The writer Franz Kafka found sounds from the outside world, whether urban or rural, intolerable, and wore earplugs to insulate himself as far as possible from their intrusions. When the first world war began, his major concern was that his supply of earplugs from Berlin might be disrupted by the upheaval. Gerald Barry’s new orchestral piece, Kafka’s Earplugs – a BBC commission whose world premiere opened the BBC Philharmonic’s concert with its chief conductor, John Storgårds – took us inside Kafka’s head. “You are Kafka,” the composer says, “hearing the world’s sounds as he heard them through his earplugs.”
That sound world is consistently quiet, from the grinding brass and string chords with which the piece opens, to the insistent pulsing into which it eventually settles, before a sudden, almost arbitrary close. Barry also makes the point that Kafka “laughed a lot”, but there are few traces of that humour in this 10-minute piece, which holds the world and its distractions very much at muted arm’s length. Whether the result in performance was what he was after only the composer can say, but, in the hall at least, the music certainly sounded distinctly louder than the pianissimo that is the only dynamic marking in the score.
