Glanert premiere

Royal Albert Hall, London

Andrew Clements
Thursday July 28, 2005
The Guardian

Illness prevented Oliver Knussen from conducting his prom with the BBC Symphony Orchestra; John Storgards replaced him. But Knussen's influence remained obvious throughout the programme, not just in the inclusion of his own Whitman Settings (sung with steepling poise and clarity by Claire Booth), but in the Russian works that framed the concert (a sequence of Lyadov's exquisite miniature tone poems - Baba-Yaga, The Enchanted Lake and Kikimora - and Stravinsky's Tchaikovsky-derived ballet The Fairy's Kiss), and in the world premiere from a former pupil of the British composer-conductor.

Detlev Glanert's Theatrum Bestiarum, commissioned by the BBC for the Proms, comes with plenty of extra-musical baggage. Subtitled Songs and Dances for Large Orchestra, this continuous, 25-minute piece shares some basic material with Glanert's opera-in-progress, based on Albert Camus's play Caligula. Yet it's not a study for the stage work, the composer says, preferring to describe it as a kind of anatomical dissection of "man as beast . . . a glimpse into the inner soul of a monster as human beings can become".

That suggests something wilder and more vivid than the piece - which is dedicated to the memory of Shostakovich - turns out to be. Musically, it's a series of reflections and projections of the basic material heard slithering out of the depths of the orchestra in the opening minutes; at one moment it turns into a lilting waltz, at the next the sound is overwhelmed by baying brass, or cut short by the Gothic interjections of the Albert Hall organ. The mood of the piece is uneasy, closer to that of Ravel's La Valse than anything else.

The 45-year-old Glanert, who studied with Hans Werner Henze as well as with Knussen, handles the huge forces with real confidence and imagination, but never comes up with a clinching moment. In the end, all that sound, and quite a bit of fury, add up to nothing special.