Stefanovich/Dennis/BBC SO/Brabbins et al. - Boulez Total Immersion Day, 30 March 2025

Milton Court Concert Hall and Barbican Hall

Domaines for solo clarinet
Piano Sonata no.2
Dialogue de l’ombre double

Deux Études de musique concrète
Douze Notations
Incises
Cummings ist der Dichter
Pli selon Pli

Beñat Erro Díez, Lily Payne (clarinets)

Hannah Miller (recording engineer)

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)

Anna Dennis (soprano)

BBC Singers

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

Images: BBC/Mark Allan

Boulez at 100. It does not seem long since we were celebrating his 90^th here at the Barbican, with another BBC Total Immersion Day, likewise culminating in Pli selon pli, from Yeree Suh, Thierry Fischer, and (neither for the first nor the last time) the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It even does not seem so very long since, as a student, I came down to London to hear Boulez himself conduct the work at the Festival Hall for his 75^th. Strangely, it very much does seem like another world thinking back just five years earlier, to when I bought my first Boulez CD, having heard on Radio 3’s Building a Library the first movement of his now legendary Mahler Sixth with the Vienna Philharmonic and rushed out to spend a good few pennies I barely had, knowing this was something I must hear and have. It remains the recording closest to my heart (and mind) of the Mahler symphony closest to my heart (and mind). Given Boulez’s long association with the BBC, it was fitting and enlightening to begin the day with a cinema showing, first of a deftly assembled compendium of BBC material, presentationally fronted and fused with typical verve and light-worn learning by Tom Service, followed by a film from the late, greatly lamented Barrie Gavin. 

A quick break for lunch was followed by an equally fitting and enlightening panel, chaired by Jonathan Cross, discussing Boulez at the BBC, musicians (harpist Sioned Williams and Daniel Meyer) and former Controller Nicholas Kenyon sharing memories, experience, and acute critical ears for what made those years so extraordinary and some aspects of their legacy. Every path to what increasingly seems to have assumed, Répons and Le Marteau sans maître notwithstanding, the stature of Boulez the composer’s popular masterwork – in its final form, it is unmistakeably finished, or at least seems so – will be different. This was no exception, but there was, even before the event, a sense of heading in that direction: appropriately enough from all directions, temporal and other. In a nod to his work with young musicians – we saw and heard tantalising excerpts from his National Youth Orchestra Gurrelieder on both films – and a statement of belief in the future of his music and his vision, we moved to Milton Court for a concert involving Guildhall School musicians, two clarinet works sandwiching the Second Piano Sonata, pli selon pli. Tamara Stefanovich, who has very recently issued her recording of the work, heroically stepped in at the shortest of notice for an indisposed Guildhall student, to add to a not inconsiderable workload later in the day (and a demanding programme, Structures II included, the previous night in Cologne). 

We had heard Domaines but three weeks earlier in London, in a London Sinfonietta programme juxtaposing Boulez and Cage. Lily Payne’s performance had little to fear even from such an exalted comparison (Mark van de Wiel). Indeed, save for the different layout, music stands arranged in a line, aptly highlighting symmetry (Original-Miroir) rather than the circular (centrifugal) approach spatialised at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, thoughts did not turn at all to comparison. One concentrated, rather, on the here and now. Crystal clear in the Milton Court acoustic, it was as beautiful as it was meaningful, line spun, indeed created, with seemingly infinite variegation. 

As it triumphantly reinstated the role of performance and the performer in Boulez’s music, so  did Dialogue de l’ombre double from Beñat Erro Díez and his taped self (with Hannah Miller as recording engineer, and a little help from piano resonance too). Lights off signalled a distinctly later proliferation of sound in the shadow not only of the clarinet (and clarinettist) but of Répons too. It was a wondrously ‘achieved’ experience, both as work and performance, clarity of line, however complex, as strongly to the fore as in Domaines. Boulez’s ‘invisible theatre’ seemed born as much of Wagner as of Claudel, the magic of Bayreuth reborn in a strikingly different environment—ironically, perhaps, given his own lament that Wagner’s theatrical innovations had been so resolutely ignored by the actually existing theatrical ‘business’ of the opera houses whose destruction he (as Wagner) had once suggested. Here, perhaps, was the Boulez opera we never had, in darkness, light, and shadows.   

This was a welcome reminder from both clarinettists that, for young players, Boulez’s music is first and foremost music, not an object of controversy. It never really was for my generation either; we all knew, which doubtless separates us from those who truly had to fight (in that case either), though we surely must continue to fight for it to be heard, given the ever-more-deplorable cultural reaction around us. It makes little sense, in any case, for young musicians to declare ‘Boulez est mort’. They relish its challenges, which will remain in one form or another, just as those of Bach and Beethoven do, but their essence will change, as Boulez takes his place in his own fabled ‘Museum’ of musical history. The Royal Academy of Music’s performance of sur Incises a few nights earlier, on Boulez’s birthday itself, was by all accounts a splendid, enriching experience for all concerned. It stands now at the heart of the repertoire of Berlin’s Boulez Ensemble, founded by Daniel Barenboim. There is cultural reaction, yes, as there is political reaction, but there is also hope. 

As indeed there was in Stefanovich’s spectacular performance of the Sonata. I have a confession to make here. When I first heard the pianist perform it, I was too much in thrall to my won preconceptions of what it ‘should’ sound like. It was not even that I did not ‘like’ it; I did, very much, but part of me, brought up above all on Maurizio Pollini, unconsciously wondered whether I ‘should’, when it sounded so very different. Memories of that 2015 encounter remained with me, though, marinating in the ombre of conscious and unconscious alike, and I slowly realised it had begun to change my understanding of the work and its possibilities. What a joy, then, to celebrate the composer’s centenary not only with a new recording, but with so magnificent and, in the circumstances, unexpected a performance, which spoke of Boulez’s own advice to Stefanovich to think of reaching into a beehive. 

The first movement ignited and transformed those memories, revealing a far more ‘universal’, less specifically ‘French’ Boulez, its molten lava that of the composer’s fire-breathing youth, its logic all the more clearly post-Schoenbergian. In fidelity was born the most personal expression, Boulez’s claim that he would be the first composer without a biography almost touchingly forlorn. The tumult of a trill, the momentum of a repeated note, the terror of a silence: all these and more were not only to be heard but to be felt in a rich slow movement that celebrated parenthesis yet nonetheless ‘cohered’, not entirely unlike late Beethoven (as well as quite unlike it). The scherzo’s making music through intervallic and other parameters fused through astonishing willpower a marriage of Debussy and Webern we only take for granted now on Boulez’s account. It gazed into the abyss and something – reflection, shadows, something else? – stared back. The fourth movement unleashed a very particular character, again from within, exultant in its Artaud-inspired cruelty, Beethoven annihilated and yet in some sense reborn, like Boulez himself in its after-shock. 

Further discussion, led by Kate Molleson, Jonathan Cross joined by Gillian Moore, a longstanding, leading figure in Boulez’s later London appearances, offered a substantial, duly provocative apéritif for the evening concert. It also reminded us just how much London and the world’s appetite for such enrichment activities owed to Boulez’s own example. I myself learned more from his own pre-concert discussions than from a host of other concerts, even festivals. There would doubtless have been other paths and they can be interesting to speculate about. ‘Virtual’ history can have its own, well, virtues, in helping us refine understanding of what did happen. But Boulez, IRCAM, and more did, just as Beethoven, Wagner, and Mahler did. We were reminded, quite properly, of more awkward encounters and memories too. Was Boulez’s return to France at the expense of figures such as Xenakis? Perhaps. There is always danger in schematicism, although in practice that is more likely to come from the derrière than the avant garde (and despite the arrant nonsense one hears from some, even now, on Boulez and William Glock).

Heard partly in that light, the opening number in the Barbican concert reminded us of a path Boulez did not really take, though it was perhaps not entirely without issue in later encounters with tape and indeed live electronics. Two 1951-2 Études for tape suggested to Boulez above all the limitations of existing technology, as well as ‘Pierre Schaeffer’s “do-it-yourself” studio methods,’ to quote Caroline Potter’s informative programme note. There is always, at least for me, the oddity of hearing purely electronic music, without performers, in a concert setting. How will, even should, the audience react? Here in awkward silence, before Stefanovich returned for more piano music. It was a fascinating opportunity nonetheless to hear these serial manipulations of percussion sounds from the eve of Le Marteau sans maître. Whether intended whimsically or not – I doubt it, at least consciously – there was a winning air of that spirit, which certainly characterised some of Boulez’s difficult diplomacy with musicians and institutions, as we had heard in the first of the two talks. 

Stefanovich renewed and extended our appreciation of Boulez the composer for piano. Dull souls will claim the earlier Boulez was the ‘real’ Boulez, or some such nonsense. They are perfectly entitled to their preferences; we all are. But if you cannot hear wonders in Incises and indeed sur Incises, to your taste or otherwise, just as you can in the Second Sonata, you are probably not hearing them in either. It was unmistakeably later, though far from late, Boulez—just as Dialogue de l’ombre double had been. The toccata-quality of the score was immediate, immanent even, in a scintillating journey suggestive also of earlier piano fantasias, Bach and beyond, and every bit as protean as the Sonata, just differently so. The twelve Notations that preceded it enabled us to hear another, similarly absorbing example of post-Romanticism, the bagatelle spirit of late Beethoven reborn and reheard via Bartók, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and others. The dialectic between mystery (IX) and mechanism (X) penetrated, both in work and performance, to the heart of the whole. 

It would, given their long, incredibly productive association with Boulez, have been a great pity not to hear from the BBC Singers on such a day. That we can do so at all is, of course, no thanks to the corporation itself; for now, let us give thanks that we can, whilst remembering how strong the forces Boulez and so many others, aesthetic foes included, have had to fight against. Joining Martyn Brabbins and the BBC SO, their pinpoint precision was, in proper Boulezian style, never an end in itself, but rather the foundation of a exquisite, multi-directional (in that centrifugal, serialist and post-serialist sense) account of Cummings ist der Dichter. Warmth, as in Boulez’s own later performances of his music, was a hallmark, so was a hyper-expressivity that surely had its roots in Schoenberg as much as Webern, Debussy too.  Given in a single, endlessly variegated whole, this offered opera-less drama that emerged almost like a tapestry that spoke and sang: a fusion, if you like, of Boulez’s earlier dark surrealism and his late fascination with Szymanowski, seeds of which one could imagine one heard here.

And so, to Pli selon pli. Memories, whether of that earlier Second Sonata performance or of other readings of this ‘portrait of Mallarmé’, are necessarily part of our experience. ‘Must I once again sing the praises of amnesia?’ Boulez once asked, and the answer in context – out of which the rhetorical question has too often been shamelessly extracted – is of course yes. Memories will never be obliterated, but they can too readily become Mahlerian ‘tradition’ as Schlamperei, to invoke once more one of Boulez’s most illustrious composer-conductor predecessors. This performance, from Anna Dennis, the BBC SO, and Brabbins, seemed to me the equal of any I have heard, probably surpassing that of ten years ago, even approaching the fina lencounter I heard from Boulez himself, in 2011 conducting Barbara Hannigan. That is not really the point, though. The past cannot be obliterated, nor did one of the most penetrating of all conductors of works from the ‘Museum’ ever think or wish it to be. He simply wished us to turn attention to the present – even the ‘present’ of the Museum’ – as we could and did here.

The opening of ‘Don’ issued an invitation to enter that none could refuse, trademark éclat followed by the seduction (and seductive birth!) of a ‘nuit d’Idumée’. Beautifully voiced and connected, this was a performance led by a conductor who, in quiet, unflashy security not unlike that of Boulez, showed that he ‘got it’, that he could and would be our guide to the work’s unfolding. Nowadays particularly, we hear much other music folding in but this is infinitely more than synthesis; it is a personal ‘voice’ that yet extends far beyond mere ‘personality’. Mesmerising in Mozartian qualities that already announced a period of ‘modern classicism’ (Arnold Whittall) in Boulezian works, in its seduction it no more brooked dissent than Così fan tutte (or Szymanowski). We had entered a  Bergian labyrinth and never wished to leave.

The first of the three central ‘Improvisations’ brought Webern and Debussy more evidently to the fore, but intriguingly also the very idea of a composed improvisation, recreated before our ears. In a sense, that is simply ‘performance’, though one can too readily lose sight of that, especially in an age still haunted by the ‘authenticity’ Boulez abhorred. Dennis’s way with the words was all: their sound as much as alleged ‘meaning’. As humans, we naturally wish to interpret, but sometimes we need simply to enjoy too. The wide range of her line and performance in a magical second ‘Improvisation’ (‘Une dentelle s’abolit’) seemed both to incite and be incited by the orchestral tapestry woven and re-woven around her—and us. Was that an echo of Prélude à l’après-midi I heard in the third? Perhaps—and perhaps it pointed to another fold to incorporate. There is no single ‘right’ answer, nor ever could there be. That sonic recreation of textures before ears and minds alike was the thing—and what a thing. Webern’s influence so thoroughly assimilated one barely noticed, until one did, both in and across the orchestra. It also felt haunted by the vocal and instrumental laboratory of Bach’s cantatas, a world that also exerted great fascination for Boulez, though, in a further indictment of current compartmentalisation of musical life and history, seldom do we hear about it. 

This, then, was a world of ever-shifting, ever-transforming folds of silk, transposed into music—and/or vice versa. Its culmination in ‘Tombeau’ was the culmination of an intense orchestral drama with voice: that invisible theatre once again, conceived before Boulez’s incursions into the operatic world, revised after them. Maybe it was the chance connection of the moment, yet Pelléas and Parsifal seemed more than usually present. There will always be ghosts at any musical feast, not least Boulez’s own. Not the least of this performance’s wonders was both to hear and to feel how his music is now taking on new directions in his absence. Boulez est mort; vive Boulez.

Aimard - Ravel, 27 March 2025

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Jeux d’eau and Valses nobles et sentimentales (excerpts)
Le Tombeau de Couperin: ‘Prélude’, ‘Forlane’, ‘Toccata’
Miroirs: ‘Noctuelles’, ‘Alborada del gracioso’, ‘La Vallée des cloches’
Gaspard de la nuit

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
Mathieu Amalric (speaker)

Presented more as show than recital, it was nevertheless the musical elements of this Queen Elizabeth Hall celebration of Ravel that shone through. The conceit did no harm; for one thing, it was a welcome opportunity to see Mathieu Amalric on a London stage. He took the part of a friend of Pierre-Laurent Aimard, calling to collect him to travel to a recital Aimard would be giving. Whilst Aimard did some last-minute practice – or rather played around with other music by Ravel – Amalric read from material with which his friend had helped inform him and also filmed him. The script could have done with more work, to be honest, but it did not get in the way; the warmth of their collaboration was evident. 

And so, when the lights went down, the music began. Aimard’s selection of sheet music from the floor – we have all been there – and (very superior) busking through a few bars of Jeux d’eau, followed by excerpts from Valses nobles et sentimentales offered a winning amuse gueule, though naturally one wished to hear more, whilst retaining a sense of eavesdropping on practice. Then the doorbell rang: enter Amalric. He suggested that Aimard play the ‘Epilogue’, which served to cast a nostalgic shadow even over music we had not heard, lilt and voicing delectable. 

Other readings followed, interspersed with music: Ravel writing to his mother in 1916 with a wounded reproach that he had not heard from her, another letter from the same year on ‘active duty’ opposing ‘patriotic’ efforts to prohibit performances of enemy music, such as that of Schoenberg and Bartók. The three movements from Le Tombeau de Couperin certainly gained something from enhanced awareness of their wartime context, as did the three from Miroirs from a 1905 letter to Maurice Delage, its talk of ‘smelting castles’ and the ‘wonderful symphony’ of their sounds nice preparation for the beauty in precision of ‘Noctuelles’ as composition and performance. Talk from another source of the cliché of Ravel’s Spain as more real than the real thing could momentarily be believed, in the Lisztian virtuosity of ‘Alborado del gracioso’, not least its exultant close. The more mysterious, even mystical realm of ‘La Vallée des cloches’ gave a sense of French music to come, Messiaen, even Boulez, heard at a different aural temperature, which paved the way for Gaspard de la nuit. 

This was the concert ‘proper’, a performance that reminded me, among other things, how infrequently we hear this masterpiece. Why? Perhaps pianists still shy away from its demands, or only have it in their repertoire for a while. One can hardly blame them. At any rate, it was a treat from beginning to end chez Aimard. The unmistakeable shimmering of ‘Ondine’ registered with a freshness that, just maybe, had some roots in the novelty of presentation as well as in the excellent pianism and musicianship. Aimard’s wondrous spinning of a musical line, unfailingly eloquent, revelled in the Bösendorfer and its sound world. The terrifying yet somehow seductive insistence of ‘Le Gibet’ was heard at proper ‘temperature’ too, as if the myriad repeated notes throughout the evening had been leading here. ‘Scarbo’, his laughter and shadows, could be seen as well as heard, a still more fitting culmination with roots in all that had gone before. Had I not seen Aimard’s two hands with my own eyes, I might have sworn he had four.

Kapelis/Berliner Barock Solisten - Bach, 25 March 2025

Barbican Hall

Piano Concerto no.3 in D major, BWV 1054
Piano Concerto no.4 in A major, BWV 1055
Piano Concerto no.1 in D minor, BWV 1052
Piano Concerto no.2 in E major, BWV 1053
Piano Concerto no.5 in F minor, BWV 1056
Piano Concerto no.7 in G minor, BWV 1058

Berliner Barock Solisten

Alexandros Kapelis (piano)

Six out of the seven Bach keyboard concertos: a tall order by any standards, and in practice probably better suited to recording than live performance, or at least spit between a couple of concerts, interspersed with other works (and/or maybe multiple soloists, even instruments). Indeed, it came as little surprise to read that Alexandros Kapelis and the Berliner Barock Solisten have indeed recorded these works, plus the missing BWV 1057. Still, it was not the first and will not be the last concert to present more of a CD than a concert programme, and I chose to go, curious to see what would come of the idea.

Putting aside, insofar as one can, the programming, how then did it turn out? Perhaps inevitably, my experience was mixed, the second half to my ears generally stronger than the first. (There is nothing unusual about that in a solo piano recital or many other concerts.) Perhaps the biggest problem for me was a general uniformity of approach, especially during the first half. If one is going to programme this way, one surely needs to consider what makes these works different from one another and communicate that—as well, doubtless, as what they hold in common. The D major Concerto, BWV 1054, set a pattern for much of what was to come, its first movement bright and bouncy, piano playing less distinct – perhaps in part a matter of acoustics – than that of the strings, although here and elsewhere Kapelis’s trills were very much to be enjoyed. 

What I missed even in isolation, and despite gravely beautiful playing from the Berlin strings in the slow movement, was a sense either of chamber music or of the pianist leading, let alone of interplay or tension between the two. The small orchestra (4.3.2.2.1), led by Daniele Gaede, pretty much did its own thing and Kapelis played along. Might a conductor have helped? Perhaps. Not that the orchestra needed it, but perhaps a conductor would have helped connect the soloist with them. Moreover, it was the orchestra, more than the pianist, that tended to vary its approach, the second slow movement (BWV 1055) more austere, somewhat ‘period’ in tone. 

It was definitely Steinway rather than Bösendorfer playing and certainly seemed to be conceived for the piano. (Why would you play Bach on the piano only to try to make it sound like the harpsichord, in which endeavour you will certainly fail?) In the D minor Concerto, BWV 1052, there were some distinctly odd passages, violin imitation/derivation in the first movement sounding merely heavy, whilst the second often seemed listless, a relatively swift tempo notwithstanding. The third movement nonetheless sprang to life, mostly maintaining that impetus. There were even, much to the music’s benefit, a few signs of Kapelis actually leading proceedings. 

The outer movements of BWV 1053 in E major largely maintained that shift of gear. The first was impressively variegated and well-articulated. There was a sense both of air behind the sails—and of high-quality sails too. I suspect it was no coincidence that the orchestra sounded more committed too. There was a better approach to chamber music in the Siciliano, even if usually of piano listening to and following the strings rather than of true give-and-take. When it came to solo passages, though, Kapelis’s playing was oddly detached, as if embarrassed to sound ‘Romantic’. The two final concertos mostly followed that pattern, with noticeable springs in the step for outer movements, the finales admirably vigorous. The slow movement of BWV 1058 was notably more successful, offering greater continuity and some genuinely lovely playing, than its counterpart in BWV 1056: oddly choppy, both at the time and as an encore.

Still, there was a large audience at the Barbican, many of whom will surely have been hearing some or all of these works for the first time. If I had reservations about some aspects of the performances, there was also much to enjoy. Further acquaintance with Bach’s music is rarely, if ever, anything but time well spent.  

JACK Quartet - Carter, Aguilar, Lachenmann, Boulez, Houben, Webern, Cage, Wulliman, and Cheung, 22 March 2025

Wigmore Hall

Carter: String Quartet no.5
Eduardo Aguilar: HYPER
Lachenmann: String Quartet no.3, ‘Grido’

Boulez: Livre pour quatuor: 1b
Eva-Maria Houben: Nothing More
Boulez: Livre pour quatuor: 3c
Webern: Six Bagatelles, op.9
Cage: String Quartet in Four Parts
Boulez: Livre pour quatuor: 1a
Austin Wulliman: Escape Rites
Anthony Cheung: Twice Removed
Boulez: Livre pour quatuor: 2

Christopher Otto, Austin Wulliman (violins)

John Pickford Richards (viola)

Jay Campbell (cello)

From a full day – three concerts – of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music for string quartet, I was able to attend the last two of the JACK Quartet’s Wigmore Hall appearances. Alas, I had to miss most of two pieces in the third, both from 2024, by Austin Wulliman and Anthony Cheung. It would be unfair to comment further, other than to say I should be keen to put that right, should the opportunity present itself. Otherwise, the JACK Quartet showed itself once again to be an outstanding ensemble of broad musical sympathies, encompassing works at what we might consider the modernist end of the spectrum, but also others, which have points of contact with the likes of Boulez and Lachenmann, as well as Cage, yet also have quite different concerns. 

Carter’s Fifth (and final) Quartet opened proceedings for me, as finely crafted in the JACK’s performance as this masterpiece is on the page. From the outset, one was left in no doubt that every note counted. Patterns, progressions, and contours in sound were communicated as readily as in an outstanding performance of a Haydn quartet. One felt as well as heard – as throughout the day – emotional breadth and depth, as well as energy, rhetorical eloquence, and intellect. Carter’s metric modulation provided the turning points, the moments of decision, in transitional material. His indications underlay not only tempi in the narrower sense, but in a fuller understanding of character: for instance, ‘Lento espressivo’, ‘Presto scorrevole’ (the latter word a favourite of Carter’s), or ‘Adagio sereno’. In high-lying violin harmonics, in a magical reinvention of viola pizzicato, in a conversation between two or three of the instruments (and players), or in the four coming together in time-honoured fusion of harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, and attack, this was the keenest, most captivating of quartet music. 

Eduardo Aguilar’s ten-minute HYPER (2021) followed, beginning almost inaudible on the first violin, yet fast becoming not only audible, but vividly present across the quartet, pitch gradually discernible in the gathering of a whirlwind. Then came another—in another direction. (I was going to say the opposite direction, but that would, I think, present a false binary.) Tempi shifted and transformed, not ‘like’ Carter, but holding a potential point in common. So did other parameters and other, less definable concerns: intriguingly including a sense of ease or effort, speaking perhaps to some, indefinable sense of subjectivity and/or objectivity. At the close, the players gave up their instruments, though continued to play with their bows, two walking into the audience and making music with and into the air. 

Lachenmann’s ‘Grido’ Quartet immediately showed the players once more fully inside the idiom: language, yes, but also a broader sensibility and strategy. There was at the opening something of a ‘story so far’ impression: both to Lachenmann’s previous quartet writing and even to the history of the genre more broadly. It invited and, if one accepted, compelled us to listen in a performance with a strong sense of discovery. Dynamic and other fluctuations – pitch, for instance, through what one might have thought vibrato, yet only rarely was – grabbed and led us on our journey as much as more overt musical gesture, in a neat-half-hour of enormous intensity of musical expression. This was, without question, a German heart and mind at work: ever-becoming, on multiple levels. At the close, one felt, as one might with Webern or Nono, that one was hearing differently, more clearly. 

In the second concert, movements from Boulez’s Livre pour quatuor framed a wider exploration, involving not only those works I was unable to hear but also Eva-Maria Houben, Webern, and Cage. Webern stood behind the other three: ironically, perhaps, for one the brevity of whose music is so celebrated (if never really the point). Here, his op.9 Six Bagatelles sounded, far from inappropriately, as much as backward glance to German Romanticism as Boulez’s ‘threshold’ for modernity. Each of his six movements said everything, and yet each said something different. This was not compression, but rather a paradoxical (or dialectical) superfluity in which not a note, not a sigh, not a Viennese dance inflection, was anything but necessary. Mahler sounded more present than ever. 

Houben’s Nothing More (2019) took what one might, in the broad rather than the US American sense, call a minimalist route from Webern (from Cage too, I think). There was nowhere to hide, not that anyone should have wished to. Precision was all in work and performance. Much playing was, if not at the limits of audibility, not so far away from them. This, one felt, not entirely unlike Lachenmann, was a way into listening ‘itself’. 

The glassy non-vibrato of Cage’s 1949-50 Quartet suggested, similarly, both a fiddling and a viol consort past, complemented by the music’s melodies and harmony. (It was a little surprising to find myself thinking of harmony in Cage, but that doubtless points to my preconceptions, not to his reality.) The apparent simplicity of its four movements is real enough, but again seems as much an invitation to listen and to listen differently, as a quality in itself. Its related chastity – rarely, if ever, does Cage (for me) sound erotic – sounded, like that of the Five Melodies I heard earlier this month, closer than one might expect to the folksiness of ‘populist’ Copland. In both cases, though, that probably conceals more than it reveals. The closing Quodlibet came as relief in every sense.   

Boulez’s more-or-less contemporary Livre pour quatuor (1948-9), long more or less unheard, seems to be regaining popularity again. It seemed to me a pity not to hear all of it, with or without the reconstructed completion of the fourth movement, but a fragmentary approach has always been part of its performance tradition—and some would say also speaks in some way to essence. Hearing parts of it interspersed with other music heightened its contrasting qualities and perhaps aided reflection on its particularities within Boulez’s œuvre too. At the outset, it may have been the relative austerity – classicism perhaps, though that raises at least as many questions as it answers – that spoke, especially if one had in mind from preceding works the explosive qualities of the Second Piano Sonata, or indeed the eroticism of Les Soleil des Eaux. And yet, even in movement 1b, a veiled sense of kinship with late Beethoven as allegedly annihilated in the Sonata came through in (smaller) fragmentary manifestation of its dialectical contrasts. 3c brought greater emotional, Webernesque intensity, aptly preceding the Bagatelles, whilst 1a at the beginning of the second half sounded more variegated, partly in reaction to the different, arguably more essential austerity of the Cage. The second movement, with which the concert closed, engaged itself – and us – in a process of seemingly infinite, centrifugal transformation, perhaps not only a quartet but a world in itself.

LSO/Hannigan - Khayam, Haydn, Vivier, Debussy, Sibelius, and Bartók, 20 March 2025

Barbican Hall

Golfam Khayam: Je ne suis pas une fable à conter (UK premiere)

Haydn: Symphony no.39 in G minor

Claude Vivier: Orion

Debussy: Syrinx

Sibelius: Luonnotar

Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin: Suite

Gareth Davies (flute)
London Symphony Orchestra
Barbara Hannigan (soprano/conductor)

The second of Barbara Hannigan’s two March LSO concerts opened with a UK premiere: Golfam Khayam’s Je ne suis pas une fable à conter, which Hannigan commissioned and has already performed with the Iceland Symphony, Radio France Philharmonic, and Gothenburg Symphony orchestras. Khayam being unable to travel to after hearing hearing her speak on Iranian music, receiving a reply and offer a collaboration within two hours of sending her message. They settled on a poem by Ahmed Shamlou. There are, it seems, elements of improvisation, though without knowing the work it is impossible to know how much. Opening with cellos and double basses, joined by other, deep-pile LSO strings, the piece effects, especially after voice and flute entry, an ‘east-west’ encounter in vocal and instrumental arabesques, and in combination of tonal and modal (at least to my ears) writing. It seemed to suggest eventual passage from mourning to light, or perhaps better, to glimpse it almost Janáček-like, at the end of our current tunnel. Not that it sounded in any way like Janáček, but perhaps there something in that sensibility was held in common. Perhaps it was no coincidence that here the words turned from French to Farsi. 

Haydn’s Symphony no.39 received a fine reading, Hannigan revelling in its quirks and surprises—considerably more so, it seemed to me, than her slightly disappointing way with the so-called ‘London’ Symphony no.104 last week (an altogether more Classical concern). From the off, she and the LSO relished its Sturm und Drang energy, silence as much part of its activity as sound in the first movement. It developed and returned, almost in a flash, yet certainly not without our knowing that it had. Here and in the ensuing Andante, there was nothing generic to form and process, deeply rooted as they were in Haydn’s particularities. And what a joy it was to hear the LSO in such music, unburdened by ‘period’ affectation. In her programme note, Kate Hopkins described the minuet as stately. It might have done with being a little statelier here, or at least sterner. Still, in its more flowing though not rushed way, it ‘spoke’ clearly, just as its delectable trio sang. The finale, full of incident, might in some ways sound ‘theatrical’ but proved, quite rightly, above all symphonic. 

Claude Vivier’s Orion followed, essentially a theme and five variations. Throughout, it was characterised by a strong sense of liminality, doubtless born, as Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s helpful note pointed out, of Vivier’s preceding opera on death and the afterlife, Kopernikus, and its foretelling; ‘You will hear the music of Orion and the mystical seven sages.’ Distinct echoes of various music – the Stravinsky of the early ballets, Messiaen, Grisey (or was that the Wagner of the Rheingold Prelude) – sounded both too close not to be intentional, yet also too fully integrated to be the point. Above all, it seemed to refer only to itself and, in the two percussionist cries of ‘hé-o’ to the mystery of human subjectivity set against something implacably cosmic. 

The second half opened with a solo from above (at least in the Stalls), Gareth Davies in a beautifully free yet coherent performance of Debussy’s flute Syrinx. Hannigan again led for Sibelius’s Luonnotar. But of course she can sing Finnish whilst conducting… It made for a fascinating combination, the Sibelius possessed of a keen narrative thrust born of words and music alike, all the drama of the ballad rooted in febrile LSO strings. It emerged as a kindred spirit to Mahler’s Das klagende Lied, albeit in (relative) miniature. 

Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin Suite rounded off an eclectic programme. For me, it is one of those cases in which I always regret the loss of material. Habits of early encounters with Boulez doubtless die hard. Nonetheless, on its own terms, there was much to ‘enjoy’, if that be the right word. Hannigan and the LSO seemed more focused on the harder edged elements to the score: a steely frame that seemed to invite comparisons with more or less contemporary Prokofiev (Le Pas d’acier and even the later Fiery Angel). Occasionally ear-splitting in the Barbican’s awkward acoustic, it danced its way to a final, ever wilder climax.

Nash Inventions - Stravinsky, Holt, Grime, Davies, Carter, Casken, Matthews, and Anderson, 18 March 2025

Wigmore Hall

Stravinsky: Concertino
Simon Holt: Acrobats on a loose wire (world premiere)
Helen Grime: Long have I lain beside the water (world premiere)
Davies: String Quintet
Carter: Mosaic
John Casken: Mantle (world premiere)
Colin Matthews: C.A.N.O.N. (world premiere)
Julian Anderson: Van Gogh Blue

Claire Booth (soprano)
Nash Ensemble
Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

Founded in October 1964 by Amelia Freedman at the Royal Academy of Music, a shortish walk away from the Wigmore Hall, the Nash Ensemble is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary season, this the culminating concert in a day’s events of ‘Nash Inventions’ that was but one part, broadly speaking the ‘new music’ part, of that season. As Harrison Birtwistle noted, quoted in the programme, the Nash is and has been unusual in ‘dedication to the old and the new’. Here, no fewer than four world premieres were heard alongside other Nash commissions, plus Stravinsky’s Concertino. 

Stravinsky’s 1920 piece for string quartet received a performance making it sound as new as the day it was born, now of course more than a century ago. Incisive, even aggressive, the Nash’s account showed that rich tone was not inimical to such qualities, quite the contrary. Quite rightly, this singular work sounded unlike anything else, although certain approaches to The Soldier’s Tale made a welcome impression.

Simon Holt’s new work, Acrobats on a Loose Wire, for flute (in the balcony above and behind) and string trio draws inspiration from a painting by Jusepe de Ribera. Its clear trajectory, the flautist moving from piercing piccolo to alto flute and finally to (standard) C flute, seemingly unaware of the string trio on stage proved engaging and brimming with melody of a kind one might almost, borrowing from Wagner, call ‘unendlich(e)’. 

Soprano Claire Booth and conductor Martyn Brabbins joined flute, clarinet, string trio, and harp for the premiere of Helen Grime’s  Long have I lain beside the water in its chamber version. Originally, it was the final song in a cycle for orchestra and solo soprano, to words by Zoe Gilbert. ‘A lament’, to quote Gilbert, ‘by a murderous sister, a tale of jealousy and love,’ it opens with a single pitch passed from woodwind to soprano, other instruments joining around them (descending). Words and music seemed to form an indissoluble union, both as work and performance, whether melismatic or syllabic. In that, they gave a taste – rather more than that – of gripping drama in which every note counted: both song and scena, it seemed. Typically vivid of timbre, it made me keen to hear the larger work from which it comes. 

Next came Peter Maxwell Davies’s 2014 String Quintet. Whether it was quite the right time and place to hear it, I have my doubts. It made for a long evening with this broad span of four movements. Still, if there were few surprises here, there was unquestionably compositional craft. The first movement in particular, entitled ‘Chacony’, might initially have sounded conventional, and the music is naturally distant from the anger of the composer’s youth; its ambiguities nonetheless suggested something more elusive the closer one listened. An oblique ‘Reel’, a broad, sometimes anguished ‘Slow Air’, and the whirlwind of a vigorous closing ‘Stamash’ brought us to the interval. 

Elliott Carter’s 2004 Mosaic, taking a further decade’s step back, proved a fine counterpart in context to the Grime piece. Once again, every note counted in a bejewelled mosaic for flute, oboe, clarinet, harp, string trio, and double bass. It evinced all the vigour of a young composer and all the wisdom of the composer’s actual years in a setting so exquisite one might reach for the word ‘Mozartian’. There was certainly no gainsaying the vibrance of the performance. If every aspect of form were not immediately to be grasped, it was certainly, like a mosaic, to be perceived as a whole. 

Returning to 2024, John Caskeen’s Mantle for piano and wind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn) offered a different sort of ‘classical’, perhaps in some ways closer to Stravinsky’s brand (though hardly to the Concertino heard on this occasion). Again, one sensed, even if one could not necessarily grasp, the music mapped out before us in another vividly present performance. As with most of the music heard this evening – excepting the Davies Quintet – there was a suggestion of it having covered such ground as might have been expected from a considerably longer piece, its span if not short, then certainly not long. It pulsed with life and clear, sonata-like direction. 

Colin Matthews’s new commission, C.A.N.O.N. for soprano and piano trio, took its leave from a 2022 setting of Christopher Reid’s poem ‘O’ for what would have been Oliver Knussen’s 70th birthday. Its first part, ‘C’ for Claire, did not actually include Claire Booth: instead, we heard a wistful, even Romantic movement for piano trio. Instant contrast was offered with an ‘A’ vocal movement (as with the rest, words by Reid) for ‘Anonymals’, ‘the numberless nameless ones’, but also for ‘Amelia’. Both singer and composer truly used the words to shape music—and, so it seemed, vice versa. ‘N’ for ‘Nightingale’ and ‘Nash’ offered the bird’s voice, I think, first in the trio, then reflected in the vocal writing. ‘O’ was clearly very much the heart of the material; that I could tell before having read the composer’s note. And ‘Narwhals’, once again for ‘Nash’, felt from the outset as a finale, its music founded on yet never merely dictated by the words it ‘set’.

Again without prejudice to any music in particular, I felt the second half might have benefited from one fewer piece. Julian Anderson’s Van Gogh Blue, for which Brabbins returned to conduct an ensemble of flute, two clarinets, harp, viola, and cello, nonetheless made for a characterful and characteristic conclusion. Sparer though also more luxuriant, perhaps more ‘Gallic’ in sensibility, it formed a beautifully crafted homage to Van Gogh’s paintings in musical images of the colour blue from dawn to midnight. The brightness of the latter made for a fitting, somewhat disturbing evocation of Starry Night in light of the painter’s suicide: clarinets again above, a quarter-tone apart.

 

Degout/LSO/Hannigan - Roussel, Ravel, Britten, and Haydn, 13 March 2025

Barbican Hall

Images: Mark Allan

Roussel: Le Festin de l’araignée (symphonic fragments)
Ravel, arr. Anthony Girard: Histoires naturelles
Britten: Les Illuminations
Haydn: Symphony no.104, ‘London’

Stéphane Degout (baritone)
London Symphony Orchestra
Barbara Hannigan (soprano/conductor)

Barbara Hannigan is unquestionably a star in today’s musical firmament. Anyone who has heard (and seen) her Ligeti Mysteries of the Macabre, live or recorded, would neither doubt nor forget that. I have been an admirer, even a devotee since I first heard her, singing songs by Berg and Webern with the Scharoun Ensemble and none other than Pierre Boulez in 2008. Her more recent, yet by now established, forays into conducting, often in combination with song, have never failed to interest and to excite. And she clearly has a deep fondness for Haydn, regularly conducting symphonies from across his œuvre. What, then, is not to like, especially in combination with the LSO and another outstanding artist, Stéphane Degout? 

Very little, in fact, though I found myself somewhat disappointed by the Haydn symphony this time around, it seeming not yet really to have settled. Proceedings nonetheless got off to a fine start with the suite, once popular yet now somewhat out of fashion, from Roussel’s 1913 Diaghilev ballet Le Festin de l’araignée. The parade of animal victims for the spider in his web had a keen narrative thrust, full of character, and vividly but far from only pictorial. Hannigan and the LSO above all imparted a sense of how it ‘moved’, even without dancers. It may not have the magic of, say, Ravel and Debussy, but it charmed, without overstaying its welcome. However different it may be in most respects from more celebrated Ballet russes commissions, there was kinship to be sensed, both in work and performance. It was far-sighted, moreover, of Roussel wittily to write a part for mobile telephone to coincide with nightfall on the lonely garden. Who would have imagined? To quote Edward Bhesania’s programme note on the music itself, ‘Nothing has changed and yet everything has changed.’ 

A piece Ravel did not orchestrate will probably always be too tempting for composers to resist, even if others have had a shot before them. I wish I could say Anthony Girard’s orchestration of Histoire naturelles offered revelations, but it sounded more workaday than that. It was skilful enough and could hardly fail when it came closer to what Ravel himself might have done, but the somewhat heavy string writing (doubtless a sense of mock-gravity to depict the peacock, but was it quite the right sense?) at the opening of the first song, ‘Le Paon’) gave a distinctly odd impression, especially given Degout’s seemingly effortless way with words and music alike. Indeed, his performance offered a masterclass in French song, all the supposed difficulties (they are real enough) with the language melting away. Again, I could hear Girard’s intent in the percussive clatter of ‘Le Grillon’, but it did not seem quite right. I was more persuaded by the closing guinea-fowl song, whose orchestration seemed genuinely to have one see, even to feel, with her. So too of course did Degout’s vividly communicative vocalism: not a million miles from the theatre, yet subtly distinct. 

Hannigan both sang and conducted for Britten’s Les Illuminations, the Rimbaud text making it seem more at home with its predecessors than otherwise it might have done. Lucy Walker’s point, in her programme note, that ‘perhaps sheltered by the non-English language here, Britten seems to be letting his hair down and channelling some of Rimbaud’s … spirit,’ seemed to me very well captured by the performance, Hannigan clearly inspired rather than inhibited by the exigencies of her dual role. The LSO, never less than very good, seemed a few notches more incisive here, doubtless partly as a result. From the opening bars, richness of string sound seemed to take us to a different level. Hannigan as soloist proved just as communicative as Degout, as were other, instrumental soloists, first among equals leader Benjamin Gilmore in ‘Phrase et Antique’. Rhythms were tight or swung, as required. A well-nigh operatic ‘Marine’ proved key to necessary transformation of mood. ‘Being Beauteous’ captured its particular qualities, not least the sense of a young heart racing. Throughout, Britten and his interpreters permitted Rimbaud to speak: not unmediated, for that would be a nonsense, but heightened, or at least a little transformed. ‘Assez connu. Les arrêts de la vie. Ô Rumeurs et Visions! Départ dans l’affection et le bruit neufs!’ Indeed. 

The first movement of Haydn’s final London Symphony, no.104, augured well. It had grandeur in its introduction, nowadays too often missed, as if Hannigan recalled Boulez’s extraordinary recording with the Vienna Philharmonic. (Perhaps she did.) It had no tedious mannerisms and was very well balanced, inner string parts sounding as if in a quartet. Tempo – not only speed, but mood – was similarly well judged. A dignified account of the slow movement offered generally good command of line and detail, held nicely in balance, though there were a couple of occasions in which tempo seemed to slip rather than to be knowingly modified. The minuet, taken fast, had a fine swagger. Alas, an excessive, almost endless holding back at the beginning of the trio and in several cognate passages made a mess of that (at least for me). The finale seemed to me just too fast, lacking in that grandeur that older conductors, not only Boulez, brought to the work. Playing, though, was excellent, and Haydn’s invention could still be relished.

London Sinfonietta/Kemp - Boulez and Cage, 9 March 2025

Purcell Room

Cage: Six Melodies
Boulez: Improvisé—pour le Dr. K
Cage: Credo in US
Boulez: Dérive 1
Boulez: Domaines
Cage: Variations I

Francesca Amewudah-Rivers (actor)

Michael McCarthy (director)

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

Sarah Nicolls (prepared piano)

London Sinfonietta

Thomas Kemp (conductor)

Images: Monika S Jakubowska

This London Sinfonietta concert, ‘innovative’ in the best rather than the debased, trivial way, framed performances of works by Pierre Boulez and John Cage with engaging readings from their correspondence by Francesca Amewudah-Rivers and short filmed contributions. It made for an enthralling and enjoyable evening at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room, precisely because the level of performance was so high, ‘additions’, though they were far more than that, genuinely complementing rather than substituting for musical excellence. It was a delight, moreover, to see a sold-out venue, once again giving the lie to claims that no one is interested in hearing this music. Many of us have a deep thirst for it; the only reason we do not go more often is a lack of opportunities to do so. Many do not, just as many do not like all manner of things, whether Mozart, Beethoven, the Beatles, or anything else; there is no reason to be dishonest and substitute one’s own preferences and interests for the voice of the world-spirit. And there is every reason to welcome an all-too-rare opportunity to hear, rather than simply talk about, this music, especially in so illuminating a juxtaposition, which offered great musical contrasts as well as points of mutual historical fascination. 

The first reading came not from the correspondence as such, although it is included in the Cambridge University Press Nattiez-Samuels edition as its first item. It was instead taken from Boulez’s 1949 spoken introduction – both manuscript and a rough draft are part of the Paul Sacher Stiftung – to the performance he helped organise of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, given at Suzanne Tézanas’s Paris salon. A brief filmed excerpt was juxtaposed with a live excerpt from Boulez’s own Second Piano Sonata of the previous year. Different worlds indeed, though the excerpted correspondence that followed suggested genuine interest in mutual exploration too, Boulez’s apology for sometimes writing in French – ‘my [English] grammar is still too shaky’ (3/11/12 January 1950) – typical of a humility for which he is still too infrequently credited. 

Cage’s Six Melodies for violin and keyboard (piano) from this same year were given a delightful performance by Clio Gould and Elizabeth Burley, the rhythmic progression Boulez admired strongly yet far from didactically to the fore. Initially un-, even anti-‘violinistic’, the music seemed to grow both as music and as violin music, the third and fourth pieces in particular splendidly ‘fiddling’. It felt like a gateway to the meditative sensibility as well as to the chance operations that would increasingly characterise Cage’s music in the years to follow. Boulez’s 2005 revision of his 1969 tribute for the eightieth birthday of Aldred A. Kalmus of Universal Edition, Improvisé—pour le Dr. K, opened with typical piano éclat. A very strong initial sense of Schoenberg – and he is there somewhere – faded slightly when I realised: ‘of course: like the other Kalmus pieces, this was written for the Pierrot ensemble’. Flute trills and their generative tendency seemed prophetic of later explorations, not least … explosante-fixe …, though its progress was very different. It was over in a flash, as ever leaving one wishing for more. 

A clip from the film Works of Calder, also from 1950, followed, including Cage’s music: ‘the first time I have felt the music to be necessary to a film’ (Boulez, 30 December 1950). Although Cage’s Credo in US was written earlier (1942) it seemed here to pre-empt the composer’s growing interest in chance operations through its use of radio music. Rhythm and sounds of percussion were truly infectious, leading up, so it seemed, to those Sonatas and Interludes. Boulez’s Dérive 1 (1984) offered more contrast than complement, though was no less welcome for that; it seemed to take up the baton from his earlier piece, the SACHER reference’s generative quality seductively palpable. Febrile, ever-transforming, a feast of Messiaenic colour, it spoke of and through Debussy rather than Cage’s Satie, and in its woodwind arabesques, similarly proclaimed a Stravinskian inheritance thoroughly internalised and transformed. 

Mark van de Wiel’s performance of the solo version of Domaines (1961-8) proved a stunning tour de force. Whatever Boulez’s intention, the element of choice and mobility, the clarinettist selecting the order in which the pages, each on a different stand, are played, brings an inescapable element of what soon would be called music theatre to proceedings, the performer’s one-man show extended to two, counting his instrument. Apart from – though who could it be apart from? – van de Wiel’s equally outstanding virtuosity and musical understanding, one of Boulez’s triumphant reinstatements of the performer, what truly stood out was an almost Wagnerian unendliche Melodie. One felt vividly as well as merely heard the procedures at work in all parameters, attack included, in the longest of constructed lines.   

Is Cage’s layering of transparencies in Variations I (1958) – to be performed by any number of performers on any instruments and any number thereof – more radical? Perhaps. Less ’Western’? Perhaps. Less ‘musical’? Perhaps. Given the presentation, it is hardly unreasonable to have felt led to ask such questions. Again, though, it was the contrast brought by something no less triumphantly ‘itself’ that was truly the thing. It brought with it a breath of the fresh air many felt Cage had imparted to Darmstadt.

Uchida - Beethoven, Schoenberg, Kurtág, and Schubert, 7 March 2025

Royal Festival Hall

Beethoven: Piano Sonata no.27 in E minor, op.90
Schoenberg: Three Piano Pieces, op.11
Kurtág: Márta ligaturája
Schubert: Piano Sonata no.21 in B-flat major, op.posth., D 960

Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

An evening with Mitsuko Uchida is rarely less than a privilege, and this was no exception. One audience member at the start seemed to take the idea a little too far, resolutely continuing to film her despite verbal and gestural requests to stop. An usher had to walk across the hall and point a sign forbidding use of telephones in the person’s face. Extraordinary! What with that and an onslaught of coughing that again occasioned requests in vain from the platform to desist, we certainly experienced the worst of live performance. Fortunately, there was enough of the best to compensate. 

The first item on the programme, Beethoven’s E minor Sonata, op.90, took a while properly to get going (a state of affairs perhaps not entirely unrelated to the case of the manic telephone user). Contrasts, especially dynamic contrasts, were immediately present. More broadly, the strange, wonderful world of Beethoven on the cusp of ‘lateness’ was with us. If some of the first movement in particular was a little brittle, that was not entirely inappropriate for this fractured world. Accentuated by very sparing use of the pedal, much of it entirely unpedalled, here was a Beethoven that was anything but comfortable or routine, even if I sometimes felt a slight lack of the continuity that underlies discontinuity. An almost Schubertian intimacy to the close, presaging the second half of the recital, came close to erasing any such reservations. The second movement seemed to breathe the air already of the late Bagatelles, in particular their lyricism, even when turned outward. Occasional technical faltering was of little import; the crucial things were engagement with and expression of Beethoven’s truculent humanism. 

Voice-leading in the first of Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces seemed in context to take its leave not only from Brahms but directly from Beethoven. So, indeed, did much else: contrasts now here become fully dialectical; melodic fragments wending their necessary yet sometimes difficult way; and harmony, yes harmony, too. Above all, there was here a not entirely dissimilar obstinacy—and nobility of spirit. Formal command was unquestionable, as founded on harmony as, say, the Beethoven of Daniel Barenboim (or Wilhelm Furtwängler). Much the same could be said of the second piece, over which the spirits of Wagner and Liszt hovered still more clearly. The third felt very much like the final movement of a ‘sonata’ of a dark variety that was yet possessed of magical chiaroscuro. 

The second half opened with Kurtág’s 2020 miniature Márta ligaturája, written for cimbalom, but here played directly from what seemed to be small manuscript pages (presumably copies), rendering the tribute to the composer’s beloved wife Marta all the more moving. Again, harmony and voice-leading seemed to pick up from where we had left off, only all the more distilled. If kinship with Schoenberg’s op.11 came across with particular strength, the emotional import came closer to his evocation of funeral bells for Mahler in the last of the Six Piano Pieces, op.19. Harmonies, not least pristine major chords, surprised and beguiled. 

Schubert’s final piano sonata followed less attacca than might have been the case, given the audience’s inability to keep quiet. The opening was nevertheless a thing of magic, possessed of seemingly intimate dynamic gradations, strength lying in intimacy and fragility, in persistence. This movement, indeed the sonata, as a whole reminded us what happiness can be built on pain, and vice versa. The last thing one needs here is a maudlin path, tempting though it may be. (I recall my own youthful attempts.) Instead, Schubert’s nobility of utterance was treasured, allowing it to speak ‘for itself’, however illusory that performative idea might be in practice. Ambivalence ran deep, especially in oscillation between major and minor. The recapitulation was, quite properly, a second development: one of a very different nature from those of Beethoven, one that seemingly never gave him a moment’s thought. The sound of Uchida’s chords in the coda would have been worth the price of admission alone 

Beautifully judged in tempo, as in all else, the slow movement neither dragged nor was rushed. It built; it sang; it said what needed to be said. The revelation of C-sharp major silenced any questions about how to understand it enharmonically and in relation to the tonality of the piece as a whole; Schubert, Uchida, and we knew.  A light-footed scherzo, if not quite lifting the clouds, suspended them for a moment. Its trio’s ambiguity, strange even by Schubert’s standards, duly registered, thus paving the way for the manifold, still deeper ambiguities of the finale, its decidedly non-Beethovenian subjectivity simply present, immanent. That said, there was here too a decidedly human, as well as humanist, obstinacy that seemed to bind together all the compositional voices on this programme: in this case, both aptly and surprisingly, in the returns of the rondo theme and the alternative, fleetingly Mahlerian vistas of the episodes.

Lortie - Chopin, 27 February 2025

Barbican Hall

Études, op.10
Trois Nouvelles Études, B130
Études, op.25

Louis Lortie (piano)  

I do not think I had previously heard all of Chopin’s piano studies given on a single evening. Fortunately, Louis Lortie’s recital was not one of those occasions on which one ends up thinking that might have made more sense as a CD than a concert programme; there is certainly much to be gained by hearing the works together, not only the two celebrated sets, but also the Trois Nouvelles Études written in 1839 as a contribution to Ignaz Moscheles and François-Joseph Fétis’s Méthode des méthodes de piano. It is not unusual in a piano recital to feel that the music following the interval flows more freely; if that was the case here, that is not to say that the first half was without interest, far from it. And whatever quibbles one might have – there will always be something – there is something heroic to the very attempt, let alone to its navigation with such success. 

Indeed, Lortie’s way with the op.10 Études was in some ways surprising. Often, the technical difficulties underlying the idea of a study came across more strongly than usual as essence as opposed to mere starting-point. In the opening C major piece, fingerwork and basic figuration very much were the music material. In the F major Étude, all was generated from tightly sprung rhythms. Voice-leading very much did its work in the E-flat major and minor studies. There was a keen sense of progression too, the C-sharp minor study vehement, torrential even, and notably proceeding from its two immediate predecessors. That is not to say there was not lyricism, as for instance in the E major study, given not without rubato yet enough simplicity; but even there, the technical ‘point’ of the piece shone through. Whether the balance tilted too much in that direction is doubtless in part a matter of taste, though for me sometimes it did. I certainly felt the loss of subjectivity in the ‘Revolutionary’ Study, an odd anti-climax whose detachment felt at odds with ‘problem’ and material alike. 

The three Nouvelles Études seemed to strike a better overall balance, as did the op.25 set. In the former, Scarlatti’s ‘ingenious jesting with art’ came to mind, Lortie uncommonly successful even among great pianists in transforming the ‘problem’ into music from the outset. The first in particular can readily sound more an ‘exercise’ than anything else, but here was deeply involving; as, in its necessarily lighter way, was the second. The A-flat major opening study of op.25 built and sang, its trajectory beautifully plotted. Slightly odd hesitations in the second piece of the op.10 set were nowhere to be heard in the long line of its counterpart here, whilst the richness of texture in the succeeding F major study proved duly engrossing. Technical demands were not banished, but there was a more consistent, conventional sense of these as miniature tone poems proceeding from a technical question: nowhere more so than in the G-sharp minor Étude. A delectable G-flat major Étude dug just deep enough. The concluding C minor piece of this set worked considerably better to my ears as a conclusion than its counterpart prior to the interval, very much a profound utterance of the soul. 

The first encore – alas, I missed the second – a generous G minor Ballade, was oddly dream-like: not necessarily how I think of it, but successfully reimagined on Lortie’s own terms. This was, then, anything but a run-of-the-mill Chopin recital. I was often thrilled and, even where slightly puzzled, found myself at least intrigued.

Götterdämmerung, Regents Opera, 16 February 2025

York Hall, Bethnal Green

Images: Steve Gregson
Siegfried (Peter Furlong), Hagen (Simon Wilding), Gunther (Andrew Mayor)

First Norn - Ingeborg Novrup Børch
Second Norn, Flosshilde – Mae Haydorn
Third Norn, Woglinde – Jillian Finnamore
Brünnhilde – Catharine Woodward
Siegfried – Peter Furlong
Gunther – Andrew Mayor
Hagen – Simon Wilding
Gutrune – Justine Viani
Waltraute – Catherine Backhouse
Alberich – Oliver Gibbs
Wellgunde – Elizabeth Findon
Vassals – Davide Basso, Max Catalano, Anthony Colasanto, Jacob Dyksterhouse, Tim Sawers, Alfred Mitchell, Ed Walters, Robin Whitehouse, Guy Wood-Gush

Director – Caroline Staunton
Assistant directors – Eleanor Strutt, Keiko Sumida
Designs – Isabella van Braeckel
Lighting – Patrick Malmström
Producer – CJ Heaver  

Members of London Gay Men’s Chorus

Members of Regents Opera Upper Voices Chorus

Regents Opera Ensemble

Ben Woodward (conductor)

The Norns (Ingeborg Novrup Børch, Mae Heydorn, Jillian Finnamore)

Wagner’s Ring is the drama of our time, yet it is surely the drama of every time. Seeing Opera North’s concert Rheingold only five days after the fateful 2016 referendum, the work seemed to take its leave from that. In our present malaise, Götterdämmerung inevitably seems closer than ever. Wagner, after all, pointed to the great virtue of myth being its alleged truth for all time, its content inexhaustible for any age. He is not saying quite the same thing there, although nor is he saying something entirely different. Tempting though it might be to proceed down that road, the particularity of this particular production and performance should be our primary concern. If my personal experience was less than ideal, in that I was unable to see Die Walküre and Siegfried, the final day of Wagner’s Ring spoke mostly for itself, with tantalising suggestions of what I might have missed—and dearly wish that I had not. 

Caroline Staunton’s production continues to tell the story with great intelligence and clarity, further framing refreshing rather than distracting. The sense of a collection of objects, a museum or gallery even, has developed since Rheingold’s contest of Valhalla and Nibelheim, to something less distant, incontestably ‘present’, as many of the best Götterdammerungen have always been. In any Ring, thoughts almost inevitably turn to that of Pierre Boulez and Patrice Chéreau: testament not only to its extraordinary quality, almost taking upon itself that mythical quality to which Wagner referred, but also to its historical fortune, falling in the right place at the right time, and with the right technology (television) spreading its word. This is unquestionably, as Chéreau remarked and showed, a post-religious society of increasingly desperate rituals, which knows no morality and finds it difficult, perhaps impossible, to ‘know’ at all. Here, the sense of objects curated, possessed, and, like the gold, fatefully valued – an ‘art market’ not so very different from what one might encounter, say, in the Tate Modern’s Turner Prize – entwines with Wagner’s epic, genealogical method, verbal and musical, of telling, retelling, adding standpoints and perspectives, never repeating. The world of the Norns seeks, perhaps, to protect objects gathered from earlier instalments. One can see and feel this when, as a gallery spectator, one ventures during the intervals to inspect the saucepan and tins, presumably Mime’s, from Siegfried, and other such objets. 

Hagen, Gunther, Brünnhilde, (Catharine Woodward) Gutrune (Justine Viani)

The following world of the Gibichungs glories, trivially yet palpably, in their extraction and abstraction, in the fetishist need to add to the collection, as Alberich needed to add to his hoard, Wagner’s furchtbare Not turned Lacanian. (We might reflect on that as we seek to add to the collection of Ring performances we have seen. Why are we doing this? Is it as mere collectors, perhaps closer to Nietzsche’s ‘Wagnerians’ or as something more active, as participants, as the revolutionary audience Wagner himself demanded?) I could not help but think of the denizens of Frank Castorf’s Götterdämmerung safeguarding their Picassos as Brünnhilde, purposely underwhelmingly, set Wall Street (slightly) ablaze. That consumerism appears to be what drives Gunther and Gutrune to wish to acquire Siegfried and Brünnhilde, though Hagen of course knows better and deeper. When all is returned to the Rhinemaidens, one can read this in all manner of ways; an ecological imperative is not necessarily to the scenic fore, though it hardly need be, since it will surely present itself to any thinking person in the midst of our climate emergency. 

Instead, we are prompted to think of the role art and its commodification, as well as more general sliding into the ‘mere’ craft, indeed ‘effect without cause’ Wagner diagnosed in the more meretricious would-be art of his own time. Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century, is transposed to the Ring in a Bethnal Green boxing ring. And the ring itself, like various of these objects more akin to Loge’s Rheingold toyland ‘Tand’ than the fearsome object we have been led to believe, gains whatever power it might have through the act of investing. It is less a matter of it working on account of belief, than on account of its valuation, or perhaps better a financialised, late-capitalist merging of the two; until, that is, the bottom falls out of the market, as it always will, rope of Fate or otherwise. 

Gunther, Brünnhilde

Conductor Ben Woodward and his small ensemble continued to work wonders. Of course there are times when one longs for a full orchestra, just as in a large theatre, there are times when one longs to be able to see the faces of those onstage. What surprised was how relatively few they were. Götterdämmerung surely presents the toughest challenge in this sense of the four dramas. Das Rheingold as Kammerspiel makes considerable sense, but the cosmic scale and grand opéra hauntings of this tale of Siegfried’s death and Brünnhilde’s redemption, heard through all that has passed before, seem to require something different. Maintaining tension over its vast span is difficult enough at Bayreuth or Covent Garden. Even the most exalted orchestras will slip here and there. This, however, was decidedly not the moment for Beckmesserish quibbles. Musical drama unfolded with care and intelligence, in tandem with the staging yet far from enslaved to it. Opportunities to hear it anew, sometimes even a little ‘inside out’, were gladly taken, forming part of an overall refreshment for the jaded, as well as a riveting introduction for those enabled to attend for the first time. The instrumentalists deserve nothing but praise for their contributions throughout, and choral forces brought welcome and, in this context, all the more telling contrast, permitting that larger-scale operatic world thrillingly to burst in. 

Hagen

None of this could, of course, have been achieved without the contributions from an excellent set of singing-actors. Different audience members will have had different favourites, and all contributed to a drama that was very much greater than the sum of its parts. Nonetheless, I was particularly struck by Simon Wilding’s Hagen and Catharine Woodward’s Brünnhilde (partly the roles, no doubt, though only partly). Wilding’s Hagen, dark and dangerous, simply owned the stage, a study in evil and its undeniable charm. The scene with his father proved especially moving, Oliver Gibbs not so much reprising as developing his outstanding Alberich for new, still darker times. Woodward’s Brünnhilde was similarly blessed of stage presence. Art in many respects conceals art: it was difficult not to feel that this simply ‘was’ the Valkyrie, and these simply ‘were’ the final phases of her journey. She could certainly sing too, offering an Immolation Scene of equal humanity and grandeur, in tandem with conductor and orchestra. It seemed, then, in many ways fitting that, at the end of the second-act trio, perhaps haunted here more by Verdi than Meyerbeer, Staunton should offer the twist of an unexpected passing union between Hagen and Brünnhilde. 

Gunther and Gutrune offer different challenges, of course. Vocal portrayal of weak characters is always a tough call, to which Andrew Mayor and Justine Viani rose very well indeed. The key, it seemed, lay in portrayal arising from the text, as was also the case with Peter Furlong’s tireless Siegfried, the character clearly, intriguingly traumatised. I suspect a clue to this would have been found in Siegfried; even without, it pointed to the difficulties our age and indeed Wagner’s (later Attic tragedy too, for that matter) have found in heroism. Catherine Backhouse gave a heartfelt reading of Waltraute’s pleading. Norns and Rhinemaidens emerged in fine ensemble, without sacrifice to individual voice. 

To conclude, then, may I once again suggest that any reader feeling able to do so might consider supporting this extraordinary venture, thrice denied Arts Council funding? The ecology of opera in this country is now as parlous as that of the world around us. Maybe, just maybe, Götterdämmerung can still be averted.