The London Sinfonietta’s Sound Across a Century is a two-part set of lecture-concerts, presented by the musicologist Jonathan Cross, exploring the modernist musical revolutions of the 20th century. The second concert will take Schoenbergian atonality as its starting point, but here Cross and conductor Thierry Fischer began with Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune, examining its influence on instrumental colour and sonority in composers as far apart as Gérard Grisey, Kaija Saariaho, Sofia Gubaidulina and Jonathan Harvey.
The Sinfonietta, of course, play this repertory wonderfully well, though Faune was given in a chamber version prepared by Benno Sachs in 1920 for Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna, which to some extent robbed it of its sensuality. Varèse’s Octandre, with its liberating dissonances and combative dialogues between brass and woodwind, hit home with considerable force. Debussy and Varèse are widely regarded as influencing Grisey’s spectralist Périodes from 1974, its shifting textures beautifully explored here.
Cross reminded us that spectral music, with its emphasis on harmonic overtones and the acoustic properties of sound, can create qualities of transcendental mystery and awe, and the second half of the evening was given over to composers for whom spirituality is paramount. Saariaho’s Oi Kuu (To the Moon) for bass clarinet (Timothy Lines) and cello (Lionel Handy) sounded exquisitely eerie. Gubaidulina’s Concordanza seemed to gaze heavenwards in its search for tremulous glimpses of numinosity, while Harvey’s astonishing Sringara Chaconne, rooted in Buddhist spirituality, unfolded like the repetitions of a mantra, contemplating the unity of the cosmos in the sensuous immediacy of sound.
• Sound Across a Century continues on 24 March.
