Michael Church: Prom 57 (…) Thomas Larcher’s «Cenotaph» makes old symphonic forms newly relevant (The Independent, 1.9.2016)

[…] His music is always instinctive and emotional, yet it possesses a watchmaker’s precision; its stock-in-trade includes biting dissonances, cinematic cross-cuts, and startling shifts in volume, timbre, and tone. What is quintessentially classical is the care and clarity with which he lays out each work’s structure.

In this new work all those qualities are there in spades. Each of its four movements is fastidiously shaped, and in each there are outbursts of anarchically dissonant fury. But under Semyon Bychkov’s baton the BBC Symphony Orchestra delivered a superbly detailed performance, with the sudden turns into pastiche-Mahler and pastiche-Bach opening like wondrous flowers in a parched terrain …
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Tim Ashley: BBCSO/Bychkov review – faultless and furious Larcher premiere (The Guardian, 29.8.2016)

Thomas Larcher’s formidable symphony commemorating refugees drowned in the Mediterranean builds to a climax of tremendous irony and power. […]

It’s a formidable score, angry yet lyrical, and rooted in the mainstream symphonic tradition, though it also pushes at the boundaries of conventional structure. Larcher argues that his music is not programmatic – that it does not «convey messages, but asks questions». But it’s difficult not to hear the heaving of a treacherous sea beneath the formal crisis of the opening movement, or the intimation of dangerously becalmed waters in the grieving adagio. The sonorities are by turns lucid and brutal, and the climax comes with a battering scherzo that furiously demands answers, only to be greeted with a banal ländler that reeks of indifference and contempt. It’s a moment of tremendous irony and power. You couldn’t fault the performance …
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Anna Picard: Prom 57: BBCSO/ Bychkov at the Royal Albert Hall (The Times, 28.08.2016)

The sound worlds in this ostensibly straightforward three-work concert were complementary, and Larcher’s new symphony exquisite.

Thomas Larcher’s Symphony No 2, Cenotaph, opens with a violent slap of sound. Smeared and blurred strings quickly cool the crimson cheek, interrupted by cauterised fanfares, fragmented hymns, sweet laments for solo violin and clarinet, a cobalt swell of sound from harp, celesta, vibraphone and prepared piano. In Semyon Bychkov’s taut performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the UK premiere, there was little doubt that Cenotaph was being treated as an important, maybe great, new work — about time too, given the parochial quality of some of this year’s new works.

Larcher’s chamber music holds itself at an exquisite distance from its often disordered subject matter. In Cenotaph he has switched off the air conditioning and stepped out from behind the lens. There are oil drums, biscuit tins and mixing bowls in the percussion section — detritus from what the composer describes as «a man-made disaster»: the drowning of thousands in the Mediterranean. Yet the symphony is as much about Europe (and Europe’s history) as it is about those who died trying to reach it: a muted funeral chorale for bassoons, violas and cellos that conjures Berg; gauzy tremors for high strings; a wistful Mahlerian Ländler placed like a question mark at the close of the scherzo …