The third and last concert in the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s latest Barbican residency carried the banner Indies and Idols. It continued their association with the Guildhall school too, with 19 student string players joining the ensemble for the first half of the concert, which was directed as always by Richard Tognetti.
The indie composers of the title were evidently Bryce Dessner and Jonny Greenwood, their idols, Lutosławski and Penderecki; works by Wojciech Kilar and Szymanowski continued the Polish theme of the programme. If the didactic intention was to trace lines of influence between generations, it failed dismally. Whatever Dessner and Greenwood might say about their admiration for their Polish models, represented in the programme by the prologue from Lutosławski’s Musique Funèbre and Penderecki’s String Quartet No 1 (in Tognetti’s string-orchestra arrangement), their own pieces hardly betrayed it. Dessner’s Réponse Lutosławski is a meandering series of featureless short movements, with titles that proved more interesting than the music itself. Greenwood’s score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, meanwhile, loses much of its potency when transplanted from screen to concert hall.
