Esa-Pekka Salonen's Floof is the piece that gave its name to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's Floof! festival of new music. A histrionic cantata for solo soprano and amplified quintet, Floof was given a hysterical, energetic performance by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and soloist Anu Komsi, conducted by the composer.
The piece sets a text by Stanislaw Lem that imagines a cybernetic world in which poetry is composed by machines, and the words lurch from semantic confusion to outright nonsense. Komsi captured the sense of a machine gradually losing control, and Salonen's music mixed machine-like passages with wild, improvisatory abandon.
But Floof had no real expressive power to match its extreme gestures. Magnus Lindberg and Salonen are the closest of friends and collaborators, but Lindberg's work represents the other side of Finnish music. Twine, a solo piano piece from 1988 played by Rolf Hind, revealed the subtle harmonic thinking that has characterised his recent music.
The infectious, collegiate atmosphere of the collaboration between the Finns - Lindberg, Salonen and the CBSO's music director, Sakari Oramo - defined much of Floof!, but the emphasis moved southwards in the last two concerts. Pride of place was given to two UK premieres by German-based composers, Mauricio Kagel and Hanspeter Kyburz.
Kagel's Doppelsextett was a large-scale chamber symphony in which a sextet of wind players was pitted against six strings, creating an ever-changing dialogue between fragments of melody, rhythm, and texture. And there was no doubting the power of Kyburz's Noesis, a three-movement work for massive orchestra that ended the whole festival. But it was the oldest work on the programme, Ligeti's 1967 Lontano, that presented the evening's most radical music.
The piece hovers at the edge of audibility and comprehension. Here, its dense textures and darkly glowing melodies created a thrilling, shimmering musical experience, helped by Oramo's sensitive performance and the cavernous acoustic of Symphony Hall.
