Hall One, Kings Place
Zemlinsky – Three Pieces, for
cello and piano
Dallapiccola – Ciaccona, Intermezzo, and Adagio
Nono – ¿Donde estás, hermano?
Gerhard – Dances from Don Quixote
Schoenberg – Pierrot lunaire, op.21
Jane Manning (reciter)
Marie Jaermann, Seljan
Nasibili (sopranos)
Katie Coventry
(mezzo-soprano)
Anna Migalios (contralto)
Benjamin Baker (violin/viola)
Rohan de Saram (cello)
Susan Milan (flute/piccolo)
David Campbell (clarinets)
Julian Jacobson, Alberto
Portugheis (piano)
Giora Bernstein (conductor)
With Schoenberg, I tend to
take every opportunity I can – at least since my first visit to the Salzburg
Festival, when understandably I chose to see Figaro over Boulez conducting Moses
und Aron, though I have rued the loss ever since. Whether that be a matter
of travelling to Leipzig to see the brilliant triple-bill of Schoenberg’s
one-act operas, ‘Moderne
Menschen’, or missing out on Leif Ove Andsnes playing Beethoven a couple of
miles away at the Barbican, Schoenberg tends to exert a special call. Whether I
should have been better off ignoring the call on this occasion remains unclear.
Certainly if the standard of the first half of the concert had been repeated in
the second, I should have been far better off staying at home. But then a good Pierrot lunaire more or less managed to
save the day.
Jane Manning remains a force
of nature, having given her first broadcast performance with Pierrot almost fifty years ago, in 1965.
No one is ever likely to agree – even with his or her own thoughts, let alone
anyone else’s – about how this work ‘should’ be performed. It is far better to
allow that different performers bring different qualities to it on different
occasions. If truth be told, Manning was probably wise to downplay the sung
element in her recitation. The moments, relatively few, when she moved towards
song suggested, not surprisingly, a voice that had known better days. And yet,
her vast experience – not just of this, but of more than 350 (!) world
premieres, a good number of which would have taken inspiration from Schoenberg
in one way or another – shone through nevertheless. The words and their
possibilities she clearly knew backwards. (Now there is an idea for another Pierrot-ensemble piece.) She knew, in a
way composers such as Luigi Nono or Helmut Lachenmann would surely have
appreciated, how to make the most of vowels, consonants, the journeys between
them. Above all, she appreciated and communicated the strong element of
cabaret. Manning’s was in every sense a performance, and all the better for it.
Not, of course, that the
reciter is all there is to Pierrot,
far from it. Giora Bernstein led a highly musical account from an excellent
bunch of players. Perhaps balance was tilted a little too much away from the
ensemble, but we have a host of other performances in which we can savour still
more strongly what Stravinsky quite rightly considered an instrumental
masterpiece. There were virtues aplenty, nevertheless. The passacaglia
registered as such as strongly as I can recall, Night eventually obscuring in
more than one sense. Dance rhythms made their Viennese impressions without
exaggeration, the ‘Heimfahrt’ an especially fine example. Benjamin Baker’s
violin and viola playing was perhaps particularly impressive, perfectly attuned
to shifting mood and context, but the ensemble as a whole, including Julian
Jacobson’s piano, such a relief after the first half, had no weak links.
As for that first half, well…
Doubtless Alberto Portugheis’s heart was in the right place. The concert seems
to have been his project; he was listed as ‘curator’. But sadly, it marked a
triumph of ambition over even rudimentary technical ability; this was piano-playing
that would have disgraced many an amateur performance, and may well have been
the worst I have heard in a professional context. The opening Zemlinsky’s 1891 Three Pieces for cello and piano would
most likely have done the composer no favours in a stronger account. Apparently
rediscovered recently by Raphael Wallfisch – I am placing my trust in a programme
note which, in many respects, proved otherwise highly fallible – they are at
best apprentice works, straining towards, yet never coming remotely close to
Brahms. Here, Portugheis and, much to my surprise, Rohan de Saram sounded as if
they were sight-reading. There was little or no sense of musical collaboration;
indeed, the players fell noticeably out of sync on more than one occasion. De
Saram fared better in Dallapiccola’s Ciaccona,
Intermezzo, and Adagio, though even when playing solo, it took him a while
to get into his stride, the chaconne initially hesitant. At least, though, the
performance offered some sense of the stature of the piece, its dodecaphonic
lyricism and structural integrity a wonderful introduction to this appallingly
neglected composer.
Nono’s ¿Donde estás, hermano? was provoked – the composer spoke of his
need for such a ‘provocation’ to compose, to bear witness – by the ‘disappearances’
in Argentina. The music comes from Quando stanno morendo, Diario Polacco,
no.2, but here without electronics.
(Not that one would have known from the programme, which bathetically informed
us that Nono had ‘strongly-held political views’.) The vocal quartet – Marie Jaermann,
Seljan Nasibili, Katie Coventry, and Anna Migalios – seemed excellent. Alas,
their performance was compromised by Portugheis’s insistence on conducting;
they would surely have better off without. Plodding and without technique,
Portugheis’s contribution was summed up by his score falling off the music
stand towards the end. As for his solo rendition of Gerhard’s Don Quixote
dances, the first opened quite strongly. At last, I thought, we might hear
something from him equating to a real performance. I should not have tempted
fate. Much of the rest sounded closer to a bumbling amateur’s initial
read-through. From time to time, some sense of rhythm or pulse emerged, only
roundly to be defeated.
Sadly,
then, I was reminded of Boulez’s observation about the self-defeating nature of
the occasional performances of music by the Second Viennese School in his
youth. The technical standard had been so poor that they did more harm than
good, an incitement to him to mount his own performances, leading to the
foundation of the Domaine musical. If only, if only…
