Next weekend the Cité de la Musique in Paris opens its doors to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and its past and present music directors, Simon Rattle and Sakari Oramo. The orchestra's sibling, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, is going along too, and the programme they are taking was aired on Sunday in Birmingham - works by Oliver Knussen, Thomas Adès, György Kurtág and Stravinsky, together with a novelty, the first performance of Kenneth Hesketh's The Circling Canopy of Night.
Hesketh (born in 1968) is one of the most promising of the rising generation of British composers. The new score was commissioned as part of Faber Music's Millennium Series, in which 12 of Faber's house composers were each asked to nominate someone younger and unpublished to write a chamber-scale piece. Hesketh was Knussen's choice, and it is easy to see why - his music is fluent, expertly put together and deftly scored. But The Circling Canopy of Light turned out to be something of a disappointment after Hesketh's earlier ensemble pieces. For all its carefully plotted structure, derived from the pre-Copernican model of the universe with the earth at its centre, the 25-minute argument is too diffuse, the individual movements insufficiently distinct and the thematic not varied enough for the work to hold attention over such a span. There are some attractive ideas and beautifully judged textures, but they need to be packaged more concisely than they are here.
Hesketh could learn a thing or too about economy and directness from a close study of a work like Kurtág's ...quasi una fantasia... Op 27, a kind of piano concerto (though without any suggestion of conventional rhetoric) full of arresting, unclassifiable images that do not waste a note, and from the imploding energy of Adès's Concerto Conciso. Adès wrote it for himself to play and conduct, but here the responsibilities were split between Rattle and Rolf Hind (also the soloist in the Kurtág), to the benefit of the slow movement, which seemed more poised and spacious than before, but to the definite detriment of the first movement, which lacked the skin-of-the-teeth excitement and dynamism that the composer's own virtuoso sleight of hand brings to it.
