The latest of the London Symphony Orchestra’s annual new music concerts, which was conducted by François-Xavier Roth, included two world premieres, one from a composer still in the very early stages of his career, the other from one of the most familiar and significant figures in British contemporary music.
Like many of the pieces that find their way into LSO Futures concerts, Jonathan Woolgar’s Symphonic Message: “Wach Auf” had emerged through the orchestra’s Panufnik Composers Scheme, which mentors up-and-coming talents. It packs an awful lot of incident into barely six minutes of music, beginning with the glorious G major chord that the chorus sings on the word “Auf” at the beginning of the song contest in the final act of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. That grandeur is immediately undermined by a referee’s whistle, and the music sets off in half a dozen different directions at once: there’s a boozy trombone solo, an irascible clarinet, even the beginnings of a Shostakovich-like gallop. It all peters out soon enough, but the eclectic energy is unmistakable.
Mosaics, Colin Matthews’s new work, was his response to the enforced inactivity of lockdown. It’s a collection of 11 orchestral studies, the biggest of them just over two minutes long; each piece seems to test out the potential of an idea and then put it aside, and many could be the starting points for much more substantial pieces. But it’s not quite the random collection of musical jottings that might suggest: Matthews has organised them into a convincing 25-minute sequence, carefully spacing out the moments of frantic activity and quiet stasis, in what became a sparkling showcase for a crack band like the LSO.
A nearly new piece had begun the evening: Cassie Kinoshi’s Fanfares, which collects together the seven brass flourishes she composed to celebrate the Barbican’s 40th anniversary last year, sounded suitably resplendent when delivered from the circle of the Barbican Hall. And two works from the first half of the 20th century, Lili Boulanger’s D’Un Soir Triste, which takes the world of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande into even darker territory, and Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, an authentic modernist classic, completed the concert; both were superbly delivered by Roth and the orchestra.
