Ether music
Aug. 5th, 2022 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiWhen I saw the listings, Prom 25 was one of the stand-out concerts: the theremin is a fascinating instrument. I suspected the concert would not be all that popular, and there wasn't very much of an early morning queue. This meant that I was comfortably on the rail, although the soloist's music stand was in-between me and the theremin. That didn't actually matter much, because there was hardly anything to the theremin. "All one has to do is not hit anything at the right time and the instrument plays itself", as J S Bach nearly said.
Caroline Eyck was the soloist and the BBC Philharmonic was conducted by John Storgårds. Kalevi Aho's Eight Seasons concerto was interesting and played various aural tricks on the listener. Early on, when the theremin made its first appearance, I would have said it sounded like a cello rather than a distinct instrument itself; yet later, when the theremin was quiet, there were theremin-like sounds coming from a combination of woodwinds. At some points Eyck added vocals to further confuse anyone not privileged to see as well as hear. The programme notes showed that Eyck commissioned the concerto from Aho, and the two had collaborative sessions, each learning from the other: the result was a piece that showed the variety of sounds that a performer can produce from the instrument, sometimes the archetypal electronic glissandi but at others carefully precise notes. I liked the way vibrato was achieved by a hand movement essentially identical to that used by string players. Eyck gave a brief explanation of the instrument after the concerto and followed with a short encore piece of her own.
The second half of the concert was almost inevitably going to be downhill. Kaija Saariaho's Vista was a mixed bag, with some good sections but not really keeping my attention overall. The final piece was Shostakovich's Symphony No. 15, certainly a quirky work, with its quotations from William Tell, Götterdämmerung and others. I don't know if it was due to the length of the Saariaho, but I felt the Shostakovich lacked energy and the slow movements seemed particularly drawn out. It made for quite a late finish, but at least in the days of hybrid working I didn't have to be up on a fixed schedule early the following morning.
Caroline Eyck was the soloist and the BBC Philharmonic was conducted by John Storgårds. Kalevi Aho's Eight Seasons concerto was interesting and played various aural tricks on the listener. Early on, when the theremin made its first appearance, I would have said it sounded like a cello rather than a distinct instrument itself; yet later, when the theremin was quiet, there were theremin-like sounds coming from a combination of woodwinds. At some points Eyck added vocals to further confuse anyone not privileged to see as well as hear. The programme notes showed that Eyck commissioned the concerto from Aho, and the two had collaborative sessions, each learning from the other: the result was a piece that showed the variety of sounds that a performer can produce from the instrument, sometimes the archetypal electronic glissandi but at others carefully precise notes. I liked the way vibrato was achieved by a hand movement essentially identical to that used by string players. Eyck gave a brief explanation of the instrument after the concerto and followed with a short encore piece of her own.
The second half of the concert was almost inevitably going to be downhill. Kaija Saariaho's Vista was a mixed bag, with some good sections but not really keeping my attention overall. The final piece was Shostakovich's Symphony No. 15, certainly a quirky work, with its quotations from William Tell, Götterdämmerung and others. I don't know if it was due to the length of the Saariaho, but I felt the Shostakovich lacked energy and the slow movements seemed particularly drawn out. It made for quite a late finish, but at least in the days of hybrid working I didn't have to be up on a fixed schedule early the following morning.