Review: SSO's Hear it, Feel it: Music, Emotion and the Brain

Sydney Opera House, August 20

The large screens above the orchestra showed a plot of conductor David Robertson's brain activity while listening to silence, to Panic from John Adams's Dr Atomic Symphony and to randomly generated sounds. Adams would be relieved to know Robertson's brain fizzed more to his piece than the alternatives. Then they showed the same brain while Robertson thought through the last movement of Beethoven's Fifth silently in his head. It turns out Keats was right: heard sounds are sweet but those unheard are sweeter.

Stripping the musical experience back to neurological activity and cognition proved a brilliant way of cleansing mind and auditory nerve as preparation for Originel from … explosante-fixe… by Pierre Boulez. More than almost any other composer in history, Boulez set out to create a new musical language that did not rely on established musical codes – a grand artistic tabula rasa after the catastrophe of World War II. After the frenetic agitation of Adams's Panic, Boulez's music, a series of carefully crafted mobile and static textures, emerged with delicate beauty, Janet Webb playing the solo flute part with clarity and poise.

The Piano Concerto by Gyorgy Ligeti, played with astonishing virtuosity, and brilliant digital and rhythmic adroitness by Nicolas Hodges, by contrast, was a tour-de-force of fascinatingly complex patterns, drawn from a wide variety of cultural sources. There were mid-European vocal laments, African sounds and mechanised, quasi dehumanised rhythms all in bewildering and joyous play tracking a process somehow beyond one's perceptual grasp.

In the second half, the first movement of Mozart's Symphony No.25 in G minor, K 183, was preceded by a video lecture from the Associate Professor Simon Carlile from the University of Sydney (also my daytime stomping ground) who explained how the brain processes spatial, timbral and rhythmic auditory events. Though it draws on Wagnerian motives and Romantic expressive codes, Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy, Opus 54, also benefited from the mind-clearing neurological discussion, by encouraging the ear to focus on the details of its sensual orchestration. Scriabin's interest in synaesthesia – the co-ordination (and sometimes confusion) of colour and sound – is also relevant to brain science.

Stimulating, cogent and fun, the concert revealed Robertson as a superb communicator of all that is exciting about the big brain activity of listening to music.