Few composers have followed Schumann’s example in his Op 86 Konzertstück and composed a piece for four horns and orchestra. Forest, which Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia co-commissioned from Tansy Davies to mark the orchestra’s 70th anniversary, makes a striking addition to that niche repertoire. Davies calls the 25-minute single movement a concerto, but as a former horn player herself, her writing for the solo quartet (the Philharmonia’s current principal horns, Katy Woolley and Nigel Black, joined by two of their predecessors, Richard Watkins and Michael Thompson) is generally less about individualism and extrovert display than using them as a group to counterbalance rather than dominate the orchestra.
Though her music is often characterised as edgily urban, references to the natural world beyond the cities regularly crop up in Davies’s works. In part Forest is, she says, a “celebration of creation, and the power that might be found – or refound – through developing better communication with nature”. And her writing for the horns regularly alludes to the instrument’s traditional associations with that world, though never in an obvious, anecdotal way; the calls and riffs of the quartet thread themselves through the orchestral busyness part of that soundworld while keeping their separateness. There are moments when the sheer profusion of detail seems to be self-defeating and the textures need more air around them, but they are distinctly outweighed by the inventive energy of the rest.
Before the premiere, Pierre-Laurent Aimard had been the soloist in a brisk, no-nonsense account of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, everything in its place in a slightly straitlaced way, and afterwards Salonen and his orchestra unleashed an equally immaculate account of Also Sprach Zarathustra, a model of good taste, always an achievement in a tone poem by Strauss.
- Programme repeated at the Royal Festival Hall, London on 23 February. Box office: 020-7960 4200.
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