His Master’s Feet

Gerald Barry once licked Beethoven’s carpet. At least, that’s what he told me, and I’m as sure as any interviewer of Gerald Barry can be that he wasn’t pulling my leg. While showing him round a museum, a guide pointed out said floor-covering. Whereupon — Barry being Barry — he was overcome by an urge for tangible, physical contact with a relic that had, after all, once been trodden by the Master. ‘So, once everyone was out the room, I got down and had a quick lick.’

And, if you can compare music to a physical sensation, the closing passages of Barry’s 1988 orchestral work Chevaux-de-Frise feel a bit like the childhood sensation of licking the carpet for a dare: a rippling, juddering sound in the whole orchestra, whose very horribleness has its own strangely compulsive sensual pleasure. Barry loves to set nerves jangling. The earlier part of the piece, in which the full orchestra blasts out blocky chords in a relentless onslaught, is like being pelted with metallic cubes. The sheer force of Chevaux-de-Frise appalled listeners when it was premièred at the 1988 Proms, but we’ve got to know Barry a bit better since then. This performance by the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Barry’s friend and number one fan Thomas Adès, felt translucent, even playful, with Adès bringing out bouncy counter-rhythms and strewing little sprays of glockenspiel about the place like tinsel. It’s almost as if Barry has been teasing us the whole time.

Beethoven’s own Eroica symphony came next. The idea was Adès’s: over three years he’s pairing all of Beethoven’s symphonies with music by Barry. None of his own music, by the way — it’s an impressively sincere act of advocacy from a composer whose public persona can sometimes come across as self-important.