Over the last three seasons, the Britten Sinfonia has been working its way through a cycle of Beethoven’s symphonies, with conductor Thomas Adès as their guide. It’s been a thrilling and sometimes revelatory journey, made all the more unpredictable by the inclusion of a work by Gerald Barry in each of the programmes. Adès and the orchestra have now reached the final stage of their joint project. This weekend in Norwich and London, the Ninth Symphony will be prefaced by Barry’s Nietzsche setting from 2000, The Eternal Recurrence. In this concert, the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies framed the first performance of his Viola Concerto, with Lawrence Power as the soloist.
For Barry, every kind of musical material is grist to his creative mill, and as he pointed out in a brief note on the new work, he has never distinguished between the exercises all musicians play when they are learning their instruments and “regular music”. Exercises have given him “as much pleasure as Schubert”. In the concerto, almost all of the soloist’s material is exercise-like – repeated figures that run through the viola’s range with manic insistence, and are sometimes interrupted by rowdy volleys of brass and explosions of percussion, or taken up by one or more sections of the orchestra, always in rhythmic unison.
After just over 15 minutes of these exchanges, there is one final surprise: the soloist lights upon a fragile, wistful tune, which he first plays on his viola and then whistles quietly, as if to himself. Power may not be as superb a whistler as he is viola player, but it still adds an unexpectedly touching ending to this typically strange work.
The Beethoven symphonies around the premiere were more of what we have come to expect from Adès and this orchestra – vivid, modern performances and bursting with rhythmic life. If the Seventh had an irresistible momentum, the Eighth was much more singular, with its quirks almost exaggerated: the second movement Allegretto sometimes conjured up comparisons with Stravinsky.
• At the Barbican, London, and broadcast on Radio 3 on 21 May. At St Andrew’s Hall, Norwich, on 25 May, and the Barbican, London, on 26 May.
