Southbank Centre, London
Most composers suffer at least a temporary eclipse in the years after their death, but in the 10 years since Iannis Xenakis died, the audience for his music has grown steadily. Two concerts in the Southbank Centre's Ether series attracted near capacity audiences. The London Sinfonietta's programme, conducted by André de Ridder, was devoted entirely to Xenakis, while Ensemble Exposé's also included the premieres of short tributes by British-based composers Michael Finnissy, Roger Redgate and Haris Kittos.
The works chosen nearly all dated from the 1960s and 70s – nothing from the first decade of Xenakis's composing career, and only the wonderfully direct and lucid Palimpsest for 11 instruments from 1979 and the piano quintet Akea written seven years later, both included by Exposé, to suggest the direction his music took in the last years of his life. The tape piece La Légende d'Eer, which Xenakis composed for the opening of the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1977, took up half of the Sinfonietta's programme; Eonta, for piano and brass quintet from 1963, is one of the Xenakis classics, and was played with fabulous fluency by pianist Rolf Hind and the ensemble.
Yet Eonta remains problematic, for its quasi-theatrical element – the relationship between the instrumentalists, the ritualised movements of the brass players around the stage – seems to be imposed on music whose intentions and existence (as the result of random processes) are profoundly arbitrary. Xenakis's music is at its most effective when it communicates directly through its abrasive sound world and unflinching rigour in a work such as Phlegra for 11 instruments, composed for the Sinfonietta in 1975 and still played by them with great pungency; it's the archetypal Xenakis work, mixing delicacy, eruptive violence, and moments of stark primitivism.