Hear and Now – Matthias Pintscher conducts…. by Wagner, Richard, Unknown, A. /., Lachenmann, Alkaen (2016/2016), Musiikinjohto Matthias Pintscher, City Halls, Glasgow, United Kingdom

With its suspension of time and space, magical colouring and mysterious silences, Wagner’s Parsifal prelude is a suitable opener to this concert of contemporary music, programmed and conducted by the BBC SSO’s Artist-in-Association, Matthias Pintscher. Joan Magrané Figuera’s ...secreta desolación… makes melodic and harmonic references to Wagner’s opera while another German musical revolutionary, Helmut Lachenmann, uses silences and large orchestral forces in Tableau, a work recently described as “mesmerising, startling and occasionally forbidding.” Jay Schwartz’s Delta, combines ‘physics with the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of sound’ to create a work of great emotional intensity; and at the centre of this Hear and Now, a flute concerto by Salvatore Sciarrino in which the soloist engages in dialogues with a succession of instruments, creating a fragile soundworld which teeters on the edge of silence.