As it hurtles away from Earth – 16bn miles and counting – the Golden Record on board the Voyager spacecraft continues to fascinate us. Caroline Shaw’s The Listeners – written for San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque in 2019 and here receiving its London premiere from the BBCSO as part of Shaw’s Barbican residency – features one of its tracks: spoken greetings in 55 languages. Heard via record player, these resonate through the hall while Shaw’s music forms haltingly underneath, from a pulsing keyboard note to briefly sweeping choral phrases. At times, the music almost eclipses the speech – which somehow emphasises its wonder. Later, Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot” speech is heard, this time unadorned, via cassette player.
Using a wordless choir to express wonderment is a cliche that Shaw skirts deftly, her harmonies avoiding sentimentality even though they often feel simple. Lasting 35 minutes and styled like a miniature classical oratorio, The Listeners starts and ends with movements that grow from a wordless lullaby, sung here hauntingly by the mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean. There’s a prominent role for keyboard; a harpsichord at the premiere, but an electric piano here, lending the whole thing an aptly Tomorrow’s World feel reinforced by the sight of the audio hardware on a table at the front. A baroque-style orchestral interlude conjures interstellar velocity; as for the texts Shaw sets to music, these include poetry by Whitman and Tennyson along with a striking 2017 meditation on the arbitrariness of borders by Yesenia Montilla.
Betts-Dean and the baritone Florian Störtz were communicative soloists, and the BBC Symphony Chorus put the choral passages across compellingly. The movements aren’t necessarily too short – Haydn managed to conjure the vast unknown in just six minutes at the start of The Creation – yet they didn’t all feel developed to full capacity. Given the immensity of its subject, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Shaw’s piece should be enjoyable, thought-provoking and slender all at once.
Stasevska and her orchestra had warmed us up with a lyrical first half. Grazhyna, a 1955 tone poem by the Ukrainian composer Borys Lyatoshynsky, was a worthwhile discovery, telling a 15th-century Lithuanian tale in sonorously dramatic style. And Randall Goosby gave us a gratifyingly rich yet unsentimental performance of Barber’s Violin Concerto. His encore, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Louisiana Blues Strut, was a toe-tapping evocation of bluegrass and slide guitar.
