There aren't many pieces of recent music that fill one with irresistible joy, but Julian Anderson's Book of Hours is one of them. Played by the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Oliver Knussen, the piece has a vitality and excitement that makes it one of Anderson's most important works. His music has always been beautifully crafted, but in Book of Hours, he finds something new: an elemental, expressive energy.
Book of Hours is inspired by medieval art, and Anderson finds ingenious ways of realising the connection between his music and centuries-old illuminated manuscripts. The whole piece is gilded by a halo of electronics, a new departure for Anderson, and there is a musical archaism in the work's essential material.
The piece begins with the first four notes of the major scale, as if the work is returning to musical first principles, only to create a vastly complex two-part structure from these simple building blocks. Technically, it's a tour de force, but it's the music's emotional journey that makes the piece so compelling. A fierce cadenza for electronics, towards the end, is the wildest music Anderson has yet written, and the way the second part transforms the music of the opening gives it a genuinely symphonic momentum.
Anderson's compositional approach, getting the most out of just four notes, was the opposite of Anton Webern's in his Five Orchestral Pieces. Miniature in scale but vast in scope, these pieces contained as much intensity and variety as a late romantic symphony in Knussen's performance. Their heightened, distilled beauty had a magical logic that connected a succession of individual sounds: a mandolin chord, a violin melody, an organ ostinato.
In this company, the European premiere of Jonathan Cole's Testament was underwhelming. Written in memory of Knussen's late wife, Sue, the piece made music from the letter names of her initials, but what began as a meditation on a single semitone never achieved the alchemy of Webern's or Anderson's pieces, where musical processes become mysteriously expressive.
