The Times
January
12, 2005
THERES
no better antidote to a surfeit of musical figgy pudding than a week on
the Park Lane Group diet: high-fibre new music, served up by the freshest
of young professional talent. It deserves and demands from its audience
both discriminating taste-buds and rigorous digestion and this year it
tones the muscle splendidly for all that James MacMillan and Michael Tippett
tocome.
Tippett,
perhaps inevitably, is one of this years PLG featured composers an eminence
grise to complement the raw cutting edges of the 27-year-old Osaka-born
Dai Fujikura. A mere three minutes of the latter was on offer on
the first night: a tiny piece called Midnight all Day played, with
its tearing trills and insect-like reverberations, by the Elysian String
Quartet. Their early evening concert, featuring an impressive London premiere
of Phillip Neil Martins An Outburst of Time, revealed the versatility
and enterprise of an ensemble who enjoy the company of electronics, and
who have touted Shostakovich round the bars of Soho.
As
for Tippett, he is to be honoured in performances of all four of his still
too rarely performed Piano Sonatas. And this is where the first star
of the week rose to full luminescence: 18-year-old Alissa Firsova played
the First Piano Sonata with all the youthful exuberance with which it was
written, as well as with a sense of panache and self-possession beyond
her years. The slow movement based on the Scots folksong, Ca
the Yowes , held the audience spellbound, though at times the enchanter
sounded dangerously like Rachmaninov rather than Tippett.
Firsovas
is already a formidable talent.
After giving a muscular and intellectually lucid performance of the Piano
Sonata No 4, String of Destiny 2000 by her father Dmitri Smirnov,
Firsova played an attractive work of her own. The single-movement
The Endless Corridor, written last year, is a skilfully structured
and hedonistically physical piece, travelling from limpid counterpoint,
through a Smirnov-like intoxication with the pianos extreme registers,
to a climax of unashamedly rhapsodic virtuosity.
Firsova
shared her recital withthe
23-year-old bassoonist Adam Mackenzie and his acccompanist, the young Greek
pianist Lefki Karpodina. Together they tackled John Caskens Blue Medusa,
with quick-change patternings of rhythmic energy; and Anthony Paynes beautifully
and cunningly worked, yet seemingly improvisatory The Enchantress Plays.
Mackenzie as soloist was teased and tested by Philippe Hersants irresistible
Niggun, a fantasy-transcription of pre-linguistic baby-talk.
ConcertPLG
Young Artists