“Father of the atomic bomb” is a boast enough to get a person noticed or, as J Robert Oppenheimer himself put it, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, “destroyer of worlds”. The American physicist, though scarcely forgotten, had to wait for Hollywood and Christopher Nolan’s 2023 blockbuster to gain modern celebrity. If cinema was slow to catch on, musicians have long been on the case of the lonely scientist and his 1945 test in the New Mexico desert: from songs by Sting and Billy Bragg in the 1980s to John Adams in his opera Doctor Atomic (2005), a work that finally abandons music and ends with a bone-shaking, heart-chilling electronic boom.
A more recent Oppenheimer piece is Radiance, by the Lithuanian composer Justé Janulyté (b 1982). For 12 voices and live electronics, it made a disturbing impact at the 68th International festival of Contemporary Music or Biennale Musica, which comes under the umbrella of the Venice Biennale. Janulyté explores that perennial question: how wild, unfettered sound – here, the delayed aftermath of an atomic detonation – can topple into the patterns, the notes and rhythms, of music. Intended as a requiem for victims of the first atomic bombing, Radiance uses two groups of high and low voices, wordless, moving in and out of focus, splitting and uniting in apocalyptic aural fusion.
The performers were the virtuosic French vocal ensemble Sequenza 9.3, directed by Catherine Simonpietri, in a programme featuring music by two other Baltic composers, the Estonian, Arvo Pärt (his early, and pivotal, Missa Syllabica) and Saline, a first, and striking, choral work by the Latvian Santa Ratniece. The concert took place in the lofty, arcaded Teatro alle Tese, part of the restored Arsenale and especially appropriate here. The ancient Venetian arms factory, which merits a mention in Dante’s Inferno, is associated with another troubled and isolated physicist, Galileo Galilei. One of his tasks there was to advise on the explosive force of gunpowder.
In the decorative elegance of the Ca’Giustinian – administrative home of the Biennale – the New York-based Attacca Quartet gave the world premiere of another work prompted by the nuclear threat, this time from a more pensive stance. Daisy, by the American composer David Lang (b 1957) takes as a starting point the American political “peace” advertisement used in Lyndon Baines Johnson’s electoral campaign of 1964: a young girl plucks petals off a daisy before being interrupted by a mushroom cloud. In the event LBJ’s presidency was overshadowed by war in Vietnam. Lang, a co-founder of the New York group Bang on a Can, writes idiomatically and fluently for strings, sharing lines generously between players, the style lyrical, clearly structured and transparent.
Daisy was paired with Black Angels (Thirteen Images from the Dark Land) by George Crumb, a work Lang calls one of his favourite pieces, and one of the great quartets written (in 1970) in his lifetime. I’d agree. The musicians vigorously caught the mood of a work indelibly associated with Vietnam. The stylistic adventures and electronics still sound fresh: tapping instruments with thimbles, bowing on the wrong side of the string to create a ghostly effect, and water-filled crystal goblets played as a glass harmonica. A timeless study of terror and lament, Black Angels is music for today. (Only later, adding to an already swirling set of impressions, did I realise that Ca’ Giustinian is where Richard Wagner wrote the epic second act of Tristan und Isolde).
Dipping in for two days to a festival lasting 16, I cannot easily sum up the many strands, which embrace concerts, lectures and “encounters” (which may mean the sound installation in the Sale d’Armi featuring works by the American John Zorn and others, in a darkened sound chamber, floor cushions provided). This festival – my first visit – buzzes with seriousness and vitality, but is conceived on a human scale: concerts tend to be short, without intervals, inviting maximum concentration. The city’s gilded musical past is also honoured. In the Chiesa della Pietà, the Venice Baroque Orchestra, directed from the harpsichord by Andrea Marcon, played five concertos from Antonio Vivaldi’s L’Estro Armonico. On their feet, powered by infectious adrenaline, bowing arms mercurial, fingering nimble, these players displayed the restless ingenuity and genius of this greatest of Venetians.
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The step between baroque velocity and the freethinking Scottish Ensemble, who played at Queen Elizabeth Hall, to close the Southbank’s Centre’s season-opening weekend, was surprisingly small: another group of elite string players, standing to perform, joyfully drilled by their leader/director Jonathan Morton. Using many of the techniques pioneered by Vivaldi, they played, among others, works by Anna Meredith, Bryce Dessner, Jonny Greenwood and Philip Glass.
Earlier the same evening, in the Clore Ballroom – curtained off to create a proper listening space – the Paraorchestra, conducted by Charles Hazlewood, gave an immersive performance of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (touring to Manchester and Dublin in November). Founded in 2011, the orchestra consists of disabled and non-disabled professional musicians, and aims to expand the possibilities of concert performance. The soprano was Victoria Oruwari, Nigerian-born, London-based and resolutely affecting. Musicians, dressed in white, were positioned on low platforms all around. We were invited to sit or stand anywhere. Perched at the feet of a violinist, in semi-darkness, surrounded by a forest of legs, I had no idea how many musicians were playing, or the nature of their disabilities or non-disabilities. Only the music mattered. It was salutary and uplifting.
