Bonkering Beethoven: Barry and Beethoven with the Britten Sinfonia
Barry and Beethoven
Nicholas Hodges, Thomas Adès and Britten Sinfonia
Barbican Hall
Stalls R75, £15
22 May 2018
Barbican page
Programme
Beethoven, Symphony no. 4
Barry, Piano Concerto
Beethoven, Symphony no. 5
There is a kind of symbiosis between Adès and the Britten Sinfonia that I think is quite unique. The Sinfonia gets to work with someone considered arguably the most important musician alive today. And he gets to conduct a band of strong musicians without having to commit more of his time than he wants, without the pressure such a partnership with the LSO, for example, might draw. They trust him because they believe him to be brilliant; he gets to conduct, to programme, to have free rein. The result has a refreshing air of experimentation about it, infused with a liberty to try things that are worth trying, even if they don’t always work out.
Of course, it’s not too experimental to combine Beethoven with Barry – I expect the piano concerto was written with these neighbours in mind, or at least as near as damnit. The experimentation here is in the approach to the Beethoven, Adès employing highly dramatic gestures of light and dark, soft and loud, with deep rallentandos that distort sometimes grotesquely the fabric of the music. I feel he has looked at the scores and found all the points where a conductor could usefully intervene and then taken them all to their logical conclusion, backed in every step by the highly alert and responsive Britten Sinfonia. In some places the effect is profoundly exciting; in others mannered in the extreme. Moments that thrill tread fast on moments that nauseate. It’s an interesting experiment and a worthwhile one, even if by the end I was yearning for some good old-fashioned voice-lead-y Karajan.
The Barry was austerely straight by comparison, even it’s packed full of his usual tricks. My mood wasn’t up for the arc-less anti-progression Barry employs and so I found my mind drifting in the second half, although I’d grinned my way through the first half’s angry mega motifs and endless scales and arpeggios and how the piano was sternly forbidden from playing with the orchestra. All good fun and rather silly. Nicholas Hodges, however, was in attack mode, just as brilliant as at the Stockhausen a few weeks ago, motored by a concise inner energy that was a continual marvel to behold.
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