You cannot hold a Manchester International Festival, dedicated to the new, without involving the city’s two big orchestras. The Hall? had a spin early on with an ambitious audiovisual distillation of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. On Sunday it was the BBC Philharmonic’s turn with another world premiere.
Up on the platform sat conventional forces: in the left-hand gallery, members of the Manchester Chamber Choir and on the podium, the promising conductor Alexander Shelley. Two harps struck up a three-note pattern, repeated, repeated, repeated. A horn solo, first of many, pitched in above. Soon after, a solo viola, with a tuba echoing; layer upon layer wandered around, mostly becalmed, and eventually inconsequential. Thus we were launched upon Orchestral Suite by the genre-busting William Orbit, rock record producer, ace remixer, colleague of Madonna, Blur, U2, and the man who took Barber’s string Adagio high into the charts smeared with electronic Vaseline.
Everyone here was living dangerously. Unused to composing for a full classical orchestra, Orbit had written a 75-minute, nine-movement suite tottering with few obvious means of support. No descriptive content, no tight structural grip, no sharp variety, no take-home melodies. Insane!
The orchestra’s professionalism couldn’t hide the work’s essential nature: symphonic ado about next to nothing. The women’s voices, understrength and sounding underrehearsed, tried to beguile with a wilting vocalise. And beneath its politeness, I sensed an audience in crisis – glad that the music wasn’t Sh?h?razade, but still with hopes unfulfilled.
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Moment by moment Orbit hit the spot: the hypnotic opening; timpani rhythms spreading like a virus; sudden pools of tinkling quiet. He has an ear and imagination. But where was the glue to bind it all? Mislaid in the layering; the bogus climaxes, almost always unearned; the shrugged-off endings; the muddle of classical gestures, rock stomping, and ambient haze.
The ending had a becoming modesty. If only the rest had followed. Fusing and experimenting is good, but Orbit should have tested the symphonic waters in a much smaller boat.