At first sight, placing music by Xenakis and Rachmaninov in the same concert is a brazen error, like putting a lion and a porcupine together and expecting them to have children. But David Robertson, conductor of this strange yet exhilarating BBC Symphony Orchestra Prom, is no fool. For Xenakis the aggressive modernist and Rachmaninov the late romantic had hidden links. Both assaulted our emotions; both wrote pieces soaked in death.
The Xenakis death piece was Aïs, 18 savagely eloquent minutes of Homer and Sappho quotations, flung across the Albert Hall’s dome by an ululating baritone (Leigh Melrose, brave), a furious solo percussionist (Colin Currie, indefatigable) and an irruptive orchestra fond of sulphurous brass laments. Ideally, Melrose’s baritone needed extra weight to reveal the full power of Xenakis’s work, one of his most personal; even so, we travelled some of the distance toward Hades, the composer’s goal.
Rachmaninov, meanwhile, put us in a boat rocking toward B?cklin’s painting The Isle of the Dead. This symphonic poem brooded decently enough, though shaggy entries suggested fatigue among Robertson’s troops. It was understandable: they had just emerged from another Xenakis battering, Nomos gamma, and it must have been hard to adjust. Rachmaninov expected his orchestra to blend; Xenakis wanted his 98 musicians scattered like peanuts, assailing the audience on all sides.
Given the Albert Hall’s layout, this wasn’t possible. But at least the musicians infiltrated the Arena, bunched in groups with Robertson, centred, conducting players spread over 360 degrees. Extreme textures — barraging drums, high, scuttling strings, juddering brass — fought duels left and right. Resistance was useless as Xenakis’s imagination surged ahead, fiery and intense. Throughout, the players’ mettle blazed, especially the percussionists.
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The orchestra showed its strengths again in the final piece of the concert’s jigsaw, Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony. Robertson’s interpretation shared the composer’s caution, toying with moods flighty and desolate but never pushing them to extremes. Nothing half-hearted, though, about the playing: bright and polished, with piercing woodwinds. An impossible concert on paper, but it worked.