At the Royal Albert Hall, a peculiar new piece from Gerald Barry disappointed, but James Ehnes’s superb solo violin redeemed the evening
Every Proms season brings its crop of brand-new pieces, nearly all of them BBC-commissioned; and one always hopes that among them will be a wild card, something that aims higher than the shinily optimistic, easy-on-the-ear curtain-raiser that so many commissions turn out to be.
Thursday night’s new piece, in the third of the BBC Philharmonic’s four Proms this year, scored highly for its title alone: Kafka’s Earplugs. And the chances of hearing something extraordinary seemed high, as its composer, the Irishman Gerald Barry, has spent his entire career following Jean Cocteau’s advice to “always go too far”. Barry’s pieces are uproariously loud, manically energetic and often wildly funny.
His idea, then, of conjuring the sound-world of Franz Kafka, a famously neurotic and maladjusted writer who tried to shut out the noise of the world by plugging his ears, was full of potential both comic and pathetic. One could imagine the orchestra mimicking the sounds of overheard arguments and laughter, and popular Czech and Viennese songs on the neighbour’s gramophone, all heard indistinctly, as if filtered through gauze.
This is more or less what we got – except that the sounds were devoid of pathos or comedy. Clouds of blurry melody rose and fell, in rhythmic tandem with equally cloudy bass lines, all in a ghostly pianissimo; there was barely a change for 12 minutes. Far from being amusing, Barry’s piece was an exercise in pitilessly austere modernist abstraction. At least it prompted a cry of “rubbish” from the audience, showing that the Proms hasn’t entirely sunk into respectability.