WILLIAM FERGUSSON – ‘TENTH’ – PIANO CONCERT 17th OCTOBER 2021
It must surely be impossible to create a great work which cannot exist, yet this was the awesome ambition of ‘Tenth’ by Will Fergusson, commissioned by the Norfolk Hostry Festival at the Music Centre, UEA, in a passionate collaboration of piano and AI, encapsulating the idea of Beethoven’s unfinished Tenth symphony as well as celebration of the festival’s first decade.
Immersing Beethoven’s unassailable Ninth with the fragmentary sketches for his incomplete final work, the recital opening performance of bagatelles set as prelude the composers’ late high-register flowing into a quest traversing peripheries of sound through phenomenal live tech composition by performer-programmer Ed Perkins.
‘Tenth’ lays its task the problem of artistic creation which it achieves with bold inspiration, nocturnal classical chords juxtaposed with post-modern static asperity, visionary mystical expression with diamond-sharp machine systems, echoes of the piano sonatas interweaving snatches of the theme of the Tenth. To an extent, the work is an epos translating an acoustic metaphysics of paradox and cosmological unity: Pamenidean principles of opposites, a journey through night and day, profoundly complex yet sacred in its simplicity.
A collage of experimentation through harmony and atonality, Fergusson, devil-like, saves the best tune last in his choral Ode to Man (instead of Ode to Joy) in Ancient Greek (instead of German). The textures achieved by Fergusson and Perkins’ duet is breath taking. ‘Tenth’ is an immense musical expression at a time of live arts’ struggle for survival, viscerally satisfying on par with great avant-garde innovation and a triumph of a blazingly creative spirit ascendant.
Tista Austin
