Trilogy of the Last Day
Royal Albert Hall/ Radio 3
Rating: ****
The music of Louis Andriessen, 60 this year, is assertive and challenging in the best sense of the word, but until Thursday it had never been heard at the Proms. The British premiere of his Trilogy of the Last Day made amends, occupying the second half of a boldly contrasted programme that began with 16th-century polyphony of Antoine Brumel's stark Missa "Et ecce terra motus", the Earthquake Mass, sung by the BBC Singers conducted by Bo Holten, with the support of the wind instruments of His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts.
The Trilogy of the Last Day was first performed complete two years ago, though like a number of Andriessen's major scores it had been assembled piecemeal, with the individual movements being premiered separately as they were finished. As the title suggests it is concerned with death, not so much meditating upon mortality as confronting its horrors and grotesqueries head on.
The first panel, The Last Day, combines a text by a modern Dutch poet sombrely unfolded by a quartet of male voices, with a macabre Dutch folk song that is heard first sung by a boy soprano, and then carried through the orchestra, boiling and rumbling around it. The movements that follow grow progressively shorter.
The second, Tao, offers an oriental perspective: the texts are in ancient Chinese and modern Japanese, and the textures are dominated first by a solo piano, then by the Japanese sho ; the finale, "dancing on the bones" is brassy and almost gruesomely extrovert - a danse macabre that hardly pauses for breath, except to be interrupted by a children's choir with another breezy folk tune, before the abrupt, almost provisional ending.
When it was performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in 1997, the Trilogy seemed a problematic work, unfocused and hard to place in Andriessen's output. This account, with the London Sinfonietta Voices, the New London Children's Choir and the London Sinfonietta conducted by Oliver Knussen, made it come alive, even if the musical language, in the second movement especially but in the chording of the outer ones too, still seems uncomfortably close to Messiaen.
Typically for Andriessen, wind instruments dominate the scoring, though synthesisers and guitars add their edge to the soundworld as well; there are passages of huge muscular power - brass riffs that break across the voices, pulsating bass lines that drive the music forward - and moments of transcendent, ethereal stillness, when the enormity of the subject matter seems to overwhelm everything and even Andriessen's instinctive exuberance is put on hold.
