I stumbled upon Kevin Volans's Double Concerto for Orchestra by accident. I was familiar with "Cicada" and one or two of his African inspired pieces sometimes utilising recorded sounds. They're strangely compelling if rather mechanistic, minimalistic curiosities that, for me promise much but never fully develop.
Volans's Concerto is different because it uses a much richer colour palette, exploiting the timbres of orchestral instruments and eruditely exploiting their textures and nuances. You can hear the influence of electronic music, serialism, minimalism, pop and Western classical music throughout the piece. The call and response between orchestras is Stockhausenesque but rarely dissonant, if at all. The timbral and textural interplay and exchange manage to be both cogent and intensely subtle, redolent of pathos, half-recalled fragments of memories, expressed in an abstract and oblique manner.
The purposeful simplicity (simultaneously complex) works to the advantage of the composer, in this piece. The limited harmonic change and absence of melody don't detract from the plangent and mysterious gestures via timbral and tonal subtlety. This is very much the Volans I wanted to hear, by-passing the busy post-minimalism of Adams, Nyman, etc or the absorption in pop music or traditional orchestral approaches, that other composers have exploited.
Like electro-acoustic music or the ambient music of Eno or similar composers, Volans has created an atmospheric soundscape for orchestras that is both gently contemplative and, at times intensely evocative.
Simon 22/02/23
