There was an appropriately explosive start to the BBC Symphony Orchestra's celebration of Oliver Knussen's music. The composer's Flourish with Fireworks is a four-minute masterpiece of orchestral colour, as brilliant as anything in the repertoire, and Knussen's conducting inspired vivid playing from the orchestra.
Many of Knussen's musical fingerprints are prominent in this ebullient score: his unrivalled ear for instrumental detail, his fastidious layering of orchestral textures and his intuitive sense of pacing and structure. But what was revelatory about the concert was its demonstration that there is more to Knussen's music than amazing craft and technique.
The only world premiere was the Symphony in One Movement, a revision of his 1969 Concerto for Orchestra. Knussen, only 17 at the time, conducted the premiere of the original version, with André Previn playing the work's jazz-inspired piano part. The reworked symphony remains a virtuosic synthesis of musical styles, from Stravinskian rhythms and jazz-like gestures to rigorous modernism. Yet throughout the piece Knussen's distinctive compositional voice can be heard. Typically, the work crams an astonishing diversity of material into a tightly integrated 15-minute structure. It ends unpredictably with an intense, lamenting string line.
Knussen's Second and Third Symphonies were also on the programme. Again, their brief durations (of about 15 minutes each) belie the enormous emotional and musical experiences they create. The Second Symphony interweaves settings of wintry poems by Sylvia Plath and Georg Trakl into a four-movement structure. With Lucy Shelton's delicate soprano, the BBCSO made the piece an investigation of spectral, shimmering musical imagery, from the tremolos Knussen creates for Trakl's rats to the uneasy high-register harmonics he conjures for Plath's moonlight.
The Third Symphony was still more powerful. Knussen's performance brilliantly combined surface intensity with structural strength; the result was a searing and tragic work, as after a series of inconclusive climaxes, the music flickered into nothingness.
The most gripping piece on the programme was his Variations for Piano, played with ferocious brilliance by Nicolas Hodges. The piece is among the densest six minutes of music ever written, as massive textures collapse into delicate gestures and tiny phrases transform into huge outbursts. Knussen's models while composing the piece were sets of variations by Webern, Stravinsky and Copland. His own set belongs in the same company. Knussen's music is never less than beautifully imagined, but this concert revealed its expressive force and poetic range.
