With other events to mark this year’s centenary of Iannis Xenakis’s birth still thin on the ground in the UK, Birmingham’s day of workshops, talks and concerts, presented on the exact anniversary under the auspices of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, was a worthy tribute. Eight of the Greek-French composer’s works were performed, interspersed with the premieres of specially commissioned pieces. The title of the day, Music & Maths, emphasised the theorising behind his compositions, but what emerged most powerfully – as always with Xenakis – is the sheer visceral intensity of his works, which sets him apart from the other great European figures of his generation.
Whether it is in the dense, curdled dissonances of the string writing in Ittidra from 1996, the wordless ullulations of the soprano soloist (the excellent Anna Dennis) in the 1977 Akanthos, or the tangled knots of wild counterpoint in Jalons, one of his greatest achievements, composed for Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1986, Xenakis always surprises. There’s something ancient, even primeval running through his music that contrasts so tellingly with the often convoluted techniques that generated it, and gives it a special charge.
All of those pieces were performed with exactly the right mix of wildness and virtuosity by BCMG under conductor Gabriella Teychenné, and their concert together included a couple of premieres. Samantha Fernando’s Breathing Forest sets a meditative text about “forest bathing” for soprano (Dennis), with strings and percussion cushioning the voice, while in Emily Howard’s Compass a solo percussionist (Julian Warbuton) led a group of strings on a rather halting musical journey.
There was a new work in the day’s final concert, too, an “acousmatic” programme presented by Beast, the electronic sound studio of Birmingham University. Sergio Luque’s It is Happening Again extends the stochastic techniques developed by Xenakis to produce a study in sustained sounds, whose alternation and repetition increase in insistence. Luque was also behind the mixing desk for an eight-channel version of Xenakis’s La Légende d’Eer, the 45-minute piece composed for the multimedia show that opened the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1978. the 45-minute piece composed in 1978. A dazzling, overwhelming achievement, bringing together naturally derived and synthesised sounds to create a canvas of immense scope it’s a piece that deserves a place alongside the greatest electronic scores, and a perfect example of why Xenakis’s significance endures.
