Kammermusiksaal
Schubert:
Piano Sonata no.18 in G
major, D 894
Lachenmann:
GOT
LOST (2007-8)
Yuko Kakuta (soprano)
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
A fascinating pairing of
Schubert and Lachenmann from Pierre-Laurent Aimard and, in the latter, Yuko
Kakuta. In some ways, roles, at least roles as might popularly be assumed, were
reversed. What we heard was plain-spoken, even austere, day I say modernist,
Schubert, followed by vividly dramatic, accessible, perhaps even Romantic
Lachenmann. Such labels doubtless beg more questions than they answer, but then
so, quite properly, do such performances. At any rate, Aimard provoked us in
the best way: not out of some desire to épater
les bourgeois, but to make us listen, to think, and most likely to
reconsider our lazy assumptions, bourgeois or otherwise.
Basic pulse and metre were
established right from the start of the G major Piano Sonata, D 894. You might
think that obvious, yet it is far from a given. Aimard’s account of the
first movement flowed, and was flexible, but never lost sight (or hearing) of
that fundamental pulse. Thematic groups remained distinct but also emerged from
one another, in a performance anything but maudlin, imbued with a fine sense of
fresh discovery, indispensable in such (over-)familiar repertoire. Aimard
captured both the deception and the simplicity in its deceptive simplicity, not
least in a vigorous, determined development section. The Andante was similarly direct and without predetermined framework,
performance seemingly arising from the notes rather than vice versa. Every note likewise told in the minuet, sometimes as
gruffly as in Beethoven, though never sounding remotely like him. There were no
easy answers – or even easy questions. A slower tempo for the trio came across
less as relaxation than as strange intensification, whose mysteries seemed to
foreshadow the Chopin of the mazurkas. The finale, likewise, was rendered
strange in a way that compelled one to listen. Modulations, almost always key
to Schubert’s music, surprised, even shocked. Modernist Schubert? I suppose so,
but ultimately this seemed less a matter of such a broad aesthetic, still less
such an aesthetic applied, than of Aimard’s Schubert.
Lachenmann’s GOT LOST takes its name from one of its
three verbal sources, a note in the lift of a Grunewald apartment block used by
Fellows of the Wissenschaftkolleg zu Berlin: ‘Today my laundry basket got lost.
It was last since standing in front of the dryer. Since it is pretty difficult to
carry the laundry without it I’d be most happy to get it back.’ The other two
texts employed are an extract from Nietzsche’s Gay Science, its Wanderer message full of association for anyone
vaguely acquainted with German Romanticism, and a poem by Fernando Pesso (under
the pseudonym, Álvaro de
Campos),’ ‘Todas as cartas de amor são ridículas’ (‘All love-letters are
ridiculous’). According to the composer, these are ‘three only seemingly incompatible texts’. ‘Stripped of their
pathos-laden, poetic and profane diction,’ they are despatched by:
… the same sound-source – a soprano voice singing ‘in whatever way’ – into a intervallically ever-changing field of sound, reverberation and movement. Calling out, playfully, ‘warbling’ and lamenting arioso: they interrupt and pervade one another, thus marking out a space that ultimately remains foreign to them, and in which – as in all my compositions – music reflects upon itself with ‘expression’ -less joviality, thus showing its awareness of the transcendent, god-less message of ‘ridicolas’ that unifies these three texts.
Un-Romantic, even anti-Romantic, then? Yes and no. The idea
of music in itself, shorn of ‘expression’ has all manner of associations, many
of them at least heirs to the Romanticism Lachenmann has long deconstructed and
perhaps, just perhaps, even reconstructed. A post-Nietzschean revaluation of
values, if we like, does not perhaps change those values, whether in work or
performance, as much as we might suspect. Transcendence, after all, remains –
and what could be more Romantic, even Wagnerian, than that?
For performance will always play its part, even when,
sometimes especially when, that outcome is guarded against. So it did here, in
superlative performances from Aimard and Kakuta, performances I find it
impossible to imagine bettered. (And what would be the point of such
imagination?) Every note, every articulation, every connection between notes,
articulations, and so much more, to the whole, remains crucial; or, at least,
so the illusion holds. Romantic ghosts? Perhaps. But are not those ghosts
actually more performances of earlier music, such as Schubert’s? Monteverdi,
perhaps the ultimate source, known or unknown, acknowledged or acknowledged,
for all ‘modern’ music in the Western tradition, seemed once again reborn in
this scena for the twenty-first
century (2007-8). Music theatre? Again, perhaps, but like so many such
concepts, it seemed more an historical reference than anything else. Perhaps
Joycean music would be more to the point, at least for me, even the Mahlerian
conception of the symphony as a world. In reality, we shall act differently,
although surely all with the joviality of which Lachenmann spoke. Kakuta sang
into the piano, only for the piano’s resonances to sing back to her, to us;
Aimard responded in all manner of ways, instrumental and extra-instrumental. The
term ‘extended techniques’, whether for voice or piano, seemed so beside the
point as to suggest that, at long last, it should be dropped. These are surely ‘just’
techniques, ‘just’ music. The final climax, when it came, might even have
seemed conventional, yet no less extraordinary for that. Whatever we may wish
to label, to say, to think, this was a performance no one there would likely
ever forget. Outstanding.
