In his programme note for his new sitar concerto, The Gate of the Moon, the great Calcutta-born sitar player Nishat Khan tells a story about a stranger falling in love with a beautiful princess. The stranger is represented by the sitar in the unfamiliar milieu of a symphony orchestra. The lovers' cultural differences are overcome by their musical exchanges in "notes that are metaphorical beings, speaking a universal language".
As a general rule, one should stop reading when musicians talk about the "universal language" of music overcoming cultural differences: music generally forms rather than transgresses cultures. One might stop listening too. Khan's piece, given its world premiere by the composer together with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, was sufficiently dull that I learned from a colleague in the interval how many lights hang from the stage canopy. There were moments of hackneyed charm, and a solo improvisation in the final movement gave a glimpse of the sitar's unique sound world. But elsewhere the instrument sounded hopelessly reined in, the orchestra in its turn reduced to semi-paralysis through unimaginatively scored undulations and block repetitions.
A happier cultural exchange came from Gustav Holst's early symphonic poem Indra. Holst eschewed any kind of simple transcultural borrowing, and simply investigated a legend of the god in his own idiom with music of great colour and compassion. Though not uniformly successful, the piece deserves more frequent outings.
As does Vaughan Williams' London Symphony, the techniques of which are influenced by Debussy, but have a more modern sense of isolation, even alienation. David Atherton led a beautifully turned performance of the piece, full of precisely shaded colour and with a quite extraordinary control of the work's complex emotional trajectory, which takes in both the city's noisy charm as well as the composer's rising horror at the hidden "wilderness of slums" and the destruction of local cultures by the rise of the marketing and banking industries. A mobile phone rang, and was answered, in the quiet passage following the Big Ben chimes. It was the concert's second grating cultural collision, but at least this one was to the point.
* Available to listen again on iPlayer until Monday.
