Pianissimo - Schnittke

Shadows - Aulis Sallinen

Harp Concerto - R. Murray Schafer

Greetings from an Old World - Ingvar Lidholm

The last concert in the Explorer/Horizons series took place at the National Concert Hall last Tuesday evening. It was a good programme of differing musical styles from four composers, all of them major figures in their respective countries, and three of them living. All four works were written since 1968. The National Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Colman Pearce.

Pianissimo (1968) by the Russian Alfred Schnittke (1934-98) is a dense, mostly quiet exploration of sonorities and dynamics. It defies normal concepts of motion by seeming to be a-rhythmic until its last few minutes.

Finland's Aulis Sallinen (b. 1935) wrote the orchestral prelude Shadows in 1982. This impressive piece, distinctively Finnish without being obviously derivative of Sibelius, is driven by large shapes in which ideas are contrasted and gradually coalesce.

The concert closed with Greetings from an Old Friend (1976), by Sweden's Ingvar Lidholm (b. 1921). Although it is based on a 16th-century song, that melody emerges clearly only at the end, leaving the impression of a long and sometimes discursive voyage of discovery.

The largest piece on the programme was the Harp Concerto (1987) by the Canadian R. Murray Schafer (b. 1933). The always-reliable soloist in this nicely scored, distinctive piece was Andrea Malir. It was unfortunate that her clarity in projecting ideas was never quite matched in the orchestral part. The main problem here and in most of the concert was a lack of that rhythmic impetus which defines what the music is doing at the moment and where it is going. It was significant that the most convincing performance was of the Schnittke, which deliberately evades such norms.