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  • Philharmonia/Hazlewood

    PHILHARMONIA/HAZLEWOOD
    Andrew Clements

    guardian.co.uk,
    Tuesday 15 June 2010 22.00 BST

    Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

    Alan Hovhaness is one of the most enigmatic of 20th-century American
    music mavericks. He was prolific - over 400 works, including 67
    symphonies - but until Richard Thompson included Hovhaness's music in
    his Meltdown programme, he had never been performed at the Southbank
    Centre.

    Hovhaness, who died in 2000, was of Armenian descent, and after the
    second world war his music began to take on ideas from the Middle East
    and east Asia, as two of the pieces played by the Philharmonia under
    Charles Hazlewood demonstrated. The Fantasy On Japanese Wood Prints,
    from 1965, effectively a single-movement concerto for xylophone
    (though the soloist, Colin Currie, played a marimba), has moments of
    japonaiserie - a piccolo imitating a shakuhachi, pentatonic ideas
    and microtones - but its rhetoric and frieze-like construction are
    profoundly western.

    The feeling that Hovhaness's exoticism was skin-deep was confirmed
    by The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a work from 1975 apparently being
    performed for the first time in 20 years. Gobbets of the poems, recited
    by Omid Djalili, are interleaved with orchestral interludes in which
    an accordion features prominently; there's no sense of development
    or form, and the music is decorative in a cheesy, movie-score way.

    The most convincing work dated from 1946, before Hovhaness is
    reckoned to have found his true voice - The Prayer of St Gregory,
    which embroiders a solo trumpet on a cushion of strings in a style
    somewhere between Barber's Adagio and the Tallis Fantasia. Brief and
    haunting, it at least connected with the works by Vaughan Williams
    also included in the programme.

    Richard Thompson's Meltdown continues until Monday. Full coverage:




    From: A. Papazian
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