![\"BRSO](\"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/brWhirlingBows.jpg\")
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By ANDREW POWELL MUNICH \u2014 Not every week does the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra<\/a> devote a whole program to music written since 2000. Guest conductor Matthias Pintscher<\/a>\u2019s concert July 7 in the Herkulessaal<\/a> proved an exception. It began spatially, extravagantly, with his own fantasy With Lilies White<\/em> (2002); progressed to a nuanced new Mark Andre<\/a> work in need of an edit; and concluded, feebly it must be said, with pieces by Gy\u00f6rgy Kurt\u00e1g<\/a> and Jonathan Harvey<\/a>. Along the way, the orchestra\u2019s precision, enthusiasm, and seemingly instinctive care with color and balances brought rewards. The 20-minute fantasy, written for Cleveland and scored for orchestra with voices, sets wholly unrelated texts by Edward Paston<\/a> and Derek Jarman<\/a>, makes chitchat in soft percussive would-be quadrophony, and fuses stylistic gestures of the Renaissance and Baroque. If it never quite makes its point, it at least achieves handsome self-sufficiency. Vinzenz L\u00f6ffel, soloist of the Augsburger Domsingknaben<\/a>, and sopranos Sarah Aristidou<\/a>, Anna-Maria Palii<\/a> and Sheva Tehoval<\/a> etched the vocal lines with varying degrees of steadiness at probably too much volume. The longer, BRSO-commissioned<\/a> whence \u2026 whither<\/em> (2016) charts the touch and direction of a barely audible wind, an element of Christian faith<\/a> for Andre, n\u00e9<\/em> Marc Andr\u00e9. Strings and percussion of a large orchestra used with remarkable restraint trace sound-shadows that are broken up by abrupt or gradual, hard or soft, events to yield an intriguing sense of physical movement, crucially free of horror-movie clich\u00e9. Even the whirling bows<\/a>, or Schwirrb\u00f6gen<\/em>, fit in snugly. The first four of Andre\u2019s seven movements, called \u201csections,\u201d present a balance of ideas and might well have made a complete work \u2014 the third rises loudly, as it were violently, at its close; the fourth hints at resolution \u2014 but the composer pushes on, stirred by the spiritual number seven, alas with duller material until a lively yet in context less innovative final section. Kurt\u00e1g conveys nothing so much as desolation in his seven-minute Petite musique solennelle<\/em> (2015), a harmonically cautious exercise in sour chord-clusters. Clangor at the midpoint comprises one statement of a permeating four-note figure. Brooding horns, soft trumpet lines of some grace, and reticent percussive utterances go precisely nowhere. Harvey\u2019s \u2026 towards a Pure Land<\/em> (2005) places a string group \u201cpeacefully behind the sound\u201d of the main orchestra, endowed with innumerable percussion instruments, and proceeds to describe in sixteen minutes an active but chronically pallid arc whose center of \u201cinsubstantial pitch\u201d is, as in the Kurt\u00e1g, and in the composer\u2019s words, \u201can emptiness.\u201d There, presumably, lies the Pure Land, \u201ca state of mind beyond suffering \u2026 revealing the meaning of Dharma<\/a>,\u201d not in the surrounding music, with its fluid, ungraspable ideas. Pintscher and BR\u2019s players nimbly negotiated all exercises.<\/p>\n Photo \u00a9 Bayerischer Rundfunk<\/p>\n Related posts:
Published: July 29, 2017<\/span><\/p>\n
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