Passacaglia - Goldschmidt
Cello Concerto - Kevin Volans
Silver Ladders - Joan Tower
The third in RTE's Explorer concerts, focusing on international trends in contemporary music" (my italics) opened with the 1925 Passacaglia by Berthold Goldschmidt (1903-96). Gold schmidt, who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and settled in England, broke a 25-year compositional silence in the early 1980s, and experienced a late flowering of his reputation, with advocates of the calibre of Simon Rattle to press his case.
The Passacaglia, completed while he was still studying with Schreker, is full of promise, combining a certain rough-cut quality with an immediacy of expressive clout, of which Colman Pearce and the NSO made the most in Tuesday's concert.
Kevin Volans's Cello Concerto, premiered 15 months ago in Munich, steers away from romantic bravura and treats the soloist as a nimble dancer, the orchestra intruding as an often obliterative presence. Joan Jeanrenaud played with vigour, but, as a fine balancing act the piece didn't quite come off. The orchestral lines seemed to move with too great a sense of flatness, with the compositional gestures not always sustaining interest over their full duration.
The American composer, Joan Tower, who was 60 last year, has yet to make much headway in Europe - in the Schwann CD catalogue from the US she merits over 20 listings, in the British Gramophone catalogue just one.
Her Silver Ladders (1986) won her the $150,000 Grawemeyer Award in 1990. The piece grapples with images of metal in its various states, and ladders, represented by rising scales.
