‘This piece of theatre without a plot is designed as an assault on our senses,” violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja writes of Dies Irae, a complex multimedia piece of her own devising, part concert, part installation, that aims to combine a ferocious enactment of the day of judgment with fierce invective against war and the climate crisis as instruments of our own potential self-destruction. It was first heard at the Lucerne festival in 2017. Kopatchinskaja has performed it with multiple ensembles since, including the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, in Glasgow, during Cop26 in 2021. For the London premiere her collaborators were the Aurora Orchestra and Aurora Voices, whose intensity match Kopatchinskaja’s uncompromising vision and the almost dogged commitment of her playing.
It’s unsparing stuff. We walk into the venue to the unnerving sound of Giacinto Scelsi’s Okanagon with its rhythmic thuds and clanging gongs. We hear the tramp of marching feet as Kopatchinskaja leads on a small group of players for Heinrich Biber’s Battalia à 10, written in 1673, its movements interwoven with extracts from George Crumb’s Black Angels for amplified string quartet, composed in protest at the Vietnam war. The effect is unnerving as Biber’s strident dissonance, remarkable for the 17th century, collapse and morph into Crumb’s bitter musical aphorisms.
