MUSIC
Of our own time
JOHN BRIDCUT
Now that the International Society for Contemporary Music's London festival is over, concertgoers have generally returned to more familiar fare, but this may be the time to say a word about one of our continuing buttresses of twentieth-century music : to wit, the London Sinfonietta, founded just over three and a half years ago with the express aim of performing works written this century, especially those by British composers.
Almost as if it were the English Chamber Orchestra of modern music, the Sinfonietta draws its members from all over the London music scene : it numbers under thirty at full strength, but contracts and expands according to the demands of the music. The orchestra and its small chorus, now touring Europe under Pierre Boulez, gave two pre-tour concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, one of them with Luciano Berio (who conducted the Sinfonietta In Siena last year) directing a programme of his own music, the other with Boulez conducting works by himself, Stockhausen and Schoenberg.
In both cases, the orchestra demonstrated its adaptability to unusual chamber groupings and played excitingly with superb co-ordination — most notably in the first British performance of the orchestral version of Boulez's Domaines, originally written for solo clarinet, but now with an ensemble of twenty-one instruments added. This ensemble splits into six groups positioned around the platform with the conductor in the centre, and the soloist (Alan Hacker in this case) moving from group to group playing music from a sheet, but in an order of his own choice. Each group then echoes what he has chosen. In the second half of the piece, the ensemble (in effect the conductor) chooses the order while the clarinet plays the "echoes." Not only can the order of the music vary at each performance, but so can the positioning of the groups, so the permutations are almost endless. Indeed, the mathematics of the piece are so fascinating that they tend to obscure its musical values.
Schubert's " Unfinished " Symphony was completed in a new way by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Charles Groves at the Festival Hall last week — a version, compiled by Gerald Abraham. making use of Schubert's own material in the last two movements. The scherzo has been orchestrated from his original piano outline of most of the movement. and Dr Abraham has incorporated the first, and recently-unearthed second, pages of the composer's own orchestration. The result I found worthy but dull.
For the finale, Dr Abraham has stolen the Entr'acte in B minor from the Rosamunde ballet music (not the first to have done so), apparently because it is in the same key as the symphony, because it is larger in scale and mood than the two acts which surround it and because the orchestra needed to perform it is the same size as that for the rest of the symphony. These flimsy justifications incline me to the view that Schubert left his Eighth unfinished deliberately, as they ignore the fact that the Entr'acte is, as its name signifies, merely a link: it does not contain the onward drive and sense of direction needed for the final and conclusive turn to a symphony of this calibre.
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