BBCSO/Ono

The BBC has regularly promoted Matthias Pintscher's music over the past five years, and to begin the second of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's new season of Barbican concerts, Kazushi Ono conducted the world premiere of Pintscher's Pourquoi l'Azur Muet ... , co-commissioned by the corporation. Strictly speaking, it is not entirely new, as it derives from a music-theatre work, L'Espace Dernier, presented at the Bastille in Paris four years ago, which itself was a product of a preoccupation with the life and work of the poet Rimbaud.

Pintscher describes the latest 25-minute piece for soprano, mezzo-soprano and a huge orchestra as a kind of suite, which draws upon the theatre project but expands its orchestration and adds new material, too. The text is a patchwork of phrases assembled from a number of Rimbaud sources, and their setting ranges between speech and the most rarefied arioso. The soprano (the outstanding Claudia Barainsky) has the lion's share of the vocal writing; the mezzo (the equally accomplished Claudia Mahnke) adds commentary and reinforcement. The intricate orchestral writing sometimes overwhelms the voices, so the total effect is dream-like, full of fragmentary images moving in and out of focus.

Ono framed the premiere with two Russian works, by Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky. But the version of Night On the Bare Mountain was not the familiar one that Rimsky-Korsakov concocted after Mussorgsky's death and that Walt Disney popularised in Fantasia, but the first of the three that Mussorgsky himself completed, in 1867. Ono and the BBCSO ensured that the primeval, raw-edged orchestration had maximum impact, but couldn't completely disguise the piece's dramatic flaws, particularly its failure to bring the orgiastic proceedings to a suitably convincing climax.