Classical: Wild things take over the hall

Live

LONDON SINFONIETTA/ CBSO SYMPHONY HALL

BIRMINGHAM

THERE WERE Wild Things loose in Symphony Hall the other night. Not just on stage, where Oliver Knussen's impeccable vocal team, with appetising aplomb, unleashed its chorus of grunts and whoops and hisses and sizzles and groans - but in the bar, where a small apparition aged about five scudded around adults at waist height, a vision clad in dazzling blues and greens, swirling tartans and garish red moccasins, who might easily have been an escapee from Maurice Sendak's unforgettable double bill.

You could be forgiven for thinking Knussen a bit wild himself, though he is in fact the gentlest of things. He - like his London Sinfonietta - has done as much for promoting the new music of others in this country as anybody. It was thus all the more welcome to hear him expounding his own. His collaborations with Maurice Sendak, Higglety Pigglety Pop! and Where the Wild Things Are, inhabits a rich, daunting world of childhood fantasy, in direct descent from the Brothers Grimm, Humperdinck, Ravel (l'Enfant et les Sortileges) and Mussorgsky's Nursery Songs.

What was so cheering was how well Pig-in-Sandwich-Boards, Cat-Milkman, Castle Yonder and Vanilla Pudding stand up in concert performance, even shorn of Sendak's looming, garish, monstrous stage decor. If there were moments when Knussen's magic perhaps just failed to crystallise (the car ride, Max's barcarolle, the forest transformation), others - musical clock, the spectacularly gloomy woodwind descent to the cellar, the Firebird- like Ash Tree prelude, the deliciously outrageous "Wild Rumpus"- mesmerised.

Both operas are tales of individuation: Jennie, Sendak's dissatisfied Sealyham terrier craves "experience" as much as Max, the petulant child in Wild Things, demands adventure. The pathos lies in their conflicting security-craving. Textual audibility is crucial, and (despite occasional over-milking) Knussen was blessed with two ingeniously lucid leads - Cynthia Buchan's Jennie, brilliantly characterised and enunciated across the registers, and Lisa Saffer's mood-changeable Max (plus gloriously obnoxious squealing baby in Higglety) fabulously well-phrased. Mary King (Mama), David Wilson- Johnson and Stephen Richardson all had us in stitches in the vignettes.

Rattle's energising CBSO return continues apace. Harrison Birtwistle's blasting Earth Dances, even with the upper sound chambers closed, tests the Symphony Hall acoustic as well as the nerves. Bits sear you like shrapnel, flying off door frames, banisters and rafters alike. Some "incident" engages the curiosity more than others, but the real pleasure emerges when Birtwistle eases off and really does "dance": a ghost of a waltz, a sneery metallic wobble. The late build-up and final dissipation thrilled.

Gubaidulina's optimistic Violin Concerto, Offertorium, is a gorgeously contrasted work: the Bachian underlay, a passage of poignant "echoes" (redolent of Schnittke), the touchingly Shostakovich-like harmonisations of the chorale with its echoes of the Orthodox rite, and the sheer variety and empathy of Vadim Repin's solo cadenza work all underlined the piece's moral, as well as musical, beauty and strength. The reduced forces in Kurtag's delicate, ritualistic tribute, Grabstein fur Stefan, elicited sounds from the CBSO as tenderly haunting as anything in the evening.