Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music is about mass and density, how different planes of sounds collide and combine, and how intricately detailed textures evolve over time. Those qualities make the orchestra the obvious medium for her work, and it has largely been through her sequence of strikingly effective orchestral scores that the Iceland-born composer has become recognised as one of the most distinctive voices in European music today.
Only eight weeks ago the CBSO introduced Thorvaldsdottir’s magnificent Catamorphosis to the UK, and the BBC Philharmonic’s Prom under Eva Ollikainen began with the world premiere of another immensely impressive study in sonority, ARCHORA, co-commissioned by the BBC with five other orchestras. Once again it’s a single, sustained 20-minute span of music that’s in constant flux. Launched over baleful pedal notes from the heavy brass and propelled by pounding percussion, the textures sometimes thin to a single sustained string pitch, distant descending glissandos or toneless, breathy woodwind attacks.
The immediacy of the music was certainly more graspable than anything in Thorvaldsdottir’s programme note, which talked about the “halo” of primordial energy and the idea of “an omnipresent parallel realm” providing its inspiration. Easier to detect in the background of ARCHORA is the influence of Sibelius – one brief passage of wintry string swirls could have come straight from Tapiola – and Ollikainen went on to end her concert with Sibelius’s Second Symphony, in a performance of bold gestures and striking colours, played with great vivacity by the BBC Philharmonic.
Elgar’s Cello Concerto had provided the filling in this musical sandwich, yet curiously seemed to be pitched on too small a scale to hold its own between two such boldly characterised and very different works. The soloist was Kian Soltani, highly accomplished, certainly, but all too well behaved and genteel, playing almost as if it would have been impolite to release the deep well of emotion that underpins the whole concerto and that, in the finest performances, gives it an overwhelming power.
• Shown on BBC Four on 14 August, and available on BBC Sounds until 10 October. The BBC Proms continue until 10 September.
