It would be hard to conceive of a concert of more vivid musical extremes than the one led by Thomas Adès with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the Snape Maltings Concert Hall. At its centre was a collision between one of the loudest and fastest works in the orchestral repertoire, Gerald Barry's Chevaux-de-Frise, and one of the softest and slowest, Morton Feldman's Coptic Light.
Barry's 20-minute piece is a study in musical violence. Chevaux-de-Frise were wooden spikes used by defending armies to impale charging cavalry. In the intimacy of the Maltings acoustic, the work was a similarly pulverising experience. The music progressed as a series of blocks, each more rhythmically obsessive than the last. Hammered chords gave way to charging quavers and dance-like music. The astringent dissonance of the harmony and the clarity of Barry's orchestration combined to produce a unique soundworld.
Adès and the CBSO gave a performance of astonishing power and accuracy. They transfigured the music's violence into expressive immediacy. The sheer weight of sound increased over the whole piece, and the final section - an unrecognisable transformation of a fragile 16th-century song - was almost unbearably intense. But the effect was not simply one of extraordinary levels of volume or speed. The physical presence of the music was a metaphor for a heightened emotional experience: a sense of overwhelming tragedy, as if the music were careering towards some terrifying conclusion.
Feldman's Coptic Light offered another kind of obsessiveness, with its almost pulseless music and sustained quiet. The CBSO produced textures of ravishing beauty, but Adès's performance found more than meditative calm in the piece. Fragments of melody and rhythm emerged out of a glittering veil of sound, and the piece ended with a delicate chiming of harps and percussion against string and woodwind chords.
The concert closed with Brahms's Song of Destiny. In the company of Barry and Feldman, Brahms's setting of Höderlin's visionary poem was no less extreme. Adès's performance with the CBSO, Tallis Chamber Choir and Britten-Pears Chamber Choir captured the serenity of Brahms's depiction of the spirit world. The contrast between this music and the desperate cries of humanity in the stormy, minor-key section was powerfully affecting. It was as if the piece contained both the violence of Chevaux-de-Frise and the radiance of Coptic Light.
There were other connections within the programme. The first two pieces were Barry's iconoclastic God Save the Queen for children's choir and ensemble, and Adès's own work for baritone and orchestra entitled Brahms, a brilliantly sophisticated setting of a poem by Alfred Brendel. In creating and revealing musical links across different repertoires, this concert was a virtuosic piece of programming. But it was also a compelling performance.
