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American minimalism can punch and thrill, hypnotize and slow your pulse, but how often does it make you laugh? What a great idea, then, from Kazuki Yamada and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to accompany John Adams’s epic Harmonium of 1980 – a fight against love and death and desire – with the music of the smartest, slippery, most guilty composer in the business, an artist who will break your heart with the cheekiest of grins: Francis Poulenc.
It is the same that Poulenc cannot call himself a symphony. Any pretense of respectability is apparent when passing through the understatement of his 1948 “Sinfonietta,” a series of shadow dances, altarpieces and music that thumb their noses at anything so important as civilization.
Lucid and urbane, Yamada’s Poulenc was perfect – a sleek musical suit, a whimsy Hermès pocket-square in silky woodwinds and harpsichords, always trimmed with clean lines. When a song has a lot of punchlines you should play it straight; above all, because there was a frenzy of coda to come as Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos.
Dutch couple The Jussen brothers (who have been playing this since they were teenagers) are about to start the Proms in matching outfits and throw themselves into this brutal musical event – as modern in purpose as Mozart’s piano concerto – with undeniable energy. Two heads shook vigorously on either side of the stage, fingers flying as one: great fun.
The Harmonium performance at home in Birmingham a few weeks ago had no good choir, but with the CBSO Chorus now bolstered by the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs we had the bleak canvas that Adams wanted for a quasi-choral concerto – a voice treated as a bright spot within. Bad Love; like an explosion, to bring out the inside Wild Night. Intermediate movement Because I could not stand Death it was the only place to stick, to weaken where it should hold us tight. But asking for electricity here is like asking for more speed on the 22-kilometer course of a marathon – a contradiction in terms.
