James MacMillan, the multi-faceted Scottish composer and conductor, is the latest "Beethoven of today" to participate in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's season. Although a considerable force on the contemporary scene, he is not exactly well known around here, so his Explorer Series venture with the BSO provides a welcome introduction.
MacMillan's intriguing calling card includes two of his own works on the first half of the program - each containing a bundle of folk tunes, classical hit parade allusions, spiky harmonies and dry wit - and Beethoven's Symphony No. 2 on the second. It's a volatile juxtaposition. (By season's end, all nine of Beethoven's symphonies will have been performed, several of them conducted by major contemporary composers.)
On Thursday night at the Music Center at Strathmore, the edgy, unpredictable qualities in MacMillan's music helped to reiterate just how edgy and unpredictable Beethoven could be, even in such an early symphony as this one. Every sudden dynamic shift in the latter recalled to mind all the surprises in the former.
And surprising is the word for MacMillan's Stomp (with Fate and Elvira) from 2006 and the Piano Concerto No. 2, which dates a couple of years earlier. He's not the only composer these days to make a practice of incorporating or deconstructing older material, but he runs with the pastiche principle in a way that is all his own, allowing familiar, accessible thematic material to coexist with unmistakably "modern" devices.
To create Stomp, the composer put the brassy "fate" theme from Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, the dreamy slow movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 (popularly known as the "Elvira Madigan" concerto) and some Celtic dance riffs into a blender and hit "grind." The result is a curious and engaging fusion that seems to move in several different directions, and for several different purposes, all at once.
The cleverness and humor of Stomp crop up as well in the Piano Concerto No. 2, which draws much of its fuel from Scottish folk tunes, but the overall atmosphere is darker, even vaguely sinister. The strange appearance in the second movement of a snippet from the Mad Scene of Donizetti's Walter Scott-inspired opera Lucia di Lammermoor adds an off-kilter jolt, from which the concerto never really recovers. That ghostly bit of tune, at one point tarted up in schmaltzy-waltzy fashion, haunts the last movement as well, and, in effect, drives the piano toward a crazed end. The concluding measures are quite literally hammered and punched out by the soloist in an unbridled barrage of massive, dissonant clusters, a leave-taking of all musical senses. It's very cool.
