Oliver Knussen's Violin Concerto, which was premiered in Pittsburgh a year ago, is his first substantial score since the exquisite Two Organa of 1999, but the wait has been well worthwhile. The new concerto was written for Pinchas Zuckerman, who will introduce it to London at the Proms in August. At the Aldeburgh festival, the BBC Symphony Orchestra was conducted by the composer for the work's UK premiere, with Clio Gould as the fine soloist.
The work lasts only 17 minutes, but as always with Knussen, the specific gravity of the music is high. There are three linked movements, conforming to a traditional concerto scheme; they are framed by the sounds of bells and a high harmonic for the solo violin, from which everything appears to flow in the opening Recitative, and into which all of the energy of the final Gigue is absorbed at the end. The central panel is an Aria, a serene violin line steadily unwound over pulsing orchestral figures, which just once curdles into something more threatening. It is beautifully direct.
Compared with Knussen's earlier works, the Violin Concerto seems less complex and rhythmically squarer, as if his typical suppleness of metre and melody had been made to conform to the ground plan of classical forms. Yet the effects are still magical; the scoring is full of sleights of hand and brilliantly imagined moments, while the harmonic world is sure and never for a moment predictable. If Knussen set out to write something that would become a repertory piece, then he has certainly succeeded.
Alongside Knussen's magical scoring, even Mauricio Kagel's handling of the orchestra seemed ordinary. Kagel is in residence at Aldeburgh this year, and appeared as the speaker in his Interview avec D, which takes a collection of quotations from Debussy's critical writings and presents them as an interview in which the orchestra is both the interrogator and audience. The result is a melodrama of sorts. As ever with Kagel, the idea is totally off the wall and the final musical purpose hard to pin down. However, without resorting to direct quotation, he has re-created and enriched Debussy's sound world expertly.
In the Maltings programme, the two contemporary works were surrounded by real Debussy: his orchestrations of two of Satie's Gymnopédies to begin and the Nocturnes to end. Knussen's performances were breathtaking: no wispy impressionism here, but bold, luminous colours. This was Debussy seen from a symbolist perspective: the painterly equivalent of Redon rather than Monet.
