The BBC Symphony Orchestra’s two days of concerts devoted to Louis Andriessen’s music included two major UK premieres. La Commedia, Andriessen’s most recent stage work (a new one will be premiered at the Holland festival in June), is a typically wide-ranging and culturally allusive riff on Dante’s Divine Comedy. The piece, like its predecessors, blurs the boundary between concert hall and opera house: sometimes it resembles a series of dramatic tableaux, other times it’s more like a collection of secular cantatas.
Whatever the designation, it was a joyous, uplifting experience. The Barbican performance, conducted with wonderful clarity by Martyn Brabbins, was a concert staging. Directed by Kenneth Richardson, it dispensed with the film by Hal Hartley that was shot for the 2008 Amsterdam stage premiere and which was also packaged with the CD version two years ago. That allowed Andriessen’s magpie-like score, ransacking three centuries of musical history, to be relished fully, and we could grasp the texts in three languages more easily. As in the Amsterdam premiere, the soprano Claron McFadden was Beatrice, and the mezzo Cristina Zavalloni performed Dante; the Lucifer here was baritone Andrew Sauvageau, while Synergy Vocals supplied the chorus and the Finchley Children’s Music Group delivered the charmingly mocking coda.
The stage works were also represented in the final Immersion concert, for which Clark Rundell conducted the BBCSO. It featured De Stijl, the third part of Andriessen’s first opera, De Materie, and Rosa’s Horses, an orchestral sequence that Rundell had expertly filleted from the second. The first piece was a wonderfully exuberant example of the quintessential Andriessen sound, the second an uproarious parody of Hollywood western scores. Together, they provided the perfect contrast to the first British performance of Andriessen’s most recent large-scale work, Mysteriën. Inspired by the writings of Thomas à Kempis, Mysteriën was composed for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Andriessen’s first ever work for his hometown band. It’s a wonderfully contained, austere sequence of movements, in which nothing is wasted, yet every sound seems fresh and totally individual, each a thing of stark beauty in its own right.
• La Commedia will be broadcast on Radio 3’s Hear and Now on 20 February; Mysteriën is available on iPlayer until 14 March.
