Music

English Chamber Orchestra, Barbican, London

If names are the consequences of things - as Gavin Bryars, courtesy of Dante, so luminously states in his cantata Incipit Vita Nova - then what can we make of minimalism? As a term for an art that makes its effects of fullness from the sense that fullness itself is an illusion, it's a useful hold-all for process music by Reich, Cage and Feldman. Yet it's a trick all art must play for coherence within the limits of personal style. Like neo-classicism, another name that was once a manifesto and can now apply to anything from Strauss to Saint-Saens, the word's suffered death by dilution - often, out of context, a polite way of saying there's not much there at all.

A commentary of this kind was probably not uppermost in the minds of the English Chamber Orchestra at their Barbican concert last Friday. With Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and Ravel's Mother Goose suite placed after the interval, their apparent theme was childhood. Yet minimalism was also on the agenda. After all, Ravel's "Laideronelle, Imperatrice des Pagodes" and "Le Jardin feerique", beautifully conducted by James Judd, are little miracles of sublime economy. But in the first half, there was the Dumbarton Oaks concerto (less well played) by that most daring spokesman for the M word, Stravinsky, plus a new Cello Concerto by Bryars himself, who, in early works like The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus's Blood Never Failed Me Yet, made templates of minimalism in its purest form.

Though there was still a trace of their rigid disciplines in the way a unitary design of unbroken music was doggedly pursued, the dominant impression of the new work was richness; closer, indeed, to the hypnotic patterns of more recent ensemble scores like Four Elements.

Commissioned by Philips Classics Productions for that champion of British cello music, Julian Lloyd Webber, it seemed well fitted out to match the particular strengths of his playing, his warm legato in particular. If repeated chords plus flowing lines of darkly romantic yearning implied a minimalism channelled to new ends, then virtuosity, too, was redefined, with a complete absence of the circus. Above telling changes of harmony, the soloist unwound a thread of melody that time and again returned to a basic shape: a phrase that began somewhere in the darkest part of the cello's register and slowly rose to soar above the textures. And what textures they were. Bryars, a bass player, writes skilfully for the strings, and knows how to colour their sound with discrete shades of woodwind tone. Colour, indeed, defined the work's extremes: brooding and shadowy at either end, but in the middle, a frenzy of cello arpeggios amid dancing solo violins like a blaze of sunshine. There were also mysteries. For personal reasons the concerto was subtitled "Farewell to Philosophy", an idea given musical substance through allusions to Haydn symphonies. He's another composer with a skill for making much out of little, multum in paivo, like Bryars. Haydn the minimalist? We seem to be back where we started.
NICHOLAS WILLIAMS