Pickard: Piano Concerto, Sea-Change and Tenebrae

There is a particular pleasure in watching a composer’s harmonic language darken across two decades without losing its appetite for noise. John Pickard has always liked things loud — really loud, cathedral-organ loud — but the loudness has changed character. In the late 1980s it still had the swagger of a young man showing off his engine. By 2009 it had become something closer to inevitability, the sound of tectonic plates finally giving way.

Start with Sea-Change, because chronology insists on it. Pickard wrote it for a student orchestra, and you can hear the pedagogical generosity in the scoring: nothing here that a good conservatory brass section couldn’t handle, though “handle” undersells what’s demanded of them in the closing pages. The piece rides on tidal cross-rhythms, layered ostinati that shift phase against one another the way real currents do, pulling in different directions until suddenly they don’t. The climax has near-vulgar power. I heard echoes of the Boléro crescendo, of Shostakovich’s Leningrad invasion tune grinding forward on its idiotic snare-drum tattoo, even a whiff of the machine-gun timpani in Nielsen’s Fifth. Pickard has never been shy about his influences. He wears them the way a magpie wears stolen foil: proudly, and to his own purposes.

The Piano Concerto, a decade further on, is the meatier proposition, and Frederik Ullén plays it like he means to stake a claim on it. Thirty-one minutes, three-ish movements bleeding into each other, jazz inflections needling through what is otherwise a granitic, essentially tonal harmonic world. Ullén has the fingers for the outer sections: fast, glittering, unashamedly virtuosic writing that occasionally recalls Tippett’s concerto in its combination of muscularity and lyric impulse, though Pickard’s ear is very much his own. The central slow section is the one passage where I’d quibble. It swirls and reflects and swirls some more, and there’s a point, maybe ninety seconds before Pickard finally moves on, where you start checking your watch. But he pulls it back. He always pulls it back. That’s the gift, an uncanny sense for exactly how long an idea can sit before it curdles, and a refusal to pad past that point with gesture.

Martyn Brabbins and the Norrköping players are extraordinary partners throughout, more responsive even than on their earlier Pickard disc for this label, the one with The Flight of Icarus and Channel Firing, works that, as it happens, form a loose sea-themed triptych with Sea-Change itself. It’s a small scandal of programming, honestly, that BIS split the trilogy across two different releases rather than uniting it here, pairing the Trombone Concerto instead with the newer scores. Collectors will now want both discs to hear the set complete. Shrewd marketing or an oversight, I can’t decide which.

Tenebrae, the most recent piece and the one that lends this disc its title, is the real test of listener nerve. Twenty-five minutes of low, dense orchestral weather, basses and contrabassoon and tuba doing most of the emotional labor, punctuated by crescendos that arrive less like climaxes than like weather fronts you simply can’t outrun. This is not music for anyone still wanting their twenty-first-century orchestral scores to resolve tidily. It received its UK premiere earlier this year, Brabbins again on the podium, this time with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. One imagines the piece will travel. It has that particular bleak grandeur that British orchestras seem to relish getting their teeth into, something in the lineage of Birtwistle’s darker canvases, though Pickard’s tonal anchoring keeps him a different animal entirely.

BIS’s engineering, recorded in the same Norrköping hall as its predecessor, gives you the width of the string section, the thud of low brass landing in your sternum, the fine internal detail of Ullén’s inner voices even when the orchestra is at full cry around him. Few labels record spectacle this well without losing intimacy in the process.

Is this essential listening? For anyone curious about where British orchestral music went after the generation of Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle, yes, unreservedly. Pickard is not fashionable, exactly, and this is not comfortable music. But it is honest, muscular, superbly crafted, paced by a composer who knows precisely how long to hold a chord before it stops meaning anything. I’ll be returning to the concerto most of all.