The writer Franz Kafka found sounds from the outside world, whether urban or rural, intolerable, and wore earplugs to insulate himself as far as possible from their intrusions. When the first world war began, his major concern was that his supply of earplugs from Berlin might be disrupted by the upheaval. Gerald Barry’s new orchestral piece, Kafka’s Earplugs – a BBC commission whose world premiere opened the BBC Philharmonic’s concert with its chief conductor, John Storgårds – took us inside Kafka’s head. “You are Kafka,” the composer says, “hearing the world’s sounds as he heard them through his earplugs.”
That sound world is consistently quiet, from the grinding brass and string chords with which the piece opens, to the insistent pulsing into which it eventually settles, before a sudden, almost arbitrary close. Barry also makes the point that Kafka “laughed a lot”, but there are few traces of that humour in this 10-minute piece, which holds the world and its distractions very much at muted arm’s length. Whether the result in performance was what he was after only the composer can say, but, in the hall at least, the music certainly sounded distinctly louder than the pianissimo that is the only dynamic marking in the score.
There were certainly quieter moments in the performances of both the other works in the programme – Walton’s Violin Concerto and Sibelius’s First Symphony – than anything in Kafka’s Earplugs. The concerto soloist was James Ehnes, totally in command of Walton’s solo writing, conceived for the fearsome virtuosity of the great Jascha Heifetz. But in a work that sometimes treads a thin line between languorous rhapsodising and lethargic rambling, the performance sometimes found itself on the wrong side. Ehnes’s deftness in the scherzo and finale was impressive, though, even if Walton’s lurch into Crown Imperial mode in the final bars still seemed gratuitous.
Storgårds’ account of Sibelius’s baggiest symphony was uneven, too. It began promisingly, with a beautifully moulded account of the opening clarinet solo from the BBC Philharmonic’s principal John Bradbury, setting the tone for fine orchestral playing throughout the work. But, as a whole, the performance never quite caught fire, so that the finale coasted to its close rather than making its triumph seem irresistible.
• Available on BBC Sounds until 8 October. The Proms continue until 9 September.
