If a celebration of American composer John Zorn's 50th birthday is the starting point for the Britten Sinfonia's touring programme, then it is Zorn's fascination with animated cartoons and the music written for them that provides the thread through the rest of the concert. The starting point for John Adams's Chamber Symphony was hearing a chance conjunction between 1950s cartoon scores and Schoenberg's first Chamber Symphony, although Adams takes the music far from both models, while Janacek's nursery-rhyme settings, Rikadla, were inspired by newspaper cartoons published for children.
It was good to include the Janacek, a rarely heard late choral gem, 18 epigrammatic numbers with quirky, wind-dominated instrumentations. But otherwise the programme mix (with Music From a House of Crossed Desires, a short taster for his opera by the Britten Sinfonia's composer-in-association John Woolrich included for good measure) was never entirely convincing. Zorn himself was represented by two contrasting works from the late 1980s and early 1990s, both of which left partial impressions. Angelus Novus, an octet using the line-up of a Mozart wind serenade, is indebted to Jewish cultures (klezmer and chant) but its textural ideas seem closer to Ligeti. For Your Eyes Only, though, is archetypal cartoon-cuts Zorn, a one-movement chamber symphony of abrupt juxtapositions, that plunders popular idioms, as well as modernist icons like Varèse and Stravinsky, to produce a patchwork of images that whirl past the ear at bewildering speed.
The effect is intermittently entertaining, but less certainly convincing, perhaps because the musical borrowings have no intrinsic interest other than their sheer incongruity and the way they joyously trample down all stylistic boundaries. The performances, though, should have been authentic (conductor Stephen Drury is a regular member of Zorn's performing group) and the Britten Sinfonia certainly produced sparky playing for him, even though earlier some details of balance in the Adams Chamber Symphony were awry.
· Repeated tomorrow at the CBSO Centre, Birmingham. Box office: 0121-767 4050.
