC Sounds until 5 January.
