Keen to think outside the box, the London Philharmonic Orchestra is presenting a month-long festival exploring the ways humans experience and express themselves though music. On paper, Dance Reimagined was a bright idea: three works with movement at their heart, including a world premiere from LPO composer-in-residence Tania León and Wayne McGregor’s reinvention of a Szymanowski ballet in collaboration with sculptural designer, film-maker and AI developer Ben Cullen Williams.
Raíces, Spanish for “origins”, is an exploration of León’s heritage which, she explains, is Spanish, Cuban, Chinese and French: “Like a jambalaya.” Opening with wheezy ethereal strings, the music moved in and out of vistas, some urban, one a steamy forest bristling with birdsong. Although there were clear echoes of Latin and jazz, the music was shifty, its syncopations frequently catching the ear off balance. Occasionally pretty but never saccharine, it hinted at mysterious, sun-dappled vistas, holding the attention throughout. Edward Gardner’s definitive beat led a scrupulously prepared performance.
Ravel’s La Valse was similarly shadowy, Gardner conjuring macabre images of reanimated cadavers hoisting up their decaying flesh for one last turn around the ballroom. The LPO breathed a convincing air of Gallic “ooh la la” from start to surprisingly polite finish.
Szymanowski’s Harnasie – a seriously underrated masterpiece – tells of a girl whose mutual infatuation with a highland robber leads to her abduction at a riotous wedding. McGregor has made a new interpretation with a trio of dancers (Rebecca Bassett-Graham, Jordan James Bridge and Jasiah Marshall) whose statuesque gestures have been motion-captured, broken down, fed through AI and partially grafted on to drone imagery of snow-capped Polish vistas.
This heady brew was projected on to a suspended oblong sculpture, one side of which was an opaque screen. But although the bodies were beautifully caught and the busy landscapes cascaded like waterfalls, the glacial movement rarely gelled with Szymanowski’s coruscating, folk-inflected score. Worse, as the object rotated, the scattered imagery became fatally indistinct.
Gardner, the LPO and the excellent Flemish Radio Choir delivered a superb reading, full of colour and incident, but the movement, for all its technical wizardry, felt like a wasted opportunity.
