Deprived of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, now being refurbished, the London Sinfonietta ventured to the perhaps surprising venue of the Coronet Theatre at Elephant and Castle, and is due back for a concert on Thursday. This first presentation in this art decoish, frequently reinvented space, with its blatant orange proscenium arch, wasn’t really a concert at all, nor even primarily musical. The Book of Disquiet (2008), by the Dutch composer Michel van der Aa, is notable more for its use of words (here in English) by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa than for anything in the score; and the most arresting thing about the event — the 75-minute music-theatre work’s British premiere — was, indeed, the acting of Samuel West, delivering with immense aplomb a stream of the diary-like observations from which the eponymous prose book was posthumously assembled.
He was alone on stage, in a set opposing circular frames to the prevailing rectangularity, and inside two of which were the video projections one associates with this composer. One circle was briefly used as a percussion instrument. The Sinfonietta sat to one side, conducted by Joana Carneiro, and, at the darkened auditorium’s rear, Sound Intermedia’s mixing desk turned all to electronica.
West, besuited, took the role of Pessoa’s alter ego or “heteronym”, the bookkeeper Bernardo Soares, while another of his personas (Pessoa’s very name is Portuguese for “person”) appeared in the video material, along with imagined landscapes and extended performances from a fado singer, Ana Moura. I was held by West’s charismatic presence, his extraordinary feat of memory and the sharpness of numerous Pessoa aphorisms, but the music itself seemed almost beside the point. As a background to recitation it was all the less effective for being so predominantly clamorous — a bristling tutti idiom close to modern jazz, but sourer — while as a performance in its own right (and this was a Sinfonietta presentation, after all) it struck me as uninventive.
Van der Aa, who directed the show, was a pupil of Louis Andriessen and clearly espouses Andriessen’s aesthetic of minimalistic clatter, intellectual eclecticism and flat-voiced vocalism. His preoccupation with film and other technical gambits seems to have dimmed his concentration on the musical essence, if he ever sought it.
His score did little to illuminate Pessoa’s words, and sometimes obscured them, yet to spread the word about the Portuguese poet isn’t in vain. It was excellent to walk afterwards across the dark, congested (disquieting?) Elephant junction with such lines as “I’m the gap between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me” echoing in the mind.
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Combining spoken word and orchestra was a feature of two other concerts that I recently attended, both marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. At the Royal Festival Hall, the London Philharmonic Orchestra was conducted by Osmo Vanska in a suite he had devised of Sibelius’s music — in effect his last composition — for The Tempest, and this proved a string of beautiful and delicate sensations rather at odds with the all-purpose digest (both précis and sampler) of the play offered by Simon Callow, standing among the players. He had to carry too much on his shoulders, and they sagged.
Better was the London Symphony Orchestra’s solution at the Barbican when John Eliot Gardiner conducted Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Guildhall drama graduates acted out just enough of the play at the relevant points for the sublime appositeness of the music to be evident.
Soon afterwards, the LSO, this time under Gianandrea Noseda, gave an ingenious programme there that juxtaposed 19th-century abstract treatments of Shakespeare plays: Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet fantasy-overture (that somehow definitive reimagining), Richard Strauss’s inaugural tone poem, Macbeth, and a rare one, Richard III, by Smetana. An unusual, insistent rhythm in the bass is supposed to convey the hunchbacked king’s gait, and does so: yet of course there’s a purely musical rationale.
Deft and vivid this piece proved, a novelty for me. I hope to hear it again.