Everywhere I looked I saw children, some burying their heads in their mothers' chests, some doodling on programme notes. One was dancing to Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony. Ambitious. Last night's BBC Symphony Orchestra concert had been given over to family listening. My first thought was why? Stravinsky's fun but dry Dumbarton Oaks is hardly suitable. And Prokofiev's Sixth is psychologically X-rated when done right. Sandwiched between these two works, however, was, superficially, a perfect stocking filler: a new Oboe Concerto from accessible Spectralist Marc-André Dalbavie that sees the apotheosis of the humble squiggle.
Everyone loves a squiggle. Give a human a pen and paper and the likelihood is that, within a few seconds, they will start squiggling. And, in all likelihood, within a few seconds, they'll also stop. Those who don't (Bridget Riley, say) must be quite clever quite quickly in deciding how to give shape and form and purpose to their ogee or it'll fall straight through their hands like cooked spaghetti.
The first squiggle on display last night was of the double-helix type. At the start, Dalbavie forces oboist Alexei Ogrintchouk to twiddle in triplets and simultaneously descend. In the second part this develops into a flatter ascending and descending scale. The music went up. The music went down. Up. Down. Up. Down. And then it went a little bit mental, attempting some sort of entropic disintegration in a hurtling finale.
It wasn't awful - Ogrintchouk didn't, as far as I could tell, put a foot wrong - but neither was it particularly inspiring. The possibilities of squiggling are myriad. Just ask William Hogarth or Tristram Shandy. I and most of the sleeping children around me knew that few of the finest doodled developments were on offer in front of us, most of them being on display next to me in a little girl's brilliantly bedoodled programme.
The rest of the concert didn't quite take off as I had hoped. Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks, a Neo-Baroque number, is really only worth doing if you know it inside out and are willing to fling yourself at it at a hundred miles an hour. The orchestra did a clean job but didn't seem confident enough to burn rubber with Stravinsky's impressive engine.
We were similarly short-changed in the Prokofiev symphony, which was colourful and noisy but lacked a strategic vision from Jiří Bělohlávek or a sense of instrumental balance that this work requires to cohere and disturb. And the symphony's significant demands on the woodwind didn't show the orchestra off in the best light. I imagine most of their spare time is already being devoted to their daunting day of celebrations in February to that king of New Complexity, Brian Ferneyhough, which should be a scorcher.
- Check out the rest of the BBC Symphony Orchestra season
- The Brian Ferneyhough Day is on 26 February, 2011
- See what's on at the Barbican this season
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