Harrison Birtwistle's Antiphonies is one of the most challenging of recent works for piano and orchestra - for musicians and listeners. Never content to accept musical forms at face value, Birtwistle's approach to the interplay between soloist and orchestra results in a complete rethinking of the one-versus-all relationship of conventional concertos.
Playing the piece for the first time, Nicolas Hodges coped dazzlingly with the subtleties of the piano part, which is a virtually continuous barrage of percussive gestures and rhythmic complexity. With Martyn Brabbins conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the performance was a visceral, elemental game of contrasts between Hodges's convincing precision and the orchestra's stratified textures of strident brass writing and string harmonics. In the intimate confines of the Scottish Academy's Matt Thomson Hall, Hodges's intensity and Brabbins's conviction produced a physically as well as mentally draining experience.
But even with this emphatic advocacy, there remained something obstinately secretive about the structural machinations of Antiphonies. The consistent alternation and superimposition of different kinds of music pointed to an inner drama that Birtwistle conceals from view - as if piano and orchestra were participants in an ancient, monumentalised ritual.
More immediate, if no less technically daunting, was Birtwistle's The Cry of Anubis for tuba and orchestra, in a superbly committed account from Brabbins and soloist Chris McShane. Anubis is a character from Birtwistle's opera The Second Mrs Kong, and is associated with the tuba throughout that piece. In The Cry of Anubis, the format of solo and accompaniment once again goes under Birtwistle's microscope. The tuba needs the orchestra in order to complete and develop its short fragments of melody, but the soloist gradually becomes abrasively dismissive of the ensemble. A final battle between the orchestra's timpanist and McShane's tuba resulted in an eerie, uneasy truce.
Birtwistle's Bach Measures, his arrangements of eight of Bach's Chorale Preludes, are like miniature plays for ensemble. Birtwistle uses the musicians like actors, assigning them different roles in each piece. In terms of musical language, these Bach arrangements seem to be a million miles away from Antiphonies, but in Brabbins and the BBCSSO's fastidious performances, they shared the same sense of inherent, instrumental drama.
