Conservatoire Darius Milhaud
Charles
Martin Loeffler: Quatre poèmes, op.5
Charlotte
Bray: In Black Light
(world premiere)
Liszt:
Romance
oubliée, S 132
Kodály:
Adagio for viola and piano
Brahms:
Zwei
Gesänge, op.91
Tabea Zimmermann (viola)
Andrea Hill (soprano)
Edwige Herchenroder (piano)
An oddly patchy concert, this:
alongside the most unidiomatic professional Liszt performance I can recall and
only intermittently successful Brahms, we heard a highly convincing world
premiere and fine performances of two other works hitherto unknown to me: one
indeed written by a composer of whom I had not previously heard. That composer
was Charles Martin Loeffler, one of the works his Quatre poèmes, op.5 of 1893. Or should that have been Karl Martin
Loeffler? So consumed with hatred, it seems, had the young Karl been for
Germany that, even following his emigration to the USA, he would claim to have
been born not Prussian but Alsatian and changed his name accordingly. Quatre poèmes was doubtless chosen
because it would involve all three musicians performing in this concert, but it
seemed to me on a single hearing fully to justify inclusion on merit. One
heard, aptly enough, what seemed to be a largely yet not exclusively German
sense of harmony with a more French taste in verse, melody, and sometimes
texture too. The first song, a setting of Baudelaire’s La Cloche fêlée, seemed to mediate both as work and performance
between Duparc and Brahms, Tabea Zimmermann’s viola-playing – Loeffler was an
early enthusiast for the viola d’amore – becoming more Romantically ardent as
the piece demanded or suggested. It offered development in a more
conventionally instrumental sense, yet seemed also to have something of a
Franco-Flemish (Franck, perhaps soon Debussy too) taste for the cyclical. It
certainly convinced, moreover, as a response to the poem. The Verlaine ‘Dansons
la gigue’ was gypsy-like – at least in a nineteenth-century sense – whilst also
seemingly responding to Carmen in its
more reflective moments. Verlaine was the poet for the remaining two pieces
too. An atmosphere of general sadness, relieved somewhat by finely spun piano
arabesques from Edwige Herchenrode, characterised ‘Le Son du cor s’afflige vers
les bois’. The vocal line in the closing ‘Sérénade’, and Andrea Hill’s delivery
of it, hinted at la vieille France,
but this was no pastiche, instead a dramatic evocation of another time,
‘mandoline’ and all. I even fancied there were suggestions of the darker Ravel:
presentiments, though, given the date. Fascinating: I shall be keen to hear
more Loeffler.
I have always been keen to hear
more Charlotte Bray too. The world premiere of In Black Light, for solo viola, furthered that keenness. It struck
me as having some aspects of variational form – developing variation if you
will, but also something more ‘traditional’ than that – within an overarching
framework that has something of what would once have called a tone poem to it. Rhythms
and intervals help generate style and idea. Following a grave opening of (relative)
pitch extremes, a broad canvas emerges, upon which composer and performer alike
offer a commanding variety of musical strokes: one section ‘jagged and fiery’
(Bray), another ‘a kind of broken waltz’, another ‘a mysterious pizzicato
miniature’, and so on: related yet contrasting. The rhythmic profile is
certainly sharp – and was certainly sharp in Zimmermann’s commanding
performance, clearly highly attuned to the work’s contours and expressive requirements.
The opening theme’s return did indeed sound, to quote the composer again, ‘urgently
present and expressively charged’.
Liszt’s Romance oubliée has always seemed to me – perhaps unsurprisingly –
superior in its piano solo version. That, however, is no reason to shun any of
its others, especially when ‘actual’ Liszt chamber music is so thin on the
ground, the composer’s tendency being, not unlike Wagner’s, to write chamber
music within works for larger forces. The opening solo line certainly suits the
viola, yet this proved for violist and pianist alike a strangely constricted
performance, tentative to the point of incoherence. Kodály’s Adagio, first written for violin, then
arranged for viola, proved much more Zimmermann and Herchenroder’s thing. Its
darkly Romantic opening sounded almost Elgarian – at least to this Englishman.
Zimmermann spun a rich, yet far from indulgent line, which enabled the material
to develop in far from predictable fashion. If her pianist seemed very much the
‘accompanist’, she performed well in that role. As she did in the two closing
Brahms songs; to begin with, indeed, we might have been about to hear a newly
discovered sonata for viola and piano. Taken as a whole, though, those
performances might have been more attuned to the songs’ form. Lack of
direction, even meandering, married to a reticent way with the words (Rückert’s)
from Hill sometimes made for heavy Brahmsian weather. If only they had been
performed as if written by Loeffler.
