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Alix Goolden Performance Hall
October 21, 2017
Decades ago London's Royal Albert Hall was plagued by a notorious echo; it was, as I believe Sir Thomas Beecham remarked, the only concert hall where a composer could be guaranteed two hearings of a new work.
The echo was cured almost half a century ago, by the installation of large white suspended fibreglass discs, commonly known as "flying saucers" or "mushrooms", years before the premiere, in August 1992, of James MacMillan's concerto for percussion, Veni, Veni, Emanuel. Yet, although only heard once on that occasion, the work has proved remarkably popular, receiving its 300th [sic] performance little more than decade later, in 2003.
The first half of Saturday's Victoria Symphony concert closed with a spectacular performance of the concerto by Corey Rae, who was required not only to display prodigious manual dexterity, but also to travel from side to side of the platform ("drums to the right of him, drums to the left of him" as Tennyson might have said) and even, at the close, rush off the stage and climb into the balcony to perform the work's tintinnabulatory coda.
The work is based on the eponymous advent plainchant, which is treated in a fragmentary fashion at first, so that it only begins to become recognisable partway through, when the strings play a joyfully propulsive version which, perhaps inevitably, summoned up thoughts of Christmas Carols.
I am not qualified to comment on the religious aspects of the music (like Bruckner and Messiaen before him, MacMillan's Catholicism informs much of his music), instead I shall limit myself to pointing out Rae's dazzling virtuosity (not to mention athleticism), which, allied to conductor Bill Linwood's firm hand on the tiller, made the work's twenty-five minutes fly by almost in the blink of an eye.
But it is that remarkable coda, in which the now-offstage soloist plays the tubular bells while the orchestra one-by-one lay down their instruments and pick up hand bells, which will stick in my mind. The effect was well-nigh overwhelming, even if I could not suppress irreverent memories of Monty Python's Rachel Toovey Bicycle Choir and their "fantastic arrangement of 'Men of Harlech' for bicycle bells only".
Superb.
Despite the presence of one of the last few decades' most popular contemporary works, there is no doubt that the main item on the menu, the one for which the majority of the audience had probably attended, was Qiksaaktuq, a collaborative work by Tanya Tagaq, Christine Duncan and Jean Martin with orchestration by Christopher Mayo.
Qiksaaktuq, we are told, is the Inuktitut for "grief" and the work is "dedicated to missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls, and to those who grieve for them".
Linwood conducted the main orchestra, while Christine Duncan, by means (apparently) of some form of musical semaphore, directed the brass section, whose slow, swelling chords put me in mind somewhat of Gyorgy Ligeti's Adventures.
But, of course, the principal focus was on Tanya Tagaq herself; Duncan's programme note promised that Tagaq would "improvise a powerful lament for those women and girls who have been lost" which, while true enough, does not begin to describe her performance, which involved not simply her singing (throat and otherwise) but her entire body.
Indeed, Tagaq performed like a woman possessed and I have rarely, if ever, beheld the like. There was a profoundly primal strength to her performance, which was more akin to a Force of Nature than just about anything else in my musical experience.
Riveting and mesmerising.
The concert opened with Christos Hatzis' Thunder Drum, for orchestra and audio playback.
I confess I did not quite know what to make of the work: each of its three movements seemed rooted in the past — in the outer movements, we heard elegiac string music which could have been written a century or more ago, whereas the middle movement was distinctly jazzy, like a 1950s movie score, or perhaps Gunther Schuller's much-vaunted "third wave".
It was the electronic sounds of the "audio playback" which came closer to establishing the music's era, although even those could have come from a 1950s score by Stockhausen or Pierre Henry.
What made the work so definitely "post modern" was the juxtaposition of the conventional instruments sounds with the electronics.
Needless to say, Linwood directed a performance of what seemed fearsome accuracy and it is certainly music I would like to hear again.
Perhaps a second hearing would enable me to make my mind up.
Which just leaves Marcus Goddard's Regenerations, which opened the second half of the evening.
According to the composer, as the work progressed, it became "a reflection on the constant rebirth of innocence".
The music itself moved slowly, informed with what struck me as more the spectral sounds of decay rather than rebirth, but what do I know?
Twice the music built to huge climaxes, masterfully handled by Linwood. The final coda is ushered in by "wild cries" from the bass clarinet and Linwood quite rightly had Jennifer Christensen, who produced said wild cries, stand at the end.
To say that I enjoyed every piece equally would be overstating the case. But to call the evening "interesting" would be a serious understatement.
Let us, instead, settle for "fascinating" and at times deeply rewarding.
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