 |
| © Volker Kreidler |
Boulez – Initiale
Schubert – Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, D 965Mozart – Piano Quartet in E-flat major, KV 493
Berg – Chamber Concerto
Widmann – Fantasie, for solo clarinet
Boulez – sur Incises
Anna Prohaska (soprano)
Michael Barenboim (violin)
Yulia Deyneka (viola)
Kian Soltani (cello)
Jörg
Widmann (clarinet)
Karim Said (piano)
Boulez Ensemble
Daniel Barenboim
(piano, conductor)
‘Musik für das denkende Ohr’ is the slogan for Berlin’s new Pierre Boulez Saal,
which opened its doors to the public on Saturday 4 March. Why a new hall? The
city’s Philharmonie (‘Karajan’s Circus’, or ‘Zirkus Karajani’, as West
Berliners dubbed it) remains a monument to architectural, acoustic, and indeed
performative modernism. There are no bad seats, whether visually or
acoustically; the surrounding of the orchestra, or other performers, by the
audience offers quite a different, ‘in the round’ experience from many more ‘traditional’
halls, even the most blessed acoustically, such as Vienna’s Musikverein and
Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, let alone the miserable examples with which London
has been cursed. Nevertheless, although
Hans Scharoun’s Berlin hall has a smaller, chamber music hall attached, Berlin
has had nothing like this. Frank Gehry’s oval design – no stage, merely a
centre, again ‘in the round’ – genuinely seems to open up, in the spirit of
Boulez’s long-held desire for a flexible ‘salle modulable’, the possibility of
the ‘thinking ear’: to engage, to reflect, to make itself part of the
performance. The greatest distance there can be between the conductor and the
most distant member of the audience (682 seats in total) is but fourteen
metres. There is intimacy, then, but the intimacy, it is hoped of collaborative
endeavour.
The conceptual collaboration
between Gehry, Daniel Barenboim, and acoustician, Yasuhisa Toyota stands very
much in the spirit of the artistic collaboration, spanning more than half a
century, between Barenboim and Boulez. They performed together for the first
time in Berlin, with the Philharmonic, in Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto, and
Barenboim has long proved one of the most ardent champions of his friend’s
music. Whilst Boulez’s death continues to be lamented, the conscience of New
Music seems almost to be reborn here. In programming philosophy, we see echt-Boulezian selections, connections
made. Barenboim’s new ‘Boulez Ensemble’, at least as modulable as the hall, made up of musicians from his Staatskapelle
Berlin and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, both of which Boulez conducted, will
present concerts with combinations of contemporary music, Classical music, and classically
modernist music – just as Boulez would insist that musicians auditioning for
his Ensemble Intercontemporain play one Classical piece, not just contemporary
music. The hall will also, most important of all, offer a home to the young
musician-students of the Barenboim-Said Akademie, whose first cohort,
thirty-seven of them, enrolled last autumn.
 |
| © Volker Kreidler |
There will be much more to say
about the hall itself; much will already have been said by others. I should
like to concentrate now on the opening concert itself. It was given twice, the
Saturday evening concert in the presence of a host of dignitaries, the German
President included; I went the following morning. It may have been a lengthy
occasion by the standards of the typical, one might say formulaic, concert; it
did not feel as if it were. There is no reason why every concert should last
for about two hours with an interval; every opera does not. If a performance
of, say, the Diabelli Variations or
the Missa solemnis is enough in
itself, then there is no reason to add to it. Nor is there any reason to fret
about a concert as rich, in very Boulezian terms, in programming possibility as
this. Split into three parts, with two intervals, repertoire stretching from
Mozart to Jörg Widmann, this encouraged, even did its part to create, that very
‘thinking ear’ of which we had previously been informed: to think and to
listen.
A new hall needs a fanfare. This
one had Boulez’s 1987 Initiale, for
seven brass instruments (two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, and tuba). The
musicians encircled us, or rather played to us, Gabrieli-like, from the balcony,
conducted (although I could not see him from where I was seated) by Barenboim.
Clarity and warmth combined in near-ideal proportions, both in work and in
performance. The experience of Répons
seemed to offer musical as well as spatial inspiration – albeit now somewhat
miniaturised. Five minutes of music offered an extraordinary expressive range,
almost as if a symphonic poem and its narrative, wordless or otherwise, were
being distilled – which, in a sense, is just what was happening. It is not for nothing that ‘form’, understood
as something more dynamic than ‘structure’, is contained within the word
‘performance’.
Schubert is to feature strongly
in the Boulez Saal’s programming. A Winterreise
with Christian Gerhaher, Barenboim at the piano, will launch a cycle of the
complete Lieder over several years;
Barenboim will also play the complete piano sonatas and conduct the
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in the complete the symphonies. Here, we heard Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, with Anna
Prohaska and Jörg Widmann, neatly also offering connections both to Widmann’s
own clarinet Fantasie in the third
section of the concert and to subsequent Widmann contributions to the season.
This was true chamber music, perhaps especially between the two ‘soloists’,
Barenboim not exactly reticent but far from dominant. The song opens: ‘When I
stand on the highest rock, look down into the deep valley, and sing,’ that
final ‘und singe’, quietly ecstatic here, enthusiastically echoed, as if across
the valley, by the clarinet. The clarity of both lines – this was certainly not
just a matter of the acoustic – did much to aid the Alpine impression:
‘atmosphere’, as Boulez would have been the first to point out, does not
necessarily entail a blur. There was real sadness to be heard in the fourth and
fifth stanzas, ‘In tiefem Gram verhehr ich mich…,’ until the ‘wunderbarer
Macht’ (wondrous power) of song itself won through: a triumph as unmistakeable
as it was unexaggerated. Playing to the gallery, figuratively or literally, is
not a requirement for the hall of the thinking ear. And what post-Mozartian
delight there was to be had in the concluding stanza, Spring arrived, receiving
a fitting celebration in Prohaska’s coloratura.
Barenboim has been associated
with the music of Mozart for as long as he has been a performing musician. For
many of us, his piano concertos (whether with the English Chamber Orchestra or
the Berlin Philharmonic) can hardly be bettered. It was fitting, then, to round
off this first part of the concert with Mozart’s E-flat major Piano Quartet,
with Michael Barenboim (violin), Yulia Deyneka (viola), and Kian Soltani
(cello). I am yet to be entirely convinced by Barenboim senior’s new piano,
much as I applaud the initiative; this was not the occasion on which I was to
be won over. At times, although I do not wish to exaggerate, his uncontested
leading role passed over into heavy-handedness. Nevertheless, at its best the
first movement offered a fine balance between ebullience and tenderness,
muscularity excluding neither relaxation nor, most importantly, dialogue. A typical Barenboim strength
was to be heard in the dynamism of form I remarked upon in Initiale; Mozart’s music developed,
motivically and harmonically, the one engendering the other. The balance
between simplicity and complexity was well achieved in the slow movement,
harmonic surprised registering with a delight that comes of knowing them well.
The quiet dignity of the score, supported by extraordinary musical richness as
soon as one exercised that ‘thinking ear’, was affirmed. Perhaps the finale was
taken a little hastily: more Allegro
than Allegretto? Such matters are,
however, tricky in Mozart. It had, at any rate, the character of a finale, even if Barenboim sometimes proved a little
too dominant again. The extroversion of the close was nothing less than
delightful.
 |
| © Peter Adamik |
The second section was given
over to Berg’s Chamber Concerto. Barenboim conducted, his son played the violin
solo, with Karim Said as solo pianist. (It was difficult not to think of this
as a reinvention of the classic recording with Boulez, Barenboim, and Pinchas
Zukerman.) Even with the intervention of an interval, one could hardly resist,
even if one wished to do so, hearing Berg with Mozartian ears: protean, teeming
with invention and expression. Boulez’s late recording with Mitusko Uchida and
Christian Tetzlaff, cunningly, revealingly coupled with Mozart’s own Gran Partita, KV 361, came to mind.
Thirteen instruments: how very un-Schoenbergian! The two soloists only combine
in the final movement, the first being the pianist’s territory. Said offered
clarity and sweep – just as Boulez, or Berg, might have wanted, or so one could
fancy. Conductor, ensemble, and hall seemed to combine to afford a relationship
between such clarity and complexity that came to the very heart of the work and
its ever-shifting balances. Barenboim had its measure as few conductors, Boulez
excepted, can ever have done, more than once playing up, or so it seemed,
anticipations of Lulu.
Musical process was audibly at
work throughout, just as much in the central Adagio as in that opening theme and variations. Michael Barenboim’s
playing gave us tenderness and fury, sometimes well-nigh spontaneous. Still
more so did that of the Boulez Ensemble, its climaxes fearsome, de profundis. Berg’s music emerged as it
should: labyrinthine yet purposeful. The thread was never lost, not even for a
split second. Furious, again, and still more febrile, the finale, piano and
violin now combined, proved endless generative in its working through of
musical material. Constructivism was shown to be in itself expressive, not
somehow, sentimentally, opposed to expression. (Again, Boulez would surely have
approved.) The re-entry of the orchestral ensemble seemed truly to set in
motion the idea of a finale, endlessly developmental and yet unquestionable in
its conclusion.
Widmann returned to give a
spell-binding account of his early (1993) Fantasie
for solo clarinet. Like the brass players for Initiale, he played down to us from the balcony, in a performance
that incited, might even be thought of as incantatory. Musical line was as clear, as direct, as
anything we had heard before, extended techniques very much at its service
rather than heard for the first time. The performance seemed almost to
exemplify the wishes expressed both by Boulez and by Barenboim that new music
(newish, in this case) be performed as if it were classical (and vice versa).
Meanwhile,
three pianos, three sets of percussion instruments, and three harps awaited
their respective performers (Karim Said, Denis Koshukhin, Michael Wendeberg;
Lev Loftus, Pedro Torrejón González, Dominic Oelze; Aline Khouri, Susanne
Kabaln, Stephen Fitzpatrick) for Boulez’s sur
Incises. Like many of Boulez’s works, sur
Incises has its seeds in an earlier work. Incises is a piano piece written (1994, revised 2001) for the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition (with which
Maurizio Pollini, long an advocate of Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata, had a
strong association). Boulez’s initial intention, as he explained in an
interview of 1998, was to:
… transform
this piece into a longer one for Pollini and a group of instrumentalists, a
kind of piano concerto although without reference to the traditional form. …
Therefore, I produced a piece for three pianos, assuming that there already
exists enough interesting literature for two pianos and ensembles, especially
in the modern age – take for example Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. (In my opinion, everybody
would have been reminded of this world if I had also written a piece for two
pianos.) I have also considered the possibility of four pianos as this
constellation is very attractive and provides a good balance.
Then, however, the siren call of Stravinsky and especially
Les Noces suggested another path. As
Boulez would remark more recently, in 2010, ‘This is the reason why I ended up
with three pianos - incidentally three pianists are part of our ensemble
[Intercontemporain].’ There were likewise three percussionists in the ensemble,
and subsequently, the idea of adding three harps occurred to him, an idea
rendered more attractive by his use of the instrument in Répons.
Boulez’s
conception of serialism as ever-expanding, open-ended, was the overriding
experience of this performance, conducted by Barenboim. The spatial element sounded
more crucial than ever: we hear solo lines but also different groups: three
groups, considered vertically, each of percussion, harp, and piano, and,
considered horizontally, the three percussionists, the three harpists, and the
three pianists. A startling aspect of those latter formations, all the more so
in this telling acoustic, was to hear passages transferring spatially across,
say, the three pianos, whilst remaining in a sense part of the one giant piano:
played, as it were, by Barenboim, the pianist-conductor. I have long thought
here of Boulez playing with something akin to a musical magical square, three
rows and columns constantly shifting, and yet always adding up to the required
total, even if we do not know what that should be: a magical extension of
Webern, one might say.
Then there were the beguiling
sonorities: the sumptuous quality of Boulez’s harmonies, fully captured here,
harks back to and yet surely extends those of Debuusy. Kinetic, rhythmic energy
brought every more strongly to mind Stravinsky and Bartók; indeed, that
distancing from the Sonata for Two Pianos
and Percussion notwithstanding, Bartók’s ghost seemed present in some of
the piano writing, contagious, as it were, for the other instrumentalists. Barenboim
seemed especially adept at signalling moments of transformation; one might
think of Boulez’s own conception, adumbrated in his lectures to the Collège de France, of the musical
‘signal’. Rising clamour, typically Boulezian frenzy, would subside, at least
partially, dialectically: confounding, yet making unanswerable sense. Form, we
were again reminded, lives, acquires meaning, in performance, especially one so
outstanding in quality as this. (What collaborative virtuosity was on show, and
yet never for its own sake!) Nevertheless, however much we might have wished this
universe to continue expanding forever, its material in perpetual
proliferation, the conclusion once again proved decisive – at least until the
next time. The ear had thought; the mind had listened.
(An edited version of this article appeared first in VAN Magazine, focusing less on the performances, more on the idea and reality of the hall and its programming. Please click here to read that. Apologies for the inconsistencies of formatting in this case: I seemed unable to get it to work, however much I tried...)
