‘This piece of theatre without a plot is designed as an assault on our senses,” violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja writes of Dies Irae, a complex multimedia piece of her own devising, part concert, part installation, that aims to combine a ferocious enactment of the day of judgment with fierce invective against war and the climate crisis as instruments of our own potential self-destruction. It was first heard at the Lucerne festival in 2017. Kopatchinskaja has performed it with multiple ensembles since, including the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, in Glasgow, during Cop26 in 2021. For the London premiere her collaborators were the Aurora Orchestra and Aurora Voices, whose intensity match Kopatchinskaja’s uncompromising vision and the almost dogged commitment of her playing.
It’s unsparing stuff. We walk into the venue to the unnerving sound of Giacinto Scelsi’s Okanagon with its rhythmic thuds and clanging gongs. We hear the tramp of marching feet as Kopatchinskaja leads on a small group of players for Heinrich Biber’s Battalia à 10, written in 1673, its movements interwoven with extracts from George Crumb’s Black Angels for amplified string quartet, composed in protest at the Vietnam war. The effect is unnerving as Biber’s strident dissonance, remarkable for the 17th century, collapse and morph into Crumb’s bitter musical aphorisms.
Gradually the troubled atmosphere edges towards chaos, as further players can be seen partying in the midst of catastrophe, air raid sirens sound and smoke billows across the platform. Kopatchinskaja’s own Die Wut (“Rage”), for violin and strings, howls in fury and fear. Lotti’s Crucifixus, sung by the Aurora Voices from the centre of the auditorium, sounds ravishing but offers little consolation, before the orchestra’s trombonists sound a deafening call to judgment from the side aisles.
Galina Ustvolskaya’s extraordinary Composition No 2 (Dies Irae), in which percussive hammer blows on wood (played by Kopatchinskaja herself) punctuate a despairing threnody for double basses and piano, then forms the evening’s effective climax, as accompaniment to an uncredited film, superimposing images of bombed out cities and a denuded landscape of dried mud. After that, the light gradually fades to repetitions of the plainchant Dies Irae, as multiple metronomes tick away to silence, an effect borrowed from Ligeti’s impudent Poème Symphonique, but oddly haunting in the context. It all adds up to a challenging, provocative evening that leaves you feeling vaguely shell-shocked.
