★★★☆☆
In its 175th anniversary season the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic is boldly focusing not on the past but the future, with a raft of commissions. Not all will be masterpieces. I don’t think Christian Lindberg’s Robot Gardens is. It meanders, and its harmonies and melodic contours are too derivative.
Yet it is expertly crafted and sounds fun to play. Both those things count for a lot. The craft is not surprising. Before he forged new careers as a composer and conductor the Swede was best known as a virtuoso trombonist. His inside knowledge of what wind instruments are capable of doing — and how to combine those techniques in exciting flurries of sound — is clear throughout the 22 minutes of Robot Gardens, which is scored for a large contingent of wind, brass and percussion.
The work’s inspiration is intriguing too. Lindberg recalls a childhood spent in an idyllic country garden and compares that with his present existence in urban Stockholm, where architects create ingenious gardens amid concrete. So he gives each movement a title mixing rustic and technological — such as Hologram Hyacinths, or Electrical Pine Trees.
The music is best in quick movements, where Lindberg’s strong sense of background and foreground pits prestissimo woodwind cascades against pugnacious brass motifs. However, towards the end a series of routine solos spread round the ensemble suggests that Lindberg wrote the piece with an eye to providing a saleable showpiece for the American college-band market.
He is unlikely to hear it better played than under his direction here. Was it wise, though, to preface it with Bernstein’s superbly brooding score for Marlon Brando et al in Elia Kazan’s great 1950s macho-fest On the Waterfront? Or to follow it with Nielsen’s equally gripping Fifth Symphony, with its terrorist snare drummer and epic sense of struggle? Lindberg conducted both with admirable verve, but the unintended result was to show up his own music’s limitations.