‘The razor’s edge between beauty and terror”: that’s where the composer and environmental activist John Luther Adams envisages a position for his music. Perhaps in a different concert it would have been perfectly possible to listen to his colossal orchestral work Become Ocean and find it merely beautiful. Here, as the culmination of a brilliantly thought-through sequence played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Dalia Stasevska, its unsettling aspects struck home powerfully, too.
All three works here were the kind that require the language of physics to describe them. This was music of ineluctable forces moving against each other, whether heavy or delicate: shifting tectonic plates and drifting clouds of gas. Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s ARCHORA, premiered at the BBC Proms in 2022, took us immediately into this listening world, the music first scattering high-frequency sounds against an elemental low note, then creating elusively shifting textures around a single, veering pitch. It’s a hugely effective work, simultaneously teeming and glacial.
And, like so much written in the last 60 years, it owes at least a nod to Ligeti’s Atmosphères – which required an even larger orchestra on stage. Here were sounds that seemed to come from the air or the ground rather than from any musical instrument. The extremes of pitch and loudness that had the players seated near the piccolo and percussion sticking their fingers in their ears for protection had the audience’s knuckles turning white, too.
Out of the final silence of Atmosphères, Become Ocean emerged without a pause. It’s a 45-minute musical palindrome in which three cross-currents – strings, wind, brass – ebb and flow, creating troughs and huge peaks out of the interference. On one level it feels stable, even peaceful – and yet there’s an unyielding quality to this rise and fall that is profoundly disquieting. Benign and menacing sounds pass by each other, seemingly unrelated yet part of the same body: xylophones and harps – four of them, two upfront and two at the back – bubble above threatening bass drum. Stasevska shaped those long surges with absolute security and a clear view of the horizon; for the rest of us, the experience was immersive, the waves all-encompassing.
• On BBC Sounds until 7 November
