Less than a week after the London Sinfonietta and pianist Nicolas Hodges were involved in the BBC's Cage festival at the Barbican, they took on a much greater challenge, and a more rewarding one. Their first performance of Elliott Carter's Dialogues for piano and chamber orchestra, commissioned by the BBC for Hodges and the Sinfonietta and completed last autumn, came at the end of a dense programme of premieres conducted by Oliver Knussen: the first London performances of Mauricio Kagel's quirkily attractive Double Sextet and Augusta Read Thomas's finely honed song cycle In My Sky at Twilight, alongside the world premiere of Silvina Milstein's cluttered and confused Tigres Azules. It simply dwarfed them all.
In the 1960s Carter produced a full-scale piano concerto, a densely argued, piece of huge structural complexity, inhabiting a musical world light years away from that of the Dialogues. In late Carter, less has come to mean incomparably more, and the acres of white space in the new score confirm how refined and exact his music has become. Sometimes the argument is reduced to a single line - the work begins with a halting cor anglais solo, before the piano answers in wide-ranging chords that initiate the conversational tone of the work in which ideas pass seamlessly from soloist to orchestra and back.
As in many of Carter's deft later works, the invention seems effortless, the musical structure self-defining and utterly satisfying. But where the general tone of many of those recent works has been light, rhythmically extrovert, and texturally transparent, there seems much more muscle about the Dialogues. The hugely demanding piano writing packs a real punch and some of the confrontations between soloist and orchestra get quite heated, even though a reconciliation is suggested in the luminous final pages of the 15-minute work. Hodges' performance was quite astoundingly committed and accurate, and he could have had no better conductor than Knussen to partner him through such a magnificent work. An unforgettable premiere.
