Wigmore Hall
Cathy
Milliken: Bright Ring (UK premiere)
Christian
Mason: Layers of Love
Dallapiccola:
Piccola
musica notturna
Benjamin:
Into
the Little Hill
Anu Komsi (soprano)
Helena Rasker (contralto)
Ensemble Modern
Ensemble Modern
George Benjamin (conductor)
This week, the Wigmore Hall
presents two concerts from George Benjamin and Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern, the
first ‘at home’ on Wigmore Street, the second moving north to Camden’s
Roundhouse. For the first, we heard Benjamin’s now classic first opera, Into the Little Hill, prefaced by three ensemble
works by Cathy Milliken, Christian Mason, and, for the evening’s spot of ‘early
music’, Luigi Dallapiccola.
An Ensemble Modern commission,
here receiving its United Kingdom premiere, Milliken’s Bright Ring spoke, to quote the composer, of ‘fields of energy that
I perceived whilst performing with the Ensemble Modern,’ an energy ‘of
collaboration and interaction, whether pulsing or still (or both)’. I initially
read such lines with a degree of scepticism, but having heard the piece, they
made a good deal of sense, the idea furthered by the title reference to the
line, ‘Bright is the ring of words’, from a Robert Louis Stevenson poem, and
the rings of Saturn. Two violins vied with each other at the opening, joined by
viola and intermittently others, in music that seemed to depict and/or express
both pent-up rhythmic violence and something (ring-like?) more numinous, often
led by flute or tuned percussion. There was, I think, a sense of something akin
to an extra-terrestrial landscape and narrative, not in a filmic way, but
perhaps more akin to the tone poems of the past. The close, in which a
flickering cello line initiated a final explosion, thereafter subsiding, seemed
once again to encapsulate that tension between ensemble and solo instrument,
planet and ring, pulse and its withdrawal.
Christian Mason’s 2015 Layers of Love, written for and recorded
by Klangforum Wien, announced itself with slithering, mysterious microtones.
Movement in various ways, rhythmic and harmonic, was initially slow and hard
won, yet undeniable. There was a strangeness that seemed more of this world
than Milliken’s other, but I am not sure I could explain what, practically, I
mean by that. Certainly there was drama, albeit less pictorial than in the
previous work. More than once, Bernd Alois Zimmermann came to my mind: again, I
am not entirely sure why, but think it may have had something to do with the
ultimately achieved rhythms and their relationship to sound, not least from the
double bass.
Dallapiccola’s Piccola musica notturna spoke with the
distilled mastery of a true classic, as perfectly formed in work and performance
as a piece by Mozart, Schoenberg, or Debussy. Indeed, rather to my surprise, I
found something naggingly Debussyan, if only in correspondence, to the turns of
several phrases, however different the serial method one could hear and feel as
clearly as if chez Schoenberg or his
pupils. It was not difficult to understand what might have attracted Benjamin to
so exquisitely logical, warmly expressive a miniature. If ever there were a
composer whose music we should hear far more often…
I had last heard Into the Little Hill only in
September, in Berlin, also conducted by the composer, albeit with the
Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Its small performing forces (two vocal soloists and
ensemble), formal perfection, and dramatic power render it a highly attractive
work for regular performance, whether on stage or in concert; yet possession of
such qualities does not always translate into such (relative) popularity. In
this case, as with Benjamin’s two subsequent, larger-scale operas, Written
on Skin and Lessons
of Love and Violence, it is heartening to report that widespread
enthusiasm continues. Stravinskian incision, violence, and economy, marked the
opening – not just for itself, but as the opening to this complete (compleat)
drama of modern political life, more bitingly relevant, so it seems, with every
hearing. Whether it were the cool hieratic (Symphonies
of Wind Instruments?) quality to the Minister’s addressing the crowd; the
latter’s controlled yet increasing hysteria; the deathly tension of electric woodwind
lines as the Minister meets the Stranger; or the latter’s wheedling, seductive
way (heightened no end by Anu Komsi in particular, likewise her bloodcurdling
cries ‘Swear by your sleeping child’): one could have cut the air with a knife –
and that only in the first scenes to Part One.
As so often, operatic mastery
shows itself particularly in the interludes between scenes. What a composer
says and does not, unconstrained by words and indeed voices, will often – not always
– penetrate to the heart of his or her musical dramaturgy. Such was certainly
the case here, both in work and performance; so too in orchestral writing and playing
elsewhere, as for instance in the terror of the intricately inviting processional
that underlies the scene between Mother and Child. ‘The rats will stream like
hot metal to the rim of the world.’ Indeed, they would – and did. A similar
observation might be made of the division into two parts, the latter’s opening
sounding and feeling strongly as if a new act, as if marking the return from an
interval for the opera’s final, fatal events to unfold. ‘And music?’ ‘All music
– smiles the minister – is incidental.’ Not at all. For the true rodent ghosts
were now in the machine; so too, led by far-from-incidental music, was the child whose grasping,
mendacious politician of a father had stolen its future. The will of the people
had been enacted: The Little Hill
meant The Little Hill.
