On paper, the programme Oliver Knussen devised for his latest concert with the London Sinfonietta, a mixture of premieres and revivals without any obvious coherence, did not look all that promising. But it turned out to be both fascinating and thoroughly rewarding.
It certainly helped that all the performances were exemplary. Even in Thea Musgrave's bracing Space Play, given without a conductor, the energy and precision were startling. Musgrave's chamber concerto is 30 years old now, yet remains such a lucid model of instrumental role play and surefooted musical drama that it sounds as fresh as ever, once again posing the question of why this major British composer, now in her mid-70s, is so neglected here.
Though Jonathan Cole's charmless Penumbra made no more impression than it did at its first performance by the LSO a year ago, the other work from the younger British generation was far more striking. Ben Foskett's Violin Concerto is one of the first products of the Sinfonietta's Blue Touch Paper scheme, in which young composers are guided by established figures to a produce a work for the Sinfonietta. Foskett's single-movement concerto clothes a solo violin line (commandingly played by Clio Gould) in increasingly luminous and independent instrumental harmonies; the ideas are always striking, and the way the music exploits the changing relationship between the soloist and the ensemble is compelling.
Foskett (born in 1977 and a former pupil of Simon Bainbridge) wrote the concerto with Magnus Lindberg as his mentor, and the London premiere of Lindberg's own Jubilees followed its first performance. Jubilees is a set of six miniatures, expanded from piano pieces Lindberg composed for Boulez's 75th birthday. They reveal his usual preoccupations with rhythmic layering and lucid harmonic planning. Some of the ensemble writing is weighty and grandiose, and the first two pieces at least are strikingly imagined, but the rhetoric gets disappointingly conventional as the set goes on, and the way in which all the structural loose ends are brought together in the last piece seems just a bit too pat.
