Last year, i spent part of the summer vacationing in Czechia. During that time, i was fortunate to meet up with composer Petr Bakla, who is also director of the Czech Music Information Centre. i came away from my time with Petr much more clued up about Czech contemporary music, as well as weighed down by the quantity of CDs and music journals he generously supplied me with. Since then i’ve been gradually working my way through what he gave me, and one work in particular proved especially arresting. If you’re someone inclined less toward refined ensemble coordination than rambunctious mob mentality – in the manner of, say, Alex Paxton or Enno Poppe – this will be right up your street.
Composed in 2005, Petr Kofroň‘s Titan Symphony is a three-movement work for large ensemble, lasting around 75 minutes. It’s really not a piece that, in a context like this, would benefit from a blow by blow analysis – if, indeed, that kind of analysis is even possible. The Titan Symphony thrives by – revels in – its continual instability and unruly, jostling ideas. The ensemble generally seems to be all on the same side, but not necessarily all on the same page, and certainly not all at the same tempo.
The first movement very quickly establishes the tone, attitude and behaviour of the work. The players get things up and running in a loose, uncoordinated, haphazard way. The sections of the ensemble seem to be waking up, warming up, immediately locked into a looping staccato idea, all out of sync with each other. It soon becomes apparent that this idea is focused on a motif of four pitches, G-A-F-E, with a corresponding bass motif, E-D-B-C. This unpromising morsel of music becomes the splinter in the mind of the movement, with all instruments gravitating toward or circling around it, the percussion – when they feel inclined – serving to drive everything along. Individual instruments and whole sections come and go, creating a constantly changing timbral and dramatic make-up, one minute spare and specific, the next a full-blown, uproarious messy chorus of misaligned unity. Two-thirds through, Kofroň mischievously throws in a new, contrasting idea, quick, scurrying and scalic, which the winds embrace completely. This predominates for a while, until the strings get fixated on a 4-note phrase (C-B-G-F) that hints back to the original idea. Over the course of the next few minutes that first idea is restored, leading to a climactic final tutti teetering on the brink of complete chaos. The trumpets blaze triads, signalling the end.
In the second movement, there’s again the sense of different speeds, but also rival ideas being articulated by different sections of the ensemble. In under a minute everyone’s already getting pretty exercised, though what’s happening is hard to parse. Locking into the same pulse? Unity? Disunity? Separate strands in parallel? Three minutes pass before the strings assert sufficiently to get their idea, a lively, folk-like melody, to take hold. And thus it begins, round and round, although there’s really no consensus. The melody persists, but it often does so through gritted teeth, propelled by an oom-pah accompaniment that itself is often the cause for wild rhythmic digressions. Here and there, seemingly apropos of nothing, large parts of the ensemble will click into the tune and run with it, before – just as capriciously – one or two players will get side-tracked by something else that suddenly seems more compelling, usually dragging plenty of nearby instruments along with them. Thus it plays out in a continual push and pull where the melody acts like an occasional landmark of recognition in a maelstrom of mayhem. Only in the closing minutes does everyone seem to think it’s a good idea to latch onto the tune again, which they do with ever more quantities of gusto, but even here it keeps alternating with wild outbursts of gleeful pandemonium.
Surprisingly, the final movement goes the other way, in terms of group agreement. Starting with a relatively simple oscillating melody, and an upbeat staccato accompaniment, from the outset this is seemingly taken as read as being the material that everyone wants to get behind. The melodic component – barely a melody in any case – is soon lost, with the focus falling instead on the harmonies and impetus of the rhythms. As soon as the percussion breaks out, the atmosphere – already a borderline party mood – is firmly established, and for the next 25 minutes the ensemble moves through highly energised, texturally distinct episodes, where everything is derived from that same basic kernel of material. Yet for all their unity, the players are as scrappy and misaligned as ever, though by now it seems abundantly clear that this is the product of pure zeal, enthusiasm trumping accuracy. There are times when the music slips stylistically sideways into something akin to an orchestral rock track – which, combined with the (s)crappy coordination, occasionally brings to mind a school orchestra concert – and throughout there’s an uncanny sense that something vital is missing, no doubt due to the fact that, unlike the previous two movements, everything here derives from an accompaniment figure (in hindsight, this seems like another act of mischief on Kofroň’s part: agreement is finally established, yet the more vague music they share makes their unity more tenuous). Yet the climactic final minutes are amazing, building up to full-force exuberance, the material by now evolved into periodic, rising wind flurries with the brass more sustained within. It’s almost like a stasis, where everyone is doing their thing, round and round and round, locked into their respective grooves, playing as if their lives depended on it, joy unconfined.
You’ve probably never heard a symphony quite like Petr Kofroň’s Titan Symphony. It’s a piece where that traditional symphonic notion of “sounding together” is focused into a boisterous pitched battle among friends; where hierarchy is resisted and overthrown; where disagreement is the engine that drives the game – and it is, surely, all a game – and where timing, coordination and alignment have nothing whatsoever to do with fundamental unity.
The piece was premièred at the Archa Theatre in Prague on 17 November 2005 by Agon Orchestra conducted by Kofroň. That first performance ran to a mind-boggling 93 minutes (which, if you’re inclined, can be streamed online). According to Petr Bakla, Kofroň subsequently edited the recording (“There’s a rather massive cut at the beginning…”, Bakla notes – possibly around two minutes in), and it was finally released by the Czech Music Information Centre in April 2015 on CD and free download.
