Of all the conductors who appear regularly in Britain, none flies the flag for experimental music of all kinds more vigorously than Ilan Volkov. Last year Volkov presided over the Proms centenary tribute to John Cage; this time he had devised a late-night programme with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra that brought together works from both sides of the Atlantic, including a couple of premieres.
The world premiere was Frederic Rzewski's Piano Concerto, with the composer himself as soloist, 39 years after his Les Moutons de Panurge created a stir at a late-night prom in the Roundhouse. That piece was scored for any number of performers playing any instrument as loudly as possible; the four-movement piano concerto is much better behaved. In fact it sometimes seems too genteel, toying with the whole genre rather than giving it a flamboyant working over as Rzewski's hugely virtuoso solo-piano works might have promised. But Gerald Barry's No Other People, being played for the first time in Britain, predictably proved unpredictable, taking its title from a poem by the proto-surrealist Raymond Roussel, combining nervously excitable string lines and rampaging brass in raw, muscular counterpoint and threatening to morph into a suite of folk-song arrangements halfway through.
The beautifully planned programme began with a rare chance to hear music by John White and ended with a late work by Morton Feldman. White's Chord-Breaking Machine from 1971 is a weirdly disorientating musical automaton, a mesh of different pulses, rhythms and common chords that gradually loses its definition, yet never threatens to outstay its welcome, while Feldman's Coptic Light increasingly seems like one of the 20th century's enduring masterpieces. This was its first outing at a Prom, and even more extraordinarily only the third piece by Feldman to be included there; the intense care that Volkov took with voicing its iridescent soundworld, and articulating its broken chords exactly made the performance quite magical.
Available on BBC iPlayer until 26 August
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