Hilary Finch
The Times
April 22nd 2010
FIVE STARS
When Paul Daniel announced from the podium: “We believe this guy needs a festival at least once a year!” he was cheered to the rafters of a full Festival Hall at the end of the Southbank’s triumphant complete Varèse weekend.
The grand finale was Amériques, Varèse’s 25-minute sensurround evocation of New York, the city to which he moved in 1922. With its vast orchestration, its savage and sensuous intercutting of image and idea, the work makes recent American musical dreams sound positively old-fashioned. The National Youth Orchestra is an old hand at the work, having given unforgettable Proms performances. But this was something quite new: the first time that Varèse’s original conception of the work had been heard in this country.
The original is vaster than ever: it looked as though there were two full orchestras on stage. There were certainly more than five of every solo instrument, at least 19 percussionists, and offstage brass into the bargain. There’s also a breathtaking passing cloud of Impressionism quietly gleaming near the centre: a fleeting remembrance of things and places past for this Parisian in exile.
Under the clarity and command of Daniel’s direction, nearly 200 members of the NYO played with exuberant virtuosity. And the performance — indeed, the entire evening — was accompanied by rising plumes of dry ice, now scarlet, now blue, now violet, with Pippa Nissen’s gentle green video of rising filaments of biological gases bubbling up. Cathie Boyd also directed the video and lighting for Varèse’s Nocturnal, a dark and enigmatic sound-fantasy, both primordial and timeless, in which the bestial chanting of the basses of Laudibus met and menaced the anguished insomniac soprano of Elizabeth Watts.
And, before that, a performance of Arcana. Varèse, as ever decades ahead of his time, propels the listener into the cosmos, encountering explosions, sunbursts, black holes. Intellectual and visceral, fierce and fragile, the work was recreated with brilliant precision and almost superhuman energy.
