Given its UK premiere by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Semyon Bychkov, Thomas Larcher’s Second Symphony, starkly entitled Cenotaph, is dedicated to the thousands who have drowned in the Mediterranean during the refugee crisis, and voices Larcher’s outrage at the “misanthropy” (his word) of the response in his native Austria and elsewhere.
It’s a formidable score, angry yet lyrical, and rooted in the mainstream symphonic tradition, though it also pushes at the boundaries of conventional structure. Larcher argues that his music is not programmatic – that it does not “convey messages, but asks questions”. But it’s difficult not to hear the heaving of a treacherous sea beneath the formal crisis of the opening movement, or the intimation of dangerously becalmed waters in the grieving adagio. The sonorities are by turns lucid and brutal, and the climax comes with a battering scherzo that furiously demands answers, only to be greeted with a banal ländler that reeks of indifference and contempt. It’s a moment of tremendous irony and power. You couldn’t fault the performance.
Bychkov chose Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder and Strauss’s Alpine Symphony as its companion pieces. The Wagner, with Elisabeth Kulman the immaculate soloist and Bychkov keenly alert to the music’s refined sensuality, was utterly beguiling. The BBCSO sounded glorious in the Alpine Symphony: Bychkov’s urgent conducting was particularly strong in the second half, when Strauss’s climbers get caught in a storm as nature turns against the human beings that seek to conquer it.
