BBCSO/Stasevska: Become Ocean review – elemental, unsettling and beautiful

Barbican, LondonA brilliantly thought-through sequence of music by Thorvaldsdottir, Ligeti and John Luther Adams made for a powerful and immersive experience‘The razor’s edge between beauty and terror”: that’s where the composer and environmental activist John Luther Adams envisages a position for his music. Perhaps in a different concert it would have been perfectly possible to listen to his colossal orchestral work Become Ocean and find it merely beautiful. Here, as the culmination of a brilliantly thought-through sequence played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Dalia Stasevska, its unsettling aspects struck home powerfully, too.All three works here were the kind that require the language of physics to describe them. This was music of ineluctable forces moving against each other, whether heavy or delicate: shifting tectonic plates and drifting clouds of gas. Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s ARCHORA, premiered at the BBC Proms in 2022, took us immediately into this listening world, the music first scattering high-frequency sounds against an elemental low note, then creating elusively shifting textures around a single, veering pitch. It’s a hugely effective work, simultaneously teeming and glacial. Continue reading...

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