Rolf Wallin & Igor Stravinskij
Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Wu Wei (sheng), SISU Percussion Ensemble, Pascal Rophé (conductor)
Stavanger Concert House, 28 April
Stavanger Symphony Orchestra has for a long time taken steps that can serve as a model for the other orchestras in Norway. In the spring of 2022, Rolf Wallin is invited as a composer-in-residence for four concerts. Saturday there was a concert at Tou Scene, with electronics, balloons and scenography by Carle Lange, and Thursday the portrait ends with Wallin’s orchestral masterpiece Act, virtuosic and captivating in equal measures. But the reason I took the trip to Stavanger was a premiere – knowing that Wallin writes for orchestra like few others, and he can build up the drama of music, often in a classical way, even though his appealing tonal language is definitely of modern date.
Stonewave (1990) is the basis for Mountainwave (2021) which opened the concert. It is a work written for percussion trio based on fractals – complex, detailed and beautiful visual patterns emanating from mathematical formulas. One could easily expect that music becomes clinical and distant with such an origin, but we are dealing with patterns that are beautiful in the outset, and besides, the musical creation lies in Wallin’s translation from mathematics to music.
Last year, Wallin expanded Stonewave so that the three excellent musicians of SISU Percussion Ensemble became soloists with the orchestra. The work was named Mountainwave. With an orchestra one can work with both pitches and richer timbre than when it is played only by percussion, and soloists and orchestra can enter into a timbral dialogue with each other. But the new and extensive sound work also gives Mountainwave a new identity, compared to Stonewave. Now the mathematical beauty does not get as much space, and I don’t experience this as intricately written for orchestra as Wallin is capable of. The work is nevertheless a window to his captivating world.
Wallin was set up against two orchestral works by Igor Stravinsky: Symphony in three movements (1942-45) and Le chant du rossignol (1917). Although SSO, under the leadership of French conductor Pascal Rophé, played with clearly carved themes and sonorous imagination, they will not get the praise they deserve now, because the centre of attention here is the house composer.
Concerto For Sheng And Orchestra (2022) was premiered, and if you have not heard of “sheng” you are in good company. It is a traditional Chinese instrument, a mouth organ with bamboo tubes (the number may vary, but there are 37 in the soloist Wu Wei’s instrument) where the musician changes the pitch with holes and keys. The sound is somewhat nasal but is also reminiscent of the most beautiful sounds from a bandoneon mixed with something woodwind-like.
Music rarely gets as beautiful as this.
Not least, Wei can sing on his instrument, so vividly that every classical wind musician has something to learn from him. Wallin has chosen to let much of the piece take place within these heavenly sounds, often in subtle colour dialogue with the orchestra. Within the orchestra, he constantly finds new instrument combinations to create expressivity. The colours undulate between different instrument groups so that the orchestra can be heard in a multidimensional perspective, purely sonically in the room. Music rarely gets as beautiful as this.
Wallin says that the progression and development in the Concerto are made intuitively, like any classical work. However, the pitches are not random, because Wallin uses a principle he himself has created to generate the pitch material, namely so-called “crystal chords” (simplified: three intervals “seeds” are stacked several times on top of each other). The dramatic form is based on the five Chinese elements: water, earth, wood, metal and fire. After an introduction, he addresses these elements, one by one, in a captivating epic tale.
There might be something about these crystal chords that makes Wallin so often recognizable just as Wallin. When the intervals are stacked on top of each other, he gets a dense tonal material that is still not too dissonant (Wallin labels the more accessible parts of his music “consonant atonality”). He limits his material to something recognizable, but demanding, and thus has a base, a material that can be developed both in colourful orchestration and dramatic interpretation. The sounds range from small ripples to the whole orchestra appearing as a furious percussion ensemble.
In the last movement, “Fire”, Wu Wei is expected to improvise according to the composer’s instructions. He plays polyphonic and evokes sounds that are hard to imagine coming from one mouth and ten fingers that cover holes and press keys. Not least, the intensity completely takes off. Using rapid tongue techniques and the continuous sound coming from a sheng can be played on inhaling and exhaling, the energy is driven to heights that take the breath away from the listeners. Wallin of course follows up with suggestive rhythmical work in the orchestra. It is nevertheless the overall inspiration, that Wallin also meditates on sounds corresponding to the sheng’s most beautiful lyrical melodic design, which makes the Concerto For Sheng And Orchestra so varied and successful.
The quality of the work, but also taking into account how few sheng players there are in the world, makes me hope for a recording of this material, preferably with SSO. The concerto was the most convincing they played during the evening. It is rare to hear nuanced, virtuoso and elaborate orchestral playing already at a premiere. SSO’s collaboration with Wallin is supposed to continue with a recording and another premiere. It is also worth noting that Emmanuel Pahud, perhaps the world’s foremost flautist, is an artist-in-residence at SSO. They are lucky in Stavanger to have such an innovative orchestra in the city.
Magnus Andersson
Klassekampen 2 May 2022