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Coming Home London
Royal Festival Hall
03/15/1999 -
Nicholas Maw Odyssey
Simon Rattle (conductor)
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Like Homer's, Nicholas Maw's Odyssey is on a massive scale. It
explores the many possibilities of identity and pleasure in depth, though
variations on a rich theme, before resolving to a simple, restful unison E
flat. Simon Rattle, who introduced tonight's performance with unpatronising
clarity, gave his television series on twentieth-century music the title
Leaving home because the century seems to move away from the tonal
and formal securities of classicism and romanticism. Maw, unusually for a
composer of the same generation as Birtwhistle, comes home not to the past
but to the musical conclusion of a complex debate between different forces
and temptations.
Maw worked on Odyssey from 1972 to 1985. The course of its movements
reflects both the development of his interest towards tonality in this
period and the musical ghosts which a twentieth-century composer cannot
ignore.
A tense but texturally diffuse introduction servers as a long down-beat,
followed by a first movement which states and develops a fourty-four bar
theme in distorted classical style. A contrastingly playful second
movement, with almost twee harp interludes, evokes the English musical
tradition "from the reign of both Elizabeths", as Rattle put it, though the
dominant spirit is inevitably Britten. The third movement reintroduces the
main theme, transformed, in an extended romantic ramble, in the spirit of
Bruckner, with many unison melodic passages. The fourth movement
reintegrates the different traditions in a dense but excited romp that ends
in an explosive epilogue and the quiet coda, where it all has been heading
in both time and tonality.
Each section of Odyssey is introduced by a "time chord", a
loose-textured chime with occasional ticking, based on the sound of a clock
that Maw grew up with. If you can spot it, this is a useful cue that a new
section is starting, but the appeal of the work certainly doesn't depend on
its formal structure, which in any case is too massive to take in on a
single hearing. Rather, the pleasure is in the way Maw builds up musical
interest by reinventing familiar musical ideas from different traditions so
that they work in dialogue at many levels towards a single point. The
extended third movement, in particular, contains many enjoyable sections
that flow from each other apparently going nowhere much but actually
building up an underlying sense of purpose and tension.
Simon Rattle commented that Odyssey is a difficult work for the
orchestra. It is the longest work in the standard repertoire, at about
ninety-five minutes, and it includes delightful but demanding solo work for
all the sections of the orchestra. The City of Birmingham Symphony
Orchestra was more than up to it. The orchestra clearly still has a rapport
with Rattle, and maintained a great sense of energy and style throughout.
This concert is part of "Edge of a dream", the 1980s segment of the South
Bank's Towards the millenium music festival. It is interesting to
find a British composer encapsulating the century in such a comprehensive
and personal way.
H.E. Elsom
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