Royal Festival Hall, London
This season marks the start of Unsuk Chin's artistic directorship of the Philharmonia's Music of Today series. Eclectic and cosmopolitan in her choice of material, she scheduled music by Johannes Schöllhorn for her first concert, allowing us to hear excerpts from his Anamorphoses, a wry, postmodern take on Bach's The Art of Fugue.
The title borrows a term from painting. An anamorphosis is a distorted image that requires a shift of vantage point in order to make sense: the most familiar example is probably the skull in Holbein's The Ambassadors, which only appears if you look at the painting sideways on. Schöllhorn's aim is to replicate the process in sound by deconstructing Bach fugues.
So his version of Contrapunctus VI opens with the players tapping out the rhythm on its own, gradually adding melody and harmony, while Contrapunctus IV transforms Bach's harmonic clashes into eerie string clusters. The scoring, meanwhile, echoes that of the Bach-influenced composers of the 1920s such as Weill and Hindemith. It was nicely played. Roland Kluttig conducted.
Christoph von Dohnányi was at the helm for the evening's main concert, a Strauss-Mozart programme, variably presented. Mozart's Symphony No 25, K183, was workmanlike rather than exciting. Dohnányi is more comfortable with Strauss, though his Don Juan, in this instance, didn't quite go to the requisite emotional extremes of eroticism. Till Eulenspiegel and the Four Last Songs suit him better. Till was all wit and scrupulous detail, while the Songs' nostalgia and gradual acceptance of mortality were impeccably judged. His soloist, Melanie Diener, took a while to strike form, but achieved a sense of genuine transcendence by the end.