Nowadays orchestras rely much less than they once did on the tried and trusted concert formula of overture-concerto-symphony. But the Philharmonia’s programme with conductor Elim Chan more or less reverted to that archetype. More or less, because the “symphony” in this case was a symphonic suite, Rimsky-Korsakov’s gorgeously coloured Scheherazade, and the piano concerto was not one of the regular romantic showpieces but a new work by Bryce Dessner, co-commissioned by the orchestra, and receiving its British premiere.
Dessner composed his 20-minute work last year for Alice Sara Ott, who was the soloist here. It is dedicated to his sister, the dancer and choreographer Jessica Reese Dessner, who currently has cancer and whom Dessner describes as his “greatest inspiration since I was very young”. The concerto is a mixture of the exuberantly extrovert and the gently personal. All three of its movements – How to Dance, How to Breathe, How to Feel – have oases of delicate intimacy, but it’s the sheer brilliance and ebullience of the music, with insistent rhythms that seem to owe as much to rock as they do to Steve Reich, that come across most powerfully. Ott was a superb soloist, dazzling in the music’s more extreme virtuoso writing, exquisitely delicate in its moments of tender quietness.
The following evening, a concert by the Southbank Centre’s other resident symphony orchestra, the London Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Gimeno, included the world premiere of a work for piano and orchestra which the LPO had co-commissioned. Francisco Coll’s Ciudad sin Sueño (City That Does Not Sleep) takes its title from a poem in Federico García Lorca’s collection Poet in New York. Coll describes it as “almost – but not quite – a concerto … more like a fantasia” and likens it to Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain, which was also included in the LPO’s concert.
Much of its musical material is derived from flamenco, though filtered through Coll’s own brilliantly lit imagination so that it never seems merely anecdotal. In the first movement, Desplantes, the soloist and the orchestra exchange stark rhythmic figures, the piano writing often reduced to a single insistent line. The second, Duende, takes the material into much more sombre territory, while the tension that generates is released in the final Orgia, where Coll’s virtuoso instrumental writing creates a glinting, whirling web around the piano. The piece was written specifically for the soloist Javier Perianes, but his rather blunt playing didn’t always seem to make the most of the work’s possibilities; other pianists may well bring more colour and contrast to it.
