MUSSORGSKIAN GIANT

RODERIC DUNNETT on the massive talents of the
English composer and conductor Oliver Knussen

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How does Knussen set about composing? 'Usually I compose a little bit -- four or five bars -- and then design the shape of the whole piece from that. Writing the piece becomes filling in the shape. The ingredients of a piece are almost invariably stated at the very beginning -- I like putting my cards on the table. But I probably don't know, even at that stage, what a work is going to sound like; often enough the shape will alter subsequently.'

Knussen probably ought to be paid treble the rate of other composers : his later symphonies each last scarcely a quarter of an hour, yet with his late-Stravinskian ingenuity -- 'in Ollie's scores not a single note gets wasted,' Mark-Anthony Turnage has said of him; Hans Keller might have said the same -- Knussen packs more into them than most manage to say in an hour.

Part of his brilliance, orchestration aside, is this remarkable Webernian gift for compressing (Symphony No 3, for instance, stems from just two three-note cells; with the Whitman Settings, 'all four songs', he says, 'grow out of the idea heard in the very first bar). Webern aside, one thinks immediately of Boulez, Carter, or, from his own generation, perhaps George Benjamin. Knussen's mature studies were with Gunther Schuller, first at Tanglewood and later privately, before returning to the UK in l975.

Living in Aldeburgh he doesn't, he says, feel 'the ghost of Britten peering over his shoulder. If I thought that, I'd freeze up! But I was lucky enough to meet him several times as a boy, so perhaps that helps.' Rather, by reducing unnecessary calls, Suffolk has actually made composition more possible -- though he can just as easily find himself composing 'in a tiny penthouse in New York (most of late Stravinsky, he points out, was composed just a stone's throw from LA's Sunset Boulevard).

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