Queen Elizabeth Hall
Satie – Socrate
Stravinsky – Three Pieces for
string quartet
Three Pieces for clarinet
Concertino
Renard
Barbara Hannigan (soprano/director)
Daniel Norman (tenor)
Edgaras Montvidas (tenor)
Roderick Williams (bass)
John Molloy (bass)
Reinbert de Leeuw (piano)
Timothy Lines (clarinet)
Harriet Walter (narrator)
Timberlake Wertenbaker
(script writer)
London Sinfonietta
This concert was part of a
greater weekend of concerts at the Southbank Centre looking at Paris during the
second and third decades of the twentieth century, the weekend itself part of
the year-long Rest is Noise season. An arresting opening – which I initially
feared would irritate, but which actually worked very well – was provided by
Harriet Walter’s narration, replete with East Coast accent, presenting a
first-person sketch, written by Timberlake Wertenbaker, of the life of
Winnaretta Singer. Daughter of the inventor of the sewing machine, Isaac
Singer, Winnaretta went on to become the celebrated musical patroness, Princess
Edmund de Polignac, commissioning both Socrate
and Renard, though Diaghilev’s
machinations and Stravinsky’s duplicity – at least according to this account – meant
that her salon would not host the latter work’s premiere. Walter’s delivery of
the script was just as excellent as one would expect from this fine actress:
never overdone, effortlessly convincing.
I wondered a little about the Princess’s, or rather Wertenbaker’s, claim
that patrons go unsung. Not in my lectures they do not; indeed, I sometimes
wonder whether I over-emphasise their role. I also wondered whether a male
patron would have received quite so sympathetic a treatment: might we not at
least have been led to think, ‘why should someone inherit all that money in the
first place?’ But those are quibbles, and the narration, heard before Socrate and before Renard seemed to go down well with the audience.
Satie’s Socrate: oh dear. I tried; I really did. Doubtless some will say
that was the problem. But for me, its sole redeeming feature was the excellence
of the performances from Barbara Hannigan and Reinbert de Leeuw. Cool, white,
monotonous, with the occasional subtle colouring of the vocal line: soprano and
pianist were really beyond reproach. However, a work, like so much of Satie,
which seems set up to forestall criticism – whatever you say against it,
someone will respone, ‘well that is the point’ – had better be of Stravinskian
quality if, as, for instance The Rake’s
Progress does, it attempts that disabling tactic. Frankly, it makes one
long even for the dullest of Stravinsky: Apollo,
or Orpheus, say. Its lengthy ‘setting’
of Plato – is it really a ‘setting’ at all, when it seems to respond no more to
the text than Rossini does in much of his Stabat
Mater? – drones on and on, until, by the time the third part, ‘La Mort de
Socrate’ opens, one feels as if one has been suffering the same composer’s Vexations. What a strange conception of
ancient Greece this is; it almost makes one sympathise with Nietzsche’s venom
against Socrates. The artists, admirably controlled throughout, made the most
of the slight suggestion of drama as we heard of the poison’s arrival, but if
the best one can say about something is that it is somewhat less tedious than
the music of Philip Glass, perhaps it is time to wonder whether Satie has an
Emperor, let alone clothes.
Stravinsky’s invention thus
struck the hall like a thunderbolt. It always does, at least in good
performances, and these performances were certainly that. A string quartet (Jonathan
Morton, Joan Atherton, Paul Silverthorne, Tim Gill, all standing save for the
cellist) drawn from the London Sinfonietta brought us the composer’s
astonishing Three Pieces. The work’s strangeness, its utter dissociation from
anything one might consider to constitute a string quartet repertoire and
tradition still shocks – and certainly did so here. Defiantly post-Rite of Spring, this is in many senses a
far more radical break with ‘tradition’, as unique as Le Roi des étoiles. Tightly focused rhythms and – as soon as one
bothered to listen – a profusion of melody were hallmarks of this account. The
final piece brought a sense of the hieratic, but what a contrast it made with
the mere tedium of Satie. Here was music.
Timothy Lines offered strong performances of the Three Pieces for clarinet,
written five years later in 1919. If the first offered a gentler, one is almost
tempted to say pastoral, sound-world, it remained utterly Stravinskian in its
evident ‘construction’. And in any case, there was nothing remotely gentle
about its joyous successor, nor to the third, which seemed to anticipate the
world of Renard. The performance was rich
in tonal and dynamic differentiation, rhythm propelling the notes and their ‘meaning’.
The 1920 Concertino for string quartet followed, though oddly the programme had
no notes on it. Again, the utterly individual approach of the composer not only
to the medium of the string quartet but to stringed instruments themselves was
immediately announced. A kaleidoscope of what Stravinsky would have hated one
to call ‘moods’ – unless, of course, he arbitrarily decided to use the word, as
in his Norwegian Moods – revealed itself
during the work’s brief span. Here was concision to rival Webern, yet long
before Stravinsky’s serialist turn. It sounded almost akin to a mechanised
Beethoven Bagatelle.
Hannigan turned director for
the wonderful burlesque, Renard,
given in concert performance, Colour and rhythm were very much to the fore in a
performance for which she seemed to act more as enabler than dictator. Old Stravinsky
hands that the London Sinfonietta are, that is doubtless the right way around.
Thematic consistency during and after the opening March was especially
noteworthy; this was no mere collection of episodes. Even when the Cock turned
languid, ‘Sizhu na dubu...’ (‘I’m on my perch...’), rhythmic underpinning
remained tight. There was room for seduction too, from the Fox with his cake.
But above all what struck was the visceral nature of Stravinsky’s score, so
truthful a representation of the or at least a childhood imagination. The London Sinfonietta’s performance could
not be faulted; the four vocal soloists proved fine advocates too. If the
tenors perhaps captured greater attention, that is probably more a reflection
of score than performance. Why do we not hear this work more often?
