The 20th century didn't exactly have the best track record in historical terms. War and devastation, the waste of lives prematurely lost, persecution, dispossession and exile form the grim catalogue of events. So it's not surprising that the musical response to such experiences have produced some of the most searing works ever written. Andrew Davis's outstanding BBC concert pulled together three pieces which all confront the horror and attempt to counterbalance it by asserting the fundamental human right to individual dignity.
Mark-Anthony Turnage's Silent Cities was inspired by a visit to war graves on the Somme, but instead of conjuring up a landscape of countless sepulchres, he gives back to the dead an accusatory voice. A jazz theme represents the life which political intransigence denied to millions. Dismembered into a myriad fragments, it rises from Turnage's deep nocturne as a terrifying, babbling ululation of rage. It is deeply disquieting stuff. The performance, rightly, subordinated virtuoso playing (of which there was plenty) to emotional ferocity.
The Concerto for Orchestra was the first major score Bartok produced after the Nazi invasion of Hungary forced him into exile in the United States. Many conductors treat it as an ebullient expression of newly found freedom, though Davis is more cautious. He imbues the work with a sense of pained nostalgia. The Hungarian folk melodies flicker in and out of focus like memories of a despoiled Eden. Only in the finale does sorrow finally find release in joy.
The trigger for Berg's Violin Concerto was more acutely personal. Dedicated to "the memory of an angel", it is essentially a requiem for Manon Gropius, the teenage daughter of Berg's friend Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler, though it's also Berg's final statement of his own commitment to the 12-tone compositional system of Schoenberg - a system already under threat from the Nazis, who condemned it as "degenerate".
The soloist was the fabulous Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos, infinitely expressive and wonderfully pure-toned, a consoling figure who gradually manages to assuage the orchestra's seemingly inconsolable grief. The final section - in which Berg quotes a Bach chorale while the violinist gently seems to usher Manon's soul into a realm of infinite peace - had many of the audience (me included) in tears, as it should.
