Derrick Skye was born in Los Angeles in 1982, the year after John Adams’s breakthrough work Harmonium was premiered in San Francisco. His new 20-minute orchestral work Nova Plexus – a Proms commission, premiered by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and its California conductor Ryan Bancroft – shares that west coast sensibility of maximalised minimalism. Three amplified instruments – electric bass, electric guitar and synthesiser – represent the ways in which the sun’s power reaches Earth, from radio waves to cosmic particles. Sounding suitably massive, these stimulate responses in the earthly, unamplified instruments of the rest of the orchestra: one tune for flutes and unison strings sounds like birdsong. Skye draws on a plethora of musical traditions – west African, Persian classical, Balinese. A solo cello plays a simple melody whose notes are tuned according to an unfamiliar, non-western scale; cellos and basses make drums out of the bodies of their instruments. It’s rhythmically powerful stuff, at times an invitation to dance. But harmonically it feels static, and those complex rhythmic patterns are largely grouped into predictable, four-to-the-floor phrases that make the music feel bound by its dance-like energy rather than freed by it.
The all-American programme moved east coast-wards for Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, the soloist Annelien Van Wauwe treading the lazy opening waltz with a beautiful sense of openness and turning all the somersaults later on with the same lively, pinging clarity she brought to her encore, the third of Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet.
Then it was back to California for Harmonium. This choral symphony on words by John Donne and Emily Dickinson brought a barnstorming performance from the massive choir – more than 200 singers from the BBC National Chorus of Wales and the Crouch End Festival Chorus. If the sheer size of the space meant that some of the volume-fluctuating effects in their music were a little blunted in the first movement, this didn’t apply to the brass, who shared notes that seemed to scythe across the stage. In the elegiac second movement time seemed almost to stand still as Dickinson’s lines turned towards eternity – only for choir and orchestra both to explode upwards again in the glittering finale, the choir sounding truly monumental.