Born in the US but based in Britain, Arlene Sierra is perhaps best known on this side of the Atlantic for her feisty, energy-packed ensemble pieces. But her catalogue also includes a number of orchestral pieces, several of which have been taken up by Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. That made Morlot a natural choice to conduct the first performance of Sierra’s Nature Symphony, which was commissioned by the BBC Philharmonic.
The title suggests something programmatic, and the symphony’s three movements all have evocative titles, but there is nothing in them that’s obviously descriptive. The mechanics of natural processes fascinate Sierra and find their way into her music, so it is the idea of endless cycles of migration, year after year, that creates the steadily accumulating loops of the opening Mountain of Butterflies, while the sense of something ominous and threatening in the melodic fragments and ticking ostinatos of the slow central Black Place was inspired by Georgia O’Keefe’s dark paintings of New Mexico.
The finale, Bee Rebellion, is based on the phenomenon of hive collapse that is sometimes seen in bee colonies, when the insect society can suddenly break down into anarchy; it’s music of unpredictable cycles and accumulations, with taunting wind solos, all cut short by a brassy, percussion-driven ending that offers no escape. Lasting just over 20 minutes, the symphony does what Sierra sets out to do with impressive economy and a succession of striking orchestral ideas.
Another “nature symphony”, Dvořák’s Eighth, came at the opposite end of the programme, well played by the BBC Philharmonic and presented by Morlot with much affection, as well as with a few moments of excusable expressive indulgence. The concert’s centrepiece was Bartók’s First Piano Concerto, with Jean-Éfflam Bavouzet as the soloist. He tended to play down the more rebarbative aspects of what is one of Bartók’s most uncompromising orchestral works, so that the solo writing seemed more conventionally virtuosic than it sometimes does, while having the timpanist and the five-strong percussion section at the front of the stage on either side of the piano rather than behind it as the score specifies perhaps created more balance problems than it solved.
• On BBC Radio 3 on 1 December and on iPlayer until 31 December.
