Tectonics: BBC SSO 1, Glasgow review: 'food for thought'

Tectonics: BBC SSO, City Halls, Glasgow ★★★★

This year’s Tectonics Festival, running over Saturday and Sunday, took as its key theme “the profound act of listening”. You could argue that goes without saying for any music festival, but when it comes to Tectonics, and the explorative cutting-edge repertoire favoured by curator Ilan Volkov, the challenge can be as provocative as it is revealing.

Ilan Volkov PIC: Alan Peebles

Saturday’s evening performances by the BBC SSO certainly gave us food for thought, not least in Norwegian composer Øyvind Torvund’s Symphony. Ignore the connotations of the title, as in music you passively sit and digest from a performance on stage. In this 40-minute work the “stage” was everywhere: woodwind in the main foyer, strings in the adjoining bar, brass inside the auditorium, soloists (saxophone, synth/guitar and percussion) located in sundry other spots, all interacting via television screens to Volkov’s baton.

We, as receptors, mapped our own way through the piece, free to promenade and thus individually determine the relative hierarchy of the textures. Hanging around the strings was to pleasurably ingest their permeating radiance, a cohesive Vaughan Williams-like density. Amble towards the wind and their cackling, dissonant belligerence grew increasingly antagonistic. Within the relative vastness of the auditorium, the brass generated waves of climactic clichés mostly in the combined spirit of Bruckner and Mahler. The magic lay in being able to create our own relationship with the score.

The SSO’s later performance spot was no less thought-provoking. The amorphous, sotto voce world of Clara Iannotta’s “strange bird - no longer navigating by a star” was sublimely meditational. The world premiere of Timothy McCormack’s “a vapour (no body, no image)”, a “seance” mourning the early victims of AIDS, probed unnerving territory but struggled to make its point. The subterranean growls of vocalist Ty Bouque seemed so arbitrary as to be inconsequential.

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