Australian composer Brett Dean is also a brilliant viola player. He was a member of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for 15 years, but recently returned to his homeland to pursue composition.
He played his solo viola work Intimate Decisions as part of the Philharmonia's Music of Today showcase of his music. The work evolved from a series of bare intervals into an unstoppable wave of energy. The climax was an impassioned outburst, but the end of the piece returned to the private unease of the opening: a haunting melody, played with whistle-like harmonics, which gradually ebbed into silence.
But the major work on the programme was Winter Songs, a setting of five poems by e e cummings. They reflect Dean's experience of dark Berlin winters after the heat and light of Brisbane. Scored for solo tenor and wind quintet, the music evoked the "filthy slush" and "ugliness" of cummings's poems with harsh instrumental effects, and a churn of interweaving lines.
Daniel Norman was a compelling advocate of these vivid songs. But the most impressive moment was the way Dean dramatised the "earth's dying" of the third poem. A chaotic, hard-edged climax subsided in the low rumblings of bass clarinet and horn, and a deathly sighing in the other parts. Martyn Brabbins and the Philharmonia players were alive to the drama of this powerfully expressive music.
The later, full-orchestral concert was dedicated to the conductor Yevgeny Svetlanov, who died on Friday. Svetlanov, who was due to conduct the programme, had a long association with the Philharmonia. Alexander Lazarev directed the orchestra in works by Balakirev, Liadov, and Scriabin. The exoticism of Balakirev's Islamey was paralleled in the fantasy and stillness of Liadov's The Enchanted Lake.
But even these showpieces could not compete with the abundance of Scriabin's The Poem of Ecstasy. One of the most sensuous works in the whole orchestral literature, the piece aims to induce a state of orgiastic transcendence in its listeners. And in a performance of Lazarev's commitment, it almost works, as layers of texture are piled on top of one another until the blazing intensity of the final chords.
Viktoria Mullova's steely performance of Sibelius's Violin Concerto completed the programme, a fitting musical tribute to one of Russia's most distinguished conductors.
