The latest of the London Symphony Orchestra’s annual new music concerts, which was conducted by François-Xavier Roth, included two world premieres, one from a composer still in the very early stages of his career, the other from one of the most familiar and significant figures in British contemporary music.
Like many of the pieces that find their way into LSO Futures concerts, Jonathan Woolgar’s Symphonic Message: “Wach Auf” had emerged through the orchestra’s Panufnik Composers Scheme, which mentors up-and-coming talents. It packs an awful lot of incident into barely six minutes of music, beginning with the glorious G major chord that the chorus sings on the word “Auf” at the beginning of the song contest in the final act of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. That grandeur is immediately undermined by a referee’s whistle, and the music sets off in half a dozen different directions at once: there’s a boozy trombone solo, an irascible clarinet, even the beginnings of a Shostakovich-like gallop. It all peters out soon enough, but the eclectic energy is unmistakable.
