25 JANUARY 2003, Page 59

Charmed by students

Robin Holloway

Workshops', piously fetishised in recent decades, have never been my idea of fun. Too often there's a sense of implicit condescension; and even when in the hands of someone with a real idea of what can be achieved, something a tiny bit risible remains — 'Now, children, be creative! — Play with your balls.'

• So I set out last Saturday morning into the soggy weather with a feeling of morosity — to be surprised, instructed, charmed by a day of half-hour slots devoted to trying out student compositions; hearing each composer's attempt to say in words what s/he had essayed in notes, receiving feedback from players, conductor, attentively listening peers, teachers, others interested; then, time permitting, a second complete run or as much of the piece as was possible before moving onto the next.

A simple formula, working well even in the absence of spectacular talent that declares at once, 'Look at me, ladies and gentlemen, and doff your hats!' If only such a facility had been available at Cambridge for the juvenile steps of Judith Weir, George Benjamin, Thomas Ades and other undergraduates who've since become celebrated in a wider musical world! Yet a somewhat more humdrum level of accomplishment, or the lack as yet of a discernible individual voice (the two are by no means always in equipoise) showed that this isn't what matters most. It would be an extra — 'sudden glory', gilt on the gingerbread. The essential is that any young composer hear their notes being taken seriously and executed with skill and sensitivity. What can be learnt inside half an hour in this fashion is worth a thousand formal lessons and can influence the practice of a lifetime.

Skill, sensitivity and seriousness are all in a day's work for the ten players plucked from the Britten Sinfonia — a string quintet, one each of woodwinds and horn. The sheer reward of a beautifully played phrase, and adroit passage of dialogue, a well-weighted chord, sufficed in itself. It could, indeed, be more rewarding than the actual music, yet still be instructive. When they were matched the result was a smile of recognition. Often a laugh too — the seriousness accompanied the professional application, but the players' good humour kept breaking in even when their technical criticisms were stringent or bellicose.

The morning session displayed the wider stylistic range. Its five pieces began and ended with dance studies; the last, complete in itself, evincing a slick attractiveness worthy of Bernstein; the first, less seductive but more adventurous, opened out into a slow section, not yet completed, very promising in its finished dense harmony. Between came three efforts with nothing whatever in common: a spare evocation of a desert world teeming with miniature spiders; a crepuscular six minutes, compellingly intense of ultra-Ferneyhough complexity; a recklessly exuberant mini tone poem, emn Heldenleben in a nutshell for ten not 110 players, charting the course of this 20-yearold's life from cradle to grave, with a brief but grandiose climax on 'Middle Age'? Si jeunesse savait . . .

The afternoon session, open to a wider public including a handful of small schoolchildren with every appearance of eager avidity, centred upon a particular project: to comment, movement by movement, upon a Haydn symphony. Each composer will then have the opportunity to extend their preliminary thoughts, expanded to full classical orchestra, and have them

programmed alongside the original in a couple of public concerts. The Haydn — no.53, a characteristically frisky affair, always ingenious and energetic, sometimes witty, sometimes affetuoso — sets a hard challenge: whether to try to tweak the recognisable surfaces of its idiom a la Prokofiev, or to dig deeper into process and proportion even if the more abstract result can't be related to the source except by theory and hearsay.

The first risks truckling to its audience; the second, alienating them. In the three attempts we heard (the finale-ists hadn't made it in time — perhaps embarrassed by the fact that Haydn's original has a choice of two finales, though one is clearly better than the other as well as more suited to its context) both approaches were used. I lost the plot in a curiously doleful take upon the sheer hilarity of Haydn's first movement wherein after a stately slow introduction a horn-tune of primeval gorrnlessness is subjected to deadpan inventive elaboration. More convincing were a rapt closeknit fantasy upon the slow movement with no audible resemblance to its actual material, and a bubbly response to the minuet and trio, where in all the material, still recognisable, was superimposed in stratified layers of opposing speeds with all the nonchalant exhilaration of a Paris rush hour.

In a venture like this everything depends upon the tone set by the animateur. James MacMillan conducted with aplomb, then turned round to lead the discussions, draw out the sometimes shy composers, referee the players' comments and elicit those of the listeners, and sum up with kindly and usable advice, drawn from the example before us, or from wider prior experience. All this with mildness, quiet humour, welltempered courtesy and tact. If all workshops were so graciously compered and so patently beneficial to their recipients, I'd go to them as willingly as to a concert.