Composer Michael Nyman has produced pieces to order for films, fashion shows, computer games and the opening of a high-speed rail link. But what does this famed collaborator sound like when he is simply making music for himself?
Surprisingly for such an accessible composer, he doesn't often get the chance. His tenure as artist in residence at this year's Harrogate festival came with a full orchestral commission for the BBC Philharmonic, but this turned out to be part of a long-frustrated plan to create an opera based on Laurence Sterne's novel, Tristram Shandy - which Nyman has been trying to do for the past 20 years. So far, snippets such as The Abbess of Andouillets and I'll Stake My Cremona To a Jew's Trump have provided sneak previews of Nyman's great Shandean opus. The present piece, A Dance He Little Thinks Of, gets him 15 minutes further forward.
One immediately wonders why a piece inspired by an 18th-century novel sounds like a helicopter taking off. Tristram Shandy is often heralded as an anticipation of modernism, so perhaps Nyman has irony in mind. But as the piece accumulates its unremitting momentum, there's the nagging suspicion of a fundamental mismatch between Sterne's erratic, digressive prose and Nyman's logical, linear methods. It's an impressively symmetrical, three-movement piece, whose disturbing, dissonant slow movement is the highlight. But any sense of Shandean anarchy is continually arrested by the repetitive percussion figure that the composer wraps around the edifice like scaffolding.
Stripped of its Shandean associations, the piece works well on its own terms. It's astonishingly dense, the two outer movements taken by conductor Vassily Sinaisky at an incredible lick. The strings were engaged in a furious contest to see who could saw through their instrument first; the percussion battered out brilliantly disciplined machine-gun triplets for bars on end. Tonal finesse may not have been top of the BBC Philharmonic's list of priorities on this occasion, but you have to admire the strength of their wrists.
