Davies/BBC Singers/BBCSO/Knussen, Barbican, review: A charmed concert under Oliver Knussen's magic wand

Concerts always have a charmed perfection under Oliver Knussen’s magic wand. Before Gunther Schuller’s Dreamscape with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he presented an arrangement he had recently made of a Peter Maxwell Davies canon, after which we were to observe a minute’s silence in that composer’s memory. A solo flute was joined by an oboe, then by a bassoon, then a harp, until the air was alive with interweaving lines, whose benign afterglow filled the ensuing silence.

Dreamscape had apparently been dictated to Schuller while he slept, and it consisted of three cleverly-crafted miniatures, the first of which was raucously comic. Then came the world premiere of George Benjamin’s Dream of the Song, that being settings of verse by three poets from Granada – Samuel HaNagid and Solomon Ibn Gabirol (writing in Hebrew in the eleventh century), and Gabriel Garcia Lorca who was murdered there in 1936, with countertenor Iestyn Davies and female voices of the BBC Singers providing the words. Arab poetry was the link, and Benjamin’s settings were a triumph of fine-grained precision which require, I suspect, more than one hearing to yield up their variegated secrets.

Ballast for these novelties came with Debussy’s exquisite Nocturnes, and Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, in which the dislocating fury of war was turned into something rich and rare. Knussen’s conducting was wonderfully clean and detailed throughout.