Not Only Opera

Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum and Gruppen
Simon Rattle, Matthias Pintscher, Duncan Ward and London Symphony Orchestra
Tate Modern
30 June 2018
LSO page

I’m struggling, but I think I have to admit myself that I hyped this event big time. Great pieces – great musicians – amazing place – done! But I could have thought a bit further. I’ve been to Tate Modern before, I know what the turbine hall is like. I know on Sunday afternoons it sounds like the contents of 300 primary schools tipped out into a bathroom. I could have thought about what kind of implications that would have for three symphony orchestras in the same space. But I didn’t. And so my hype let me down.

If I’d not been expecting so much, I would have appreciated more what was so fantastic about this concert. These are pretty self-evident but I’ll enumerate them anyway. Both pieces are extremely impressive, in very different ways: the Messiaen totemic, solemnly spiritual, monotheistic, tormentuously loud; the Stockhausen febrilely pluralistic, fizzing with curiosity and imagination, producing sounds that seem to wriggle under your skin and consume you from the inside. The LSO was already a bunch of superb musicians that under Rattle are flourishing even more. Both pieces are a challenge to stage and it is an honour to be in the presence of these musicians performing this music. And there aren’t exactly many places you can perform Gruppen. Where are you going to go, if not the turbine hall?

Nevertheless, the extraordinariness of the opportunity makes the obvious defects of the turbine hall the more difficult to bear. This is not a volume-controllable environment. In this echoey space the orchestras had not only to compete with themselves but with the day-to-day running of a museum: with air conditioning, with muttering masses, with excited children. Even if they had sealed off the turbine hall for this performance (which to be honest I think they should have done) then it still leaves a lot to be desired; this is a big washy space and the idea of being able to hear more in Gruppen than the players immediately next to me and a vague mush of other sound was impossible. This piece is so wonderful, and every performance is to be celebrated, but at the moment I still don’t feel I have ever heard it live.

So it’s sorted then: we need a new three-stage concert hall toute suite, and then the LSO can perform Gruppen properly. Maybe this was the master plan?