It must be tricky to come up with the right mix for a programme that includes a new work by Richard Ayres. The world that Ayres’s music inhabits is so quirky and unpredictable, so various in its associations and references, that almost anything else can seem uneventful by comparison. But Ilan Volkov never shies away from the surreal and the strange, and in this BBC Symphony Orchestra concert he opted for something completely different to offset Ayres’s piece, surrounding the premiere with works based on Goethe’s poetry, and a classical symphony.
There were Mendelssohn and Beethoven’s responses to the poem Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, the first a freewheeling overture (something of a rarity, which Elgar quotes in the Enigma Variations), the second a late, rather austere choral setting with the BBC Singers. They also delivered Schubert’s very beautiful version of Gesang der Geister über den Wassern for male voices with an equally low-pitched accompaniment of violas, cellos and double basses. Volkov’s tidy, if slightly subfusc performance of one of the most striking of Haydn’s Sturm und Drang symphonies, No 52 in C minor, came last.
All of which had nothing to do with Ayres’s piece, which was titled in his usual poker-faced way as No 48. This time, though, there was a subtitle, In the Night Studio, which helped a bit. It’s the latest in a series of pieces inspired by artists – this time the painter Philip Guston. His late-1960s shift from pure abstract expressionism to a style that included self-referential objects and cartoon-like figures clearly strikes a chord with Ayres, whose own music has a cartoonish quality and a tendency to place the familiar in unlikely contexts.
Here, the wildly eclectic repertoire of musical ideas, ransacking three centuries of musical history, was punctuated by a series of sampled sounds – footsteps, sighs and heavy breathing, doors being locked – and a voice quoting musical terms – scherzo, symphony, adagio, canon – which tended to send the orchestra off on different tacks. It’s a charming, often witty and sometimes disconcerting journey, with a nagging sense of a logic that’s always just out of reach. I’m not sure things would be much clearer on a second hearing.
