Whatever their achievements, the most prominent composers of our time don’t feature prominently in the public mind; so it may well be that you’ve never heard of Louis Andriessen, the veteran of the Dutch musical avant-garde who was the subject of the BBC’s Barbican showing of Total Immersion: The Work of Louis Andriessen. But that’s why these weekends exist: to open up the mystery of significant creative figures to a wider audience. And Andriessen is a worthy candidate for the attention.
Born in 1939, he is the same generation as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and there was a time when he wrote music that responded in a tougher, more neurotic European way to their laid-back New World minimalism. But he proved more radical. His voice became more strident. And his classic scores (as they deserve to be described) are large-scale statements of Romantic Brutalism. Written with a clenched fist.
As the Barbican weekend suggested, though, there’s more to him than this. He’s written Bach-inspired chorales for chamber groups. He wallows in exotic fantasy in a cantata-like extravagance for voice and orchestra called Dances that depicts the private thoughts of an Egyptian princess. And he raids the world of metaphysics in a so-called film-opera, Commedia, whose British premiere was the chief attraction of the weekend.
Given in a semi-staging by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and various singers under the conductor Martyn Brabbins, it was more like a dramatic oratorio than an opera, and we didn’t get the film. A swindle. But Commedia was nonetheless the most extraordinary thing I’ve heard in months. Relentless, overwhelming (at 100 minutes without break), rhapsodic, sensuous and inexplicably arcane (don’t ask me what was going on), its basic brief was Dante’s Divine Comedy but with diversions into other, more politically engaged realms – with a chirpy children’s chorus at the end that cleared the air. A sort of satyr-play after the serious stuff.
Unfolding like the memory of some 1960s drug trip on an Amsterdam canal boat (not that I have personal experience of such things), it was sonically intoxicating. By the end I felt exhausted, drunk, but knowing that I’d had a musical encounter of significance, and desperate to see the piece staged as intended, with the film. Which may explain all, though I doubt it.
Strange but on a smaller scale was a peculiar concert, Sonic Visions, given at the Forge in Camden Town by an ensemble called The Hermes Experiment who specialise in improvised performance using visual stimuli. The stimuli in one piece were a washing line of dirty tea towels, the performers finding music in the contours of the stains. Ingenious, impressive but not terribly hygienic.
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