Royal Albert Hall
Ravel:
La
Valse
Berio:
Sinfonia
Stravinsky:
The
Rite of Spring
London Voices (chorus master:
Ben Parry)
Ian Dearden, Sound Intermedia
(sound projection)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Semyon Bychkov (conductor)
A richly allusive programme and
performance, this. With any artwork – even, one might say, with anything at all
– we all bring something different to it and take away something different too.
With Berio in meta-mode, that becomes still more the case, in Sinfonia at least as much as in, say, La vera storia. (Will someone please,
please stage that – or indeed any of the composer’s operas? The closest I have
come was a wonderful performance of Laborintus
II in Berlin from Simon Rattle et al.) Both La Valse and The Rite of
Spring are quoted – allusively and/or elusively? – in Sinfonia, of course, but that is perhaps not really the point; or at
least it was not for this particular listener on this particular occasion. I was
led to think what ballet and opera might be or have been, what their
relationships might be or have been, how they relate to the ‘symphony’ or
sinfonia, and indeed to that thing, that practice, that whatever-and/or-however-we-want-to-think-of-and/or-experience-it
we call ‘music’.
La
Valse opened de profundis, as a companion to the
yet-to-be-heard Rite: highly,
ominously rhythmic, waltz fragments and later waltzes (?) themselves evolving.
Much was seen, or rather heard – although somehow I fancied I saw things here
too, in a ballet of the mind – as if through a kaleidoscope. The business of
the senses, as of the mind, is messy, contradictory. Semyon Bychkov and the BBC
Symphony Orchestra imparted unease as much through variegation of colour as
rubato or harmony. There was often, not always, a mechanistic quality:
paradoxical perhaps, given the apparent freedom of the waltz(ing), yet in
keeping with the dialectics at work in the rest of the evening’s programme.
Such, after all is this work, that conflict conveyed with disturbing magic in
this performance.
The darkness of the opening
chord of Sinfonia seemed, in context,
to relate to the opening of La Valse.
Voices entered, rendering – to use an appropriately Berian term – the music ‘lighter’
perhaps, or at least differently mysterious. Then they were off. Words from Claude
Lévi-Strauss – I do not think we should say this is Lévi-Strauss him- or
itself, or should we? – emerged, individual voices emerged: from the mass and vice versa. Words and sound, words’
relationship with sound, with instruments, and so on: all this and more was not
just what we were led to think about; it was what we experienced. It was music.
How ‘symphonic’ it was or should have been really depends entirely upon
definitions: not an interesting game, really, save for the analytical
philosopher – who, tellingly, will rarely have anything to tell us about music.
The name, the sound of Martin
Luther King came together, like the musical forces as a whole, in the second
movement. Points – however understood – of precision, of incision, not least
from piano and brass seemed to gain meaning against the backdrop of a more
mysterious ‘mass’, again however understood; and vice versa. Deconstruction was not only our lot, our necessity; it
was our joy, our freedom, our music. Beguiling yet menacing, the wonderland of
the third movement, like its Mahlerian bedding, asked us: what does this mean,
where are we heading, perhaps even who cares? And of course, it told us: ‘keep
going’. Interplay between voices and instruments, as well as their
differentiation, seemed especially apparent in this performance. ‘Thank you, Mr
Bychkov’: from which the fourth movement flowed, a tributary perhaps, or even a
tribute, as if Mahler’s ‘O Röschen rot,’ yet not, emphatically not. This and
the fifth movement sounded, as indeed the performance had increasingly,
retrospectively as a whole, as if an instrumental, vocal, electronic madrigal
reborn, both consciously and unconsciously. The opening to the latter, with its
piano, flute, and soprano trio, seemed to incite a rejuvenation or better a
reinvention of the work’s earlier musical worlds in both unity and dissolution.
Again in context, the
multifarious woodwind lines of The Rite
of Spring’s opening sounded as if a response to Berio. Wilder, I think,
even now: testament to a performance that refused to treat this totemic work as
a glossy ‘orchestral showpiece’. It was never, ever slick, constantly
ratcheting the rhythmic and harmonic
tension. Given Stravinsky’s method, ‘developed’ is probably the wrong word, yet
Bychkov heard and projected it as a single, vivid narrative that yet gave space
and voice to its individual scenes. Motivic insistence and transformation
rightly did much of the work, grinding of ritualistic gears lacking nothing in
force, willpower, and fatal inevitability, such affinities and conflicts readily
evoking parallels in the previous two works on the programme. ‘The Sacrifice’
began as if a second act to a wordless opera; in a sense, it is: a new world or
at least a new standpoint that only makes sense in reference to its
predecessor. (Might one not say the same of movements of a symphony, or a
sinfonia?) There was strangeness here that was anything but appliqué: no effort to be different, no
effort to impress. Perhaps the challenge of playing the Rite today is actually to play it as music. Perhaps the same might also
be said of the challenge of listening to it and indeed to any music.
