Earlier in Friday's concert, he led the world premiere of Louis Andriessen's 'The Hague Hacking,' for two pianos and orchestra. The Dutch composer admits to a number of influences and in this 18 minute piece he uses two pre-existing melodies, one, 'a once-popular sing-along song about the city of The Hague,' and the other, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, which entered his conscious not through direct knowledge of the score, but through a Tom and Jerry cartoon called 'The Cat Concerto,' in which our heroes play a cat and mouse game with it.

Andriessen, too, plays a kind of cat and mouse game with the melodies, deconstructing them, processing them, stretching them. I doubt I would have recognized the Liszt had I not known it was there. Yet, having been informed, there it was clear as day and the fun of the piece became hearing what the composer was doing with it – the procedure of the thing. (Such is the case as well with Stravinsky's famous 'Greeting Prelude,' a Cubist deconstruction of 'Happy Birthday.') One of Andriessen's procedures here is something called 'hocket,' in which single notes in a phrase or line are rapidly traded between one or more performers. Sisters Katia and Marielle Labèque were the pianists, and they made their hammered hocketing sound easy. The whole piece has a chiseled quality, bright and brittle and sculpted out of rock.

By Timothy Mangan