The Queen Elizabeth Hall is out of commission for two seasons while a large section of the Southbank Centre is refurbished, and among the replacement halls is St John’s Smith Square. The London Sinfonietta duly opened its season in the capital there, with a concert that couldn’t help but recall the early 1980s, when it mounted the memorable “Post 1945” concerts in the converted church. Of this season’s dates, though, only two are here, with others at Kings Place, Southwark Playhouse, the Coronet Theatre and the Royal Festival Hall.
It will be a Sinfonietta Londonish as never before, but of course it goes much farther afield on tour: this month to Mexico, Lithuania and Latvia, in March to Singapore. The St John’s programme was suitably cosmopolitan, with Mexican and British premieres in the first half, and the second devoted to the American composer Morton Feldman’s 55-minute For Samuel Beckett, for 23 players — an unbroken unfolding from his final year, 1987.
The seating at St John’s was not the usual rectangular formation, where one can feel one is sitting in pews, but a welcome tilting of that configuration by 90 degrees to create an amphitheatre effect, with the conductor — Garry Walker — on his podium facing the west door. The gain in atmosphere was immediately apparent, and the sizeable, young, keen audience warmed it, too. The new work by Laurence Crane (b1961) was his Chamber Symphony No 2, subtitled The Australian (for reasons undisclosed), and this single 18-minute movement proved a rather compelling excursion in his unruffled minimalist style. A few simple ideas — booming unison pedal notes, diatonic riffs — are rotated and quietly interrogated in a way evoking, for me, the ritual continuity of a John Tavener piece, with an eventual, if not exactly symphonic, brief build-up of complexity near the end.
The other premiere was of XLIII — Memoriam Vivire, by Marisol Jimenez (b1978), a 15-minute essay in extremist playing techniques (a Helmut Lachenmann-like repertory of tricks such as bowing the inside of the piano) offered in tribute to the hundreds of “missing” people in Mexico in the past decade. There did seem a gulf between the declared emotional intention and the distinctly cerebral realisation. And it was a contrasting success in making intellectual intensity coincide with raw feeling that, among other things, marked out the Feldman. For Samuel Beckett — one of several Feldman scores bound up with the author — honoured him by reproducing in musical terms the sort of pure expression, unbuttressed by rhetorical or formal devices, to which he aspired in his plotless novels and immobile dramas, themselves profoundly musical in rhythm.
The work is essentially a single dissonant, indeed acidulous, chord, sounded by the near-tutti and dominated by a pair of flutes, that is repeated with variation at stately pace for what actually seems — so remarkable and even Wagnerian is Feldman’s manipulation of time span — much less than an hour. Nothing is ever very different and nothing is the same. The delayed entry of the piano, the increasing prominence of harp notes and, most magical, the insinuation of a wash of vibraphone are subtle inflections along the static, multilayered way. The relief of a proper change of chord seems ever possible, but is teasingly withheld. It is only the ghost of the old “functional” harmony that appears. The writing is masterly, and Walker’s skilful account was as hypnotic as it was — by Feldmanian paradox — vitalising.
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Three nights later, the second in the Southbank Centre’s new series of international piano recitals took place at St John’s. For this programme, by Denis Kozhukhin, the seating was back to normal, but the (medium) size and superb acoustics of the hall — London’s most beautiful! — made it seem ideal for this kind of concert. Unshowily but grippingly, he dispatched two Haydn sonatas and Bartok’s brilliantly condensed Out of Doors pieces, and ventured the high Romantic contrast of Liszt’s Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude. There was Brahms and encore Scarlatti, too — Kozhukhin ranged over the keyboard centuries like a duke displaying prized possessions.