Cadavre Exquis was the game – akin to Consequences – in which surrealist artists such as Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró made separate contributions to a single piece of work without sight of what anyone else had done, to see how a picture might evolve, or just for the hell of it. Anders Hillborg took the principle as inspiration for his composition Exquisite Corpse but, where the surrealists hoped for signs of an unconscious collective sensibility, the emerging components of Hillborg’s piece bear his consciously singular imprint while also incorporating references to composers as disparate as Stravinsky, Ligeti and Sibelius.
In the performance given by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under their chief conductor Ryan Bancroft, the unfolding layers of sound were never less than brilliantly alive. Hillborg’s instinct for a remarkable range of instrumental colour – delicate tendrils of harmony, monstrously growling bass registers, insistent conga drumming, shrill piccolos – taunted and teased the ear before finally fading into a gentle haze.
Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite Op 22 made for an intriguing and blackly surreal connection, since in the Swan of Tuonela – second of the sequence of four tone poems based on episodes from the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic – the shamanic demigod hero Lemminkäinen is killed and his body dismembered. This exquisite corpse is then lovingly restored to life by his mother so that he can return home in triumph. Eliciting very fine string playing, with Amy McKean’s cor anglais solo most evocative, Bancroft found a balance between the narrative drama and the intoxicating, elemental quality of Sibelius’ score, while also creating a positively symphonic overall trajectory.
Between these two works came Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 2, Op 126 in G major in which the soloist was the magnificent Alban Gerhardt. In his hands, it was the music’s melancholy beauty rather than the implicitly tragic vein that came across so hauntingly, the writing high on the A string impeccably delivered, and, in the Allegretto movement, Shostakovich’s bleakly sardonic rhythmic bite precision-honed. After such an intense experience, nothing was more heartwarming than seeing Gerhardt, modest cello-hero, join the back of the cello section to play in the Sibelius suite. Just for the hell of it.
