Dadaville (2015)

Gary Carpenter’s well-crafted and witty Dadaville, inspired by Max Ernst’s 1924 painting in Tate Liverpool, began with spiky modernity and metamorphosed into a brilliant funk ending with a dazzle of indoor fireworks: a clever and serious first premiere of the season... ...Carpenter (born 1951) has a lot of musical voices, all interesting.

Carpenter’s new piece was a terrific orchestral scherzo showpiece, scored and paced with real mastery.

The world premiere of Gary Carpenter's BBC commission Dadaville (a response to Max Ernst's 1924 relief) proved an engaging juxtaposition of eerily ethereal timbres, and exuberant jazzy rhythms, built fugato-like and with assertive punctuations from a huge bank of percussionists. Carpenter joins the phalanx of composers who have penned something similarly attractive, not least Mark-Anthony Turnage, and I doubt its surprise firework-fizzing ending can ever be repeated.

Gary Carpenter’s six-minute Dadaville was just as light, but whereas Nielsen’s piece was guilelessly jolly, Carpenter’s was flecked with a dark, syncopated glamour that was hard to place, as if a film noir score had been crossed with the spirit of 1920s Berlin. The word ‘Dada’ is a gift for a composer with a taste for musical punning, which Carpenter certainly is. He rung the changes on the notes D and A with entertaining ingenuity, the piece eventually building to riotous a complication of polyrhythm which ended in a literal burst of fireworks in the balcony.

Inspired by a sculpture by Max Ernst that looks like a forbidding iron wall but is actually made of cork, it’s a piece about deceptive appearances that progresses from its creepily sweet strings-and-harp opening to a passage of considerable rhythmic violence, its mood gradually turning more jubilant and
its final chord coinciding with a burst of indoor fireworks from the balcony. Attractively scored, it was ritzily done.

One of the best new pieces to be premiered on a first night for years, Dadaville was inspired by an enigmatic painted relief by Max Ernst. Carpenter saw it at the Tate in his home town, Liverpool, and imagined what might be behind its strange, iron barricade. He came up with this six-minute soundscape that began with whispering strings and gradually disclosed what sounded like 50 mechanical toys coming to life, until exploding into a full-blown jazz riff with wild solo breaks for brass. The surprise was the ending: a whoosh of fireworks erupted from the Albert Hall’s balconies. Gimmicky? You bet, and I loved the audacity...