read other reviews

THE TIMES, LONDON - May 08, 2003

BCMG/Mälkki
BY GEOFF BROWN
Concert
CBSO Centre, Birmingham

THOUGHT I could switch off when Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks concerto arrived. After most of a testing concert the ears needed a rest, but the masterful young Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki didn’t provide it.

Down and sideways chopped the arms, lethal as a scythe, putting a spring in every rhythm, inspiring the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group to excel.
It had been like that all night. Here were contemporary scores that would make other musicians crumple. But Mälkki and her players, embarking upon a week’s tour, kept a firm grip on every glissando, drum thwack or brass seizure.

The most difficult customer was Param Vir’s The Theatre of Magical Beings, the latest fruit of the BCMG’s excellent Sound Investment scheme, whereby punters invest £100 and upwards in a commissioned piece and then sit back to watch the notes fly.

And what notes they were. They slithered out from slippery strings, or rained down from antiphonal percussionists, one of them armed, according to the score, with “anvil (section of railway track)”. So that’s why my train was late.

Behind the swirling sounds inside Vir’s head lay four creatures from Indian myths. But seekers after the descriptive were sunk: distant cries of the Messiaen bird apart, Vir’s score only made sense as an architectural and theatrical space, 30 minutes wide, where sound textures ran free. An extraordinary new work, dazzlingly well performed.

Vir’s piece floated in the air with little apparent structural support. Two others made a point of showing their joins. David Sawer’s delicious Tiroirs of 1997, inspired by the linguistic games of the French writer Raymond Roussel, chopped and changed its rhythmic and melodic cells to a point close to frenzy — an ideal concert opener. Then, after the muted aquatics of Takemitsu’s Rain Coming, Magnus Lindberg and the British premiere of Jubilees arrived.

Originally a piano suite, the work now wears orchestral clothes, moving from complex gestures towards brass-dominated chorales. Lindberg’s famous Dionysian punch was missing; but Mälkki’s troops still gave these six brief pieces their all. The tour hops daily around the country: Durham tonight, then York, Bayston Hill, Shropshire, and Oxford.