Tom Service 

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Classical BBC Symphony OrchestraBarbican, LondonRating: **
  
  


Even Marin Alsop's superbly committed performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra could not disguise the problems with Philip Glass's Second Symphony. The piece is exhausting for both players and listeners, and exhausted in its use of musical material. The finale, for example, is based on repeated fragments of extremely loud, very fast music, and culminates in an enormous, emphatic coda.

Glass, however, made his reputation through his development of repetition in music. One of the founding fathers of minimalism, his works from the late 1960s and 1970s subtly manipulate listeners' perceptions. Endlessly repeated loops of music induce a state of hypnosis or heightened awareness in which tiny changes of pattern have profound effects.

In the 1994 Second Symphony, though, there is little of this open-ended richness. Instead of allowing an audience to create its own interpretations, the piece insists on telling us how we should feel. The trouble is that Glass attempts to fit his loops and repetitions into the rhetoric of symphonic structure. The first movement is designed as a ruminative essay in minor-key melancholy, with echoes of classical forms, while the finale is a riotously energetic conclusion. Glass has expanded his palette to include harmonic progressions, but the material does not support the expressive weight that his symphonic architecture demands. And the result is doubly deadening: the symphony does not justify its epic length, and also fails to fulfil the implications of its ideas.

The Third Symphony, written in 1995, benefits from its reduced scale. Scored for 19 strings, the work's four movements have all the lightness and variety that the Second Symphony lacks.

At the opposite end of the sonic spectrum was the European premiere of Glass's Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra. There was no doubting the conviction of soloists Jonathan Haas and John Chimes, but they were fighting a losing battle from the start. Glass's solution to the unique problems posed by this unusual combination was to have the timpanists accompanied by a full orchestral texture throughout nearly the entire work. This meant that neither the soloists nor the orchestra could communicate with clarity. Still, it was difficult to miss the opening theme's striking resemblance to the title music from Mission: Impossible - which is an appropriate enough description of the timpanists' job in this bizarre piece.

 

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