Subtitled Music for Eight Horns and Orchestra, Helmut Lachenmann’s My Melodies is an immensely taxing work for performers and audience alike, that batters with dogged persistence at the limits of form and technique. It’s also a thing of paradoxes. Despite the title, there’s not a melody in earshot. And though it seemingly inhabits modernist extremes, it also engages with vast post-Romantic orchestral forces, reminiscent of Strauss’s Alpensinfonie or Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder: in addition to eight horns, there were multiple brass and woodwind, eight percussionists, two pianos, two harps, two electric guitars for this the London Symphony Orchestra concert under Ilan Volkov.
Lachenmann’s composition (written for the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2018, and subsequently revised and expanded in 2023) is also not quite the concertante work you might expect. The horns, seated in horseshoe formation round Volkov’s podium, are not so much engaged in dialogue with the rest of the orchestra, but embedded within, albeit dominating, the restless textures, which embrace everything from conventionally played notes to un-pitched sounds. There are fragmentary chorales and brief toccatas, at times horrendously difficult for the players. Valves and mouthpieces are removed from the horns and blown independently, making sounds like pan-pipes, or gasps as if struggling for air. Silences gradually seem to fill with eerie mutterings, taps and whispers, though elsewhere violence and cacophony erupt with sudden, sometimes brutal force. You couldn’t fault the performance, with its precision, virtuosity, and attention to detail across the board. It’s never for a second less than impressive, but ultimately, it’s also extremely hard to like.
Its companion piece was Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, in a lean, lithe interpretation, done with great dexterity. Rhythms were taut and precise, speeds frequently sensible without losing tension or energy. The symphony doesn’t need to be the breakneck scramble we sometimes hear in order to be exhilarating, though the allegretto was pressed gently but firmly forwards, and the scherzo fleet and buoyant. There was some gracious, dexterous playing, too – really lovely oboe solos in the slow introduction, vibrant brass, poised strings. An excellent performance, in short.
