Programme building is an art rather than an exact science, and concocting programmes that incorporate contemporary music a more esoteric gift still. Combinations of repertory works and new scores that look right on paper sometimes misfire completely in the concert hall. Somebody, somewhere decided that Kevin Volans's new Concerto for Double Orchestra, a BBC commission, would comfortably open a BBC Symphony Orchestra concert that continued with Beethoven's First Piano Concerto and Sibelius's First Symphony. But the audience for such staples were unlikely to respond sympathetically to Volans's remarkable score. For most people at the Barbican, the premiere was just an experience to be endured, before the main business of the evening began.
Volans has said that he set out to write a piece that was empty of content, an analogue to minimalist art (the concerto's starting point was an exhibition by the sculptor Rebecca Horn). Essentially the 20-minute work is built from a single four-note chord, chosen for its neutrality and derived from the open strings of a violin. The 90-piece orchestra is divided into two almost identical ensembles, placed either side of the conductor. The frugal material, constantly varied in its colour, voicing and articulation, and just occasionally given a chromatic twist, is passed between them.
It is music of extreme refinement and detail, and it unfolds at a rapid tempo, even though that speed only becomes obvious occasionally, when repeated pulsings erupt through the texture. There are some remarkable passages: luminous chords surrounded by fluttering attacks, sonorous progressions unfolded over held horn notes, repetitions tossed from one side to the other. The overall form seems intuitive, though the return of the opening gestures just before the end does hint at a kind of closure.
If there are any models for the concerto, they would be found in the music Morton Feldman and LaMonte Young produced in the early 1960s, though Volans's raw material is more fundamental than theirs ever was. What his piece does share with those composers is the need to be performed as precisely as possible. This premiere, conducted by Joseph Swensen, ironed out the dynamics so that triple fortes and triple pianissimos sounded scarcely different, fudged some phrasing details, and hardly separated the two halves of the orchestra, so that the crucial sense of chords being passed from one side to the other barely registered. It deserved far better.
