Wednesday, October 8, 2025
Barbican Hall, London
Three works related by sound and dynamics – similar objectives, different results – occupied this without-interval concert, the BBC Symphony Orchestra (Stephen Bryant, leader) demonstrating its prowess in music that isn’t ‘everyday’ and needs working at, Dalia Stasevska conducting with sympathy and conviction, the players as subtle, integrated, and overall-responsive as these scores demand. Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s ARCHORA is full of naturalistic scrapings and knockings, suggestive of primeval chaos, perhaps dinosaurs will parade themselves under changing skies – sunny, stormy, bright, sinisterly-overcast – in the cinema of one’s mind. At only twenty minutes the feel of the music is nevertheless monumental. Half that length and planetary in the hearing (maybe due to Kubrick’s use of it in 2001: A Space Odyssey), Ligeti’s Atmosphères contemplates timbres, blends, the juxtaposition of high and low frequencies, opening with a chord (beautifully balanced here) that offers transport to a faraway place, with varying ambiences determined by instruments and volumes … Stasevska going into Become Ocean indivisibly, John Luther Adams’s remarkable forty-minute piece – “a vast sea of orchestral sound” (he says) – involving an unvarying pulse and three distinct ensembles employed in the service of sounds travelling through water, with some threatening crescendos, leviathans riding the mighty waves to invade complacency. Somehow Become Ocean, despite its repetition and length, issues a compelling experience, mesmeric, sonically beautiful yet disturbing and (potentially) prophetic, Adams aware of and concerned for Nature. Become Ocean is musically stupendous, superbly realised here, with the capacity to propose important worries and make one think.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live/bbc_radio_three