The viola player Lawrence Power is a resident artist at the Southbank Centre this season. As well as playing concertos and chamber music, he’s exploring less conventional performances, and the first of those, Lawrence Power’s Lock-in, was a mix of video, live performances and spontaneous poetry readings, in which Power included music that he had commissioned during the Covid lockdowns.
Some of those miniatures were screened in the performances that Power had streamed in 2020. Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Objets Trouvés runs through a collection of string tropes before alighting on a fresh, original idea; Garth Knox’s Quartet for One imagines a deconstructed string quartet and has the viola play the four instrumental parts in succession, while Thomas Adès’ tiny Berceuse for viola and piano is extracted from his opera The Exterminating Angel. Two more substantial new pieces were performed live. Fazil Say’s Sonata for solo viola is a two-movement memorial to the Turkish viola player Roşen Güneş, its first movement a set of variations on a insistent keening theme, while Héloise Werner’s Mixed Phrases takes lines from a poem by Rimbaud, which a soprano (Werner herself) atomises into syllables and isolated phonemes as the viola urges her on, creating a witty to-and-fro.
Werner also joined Power for one of Machaut’s Virelais – Douce dame jolie, pour Dieu, part of an assortment of early music that surrounded the novelties. With continuo from the lute player Sergio Bucheli, Power launched into Buxtehude and Matteis to begin his programme and pieces by Marin Marais to end it; the commitment and virtuosity of his playing on both viola and violin one quickly took for granted, but they still dazzled.
Power was back on the Southbank the following evening as the soloist with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia for the first UK performance of Magnus Lindberg’s Viola Concerto, which was sandwiched between Lotta Wennäkoski’s feisty concert-opener Flounce and Sibelius’s First Symphony. The work for viola is Lindberg’s Fifth Concerto for a string instrument (after two each for violin and cello) and in its steadily shifting, single-movement form, lasting just over half an hour, it seems to deepen and considerably enrich the language of his recent scores. The traditional three-movement form of a concerto lies behind it, with the main sections signalled by brass fanfares, though that fast-slow-fast scheme is punctuated by a skittering interlude and two cadenzas, in the second of which Power sings along to his own strummed accompaniment. The solo writing is fiercely challenging, its orchestral counterpart sometimes deliciously intense; it’s an instantly attractive, strikingly communicative work.
