San Francisco Polyphony - Gyorgy Ligeti

Sphinxes - Raymond Deane

Dammerschein - Xenakis

Oboe Concerto - Raymond Deane

Tuesday's National Symphony Orchestra Horizons concert was programmed and introduced (in a pre-concert talk) by Raymond Deane. His early Sphinxes (1972) and 1994 Oboe Concerto were paired with roughly contemporaneous works, Ligeti's San Francisco Polyphony (1974) and Xenakis's Dammerschein (1994), though, as the composer was at pains to point out, there was no inference of influence to be made. Indeed, at the time he wrote Sphinxes, Deane took a slant on Ligeti that he now describes as "sniffy".

The Oboe Concerto is unusual in that it pits the soloist, the heroically striving Matthew Manning, against a large orchestra in a David and Goliath battle in which Goliath triumphs. As a piece of theatre - the straining, red-faced soloist is often inaudible - it seems like an exercise in cruelty. The balance of the eventual resolution is explained by the work's composition after a visit to war-torn areas of the Middle East. It was interesting to hear Deane quote approvingly Messiaen's appreciation of the cruelty in Xenakis's work, a cruelty that seems, even in the late, cluster-smattered Dammerschein to have more to do with elemental forces than human behaviour.

Sphinxes, Deane's earliest orchestral work, inhabits an offbeat world of 1970s avantgarde, though without the clarity and certainty of his smaller works of that period (where the harmonic outlines are clearer and more playful), yet not quite convincingly committed to the gestural orchestral style it seems also to aspire to.

It was, however, in Sphinxes that conductor Colman Pearce seemed most persuasive. Elsewhere, there was frequently an opacity which rather greyed-out distinctions of character and event, even in that fascinating "interaction between order and chaos" that is Ligeti's San Francisco Polyphony.