Queen Elizabeth Hall
Georg Friedrich Haas – in vain (London premiere)
London Sinfonietta
Emilio Pomàrico (conductor)
It has taken quite a while
for Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain to
receive a performance in the United Kingdom. The London Sinfonietta under
Emilio Pomàrico – valiantly, brilliantly standing in for an indisposed André de
Ridder – gave this country’s premiere in Huddersfield, before bringing the work
to the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the final weekend of the Southbank
Centre’s Rest is Noise festival. Audience numbers are far from everything. If
something is worth doing, it is worth doing in front of a couple of
enthusiasts, or indeed simply for its own sake in front of no one at all: for
the glory of God, as any mediæval composer would have understood. Yet the claim
that contemporary music is of limited interest, that what audiences want is a generic
programme of overture-concerto-symphony – a perfectly reasonable formation if
done for a good reason rather than out of laziness – was once again belied by a
sell-out for a more than hour-long ensemble work by a sixty-year-old Austrian
composer. This is not the churned-out pandering of minimalism, ‘holy’ or
otherwise, but substantial, substantive, music, which both requires effort and
rewards it. Such in any case was my first experience of a work whose renown has
steadily grown over the past few years, not least thanks to the advocacy of
figures such as Sir Simon Rattle and Alex Ross. An introduction by Rattle,
given before a Berlin performance earlier this year, was reprinted in the
programme. I am glad I only read it afterwards, since it enabled me to hear the
performance without any preconceptions, not knowing at all what to expect, but
I should recommend the enthusiasm and intelligence of Rattle’s words to anyone
remotely curious.
One thing that struck me
about a performance, whose length was not so very far off that of a Mahler
symphony, was how compelling the experience was, in the sense that not only I,
but seemingly 99% of the audience, had no difficulty whatsoever in
concentrating throughout; the impression was of an audience gripped. In a
situation such as this, one inevitably tends to make references to other works
and composers, sometimes more revealingly than others: not only as a reference
point, but also simply in an attempt to find verbal approximations. I do not
mean, then, necessary to imply ‘influence’, let alone derivation, but simply to
offer a few descriptive signposts of my own experience, itself derived only
from hearing a performance rather than from having seen the score.
Ligeti came to mind, not that
the opening string scurryings sounded quite ‘like’ him, let alone the ‘harsher’
soundworld of, say, Xenakis, but as a starting-point, not only for my own
orientation, but for appreciation of Haas’s sheer inventiveness, one could
probably have done worse. (I saw afterwards that Rattle had also invoked
Ligeti, so perhaps I was not being entirely fanciful.) There is theatre, of
course, even if one did not know that Haas composed the work partly as an
expression of dismay at the rise of the Freedom Party in Austria’s 1999
elections. (He grew up in Voralberg, later reflecting upon his experience: ‘However
impressive the landscape might have been … life there in the 1950s and 1960s
was largely cut off from the cultural developments in the world outside.’ This
was no sentimental rural idyll, then, for him, but a disturbingly reactionary
environment in need of response.) Periods of total darkness enable one to
listen all the more closely: what extraordinary skill on the part of the
musicians! And the dawning of light upon the stage more often than not proves –
yes, in vain. Ceremonial contributes to that sense of theatre, brass perhaps
recalling the great aequale of Austrian tradition: archaic almost, and yet very
much of the present, just like the trombones in Don Giovanni or Beethoven’s
Missa solemnis.
For it was the ghosts of
German Romanticism that most haunted my experience of the work. Perhaps that is
simply a matter of personal preoccupation, but it is not, I think, entirely so.
Battle and curious confluence between ‘natural’ and modern, tempered tuning
take place; again, Ligeti inevitably came to mind. (Is it that contest that makes the music 'microtonal', or is it the microtones that suggest to Haas the contest? Does it matter?) But the sense of trying to
recreate a ‘natural’ world both necessary and yet, in some senses, out of our
grasp, born of major triads, the arpeggios of, say, Das Rheingold, and the heart-rending horn echoes both of Wagner and
of Der Freischütz, Schumann too, summons
up the ‘in-vain-ness’ not only of musical works but the landscapes of Caspar
David Friedrich. Those paintings may have been over-exposed in recent years,
tarnished by base commercialism; so has Romanticism itself, many times over.
The specific and the generic will nevertheless survive. Ghosts will adapt;
indeed, we may doubt whether they are ghosts at all. There were indeed a good
few times in which memories that great ‘farewell’ that is not really a farewell
to Austro-German tradition, Strauss’s Alpine
Symphony, insinuated themselves. I have heard many people express surprise
that Helmut Lachenmann, that most avid, intrepid examiner and re-inventor of
this tradition, should so admire Strauss’s work; that must reflect on their
misunderstanding of Strauss. Lachenmann ‘gets’ Strauss; so, I suspect, does
Haas.
The inexorable downward
scalic passages of the closing ten minutes or so are as mesmerising as anything
I have heard in ‘new music’ for quite some time. Tension mounting, doubtless at
least as much through the Sinfonietta’s superlative performance as through the
work itself, these apparently generative passages lead nowhere – but it is, of
course, nowhere, nothing, something negative, in vain, that is being generated.
Attempts to break free of what Rattle illuminatingly describes as ‘music …
[getting] stuck on … [an] extraordinary
Escher staircase’ seem to involve both reversion, that is to scales themselves,
and also neo-Lisztian innovation. My memory drew parallels with the
introduction to Liszt’s B minor sonata, to the astonishing scales that most
undervalued, most farsighted of nineteenth-century masters offers as material
for more or less the entirety of that indisputable masterpiece. And the
disconcerting, even frightening stop to which the music suddenly came: that, I
thought, could only be Wozzeck.
Rattle, I discovered, thought so too, adding Erwartung to the mix as well.
Performances, insofar as I
could tell, were exemplary throughout. The London Sinfonietta are past masters
at such challenges, yet we should celebrate that achievement rather than take
it for granted. Pomàrico, making his London debut, clearly needs to visit these
shores again soon. So does Haas. The concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3
Hear and Now, on Saturday 18 January 2014.
