Oliver Knussen: Something to celebrate

The Glasgow-born composer and conductor Oliver Knussen is 50 this month. And, as befits a man whose music is played all over the world, fellow musicians are queuing up to pay tribute to him at his birthday concerts, writes Bayan Northcott

Earlier this year, over a few weeks, Oliver Knussen, conceived, sketched, scored and handed over to Pinchas Zukerman and the Pittsburgh Symphony a complete Violin Concerto in three linked movements, confounding his reputation for painful slowness. He then travelled to the US to conduct what a publisher's recording reveals to have been a characteristically vivid and polished and rapturously received first performance.

It seems that British audiences are going to have to wait for over a year before getting the chance to endorse or modify that rapture. So, meanwhile, what is the new Concerto like? Attempting to describe music to readers who have yet to hear it is, at best, a tricky business, and, at worst, can be seriously misleading; but here goes. It begins with a clang of tubular bells and a sustained high, solo violin E, a musical question mark: what now? Unusually, it turns out to be the cadenza; but a cadenza cast in the form of a jagged recitative with many orchestral urgings and amplifications, as if straining to attain a more sustained forward momentum – which, over a sequence of lumbering bass figures, it does for a time, before falling away into a profound calm.

What now emerges is a slow aria of arching violin phrases against a tenderly rocking string accompaniment – the rockings twice transferred to the foreground of the texture as tutti-like punctuations of the evolving solo line, which ultimately ascends and freezes once more on that questioning high E. This time, the answer that unfolds is a fast tarantella-like finale, with incessant triplets galloping through a number of contrasting episodes, ranging from the ebulliant to the faintly sinister, climaxing, then running down as the high E emerges yet again. The bells clang and the circuit is complete.

The stopwatch reads 17 minutes, which is on the short side of most standard repertory concertos. But the work's overall form and apparently straightforward unfolding are so well balanced, and, as repeated listening gradually reveals, so subtle in melodic cross-connections, so rich in harmony and resourceful in scoring, that it does not feel short. And it does feel at least like a potential repertory piece – a hunch one pronounces the more confidently given the already ubiquitous performance history of around a dozen of Knussen's previous scores, from the modest tally of some 35 that have survived his recurrent revisions and exiguous castings-out over the years.

Not that a relatively select output is necessarily a disadvantage these days in gaining entry to a standard repertory that many would regard as full up long since; it is the massive producers of our time such as Henze or Maxwell Davies whose later efforts constantly threaten to displace their earlier ones. Nor should one discount the effectiveness of Knussen's self-advocacy, though his conducting skills have equally served a vast range of his fellow-composers – as the many musical tributes for his birthday evening at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, in London, next Wednesday by colleagues, ranging from the 35-year-old Julian Anderson to the 93-year-old Elliott Carter, will be gratefully acknowledging.

But if the Third Symphony (1973-9) has by now enjoyed 80-odd performances worldwide; if a steady succession of opera companies have staged the Sendak-inspired double bill Where the Wild Things Are (1979-83) and Higglety Pigglety Pop! (1984-90); if such ensemble pieces as Ophelia Dances (1975) and Songs without Voices (1991-92), such chamber works as Cantata (1977) for oboe and string trio, and such piano pieces as Sonya's Lullaby (1978) are by now thought of as core repertory of their genres, it must ultimately come from certain qualities in the music itself.

In a way, those qualities are best defined through Knussen's detractors. Only weeks back, he was side-swiped in the modern music quarterly Tempo as "a pseudo-avant-garde orchestrator" – a curious formulation, to be sure (what is genuine avant-garde orchestration?), but presumably suggesting a mere simulator of sonic novelty, lacking the tough originality of concept and style to which a real composer today ought to aspire, at least according to latter-day Modernist doctrine. Except that Knussen has never claimed adherence to any avant-garde line – even though he is well acquainted with the history and theories of those ideologies, and has lucidly conducted such avant-garde father figures as Boulez, Stockhausen and Ferneyhough. On the contrary, he has often been criticised as eclectic, even derivative – though the allusions to the sounds and procedures of favourite composers that he often makes the starting point of his compositions are invoked with a sense of appropriateness and responsibility quite distinct from the cynical relativism of so much post-modernist pick-and-mix. And the confidence with which he has steered a steady course between the twin dangers of dogmatic theory and consumerist kitsch reflects, in turn, his lifelong immersion, as composer, conductor, programme-planner and mentor, in the immediacies of music-making itself.

Hence, not only the infallibility of his ear and the virtuosity of his technique, but his acute sense of exactly how much material a particular passage of composition requires if it is to fully engage without overloading the genuinely musical listener – a sense he has subtly reinforced through some innovatory pitch procedures and proportional devices of his own, which deserve study by musicians and theorists interested in such things. And hence, more broadly, his evident understanding that the evolution of Western music has always been primarily a matter of recomposition, whatever nudges genuinely original figures may have given it from time to time – and among whom Knussen himself has always venerated Mussorgsky and Ives.

If music is intended only as background or to induce trance, of course, it does not need to communicate. But if it does seek to communicate, then the only way remains to invoke sounds and procedures with which the listener is already, in some way, familiar, and subsequently to modify them – the extent of the modification offering a measure of the new information and emotion the work has to offer, and of the composer's individuality. Like much of Stravinsky and Britten – two composers Knussen met as a child, and conducts with special understanding – the first impression of a Knussen score may be of its apparent borrowings and influences; but, as with those masters, these will generally sink into the background through subsequent hearings as the work's own substance emerges.

No doubt the British critics hearing the new Violin Concerto for the first time next year will catch themselves scribbling "Bartok" and "Berg" in the margins of their programmes during its opening pages, and perhaps "Britten" during its finale. But the more lasting question will be whether the snappy attack, the lyrical expressivity and the ambiguous playfulness it intermittently shares with those composers, to say nothing of the appeal of its lustrous scoring and resonant textures, prove to accommodate a varied succession of interpreters while continuing to disclose personal significances, as other works of Knussen have.

Knussen birthday concerts: 6.30pm and 7.45pm, 12 June, Queen Elizabeth Hall (020-7960 4242); and 3.30pm, 23 June, Snape Maltings (01728 687110). Also, Knussen is Composer of the Week, from 9am on 10 June, on BBC Radio 3