With BCMG, quality has always been more important than quantity. There were just two pieces in this concert, and just one composer. But that composer was Kevin Volans – described in the programme, not without justification, as “the most celebrated ‘classical’ composer Africa has ever produced” – and both of these works were world premieres: the second, Volans’s Piano Concerto No.4 being a BCMG Sound Investment commission.
First, though, came his String Quartet No.12, performed sympathetically and with style by the Signum Quartet. Volans’s material is slight: little rain-showers of pizzicato framed by long sustained high notes, with occasional clicks and tuckets serving to switch the music’s direction. The patterns evolve and shift, giving the sensation of a kind of musical “Magic Eye” picture. Whether there’s enough here to sustain a 36-minute unbroken span will depend upon your personal appetite for music that, as the programme essay put it, is content to inhabit the “here and now”. I found myself thinking that Morton Feldman has a lot to answer for.
With soloist Barry Douglas centre stage and blocks of woodwinds, strings and brass (conducted by Geoffrey Paterson) placed antiphonally around him, Volans’s new Piano Concerto felt more dramatic. As a virtuoso showpiece for Douglas, it’s a non-starter: barring a few jagged outbursts the solo piano surfaces only occasionally from the chugging, glinting textures around it.
Instead, Volans uses his four instrumental elements to create a minimalist Concerto Grosso : energetic, elegantly-shaded, and in its fast central movement in particular, vividly imagined - the music boiling up from a bubbling, oily soup of bass clarinets and giving way to broken fanfares. Since Volans provided only vestigial programme notes, it would have been helpful for listeners to have known in advance that the piece was in a thoroughly traditional three movements.
