A celebration of Claude Vivier's distinctive soundworld, plus the best of May's classical concerts

The Southbank Centre celebrate the work of Canadian composer Claude Vivier − the victim of a grisly murder in Paris in 1983

London Sinfonietta/Claude Vivier celebration, Queen Elizabeth Hall ★★★☆☆

Nearly 40 years since his death, the Quebecois composer Claude Vivier retains something of his cult following. The cult was, perhaps, a posthumous phenomenon, since at the time of his grisly murder in Paris in 1983 his distinctive music was not yet all that widely appreciated. If his star seems again to have dimmed a little in recent years, there is every chance that this concert by the London Sinfonietta under Ilan Volkov − the opening event of a weekend series celebrating Vivier at the Southbank Centre − will have won new friends for the composer: in the final work the evening the Sinfonietta was joined by the students of the Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble.

One thing this compact series highlights is how Vivier lived life so furiously − a figure blazing towards extinction is how the critic Paul Griffiths has described him. He enjoyed only about a decade of productivity, and even such an early work as Musik für das Ende shows his fascination with death. Vivier’s opera Kopernikus was subtitled Rituel de la mort, and his last work, Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele?, translates as “Do you believe in the immortality of the soul?”. It was left unfinished, a premonition perhaps paralleling that of Mozart’s when composing his Requiem.

This well-designed Sinfonietta programme − a throwback to when London’s leading new music ensemble regularly presented concerts that really mattered − was framed by two Vivier works from his breakthrough year of 1980. The distinctive timbre of his music was all there in the evening’s opening with Zipangu, a piece for strings that draws its name from that given to Japan at the time of Marco Polo. Vivier’s Asian travels left their mark on him, though not in any obviously derivative musical way.

Zipangu is a tense soundscape; playing without any vibrato cushioning, the upper strings pull away from the drone of the lower strings. Putting pressure on their bows, the musicians dig in before a wall of sound eventually splinters. From this point on the music − even while unfolding in clearly contrasted sections − remains in a state of flux, and Volkov shaped it impressively. Gathering up its disembodied voices for one final burst of energy, he drew it to a questing close.

Two aspects of Vivier’s autobiography are seldom far from his music: his homosexuality and the fact that, having been put up for adoption, he never knew his birth mother. He described Lonely Child, his piece for soprano and chamber orchestra, as “a long song of solitude”. It is actually quite concise, despite such Mahlerian suggestions at the beginning as a tolling bell and funeral tread. Claire Booth was the ethereal soloist, bringing a feeling of incantation to the vocal line, often shadowed by the orchestra. Everything is stopped in the middle of the piece by several blows of the bass drum, before the text (some of it in French, some in a made-up language) invokes Tadzio, the boy in Death in Venice.

Specially commissioned to go in the middle of this programme and given its world premiere here, The Seeds of Solitude by the Canadian composer Nicole Lizée consists of three short and somewhat oblique films with live musical accompaniment. A layer of sound design is already built into the video, but most of the music is supplied by the ensemble. Next to Vivier’s work, Lizée’s postmodern atmospherics lowered the musical temperature a little. But in dealing with such themes as paranoia, insomnia and even communicating with the dead, her Seeds of Solitude certainly seemed true to the spirit of Vivier.

Composer Claude Vivier

The Southbank Centre weekend continues with Vivier: Musik für das Ende