Sunday, 1 December 2024

LSO/Volkov - Lachenmann and Beethoven, 28 November 2024


Barbican Hall

Lachenmann: My Melodies (Music for Eight Horns and Orchestra)
Beethoven: Symphony no.7 in A major, op.92

LSO Horns
London Symphony Orchestra
Ilan Volkov (conductor)


Images: Mark Allan


This concert was the latest casualty of François-Xavier Roth’s absence from the concert platform. Whilst Ilan Volkov, another conductor with considerable experience in both new and older music, made good sense as replacement, it was difficult not to feel losses of connection in programming concept and, to a lesser extent, between conductor and orchestra (if only through Roth’s long association with the LSO). 

First up was My Melodies by Helmut Lachenmann, who had celebrated his eighty-ninth birthday the day before. Eight horn players (Diego Incertis Sanchez, Timothy Jones, Angela Barnes, Jonathan Moloney, Katu Woolley, Annemarie Federle, Richard Watkins, and Ben Goldscheider) were seated at the front, encircling the conductor, in front of the strings. Volkov offered a brief introduction, with musical examples: welcome as far as it went, though it did not go beyond identification of a few musical figures. What we used to call extended techniques, which have long since passed into common instrumental practice, elicited baffling, uproarious laughter from sections of the audience, some of whom proceeded to leave, both then and throughout the actual performance. It is certainly not the case that Lachenmann and his music lack humour, but it is not really to be found there, at least not intrinsically. Perhaps that was why Volkov forewent further analysis, understandably if so. 



The LSO sounded in its element for the opening éclat, razor sharp, full of colourful, and ably guided by Volkov, if perhaps without quite the sense of what was going on beneath the surface Roth might have conveyed. (I wonder whether it may in part also have been the difficult Barbican acoustic, to which Roth would have been more accustomed.) Even when the horns played together, as often they did, forming a single ‘macro horn’, parts as well as sum were apparent through the necessary workings of sound. Passages of stillness in motion were equally given their due. I loved the interplay with the orchestra, seemingly incited and infected, and vice versa, ‘conventional’ sounds coming across all the more freshly: dialectically rendered anew, even in a single piano note or chord, or harp arpeggios. The impression of wandering in pitch, even when objectively it was not, fascinated and further incited. Sometimes, a horn echo sounded, miraculously, as if it from the distance, though again clearly it did not. This was a performance that could be heard and felt viscerally and spatially, lines darting across the orchestra, not unlike, say, Webern or Boulez, albeit less geometrically. It was exhilarating, confounding, and yes, inspiring; but equally, there was an unmistakeable quality of Romantic solitude, even loneliness. Through the horns in particular, Lachenmann showed himself once again an heir to Schumann and Caspar David Friedrich, as well as to Nono and the postwar avant garde.



To follow My Melodies with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony made excellent sense then. Volkov’s reading had its moments, yet, save for an excellent Allegretto, did not quite seem to have settled. The first movement was a case in point, as indeed was its introduction: expectant, yet lacking a sense really of heading anywhere. Some of the LSO’s playing was strangely abrasive: by ‘period’ design, I imagine, far closer at any rate to the world of John Eliot Gardiner than that of Colin Davis. The exposition blazed rather than blared and had a stronger sense of form, as did the rest of the movement, though it still lacked that necessary goal orientation. The second movement, by contrast, was given as if in a single breath, with a keen sense of expanding from a chamber ensemble, and darkly developmental throughout. The scherzo and trio seemed to have exchanged characteristics: the former at times, again seemingly by design, turning strangely inward, save for on its more convincing second reprise; the latter possessed of considerable strength. The finale went where it needed to, yet never quite took flight, dogged from beginning to end. I have certainly heard worse, but I have also heard better.

Wednesday, 27 November 2024

Rossi/Kubota/BCMG/Paterson: Saunders, Anderson, Eötvös, Illean, and Birtwistle, 26 November 2024


Wigmore Hall

Rebecca Saunders: Stirrings
Julian Anderson: Mitternachtslied
Peter Eötvös: Secret Kiss (English version, world premiere)
Lisa Illean: Cantor
Harrison Birtwistle: The Woman and the Hare; …when falling asleep (London premiere)

Alice Rossi (soprano)
Meg Kubota (reciter)
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)

London visits from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group are rarer than we might hope, though doubtless many would object, quite reasonably, that visits to the capital need not be its priority. At any rate, a city seemingly ever more starved of new music was here blessed by fine Wigmore Hall performances of six works from the last twenty-five years. 

‘The strokes now faint now clear as if carried by the wind but not a breath and the cries now faint now clear,’ is one of two quotations from Samuel Beckett Rebecca Saunders selected to accompany her 2011 ensemble piece, Stirrings: in this case from Beckett’s late Stirrings Still. Although the only vocal work on the programme, it seemed to set up much of what was to come, its title and perhaps not only that coming to life in the opening double bass solo and what it provoked. Nine players, most onstage, some behind us, took us on a captivating journey of extraordinary sounds that were never mere sounds, always music, ever evolving, as if this were a geological process. As before in Saunders’s work, I could have sworn I was hearing electronics, but I was not: simply nine musicians and their instruments who seemed  before our eyes and ears to have, in Gurnemanz’s vision – and Wagner’s – time become space. A sense of musical landscape already hinted at the music of Birtwistle to come, as did that of inherent musical drama. It is probably better to leave Beckett the last words, again as selected by Saunders, this time from Company: ‘Light infinitely faint it is true since now no more than a mere murmur.... In dark and silence to close as if to light the eyes and hear a sound. Some object moving from its place to its last place. Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more. To darkness visible to close the eyes and hear if only that. Some soft thing stirring soon to stir no more.... By the voice a faint light is shed. Dark lightens while it sounds. Deepens when it ebbs. Lightens with flow back to faint full. Is whole again when it ceases.’

A recent (2023) setting by Julian Anderson of Zarathustra’s roundelay followed. Undaunted by Mahlerian precedent, composer and performers (here the Pierrot ensemble, joined by soprano Alice Rossi and conductor Geoffrey Paterson) made something new yet old, in that sense at least like Saunders and Birtwistle. It is tribute to their success that not once did I think of Mahler, save for the occasional resonance, perhaps via Schoenberg. Stravinskian inheritance seemed at least as strongly in play, not least in rhythm. It opened de profundis – how could it not? – yet soon moved on, even before Rossi’s entrance. If the pace was slow – again, how could it not be? – it seemed over too soon, like midnight or a Nietzschean aphorism. Much caught the ear. vocal and instrumental melismata seemingly inciting one another, building to a midnight climax both dark and refulgent, touching and perhaps ironic in the brevity of its evocation of eternity. 

To complete the first half, we heard the premiere of the English version of the late Peter Eötvös’s Secret Kiss (2018). Another arresting opening, this time from percussion, set the scene for a typical yet typically individual melodrama, words selected by Mari Mezel from Alessandro Baricco’s novel Silk. Five players, on flutes, clarinets, percussion, violin, and cello, were joined by reciter Meg Kubota and Paterson, seemingly bringing a silken world into existence before our ears. It was an instrumental as much as a verbal drama we heard, processes recognisably rooted in central European tradition – Webern, Bartók, et al. – yet reinvented in magically pictorial terms that were entirely Eötvös’s own, Bluebeard notwithstanding. My sole reservation related to what sounded like overmiking. I wondered whether it were simply a feature, if an odd one, of the piece, yet its persistence in the two Birtwistle pieces suggested otherwise. Maybe it was nonetheless an artistic decision; if so, at least to my ears, it proved a pity, detracting not insignificantly here and later from the ultimate coherence of otherwise spellbinding performances. 

Lisa Illean’s Cantor (2017) opened the second half, verse by Willa Cather separated by entirely different, yet no less exquisite, instrumental movements for somewhat augmented ensemble, more string-focused than anything heard previously (or afterwards). Whether it were simply Schoenberg on my mind, I am not sure, but I sensed his presence at a distance in noticeably un-Schoenbergian, postspectralist (?) music: a pattern from Pierrot here, a floating vocal line there. As with all pieces on the programme, rates of change, be they melodic, harmonic, or timbral, seemed just right in work and performance alike. 

The Woman and the Hare (1999) brought singer, reciter, ensemble, and conductor together in exploration of a post-Gawain landscape both alluring and threatening, unmistakeably English in its melancholy and in its vocal and instrumental reinvention of Morgan Le Fay. The two voices contrasted and complemented, embellished and elucidated, music not necessarily ‘autonomous’, yet unquestionably ‘itself’. Stravinsky was an abiding, yet intangible presence, as sure as in Punch and Judy, all the way down to Birtwistle’s musical bedrock. And like Stravinsky’s Pierrot, it was above all an instrumental masterpiece—and yet… 

To hear …when falling asleep immediately after (twice, the second time as an encore) was instructive and, it seemed, inevitable. The 2019 commission sounded less a homage to the earlier work, despite the return to responsorial combination of singer and reciter, than its distillation in a new yet related world. Rilke in English translation (Jochen Voigt) and words drawn from Swinburne’s elegy for Baudelaire here sounded more strongly in opposition, until they were not. Instrumentalists played on as as ever-changing voice of continuity, in this world and the evening’s music as a whole.


Sunday, 24 November 2024

Hänsel und Gretel, Royal Academy of Music, 22 November 2024


Susie Sainsbury Theatre

Images: Craig Fuller


Hänsel – Anna-Helena Maclachlan
Gretel – Binny Supin Yang
Peter – Conrad Cahatterton
Gertrud – Ella Orehek-Coddington
Witch – Konstantinos Akritides
Sandman – Grace Hope-Gill
Dew Fairy – Caroline Blair

Director – Jack Furness
Designs – Alex Berry
Lighting – Ben Ormerod
Choreography – Rebecca Meltzer

Royal Academy Sinfonia
Royal Academy Opera Chorus
Johann Stuckenbruck (conductor)

Working as I do in education, I am probably more accustomed to trigger warnings, above all to what they are not, than many. It really does no harm to signpost what might be ahead to those who are vulnerable so that they can prepare and, in extremis, make alternative arrangements. Warnings are not and never have been a matter of avoiding, let alone prohibiting, presentation and discussion of difficult subjects; rather, they can offer a framework for that very presentation and discussion. In practice, we learn from experience, including from mistakes, and I have never found students difficult or unsupportive in difficult cases; we work together, and that is how it should be. That said, I was a little surprised when checking the Royal Academy of Music’s website for the starting time of Hänsel und Gretel to see a trigger warning: ‘This production contains scenes of a violent nature which some audience members may find upsetting, including the use of stage blood. Therefore, we recommend that audiences are aged 13+’. Not so long into this production, by Jack Furness, I understood why, although the age recommendation and general circumlocution seemed to be missing the point. Yes, there was a bit of stage blood, which might have led the ultra-squeamish (I count myself among them) at times to avert their eyes, but it was surely the sexual nature of the violence that presented the potential problem and might have ‘triggered’ audience members of any age. 


Hänsel (Anna-Helena Maclachlan)

This, then, was a serious Hänsel, such as many of us have always maintained should be the case. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the best previous example I had seen of such a production – and still, I think, the best all round – was that of Liam Steel for another of the London conservatoires, the Royal College of Music in 2016. It tackled head on issues of familial child abuse, without abandoning the story ‘itself’; far from it. Furness’s staging was probably more ambitious still, for better and for worse. It opened up a good number of questions, yet, at least (for me) on a first viewing, was sometimes a little confusing in their presentation, making it difficult (again, at least for me) to establish what had been intended.   

The setting was that of a fundamentalist (Amish-like) community, in which abuse was clearly rife, tapping into current Handmaid’s Tale and broader US fascist-Protestant preoccupations. Gretel dreamed, it seemed, of escape—and finally achieved it, though at what cost? Disturbingly, her sexual awakening, was not only represented and paralleled in various stage representations – her first period coinciding with the Dream Pantomime and concluding with chastisement from her father; serial sculpting of gashes; the Dew Fairy as alluring flower; the red cellophane membrane of the Witch’s gingerbread house – but also entwined with abuse at the hands of her father. So far, so distressing, her apparent assault being part of the dream, though presumably rooted in reality, but the role of starving children around was more unclear, more sometimes proving less. Learned behaviour was clearly exhibited between Hänsel and Gretel themselves, she first trying on her knowledge with her brother, he traumatised and only later attempting it, now to her horror, for himself. The mother had clearly opted for a policy of least resistance. Quite why, then, one would have a ‘larger than life’ cabaret-Witch en travestie was unclear; it seemed an odd thing for that abused girl to fantasise about and frankly jarred, though nonetheless it retained an imprint. 


Witch (Konstantinos Akritides), Gretel (Binny Supin Yang), Hänsel 

Johann Stuckenbruck’s conducting, impressively, seemed very much of a piece with the seriousness of the production. It began very slowly and, especially during the first and second acts, seemed inclined to highlight colder, disturbing aspects of the score, some of which I had never really imagined existed—or to come close to inventing them in tandem with Derek Clark’s orchestral reduction. There were occasions when the small Royal Academy Sinfonia was out of sorts, indeed out of tune, which highlighted the impression, but Stuckenbruck restored order on each occasion, and the greater freedom with which the third act proceeded further signalled a musicodramatic strategy; here, at last, Gretel awakened, was some Schwung. Clark’s reduction bothered me more than these arrangements tend to. There are good, pragmatic reasons for using them, though we need to be a little wary in the broader scheme of things, lest they ‘cost-effectively’ supplant the real thing, which here is truly a thing of wonder, its Wagnerian scale (in one sense) crucial to it. Some instances that sounded straightforwardly odd, yet I was also bothered in a more positive, dramatic way by its coldness: not unlike, then, the rest of the show. 

Our Hänsel and Gretel gave multifaceted performances, founded on highly accomplished acting. Binny Supin Yang’s facial expressions as Gretel were key to delineation of this realm of nightmares. Vocally, she came into her own, appropriately enough, in the third act, whilst also offering an animated performance earlier on. Anna-Helena Maclachlan’s Hänsel was properly awkward, all the more so in this setting, benefiting from a beautiful, unforced mezzo and signal attention to words and their meaning. A commanding Father in Conrad Chatterton and an intriguingly withdrawn, albeit finely sung, Mother in Ella Orehek-Coddington vocally completed the family, augmented by an alert team of choral extras. Konstantinos Akritides’s star turn as the Witch was despatched with vigour and verve; whether the concept were misjudged was a question for the production, not the performer. Grace Hope-Hill and Caroline Blair both impressed in their roles too, as Sandman and Dew Fairy. Whatever my reservations, then, this was a Hänsel to provoke insight and disturbance, which is as it should be.  


Wednesday, 13 November 2024

Takács Quartet: Haydn, Britten, and Beethoven, 12 November 2024


Wigmore Hall

Haydn: String Quartet in C major, op.54 no.2, Hob.III:57
Britten: String Quartet no.2 in C major, op.36
Beethoven: String Quartet no.16 in F major, op.135

Eduard Dusinberre, Harumi Rhodes (violins)
Richard O’Neill (viola)
András Féjer (cello)

It is always a joy to hear the Takács Quartet and, in my case, it had been a little while, so was all the more welcome. This Wigmore Hall recital opened with an outstanding performance of the second of Haydn’s ‘Tost’ Quartets, totally ‘inside’ the music from the off, presentation and subsequent development of Haydn’s ideas making that abundantly clear. Surprises duly registered, however often one might have heard them before: not through exaggeration, but through sound musical means, delivered as fresh as the day they were born. Haydn’s invention truly spoke throughout this first movement and beyond, structure becoming form in real time. A gravely beautiful Adagio and its flights of first violin fantasy as brought to life as Eduard Dusinberre cast shadows back into the Baroque and forward to Beethoven and beyond. It led directly into a spirited yet graceful minuet, its trio sternly impassioned as if developing sentiments from the slow movement as well as responding to its sibling. The finale’s formal experimentation again seemed to look forward to Beethoven, late Beethoven at that, its first and third sections elegant and heartfelt, full of harmonic tension and clear of direction. The brief Presto interlude achieved the paradox of skittish rigour, Haydn’s quizzical enigma enhanced. 

I have no doubt Britten’s Second Quartet received a performance of similar commitment and excellence, though the work itself pales beside Haydn (and Beethoven), suggesting, as the composer’s instrumental music often does, that words and, in many cases, a stage were necessary if not to ignite then to discipline his compositional imagination. It was certainly a very different tradition from Haydn’s that came to mind in the first two movements, that of relatively recent Russian music: Prokofiev at his more discursive more than Shostakovich, though the latter’s hysterical tendencies exhibited themselves from time to time. The Takács players imbued their performance with character and rigour, and the second movement at least did not outstay its welcome. For all the talk of Purcell – and indeed the overt attempt at homage – the chacony finale seemed lacking in his spirit or much of any other. This performance made as good sense of it as any, but to me it remained grey music, without much in the way of the Peter Grimes-like dramatic leavening of the first movement’s opening. 

Where the rot set in was Britten’s notorious verdict on Beethoven. Give me that rot any day, especially in so all-encompassing a performance as that of the Takács Quartet of his final quartet, op.135. Its opening was inviting, good-humoured, and mysterious in equal measure. That sense of productive, generative balance was typical of the first movement as a whole, imbued with the character as well as the tempo of an Allegretto, ever developing in a reading as spacious as it was intense. It very much felt as if it picked up where Haydn and also the Beethoven of the Eighth Symphony had left off. The ensuing Vivace similarly balanced control and freedom, regularity and the danger of careering out of control. Deeply felt and beautifully sung, the slow movement’s balance between introversion and extroversion was inevitably weighted toward the former, yet outward expression told in the moment, both at micro- and macro-levels. It was played and thus heard as if in a single breath. Following a questing introduction, sad and vehement, seeming both to confront the terrible, tragic truth of existence and yet also to move on, Meistersinger-like, to cope with it in complexity, the finale seemed to hark back to earlier Beethoven, the Razumovsky quartets in particular, yet also to know that it could not merely return. And yet, it persisted. Such, after all, is our lot. If our world is going to end, then let it be here.


Saturday, 9 November 2024

Eugene Onegin, HGO, 8 November 2024


Jacksons Lane Arts Centre


Images: © 2024 Laurent Compagnon 


Eugene Onegin: Ambrose Connolly
Tatiana: Nicola Said
Lensky: Martins Smaukstelis
Olga: Katey Rylands
Prince Gremin: Wonsick Oh
Mme Larina: Erin Spence
Filipyevna: Hannah Morley
Zaretsky: Conall O’Neil
Monsieur Triquet: Quito Clothier

Director: Eleanor Burke
Associate director: Finn Lacey
Designs: Emeline Beroud
Lighting: Trui Malten
Movement: Alex Gotch
Fight director: Rich Gittens

HGO Chorus and Orchestra
Oliver Cope (conductor)


Eugene Onegin (Ambrose Connolly)


HGO’s new Eugene Onegin is not only one of the most impressive productions I have seen yet from the company; it is one of the most impressive of the work I have seen for quite some time too. It would be easy to dwell on what it is not: it is not a lavish big-house staging with big ‘names’; it has a tiny one-to-a-part orchestra; and so on. That focuses attention in different ways, to a certain extent intrinsically: one hears things differently in arrangements, of course, an intriguing case in point being the way one perceives the band almost diegetically during the ball scene. Acting at close quarters offers a very different, in many ways more intense experience too, visually and aurally; one learns much from the detail of facial expressions that would be missed by the greater part of an audience elsewhere Yet none of that would count for very much at all, were it not for the excellence of staging, performances, and ensemble. Almost as if one were attending a performance of, say, Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances, one begins to wonder whether one needs the ‘original’ experience at all. There is room for both, of course, and must be; HGO’s raison d’être is to offer singers at the start of their professional careers opportunities to sing in full-scale, interesting productions before London audiences. Yet it is testament on this occasion to the success of this first night, that I did not feel remotely troubled by having missed Covent Garden’s new staging and having gone to this instead. 

Eleanor Burke’s staging sets the work maybe 30 or 40 years ago: it could be just before or just after the fall of socialism, or whatever it is, but that is not really the point. Even in the final act, skilfully evoking with, as elsewhere, minimal resources, what might be some sort of St Petersburg art show, founded in new prosperity (for some), again the point is not so much political as the passing of time. Time and regret are crucial to the work, of course, as to the production. There is nothing pretty, let alone prettified, about the countryside in which this opens; one can well imagine its protagonists would feel some relief on leaving it—save if, like Lensky, they were dead; or, like Tatiana and Onegin, they endure other miserable fates.



 

These are lonely people, trying to pretend otherwise, trying to make their way in the world, and relying on various crutches – alcohol, drugs, sex, and above all each other – to do so. That again, does not in itself become the point, but rather contextualises the drama and permits it to emerge. Another such crutch lies in literature and in the world of art more broadly. Onegin initially hands Tatiana a book, later returned to him. She writes her letter in it, and that appears to mark some stage in growing up as well as more obvious awakening. Whether ultimately it helps them make sense of themselves and their situation is perhaps questionable, though. Tragedy lies in the consequences of what they do there and then; they cannot always simply learn from their mistakes, since it will often be too late.

 

Olga (Katey Rylands), Tatiana (Nicola Said)

For once, one does not find everything, or indeed anything very much, a metaphor for Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality. The strong direction gives the overt drama a new lease of life and one believes in these characters as themselves, Lensky and Olga as much as Onegin and Tatiana, the troubled community in which they grow up too, different characters sketched intriguingly, becoming a chorus when called upon, yet clearly having lives, problems, and personalities of their own. The most real connection – at least before it is all too late – may still lie between Onegin and Lensky, but the devastation felt by both, again realising that they too have destroyed what they had, something that cannot be put back together, seems very much to be what it overtly seems to be. That does not mean other paths might not be or have been followed. A splendid cabaret turn from Quito Clothier’s Monsieur Triquet – very well sung too – acts as a beacon of fascination, awakening, and perhaps liberation for the assembled company. What happens when he and Onegin disappear after the ball, returning for the duel, could doubtless be read in another way. Again, I am not sure that is the point, though, and it has not granted them neither enlightenment nor fulfilment. It merely points the way to the pill-induced disorientation, laced with probably unsatisfactory sexual experimentation, Onegin suffers in his time of wayfaring on the way to St Petersburg: a metaphor for whistling one’s life away, as much as the thing itself. 


M. Triquet (Quito Clothier)

Ambrose Connolly and Martins Smaukstelis presented a contrasted and complementary pair as Onegin and Lensky, dark and blond, introvert and extrovert, brooding and apparently fun-loving, capable of shocking, volatile exchange in the whirlwind transformations of the ball, here Tatiana's disastrous eighteenth birthday party. Onegin’s flirtation with Olga, cruelly mocking Lensky, can rarely have felt so overtly real, Smaukstelis in turn seeming to retreat in collapse to his childhood. This was accomplished by excellent acting and singing, their Russian (insofar as I can judge) matching their command of vocal line. Moving unmistakeably, yet not without regret, from girl to woman, Nicola Said’s Tatiana likewise matched dramatic, verbal, and ‘purely’ musical qualities to a degree that would have impressed on any stage. Katey Rylands illuminated Olga’s particular path, first fun-loving and yet ultimately as nagged with doubt and regret, to complete an outstanding central quartet. A Prince Gremin will almost always stand out, his aria such a Tchaikovskian gift. That does not negate the moving excellence with which Wonsick Oh presented it; far from it. Erin Spence’s Mme Larina and Hanna Morley’s Filpyevna were entirely convincing in their new setting, unquestionably more than stock characters; so too were Conall O’Neill’s dark and dangerous Zaretsky, and the broader chorus out of which he stepped.


Lensky (Martins Smaukstelis)

Oliver Cope’s musical direction was equally crucial to the evening’s success of the evening. To conduct such a performance is at least as stiff a test as with full orchestra; Cope passed with flying colours, as did his band of soloists, whose cultivated chamber playing metamorphosed seemingly without effort into statements, clashes, and tragic entanglements of full-scale Romantic emotions. Interplay between public and private was located above all here in the orchestra, not least given the fruitful scenographic limitations on such a stage. Pacing and balance were well judged, in the service of an excellent musicodramatic continuity impossible to divorce from what was unfolding ‘onstage’. Clearly a consequence of dedicated, intensive collaboration, all was more than the sum of its considerable parts. Highly recommended.

Dego/LSO/Rustioni - Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Schubert, 7 November 2024


Barbican Hall

Liszt: Les Préludes, S 97
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor, op.64
Schubert: Symphony no.9 in C major, ‘Great’, D 644

Francesca Dego (violin)
London Symphony Orchestra
Daniele Rustioni (conductor)


Images: Mark Allan

This was a slightly curious concert: much to admire and very little, if anything, to which to object, the LSO on excellent form throughout. Yet the performance of Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony rarely ignited as it might have done, a case of being almost yet not quite there under Daniele Rustioni’s direction, and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto received an unusual, interesting, yet again not entirely convincing performance from Francesca Dego. 

Liszt’s symphonic poem Les Préludes came off best, in an outstanding performance from orchestra and conductor alike. From the opening bar, they conjured up a splendidly Lisztian sound – easier said than done with orchestra, as opposed to piano – and showed themselves adept at managing those all-important transitions and transformations. What can all too readily sound stiff, even from the most exalted names, here evinced first-rate continuity and flexibility; it was refreshingly free of brashness, let alone vulgarity, too. Lyrical, even operatic, it seemed to confirm Wagner’s unhistorical placing of Liszt’s symphonic poems as an intermediate stage between Beethoven’s symphonies and his own music dramas. Exemplary woodwind playing and blend, melting strings (with an especially spirited cello section, where called for), and big-hearted climaxes that lacked nothing in power combined to form a performance of power and sensitivity.


 

Rustioni’s way with the Mendelssohn was often as impressive. He began the first movement swiftly, yet never drove too hard, and lightly emphasised its darker undercurrents, as if to confound absurd preconceptions of this as ‘pleasant’ music. Dego’s sound was often on the smaller, silvery side, worlds away from, say, Anne-Sophie Mutter, yet always cut through, and line was secure and finely spun; any qualms were really a matter of taste. She had a nice line in telling rubato too. The cadenza in particular was captivating, likewise the closing accelerando. Her tone in the slow movement was often a little nervy, even wiry: again, clearly an interpretative choice, since it was not always like that, but a little odd. There was nothing routine to the performance, though, which showed commendable metrical flexibility. A quicksilver finale pulsed with life and good humour, with all the give and take of chamber music. It made me smile, and goodness knows we need something like that in the world right now.



The introduction to the first movement of the Schubert trod a middle path between old and new. (The labels make little intrinsic sense, but perhaps remain the easiest way to describe broad interpretative trends.) It was certainly alla breve, yet sounded less rushed than has became the case, nonetheless lacking the grandeur – and meaning – of ‘old’, whether Klemperer and Furtwängler, or Colin Davis and Daniel Barenboim (Barenboim’s 2015 VPO performance in Berlin by some way the best live performance I have heard). It was elegant and euphonious, and had a sense of heading somewhere, the movement ‘proper’ then being taken at a perfectly reasonable tempo. Likewise, it evinced vigour and rigour, still flying by, all the time retaining creditably cultivated orchestral sound. The Andante con moto was bracingly swift, yet retained flexibility and an admirably Viennese sound. Solo playing was comfortably the equal of any one would hear around the world, and the orchestra as a whole offered a winning match of transparency and warmth. The third and fourth movements, both played very well and far from lacking in energy, nonetheless seemed to outstay their welcome, repetition supplanting development: a pity, given the swagger of the scherzo and the initial excitement of the finale.


Wednesday, 6 November 2024

WEDO/Barenboim - Mendelssohn and Brahms, 4 November 2024


Royal Festival Hall

Mendelssohn: Symphony no.4 in A major, op.90
Brahms: Symphony no.4 in E minor, op.98

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)


Images: Pete Woodhead


A performance from Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has always been an experience hors concours. That has not changed; it is arguably all the more so than ever. The warmth of applause Barenboim received coming on stage was in itself striking, arguably beyond even that Bernard Haitink did during his later years; that with which Barenboim and the orchestra met on departing was something else again. The reasons for this are obvious and do not need rehearsing, but they are very much part of the context in which any listener from this planet, perhaps even from beyond, would experience this concert. 

Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony was not a work I associated with Barenboim, but that was clearly a matter of my ignorance, since he conducted it, as he would Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, without a score. The manner in which it opened banished any such doubt for good: buoyant, transparent, directed, at an ideal tempo, and imbued with chiaroscuro. Ravishing woodwind solos characterised not only this first movement but the performance as a whole. Split violins brought the dialogue further to life—and what a luxury it was to hear this music with an orchestra ranging from sixteen firsts to eight double basses. That depth of strings truly told in the struggle of the development, more Beethovenian than one generally hears, and all the better for it. Indeed, it was not only Beethoven but the Beethoven of Furtwängler who increasingly came to mind: surely a matter not entirely dissociated from the state of the world around us and, above all, around these extraordinary young musicians and their wise guide and mentor. It was likewise perhaps my imagination, but I am not sure I have heard the second movement sound so mournful. It was neither slow nor lugubrious, but told of an underlying pain that could never be put into words (thinking of Mendelssohn’s own aesthetic claim). This processional, steeped in the deepest melancholy, maintained its line from beginning to end, detail and broad sweep in perfect equipoise. Moving to the major mode brought Schubertian bitter-sweetness. The close, alas, brought a less than welcome intervention from mobile telephone. 

Was the minuet too loving? I imagine some might have thought so. For me, as a one-off, it offered a fond backward glance to a world before, ever vanished, yet tantalisingly close, whether to Mozart or whatever one might choose politically. Again, woodwind were to die for. Horns and bassoons in the trio, beautifully hushed, seemed to recall the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, building to a stern climax with militaristic trumpets and drums. In that context, the finale offered a wake-up call in several senses. Fast, furious, unrelenting, it had never terrified me as it did here. String figuration again darted from the Dream music, the Scherzo in particular, yet turned to acid, disturbingly close to the world of, say, Mahler’s Fifth. Throughout, the sense of purpose evoked Beethoven and anticipated Brahms.

 


The first concert I heard Barenboim conduct was of Brahms, in this very hall: not the Fourth Symphony, but rather the Third and First. He still has much to tell us and much to surprise us with. If the candle occasionally flickers, as here in the great finale, which almost yet not quite fell apart; it continues ultimately to burn, perhaps all the more movingly for its infallibility. There is little doubt that the Divan musicians would follow him to the end of the earth and there is hope in that. The first movement, deeply sad without sentimentality, felt well-nigh overwhelming. It may have been on the slow side, but it pulsed with life both in its harmonic fundamentals and in the motivic working of inner parts: Schenker and Schoenberg united, as so often in the best of Barenboim’s (and anyone else’s) performances. It became more frightening, more vehement, its insistence frightening, sweeter passages arguably still more so. Its fragility remained deeply moving. The development opened as if showing us a musical (and political) wasteland, from which the world somehow, just about, picked itself up. Horn calls and massed string portamenti sent chills, properly ambiguous, down the spine. Battle between first and second violins towards the close told its own unmistakeable story.

The second movement, intriguingly, seemed to take up whether the inner movements of the Mendelssohn had left off, building rhythmically (those hemiolas!) and harmonically into a tragic statement of Beethovenian stature, whose virginal tenderness troubled still more than external defiance. Truth, here, was the essence. It was not beautiful; nor was it intended to be. Yet in the richness of Brahms’s inner parts, there lay hope, as there did in something later, warmer, aptly (given Barenboim’s history) Elgarian. He may not have seemed to be doing very much, yet detail remained within his hands, as witnessed by a subtle signal to the firsts to tone down, instantly obeyed. The scherzo-like third movement offered ebullient contrast, as if a thunderbolt from Zeus. In dialectical contrast, it became almost balletic, only adding to the sense of what humanly was at stake. The passacaglia was as implacable, as naked in its honesty: the final, complete tragic utterance, laden with all the cares of the world and yet still able to speak, to resist, to bear witness. At times, it almost stood still; at others, it pressed on. All was part of the same flow, all rooted in harmony, musically Sophoclean. 



The Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as at the Waldbühne this summer, made for a fitting, featherlight encore: charming, yet with depth rarely achieved and perhaps never surpassed. Encapsulating so much of what had gone before, it also offered something refreshingly new. Again, a sign of hope.


Tuesday, 5 November 2024

Gerstein/BBC SO/Oramo - Bacewicz and Busoni, 1 November 2024


Barbican Hall

Grażyna Bacewicz: Symphony no.2
Ferruccio Busoni: Piano Concerto in C major, op.83

Kirill Gerstein (piano)
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Sakari Oramo (conductor)


Images: Copyright: BBC/Sarah-Louise Bennett

The centenary of Ferruccio Busoni’s death fell earlier this year, not that ninety-nine per cent of the musical world appears to have noticed. Where are the operas, even his masterpiece and summa, Doktor Faust this year, or any other? His Turandot will never rival Puccini’s for popularity, nor for various other attributes, least of all disturbingly alluring sadism. Yet, though I admire both, I think Busoni’s is ultimately the better piece. In the meantime, the BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, Sakari Oramo, and Kirill Gerstein offered a rare opportunity to hear his genre- and much-else-defying Piano Concerto, which in its finale offers a male chorus setting of words from the Danish Romantic Adam Oelenschläger’s Aladdin, in Oelenschläger’s own German translation (long since superseded), which Busoni at one point considered turning into an opera. If that sounds more like Beethoven’s Ninth than any of his piano concertos – not, if truth be told, the work has much in common with either – then it points to an important truth: namely, that this superlative pianist and veteran of many a piano concerto, historical and contemporary, chose in his own to write, without sparing the pianist great technical challenges, a work that was more operatic symphony with piano than concerto in any traditional sense, adversarial or otherwise.

A composer such as Busoni needs a champion, and Gerstein probably has better claim than any other current performing musician to the title. During the 2022-23 season, he gave a series of three concerts at the Wigmore Hall, entitled ‘Busoni and his World’. I attended two and left enriched by both. He has also been performing the Piano Concerto, a live recording with Sakari Oramo and the Boston Symphony Orchestra having been warmly acclaimed. I have yet to hear it, but if it is anything like this performance with Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, it should be snapped up by anyone with the slightest interest or curiosity. I suspect it will be in broad outline, since swift overall timings of about seventy minutes are common to both. For the sake of comparison, John Ogdon takes about seventy-eight and Victoria Postnikova manages to stretch it to almost ninety. A signal achievement of this performance, though was that such thoughts never entered the mind. The work did not even seem long, but rather, like a Mahler symphony, the precise length that it needed to be, compelling from beginning to end. 



Indeed, from the outset, soloist, conductor, and for the most part orchestra approached it as if it were a repertory piece. The first movement flowed with notable fluency, with no question as to its depths. Whatever this is, it is not a ‘surface’ work. There was a Beethovenian strength to the string foundations, the Seventh Symphony in particular coming to mind. Gerstein, on his first entry, showed himself both secure in command and inviting—even if we did not yet quite know to what he and Busoni were inviting us. He made the massive piano chords sing in themselves, but equally in counterpoint with the orchestra, unleashing Faustian energy yet also relishing the more ‘feminine’ – in the old, gendered typology – passages in which Doktor Faust itself is at its least successful. If the creation of music from often simple elements required Beethovenian struggle, it rarely sounded like it, the effect closer to Mozart, to Liszt, and occasionally to Brahms. One sensed if not the birth of Busoni’s Junge Klassität, then a milestone in its evolution. 

That Classical-Romantic line ran through the following Pezzo giocoso too, its energy almost yet not quite delirious in piano and orchestra alike. Like its predecessor, it seemed effortlessly to capture the protean spirit of its composer, here pointing, tambourine and all, toward the warm, Mediterranean south. The longer Pezzo serioso struck, unsurprisingly, a more serious, even Teutonic note, pianistic shadows and rays of winter sun from the worlds of Beethoven and Brahms set against surprisingly Wagnerian trombones: a magical combination. Form was unerringly communicated as was a musical narrative perhaps closer to that of Liszt’s symphonic poems than to Strauss. Faustian tones became more pronounced, as if the good doctor himself were seated at the piano, performing his own concerto. The fourth movement tarantella sounded as a truly Italian vision, albeit an Italy different from anyone else’s. In its Lisztian figuration, we experienced a unique, even outrageous fever. And how could we not smile at the evocation of Rossini on entering the realm of commedia dell’arte? 

The transition to the final movement, as the male chorus stood, was a thing of wonder. Busoni instructed that it should be invisible, and the effect would doubtless be all the more magical if it were, if perhaps at the cost of intelligibility, though we had (welcome) surtitles in this case. A quietly ecstatic new and final chapter opened: ‘Lifet up your hearts to the Power Eternal. Feel Allah’s presence. Behold all his works.’ A splendidly warm and consoling choral sound led us into a realm in which it was difficult not to think, perhaps through a Goethian lens, of Die Zauberflöte—and of Mahler. The rapturous acclaim with which Gerstein and his fellow performers met was fully justified. I have no doubt it will prove to be one of my musical memories of 2024. 



Preceding it, we had heard Grażyna Bacewicz’s Second Symphony, a much shorter and more modest work, far from without its virtues, yet paling when placed beside the Busoni. The BBC SO and Oramo summoned just the right sort of mid-century sound in a committed performance of this 1951 work. Other composers came to mind, Prokofiev and Bartók in the first movement, Hindemith later on, but Bacewicz was never merely to be reduced to them, her personal contrasts of ‘voice’ and texture holding the attention throughout. The second movement evoked unease through traditional harmony and counterpoint. The third, a scherzo proved incisive and ambiguous. In the finale, not for the first time, the composer showed her ability not only to write a melody but to ensure that it was generated from the material in which it found itself. Bacewicz’s symphony could probably have found a more suitable home than this concert, but it was a good opportunity to make its acquaintance.


Thursday, 31 October 2024

Dubois/Raës - Massenet, Fauré, Dubois, Godard, and Saint-Saëns, 28 October 2024


Wigmore Hall

Massenet: Elégie; Nuit d’Espagne; Sonnet
Fauré: Aubade, op.6 no.1; Chant d’automne, op.5 no.1; Dans les ruines d’une Abbaye, op.2 no.1; Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre; L’Absent, op.5 no.3; Tristesse d’Olympio
Théodore Dubois: Musiques sur l’eau
Benjamin Godard: Fleur d’exil, op.19 no.5
Camille Saint-Saëns: Mélodies persanes, op.26

Cyrille Dubois (tenor)
Tristan Raës (piano)

Tenor Cyrille Dubois and pianist Tristan Raës are to make Wigmore Hall history in a five-year series of the complete songs of Gabriel Fauré. Dubois will be the first artist to perform all of them at the hall; I presume, though do not know for certain, that Raës will be with him throughout. In this, the first concert which dovetailed neatly with 2024’s commemoration of the centenary of Fauré’s death, Dubois and Raës gave voice to ‘Young Fauré and his masters’, six of Fauré’s early songs heard with mélodies by Jules Massenet, Théodore Dubois, Benjamin Godard, and Camille Saint-Saëns. If there were a few, mostly by Dubois, I could happily live without hearing again, there were discoveries aplenty; it is hard and indeed would be foolish to begrudge outings for songs many of us will not have heard before, certainly in concert and quite likely at all. 

For me, the opening Massenet songs were quite a discovery. I have never been much of a fan, but that has been founded on the operas. These three songs from around 1870 offered a spur to reassessment. Whereas much of the operatic talk of Wagnerism has left me a little bemused, it was certainly present in the opening Elégie, from the harmonies of Raës’s striking piano introduction onwards. Their pairing, on Dubois’s entry, with Gallic elegance of vocal line made for a striking, even passionate mode of expression. ‘Nuit d’Espagne’ offered winning contrast and obstinate determination to prove the old saw, however fallacious, of the best ‘Spanish music’ having been written by Frenchmen. Affinity with Carmen was noteworthy; so too was the song’s composition having preceded that of Bizet’s opera. Enchantment of various kinds, eroticism without the Nietzschean decadence one might have expected, characterised Sonnet, which shared with its predecessor a frankly operatic climax chez Dubois. 

The Fauré songs initially inhabited stiller waters, yet already at the beginning of his œuvre, the closer one listened, the more varied the palette and the emotions, both within and between songs. Chant d’automne emerged as a splendidly Romantic response to Baudelaire, Dans les ruines d’une abbaye and, still more so, Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre (as early as 1862) acting in not dissimilar fashion to Hugo. The passionate climax of another Hugo setting, L’Absent, was finely judged by singer and pianist alike, whilst the turbulence of the last in the set (also Hugo), Tristesse d’Olympio grew ‘naturally’, art concealing art, from the preceding verse and music. Few will need reminding of the difficulties attendant to French word endings in song; no one would have guessed so from Dubois’s seemingly effortless command of idiom. 

The tenor’s namesake – no relation – Théodore Dubois close the first half. I cannot say I really ‘got’ his (considerably later: 1904-10) cycle, Musiques sur l’eau, the musical material coming across as rather characterless. Despite committed performances, (Cyrille) Dubois here suffered from a persistent catch in his throat. If it were to happen anywhere, it was probably better here, and he soon recovered, maintaining line and style. Raës’s performances were at least the equal of his partner’s. I was a little confused regarding one song, ‘Promenade à l’étang’, whose text differed from that printed in the programme; checking afterwards, it would certainly seem to have been included correctly, so perhaps the wrong text was inadvertently included. No matter. 

There was no doubting the sincerity of responses, nor to Benjamin Godard’s songs, which followed the interval. One would hardly call them adventurous, but they seemed more comfortable in their skin than Dubois’s, and were again given with a fine command of idiom and, where appropriate, as in Fleur d’exil, delectable vocal hush. The turbulence of Amour fatal, piano scalic passages and all, built to tumultuous climax, Je respire où tu palpates falling somewhere in between. I shall admit to wishing at one point that I might hear Dubois’s Don José or Samson instead, but full marks for his keenness to explore little-known corners of the repertoire. 

Finally, we heard Saint-Saëns’s outrageously Orientalist Mélodies persanes from 1870. Problematic nature aside, they offered a welcome change not only in mood but in compositional ambition and, for the most part, achievement. A vigorous yet subtle account of ‘La Brise’ showed the way for what was to come, patient attention to detail paying off handsomely in painting a larger picture. Ringing top notes (‘La Solitaire’) and Orientalist melismata (‘Sabre en main’) rested firmly on the foundations of rock-solid piano rhythm. A haunted visit ‘Au cimetière’ prepared us, in contrast as much as complement, for the étude-like piano blizzard of ‘Tournoiement’. 

By way of a calling-card for what is to come, the musicians gave Fauré’s op.1 no.1 as an encore. Le Papillon et La Fleur received a performance both buoyant and seductive. A smallish yet enthusiastic audience certainly appreciated the endeavour as a whole and seemed keen to hear more. Dubois and Raës merit following in this journey. Watch, or rather listen, out for the new year’s next instalment, devoted to the theme of Fauré and Nature.


Wednesday, 30 October 2024

Tiberghien - Illean and Beethoven, 25 October 2024


Wigmore Hall

Lisa Illean: Sonata in ten parts (world premiere)
Beethoven: 33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli, op.120

Cédric Tiberghien (piano)

How to present the Diabelli Variations? What better way than commissioning a new, related piano work to precede them? I should never have guessed that Lisa Illean’s Sonata in ten parts was her first work for solo piano, so assured was the writing, realised beautifully and meaningfully, as if a classic work, by Cédric Tiberghien. Each of the ten ‘parts’, which I think we might consider in some sense variations – the interesting question being variations on what? – is derived from a short passage, often as little as a bar, from Beethoven’s set. Interconnections in Illean’s own work were sometimes clear even on a first hearing; I suspect there will be more to be discovered on levels subterranean and subliminal. The opening seemed designed, both in work and performance, to invite us in, questing and uncertain (in a positive sense), full of potential. It was not Beethoven so much as Debussy and Schoenberg who initially came to my ears, though his ghost certainly visited the feast later on, perhaps as much through passages of unmistakeable dignity as through thematic connection. So too did others, Chopin and Brahms included. Not that these were necessarily overt references or even reminiscences, more points in common via, for instance, exquisite voice-leading (again both Illean’s and Tiberghien’s), use of the sustaining pedal, or horizontal employment of chords. Here was a splendidly old-school beauty of pianistic sonority put to contemporary musical ends, to the distinct benefit of both. 

Tiberghien elected to offer his engaging spoken introduction to the Diabelli Variations immediately after Illean’s Sonata, leaving us to ponder during the interval before launching into the fabled Schusterfleck. That worked very well, I thought, both in forging a greater whole and in rejuvenating a Beethovenian shock of the new. The Waltz, at any rate, was delectably sprung, without affectation, the first variation an excellent alternative beginning, as if Beethoven were saying – and surely he is – ‘that aside, now let us begin afresh’. As soon as its successor, we were in definably ‘late’ territory, kinship to the composer’s early years apparent in the third, for a distinct virtue of Tiberghien’s performance was sympathy to the multiplicity of voices, letting them sing to combine in the unmistakeable single voice of Beethoven. Here were humour, vigour, sheer élan, the knowingly wayward, and so much more, stretching in reference from the beguiling contrapuntal legacy of Bach, through heartfelt Mozartian equipoise, to Boulezian ‘organised delirium’ (to borrow the title of Caroline Potter’s new book). Formal command and communication were crucial, however lightly worn: one experienced groups of variations as something akin to sonata movements, whether in the rapt hush of a slow movement or the display of a finale. Overall balance and individual character were equally well judged, a Beethovenian hour passing in the twinkling of an eye. The composer’s apparent, readily explicable unwillingness to let go for (almost) the last time was captured to near perfection, as heart-rending as it was truthful. We had come home, though home would never be quite the same again.


Tuesday, 22 October 2024

Burkhard/London Sinfonietta/Berman - Schoenberg, Lutyens, and Webern, 20 October 2024


Queen Elizabeth Hall

Schoenberg: Serenade, op.24
Lutyens: Six Tempi, for 10 instruments
Schoenberg: Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, op.41
Schoenberg: Six Little Piano Pieces, op.19
Webern: Symphony, op.21
Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony no.1, op.9

Andrew Zolinsky (piano)
Richard Burkhard (baritone, speaker)
London Sinfonietta
Jonathan Berman (conductor)


Concert images: Monika S Jakubowska


Much nonsense is spoken about all composers, all artists, all celebrated historical and contemporary figures. There can be few, save perhaps for Wagner, who at least bears a share of responsibility for the nonsense spoken about him, about whom more and greater nonsense is spoken than Schoenberg. A Queen Elizabeth Hall concert devoted to his music, with further contributions from Webern and Elisabeth Lutyens, sold out, once again disproving the claim that no one wishes to hear this music. Even if that were true, it demands nonetheless be performed. Whether readings from Schoenberg and others, and changes in lighting – a tricolore for the Ode to Napoleon – added up to anything much may have been a matter of taste. In the greater sum of things, they did no harm either, and perhaps offered a way in for some. So too will have an excellent pre-concert discussion from conductor Jonathan Berman and musicologists Jonathan Cross and Julie Brown. 


The problem is not that there is no audience for Schoenberg’s music, but rather that certain interests in the musical world wish us not to, as with modernist music of subsequent generations. There is more than a hint of the trendy vicar to (largely US American) neotonal evangelists insisting on the ‘popularity’ and ‘relevance’ of something that at best has long since had its day and probably never had one, whilst the Second Viennese School and what was once called the ‘postwar avant garde’ continue to nourish performers, audiences, and indeed composers alike. If, like many other cities, London has done culpably little to celebrate the 150th birthday of the most important composer of the twentieth century, this London Sinfonietta concert helped make amends. Its dedicatee, the late Alexander Goehr, would surely both have applauded this contribution and rightly deplored the establishment’s ongoing hostility. 

More important, these performances will surely have made fresh converts from a pleasingly mixed audience—save, alas, for those who more or less obliterated stretches of Webern’s Symphony with their coughs, shuffles, and worse. It was not entirely clear which was the chicken and which the egg in a surprisingly tentative performance, at least in terms of expression. We certainly heard pitches and timbres, various symmetries and their implications readily apparent. Yet the whole in combination fell somewhat flat, beautiful moments never quite combining to make the symphony the work is claimed to be—and is. For perhaps the first time in my life, I began to think a Webern piece too long. The music, however, sang more as time went on, Webern’s second movement a considerable improvement on the first. 

Lutyens’s 1957 Six Tempi for ten instruments had fared much better, as did all else that we heard. The influence of Schoenberg and Webern was certainly apparent in this, Lutyens’s breakthrough work, though nothing was to be reduced to mere precedent in utterances and performances of great integrity. The six movements’ varied quality, whether in approach to melody, emotional quality, and other aspects of character shone through. Scintillating piano writing, a strong sense of representation or embodiment, one movement that even suggested serial miniature Bruckner (one might say Webern does that too in the first movement of his Symphony), and much more combined to leave me keen to explore further. More please, London Sinfonietta.

The rest was Schoenberg, beginning with the Serenade, op.24, which received an outstanding performance from the opening viola line onwards. In its combination of precision and lilt, it indeed proved prophetic of much that was to come. ‘Serenade’ covers a multitude of sins, and a particular virtue of Berman’s knowing, idiomatic performance was its understanding of roots in more popular music, again without in any sense indulging in reductionism. One could hear, perhaps even see, the days of Schrammelmusik; I could not help but think, particularly in this first movement, of a 1900 Reichenau photograph of Schoenberg, Fritz Kreisler, and two others (Louis Savart, Carl Redlich, and Eduard Gärtner). So much was toe-tapping, here and beyond. Much was haunted, not only by the past, but also by the future. Even without knowing the first Chamber Symphony was coming, one felt that it was present in method, sonority, and harmony: both as complement and as contrast. 


Image: Arnold Schönberg Center

For Schoenbergian dialectical method, or better that multiplicity of dialectical methods, was the progenitor of dance and delight: doubtless no surprise to those who knew, but the most welcome of introductions on the cusp of dodecaphony for those who might not have done. A rich, flexible performance took us through Wozzeck-like dances, fantastic arabesque flights in multiple directions, nostalgia, resolution (in one sense, anyway), density, and lightness of being, in a flow as inevitable as it was endless imaginative. Command of detail from the Sinfonietta proved key to liberation of the Schoenbergian imagination; so too did seemingly effortless command of idiom and formal articulation. Here was a Viennese serenade and no mistake, yet it never fell prey to lesser composers’ confusion of sentiment and sentimentality. 

Richard Burkhard, baritone for the Serenade, shone equally as reciter in the Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, which took its leave from Roosevelt’s ‘Day of Infamy’ speech in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, as well of course from Byron—and Hitler. Present-day comparisons will surely have come to many minds; but here, rightly, this emerged in melodramatic expansion of the piano quintet. ‘Expression’ of all kinds was intense, but it was founded in the notes, not least in Schoenberg’s inheritance from the chamber music of Beethoven and Brahms. We heard and felt the ghosts of earlier forms, not only genres, combining to form something both old and new: truly visionary and ultimately defiant. 

In a very different way, so we did in Andrew Zolinsky’s account of the op.19 Six Little Piano Pieces, Brahms the starting point and never vanquished, Wagner the purveyor of unendliche Melodie, Schoenberg the architect of an ever-transforming constellation in the musical skies. Zolinsky certainly had his own ideas, the third taken slower than one generally hears and gaining in weight of utterance. As with other performances of the evening, they were rooted in the score and in its potentialities, in letter and in spirit: in both style and idea. 




The First Chamber Symphony was long the Sinfonietta’s calling card. Let us hope that it might become so again, given so intriguing and satisfying a performance as we heard here. Berman approached it symphonically, in the sense of a Brahms symphony’s motivic working that requires a great deal of flexibility in elucidation, so as to sound the most natural thing in the world—which it both is and is not. Unshowy warmth and security in line and direction brought Brahms masters of old to mind and, not for the first time, had one regret more of them did not show such devotion to Schoenberg. Musical line horizontal and vertical flowed beautifully, without a hint of the problems of balance that bedevil so many performances. If the Sinfonietta’s long history with the work was part of the key to that, so too surely was something new brought to the party—and it was a party of Haydnesque joy, tonality (not neotonality) in context both relativised and rejuvenated. Happy belated birthday, Arnold Schoenberg.