The statistics of Ian Pace's world premiere performance of The History of Photography in Sound, by Michael Finnissy, are mind-boggling. The piece is five and a half hours long, and its five books took Pace an entire day to perform at the Royal Academy. None of the 11 separate "chapters" is shorter than 15 minutes and the longest, at 75 minutes, lasts the same time as a Mahler symphony. Book four alone is a vast, two-hour structure.
The touchstone for enormous piano pieces, Kaikhosru Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum, clocks in on a recent recording at a whisker under four hours - a mere minnow in comparison with the scale of History. Finnissy's main rival for the crown of longest non-repetitive piano piece is La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano. Young's ongoing project now lasts roughhly six hours in performance.
The scale of History is monumental, both in length and the physical and technical difficulties the work poses for an interpreter. In accepting the herculean challenge, Pace - long one of Finnissy's closest collaborators - ensured his status as one of the most adventurous pianists of his generation. Yet the main feature of the music, and the performance, was the opposite of the heroic grandiosity you might expect from such a self-consciously huge piece. History expresses instability, ambiguity and crisis.
Writing a "history" in sound is, in a sense, an impossible task. Music is not capable of expressing the kinds of information needed for such a history, nor the reproductive accuracy of photographs or films. But from the titles and dramas of individual movements, Finnissy's purpose becomes clearer. North American Spirituals, a chapter from the second book, is a critique of the horrors of slavery. The music begins with the spiritual tunes themselves, which gradually become distorted by unpredictable, hysterical outbursts. This is a music of innocence corrupted and perfection disfigured. Here, as elsewhere, Finnissy uses photography as a metaphor for the violence of cultural appropriation.
Quotations from Beethoven, Bach, Berlioz and Wagner appear throughout as ciphers for spirituality, love, death and vanity. But Finnissy's range is much wider than the western tradition: Vendan African songs are prominent in book four, as are Moroccan and Berber folk songs; Indian ragas and 1940s pop songs appear in Book 2. Everywhere there is allusion and critique.
Finnissy explores the tyranny of power in Parents' Generation Thought War Meant Something, the devastation of colonialism in Unsere Afrikareise and the emptiness of capitalism in Kapitalistisch Realisme. Representation, he seems to be saying, is always political.
Paradoxically, this endless ambivalence produces a music that is full of dramatic contrast and virtuosic spectacle. The chapter Alkan-Paganini that opens the third book is even more jaw-droppingly pyrotechnical than anything by Alkan or Paganini.
Pace's strength and conviction were magnificent. Yet there were many passages where his performance seemed more like interior monologue than public event. Although Finnissy's music is one of all-encompassing complexity, it needs vibrant characterisation to come to life. But with the glitter of Etched Bright with Sunlight, the final part of History, Pace - and his devoted audience - had completed a remarkable journey of discovery.
