Contemporary music without tears

Free music is all the rage and a long-running series of free concerts is being used to boost audiences for contemporary music in London. Music of Today is an innovative eight concert series given by the Philharmonia Orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall before regular evening concerts of mainstream repertoire. The deal is you turn up for the free concert at 6.00pm which features an introductory talk by series director Julian Anderson plus a free programme (is the UK alone in having outrageously over-priced programme books?) before paying normal prices for the main concert at 8.00pm. You don't need to buy tickets for the main concert to attend the free one, you can simply enjoy the contemporary music and go home if you choose.

The 6.00pm concerts are not 'bolt-ons', but are meaty and challenging programmes with a different conductor specially booked for the event. Last Thursday we were in London to hear Diego Masson conduct Iannis Xenakis' Anaktoria and Thalleïn in the free Music of Today concert, an event that drew a gratifyingly large audience. The 73 year old Masson is one of the great champions of contemporary music with an incisive stick technique that is rarely seen today and which really fired-up the group of players from the Philharmonia. He is also a great speaker and worked with Xenakis and many other composers, he told how Xenakis struggled for performances in the 1950s, adding that Boulez didn't like his music. A quick cross-reference to Joan Peyser's biography of Boulez confirms this, there is not one mention of Xenakis in it.

In the days when Pierre Boulez was at the BBC the 8.00pm concert would have been Thalleïn in the first half with a Mahler symphony to follow, and the hall would probably have been full. But those days have gone and it was film music all the way with Mozart K467 in the first half and Mahler's Fifth Symphony after the interval. In the Mozart François-Frédéric Guy played very non-Elvira Madigan cadenzas by Marc Monnet - the CV says it all. One of today's hot 'box ticking' young conductors was on the podium. 33 year old Swiss born Philippe Jordan has ticked quite a few boxes already; he has conducted at Covent Garden, the Met and Glyndebourne, has ticked Parsifal in Munich, is signed with leading agency IMG Artists and has a Ring in Zurich and the directorship of the Paris Opera soon to be ticked. Thursday was London and the Mahler 5 box, and it was duly ticked with a performance as mannered and uninvolving as any I can remember.

But congratulations to the Philharmonia for programming contemporary music without tears. But just a couple of questions. Why didn't the 73 year old Diego Masson conduct the Mahler and Mozart, and the 33 year old Philippe Jordan the Xenakis? Could it be that there is no Xenakis box to be ticked on a hot young conductor's CV these days?

My header photo was taken a couple of weeks ago and shows Henry Moore's Reclining Figure in the grounds of Dartington Hall where Diego Masson will follow in the footsteps of Boulez, Stravinsky, Elliott Carter, Bruno Maderna and many other great musicians when he teaches there at this year's Summer School. See Stravinsky in another Dartington header photo here.

* I'm playing Xenakis' Komboi for harpsichord and percussion on Future Radio on April 13. Also in the programme are Scene 3 from Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo Vitutum and John Mclaughlin Williams' Grammy winning recording of Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques.

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New music and the disco from hell

Anthony Holden writes in today's Observer ~ 'Alpha-gamma is a grade given by Oxford dons to bright but 'wayward' students, according to Professor Vernon Bogdanor, Michael Berkeley's guest on Radio 3's Private Passions last weekend. The prof was speaking of the hit-and-miss output of Delius. But it struck me as the perfect grade for too much contemporary music, the best and worst of which was on display in a London Sinfonietta concert conducted by the meticulous Diego Masson.

What wonderful players make up the Sinfonietta, a band of individual virtuosos blending into an ensemble of thrilling panache. How dispiriting, therefore, that they choose to play such vacuous music so much of the time. Few living composers can hold their own beside the late Luciano Berio when it comes to musical bravura, inventiveness and character, but some are barely fit to grace the same programme.

Berio's dazzling Laborintus II, a model of musical architecture, construction and diversity, was the nourishing red meat in a sandwich otherwise staled by the arid austerity of Simon Bainbridge and the garish monotony of Anna Meredith. Bainbridge's Music Space Reflection was inspired by the buildings in which it was written to be performed, the Imperial War Museum North and Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum. Shards of glass drifting down a giant screen were no substitute for the ingenious spaces created by Daniel Libeskind as the sound bounced around giant speakers in the work's London premiere.

As with his Diptych, recently premiered by the BBC Symphony, Bainbridge is composing 'vertically', with minimal linear flow. As important as his clusters of bleakly meditative chords are the conspicuous silences between them, creating a mood as sombre as the Jewish Museum in Berlin (photo above), which first fired his response to Libeskind's architecture. To perform this work outside the spaces for which it was written seems, on reflection, an emptily academic exercise.

The hall was packed with excited young people, all there, apparently, for the gaudy electronic confections of Anna Meredith, whose flak was rendered no more interesting by the smoke filtered into the coloured spotlights as the QEH turned into the disco from hell. The filament of the light-bulb projected on to its giant screen became ever more fascinating as the work's 20 minutes ground very slowly by.'

Now take the path to Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin.
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