Contemporary music in ADDA

 

As a prelude to their forthcoming season of orchestral concerts, the ADDA orchestra of Alicante under their inspired and clearly inspiring conductor and artistic director, Josep Vicent, offered a programme of contemporary music free of charge to its subscribers. Perhaps this might have been a chance for the players to loosen their fingers, lips and hands before embarking on their new season. If that were the case, one wonders how many other orchestras in this world would rise to such a curtain raiser if it involved learning a full programme of complex pieces unfamiliar to them, some of which they might never play again!

And so we were presented with four works, three of which were composed recently, and a fourth that was premiered in the 1950s. Here we had four composers, all of whom presented their own, very personal and mutually contrasting musical languages. Just like the label “classical music” is useless as an indicator of style, given that it apparently spans close on a thousand years of art from Leonin to Lim, one must also insist that “contemporary music” is about as much use, being nil. There are clearly almost as many styles of contemporary music as there are composers of it. And the idea was illustrated beautifully in this programme, which seemed to take its audience on a journey from a strange place back to their musical and physical home. The term “brilliantly conceived” certainly applies to the choice of programme.

We began with Metastasis by Yannis Xenakis. In theory, this is a representation of the mathematics of architecture as music. It is a piece where dynamic, texture and line are conceived to illustrate an emotional response to the parabolas of Le Corbusier’s Phillips Pavilion, a building that has no straight lines, no right angles and thus an inner space that surely disorientated. Al least until you got used to it… which is a useful phrase for anyone who might feel “frightened” or “dismissive” of contemporary music.   

Xenakis used sketches of the building’s form to create a musical score, drawings whose shape determined the notes to be played. Like the building, the musical representation might take some a while to appreciate, its glissandi and sustained space-creating string murmurings punctuated by flashes of percussion and eyerolls of woodwind. But familiarity with the piece, at least for this listener, mimics what I feel looking up towards the ceiling of any great building. How far does it go? Is what I see mere illusion, or is it stone, concrete or glass? Xenakis, by the way, was the civil engineer on Le Corbusier’s project. In the 1950s. he was the bloke with the slide rule.

Second on the bill was Mosaicos de Arena Errante by José Javier Peña Aguayo, a graduate of both the Julliard in New York and Valencia University. In form, this world premiere was the evening’s ground breaker. It was an orchestral piece featuring, concerto-like, a brass quintet, a Puerto Rican bomba group and a dancer. The brass quintet was Spanish Brass, no less, the bomba group comprised Marina Molina, Daniela Torres, Ambar Rosado and the dancer-choreographer was Isadora López Pagán. I mention these names in recognition of the massive contribution they all made in the realisation of this piece and, indeed, making it a convincing musical and theatrical experience.

I will ignore the programme notes and try to describe what I took from the piece. For me it was a narrative which told of the realisation of identity. Oppressed by history, slavery and colonialism, the people who formed the central idea of the piece fund themselves disorientated in a new place. They could not make sense of their role, their lack of status or their surroundings. Memories of their African origin regularly surfaced, but these were broken by the oppression of circumstance and strangeness of surroundings. This was depicted by broken lines, irregular harmony and techniques such as the brass players blowing through the instruments rather than making notes. The dancer, meanwhile, presented angular contortions that mirrored distortions of sound and, presumably, pain of suffering.

Gradually, however, memories of past grew stronger, perhaps more relevant, and identity is rediscovered. The rhythms of an African past begin to dominate. The rhythms take over and impose their needs on the sound, prompting the dancer to become both more expressive and more animated, but also celebratory. The culmination was a glorious, complex, but utterly accessible rejoicing in rhythm. A people had found themselves again.

David Moliner’s Figuratio I - Mein logos came next. This was a percussion concerto performed by its composer. The soloist also contributed vocally to emphasise particular aspects of the music. Essentially, this came across as a fast, slow, fast structure, where the percussion was virtuoso in style throughout. There were some wonderful moments in the quieter sections when thin mallets made sounds of distant bells, thus creating landscape. The orchestral percussion players were heavily involved as well, at one point to the extent that string players holding a tremolo could not be heard above three percussion players combined. But this is a minor criticism of a work that banged with vitality.

The evening’s second world premiere was the symphonic poem, Alí y Cántara by Oscar Navarro. At times, stylistically, this music could have been written in the late nineteenth century, at least in its harmonies. But there were Middle Eastern shapes here too, just the right side of cliché to avoid evoking images from Hollywood’s technicolour Panavision era of spectaculars.

The piece followed a narrative provided by the story of Ali and Cántara, ancient lovers who, according to the legend, combined to name the city of Alicante. The piece’s sections described episodes of the story impressionistically, but also vividly. And what developed was something remarkably familiar to the audience and yet expressed in a new language. Festivals in this part of the world often involve the re-enactment of legendary battles and rulers. Moors and Christians are what they are called and the musical language of Alí y Cántara increasingly evoked the sounds of street festivals, but in a more subtly nuanced form provided by the orchestral textures. But by the end, the musical statement was noticeably located in the wind instruments and percussion, and, for a while, this orchestra sounded like a symphonic band. It was musically the most conventional work of the evening, and also provided the most direct, accessible narrative. And it worked beautifully.

Rapturous applause prompted Josep Vicent to offer two encores. John Williams’s Theme from Schindler’s List was followed by a local favourite, Danzon No2 by Arturo Marquez. Out of six composers represented, five are still alive, Xenakis have died in 1997. His music, as with everything else in this wonderful evening, is very much alive.