With other events to mark this year’s centenary of Iannis Xenakis’s birth still thin on the ground in the UK, Birmingham’s day of workshops, talks and concerts, presented on the exact anniversary under the auspices of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, was a worthy tribute. Eight of the Greek-French composer’s works were performed, interspersed with the premieres of specially commissioned pieces. The title of the day, Music & Maths, emphasised the theorising behind his compositions, but what emerged most powerfully – as always with Xenakis – is the sheer visceral intensity of his works, which sets him apart from the other great European figures of his generation.
Whether it is in the dense, curdled dissonances of the string writing in Ittidra from 1996, the wordless ullulations of the soprano soloist (the excellent Anna Dennis) in the 1977 Akanthos, or the tangled knots of wild counterpoint in Jalons, one of his greatest achievements, composed for Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1986, Xenakis always surprises. There’s something ancient, even primeval running through his music that contrasts so tellingly with the often convoluted techniques that generated it, and gives it a special charge.
