Gavin Bryars premiere

Barbican

GAVIN BRYARS' cello concerto was commissioned by Philips Classics for Julian Lloyd Webber. While it is wholly commendable that a major recording company should be commissioning major new work, I was left with an uneasy feeling that Friday night's premiere formed only an appendage to a series of recording sessions that had taken place earlier in the week. The concerto is both elusive and allusive, and demands repeated hearings. It has a contemplative intimacy that in some respects requires solitude and a sound system, rather than the vast space of a concert hall with its coughing and fidgeting.

Bryars teases his audience with a programme note claiming the piece derives its title, Farewell To Philosophy, from the nicknames of two Haydn symphonies alluded to in the orchestration. In fact, few works soundless like Haydn. Bryars produces a long, post-Romantic, one-movement noctume, redolent of Mahler and Strauss. A glockenspiel tinkles a quote from the Farewell section of Das Lied Von Der Erde. At one point, the soloist is drawn into a chamber ensemble which alternates with a clanging bell a semitone adrift from the work's key structure, an allusion to Strauss's Zarathustra and its inspiration in Nietzsche's philosophy. Lloyd Webber plays with great fervour and remarkable variety of expression, given there is little to demand virtuosity. James Judd drew playing of great sensuality and beauty from the ECO.
Tim Ashley