Royal Festival Hall
Debussy – Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Varèse – Amériques
Stravinsky – The Rite of Spring
Philharmonia Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)
Another week, another anniversary.
Ubiquitous though it may be, and though it might, like Mahler’s symphonies in
this if in little else, benefit from fewer, better performances, The Rite of Spring surely deserves
mention in its centenary. One can argue about whether it, or Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, premiered the previous
year, had the greater ‘influence’; that will largely come down to what one
decides to mean by that notoriously slippery term. But since that legendary
premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the Rite has passed not simply through the vessel of its creator, as
Stravinsky famously put it, but into our collective consciousness. That has not
always been a good thing; too many of today’s performances treat it as a mere
orchestral showpiece, reduce it to the level of slightly spicier
Rimsky-Korsakov. Boulez’s analysis, available in his Relevés d’apprenti (‘Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship’), should
be required reading for anyone tempted to proceed down that path. Certainly
anyone having heard Boulez conduct the work is unlikely ever to forget the
experience. (I am fortunate to have done so twice.) So, a hundred years on,
performing the Rite brings its own
challenges, not least, how does one make it shock anew?
Clever programming helps –
but all too often that can fall down unless performances match it not only in
quality but in conception. Fortunately, Esa-Pekka Salonen hit or rather engendered
the jackpot in both respects. Prélude à l’après-midi
d’un faune is as good a candidate as any for the first piece of
twentieth-century music. Its composer would famously give a two-piano
performance of The Rite, with its composer, and minus its final ‘Sacrifical
Dance’, in 1912. More importantly here, Salonen imparted a marriage of warmth
and coolness that presaged a similar dialectical confrontation in the second
half. The performance, conducted but not micromanaged, was wondrously flexible,
especially when it came to Samuel Coles’s delicious flute arabesques. The
Philharmonia strings were on far better form than they had been for last
week’s Wagner anniversary concert: rich, even glamorous in their sheen,
though not too much, and only when truly given their head. And the climax may
well have been the most erotic I have heard, positively Tristan-like (think of the opening of the second act) in its
pulsations. Except, of course, Wagner’s metaphysics are gone, replaced not with
Strauss’s Nietzschean materialism but with Debussy’s far more radical indeterminacy.
Boulez, a master conductor of The Rite, not
to mention one of the greatest composers of the later twentieth century, stood not so very far away. Likewise Mallarmé – and his union with Boulez
in Pli selon pli.
Varèse was present at that
first Rite performance in Paris,
prior to his emigration. Amériques was
his first large-scale work following his arrival, though here it was given in
the reduced, 1927 scoring. (The orchestra is still huge!) Its opening alto flute solo necessarily brought back
memories of Debussy’s Prélude, though
the specific instrument, here splendidly played by Rowland Sutherland, with
equally necessity brought to mind Boulez, also a master conductor of Varèse,
and Le Marteau sans maître. A New
World cityscape it may be, at least at some level, but Amériques under Salonen also gave us presentiments of the primæval
stirrings of The Rite. He was equally
deft at imparting dramatic form and inevitability to a work which, in lesser
hands, can all too easily sound sprawling. Lest that sound dry, I can assure
you that this was also a riot to put to shame those dubious events at the
Théâtre des Champs-Elysées., a riot that took upon itself many forms of
wildness. And what a tremendous conclusion! Salonen visibly willed the
orchestra to a still higher decibel count, its noise finally managing to drown
out the coughing couple – it is, apparently, still more fun with a partner – seated
behind me
Such was the power of that
performance of Amériques that I
worried Salonen’s Rite might pale
somewhat. Quite the contrary: this proved a performance to match one I thought
I should never hear approached, from Boulez and the LSO. The challenges were
new, of course; that first bassoonist never had to vie with an accursed mobile
telephone, but I doubt that he could possibly have matched Amy Harman in
richness of tone or precision, initiating duly weird – in the very best sense –
responses from her orchestral colleagues. Salonen’s sense of flow here at the
opening was similar to that in Prélude à
l’après-midi; consciously or otherwise, links were being forged. Ghosts of Petrushka began to dance on acid. Yet something
older and newer was getting under way
– and it truly felt, in mind and body alike, as though it were a celebration, a
rite. All those pointless showpiece performances were forgotten; this was the
real thing. Presentiments of later Stravinsky, for instance the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, were
offered – but in a sense they were not, for whereas that later masterwork is
frozen, almost objet-like, here it
was part of a gigantic, world-changing thaw. There were a few slips here and there, but they mattered little or nothing, unless one were missing the point to Beckmesser-like proportions.
This, then, was a performance
that combined, indeed brought into fruitful conflict, various opposing forces –
just like the work itself, and its plot. It was viscerally exciting and musically satisfying; it was as
sardonic as Stravinsky’s own performances, yet benefited from far greater
orchestral weight and, dare I say, theatrical imagination. In that sense, it
did what seem people claim to hear in Gergiev’s performances, though I have
found them mostly an incoherent mess. And those dancing reminiscences of Petrushka kept coming. Tension was
maintained until the sudden close of the first part. Then we found ourselves in
territory similar and yet quite changed. It soon became clear what had changed;
the fate, quite inescapable, of the chosen one had been ordained. Now we could
only sit it out, fearful and yet complicit, indeed relishing it; for it felt
that we were involved, dramatically, almost as if in a Wagner drama. (We have
not even really begun to relate the tale of Stravinsky’s debts to his supposed
antithesis.) Alluring sweetness, not in the least cloying, characterised rich
violas. Controlled delirium marked the evocation of the ancestors. I could list
many such wonderful features of the Philharmonia’s outstanding performance.
However, the crucial thing was not just that they added up to more than the sum
of their parts, but that Stravinsky’s miraculous score was communicated and
experienced as a searing drama. Just as drums hammered blood-lust and carnage
into our immediate consciousness – a word to which my thoughts keep returning –
so was the final nail hammered into Stravinsky’s absurd claim that music could
not express anything other than itself. The
Rite was experienced as vividly as the Symphonie
fantastique, yet penetrated far deeper into our collective consciousness,
the consciousness of our so-called ‘civilisation’, shown to be anything but. It
emerged as a work of 2013, not 1913.
