Royal Festival Hall
Stravinsky – Symphonies of Wind Instruments
Birtwistle – Responses: Sweet disorder and the carefully
careless, for piano and orchestra (UK premiere)
Messiaen – Oiseaux exotiques
Stravinsky – Orpheus
The final event of
Birtwistle’s eightieth anniversary year, at least for me: the British premiere
of his new work for piano and orchestra, Responses,
first performed in Munich this October, by its dedicatee, Pierre-Laurent
Aimard. To grant the work its full, somewhat cumbersome title, replete with
subtitle after a collection of architectural essays by Robert Maxwell, Responses: Sweet disorder and the carefully,
careless, is certainly better understood as a work for piano and orchestra
rather than a piano concerto as such. The contrast with the (relatively) recent
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra is strong in that and many other respects. That
said, Birtwistle, in a programme interview with Jonathan Cross, does refer to this
work as ‘my new concerto’.
Later in that interview,
Birtwistle remarks: ‘When one thinks of a concerto, one usually expects the
orchestra to play some of the tune, then the soloist to play some of it. It’s
the same material. This is not the case in my work. Rather, it’s a dialogue:
the soloist is asking questions.’ Hence Responses,
and that is certainly how it sounded, from the opening pulsating E – as Cross
notes, that pitch a typical starting-point – onwards. Yes, there is
questioning, and yes, this is definitely a piece for piano and orchestra, no ‘mere’
ensemble here (eight double basses, three percussionists, two harps, and so
on). Piano chords sound, especially, I suspect, in Aimard’s hands, like ghosts
stranded between the nineteenth century and Birtwistle’s own modernism. The
orchestra glistens, machine-like: again highly characteristic. There seem to be
some intriguing echoes of Messiaen, presumably part of the reason for
programming the work with Oiseaux
exotiques. And there is dramatic insistence, especially from the brass,
sounding against longing, string-based melancholy, in what seemed to me very
much post-Minotaur fashion. There is
frenzy, with something of the Dionysian to it. (Although I suspect this merely
to be coincidence, I was a couple of times, especially with respect to the
percussion, put in mind of the Maenads’ Hunt from Henze’s opera, The Bassarids, albeit in a more
fractured, more ritualised fashion.) Less a cadenza, more a brief soliloquy,
one piano passage brings on a sense of momentary stillness, against which piano
and orchestra seem to wish to escape;
it is a more arduous task, however, than it initially might seem. The idea, or
perhaps better, practice of hocketing is clearly instantiated – and, of course,
dramatised. I had a sense of spatial games within the orchestra, without the
actual movement of, say, Theseus Game.
Gabrieli reimagined for a ‘conventional’ orchestra and soloist? Theseus Game reimagined in a world after
The Minotaur and the Violin Concerto?
Perhaps. Or maybe it is ‘just’ another exploration of particular material. In
truth, of course, there is no need for either/or here. Jurowski and the LPO
offered excellent performances, as of course did Aimard; it is always difficult
to judge, of course, from a first hearing, but I had the sense that this was
how the work ‘should’ sound.
Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques received a mesmerising
account, its hieratic opening recalling the Symphonies
of Wind Instruments, with which the concert had opened, though the language
is unmistakeably Messiaen’s own. The piano is more clearly a concertante
instrument here; indeed, much of its role is taken up with cadenzas.
Ironically, the dialogue here seemed more overtly, or at least more
straightforwardly, responsorial. Orchestral colours sounded as vivid as they
could to one who is not a synesthete. The naïve, elemental quality to so much
of Messiaen’s music registered just as powerfully as the complexity of his ‘enormous
counterpoint of birdsong’. Not least, this was a riotous and ecstatic
performance. Aimard played his part – superlatively – from memory.
On either side came works by
Stravinsky. Symphonies of Wind
Instruments has long held fascination for Birtwistle – and indeed for many
of the rest of us. In Jurowski’s performance, it opened just as it should:
angular, spiky, hieratic, aggressive. Echoes of the Rite of Spring were perhaps unusually apparent in the contrasting
material. Neo-Classicism seemed to shoot forth, yet also to withdraw; this, one
felt, was more than often being read as a ‘transitional’ work. Soldier’s Tale puppetry and Œdipus Rex gravity, life and
desiccation: it was in its very particular way, and whatever Adorno may have thought,
as dialectical as Beethoven. Moreover, it sounded very much as a curtain-raiser
to a drama.
Orpheus brought another different variety of
ensemble, this time a smaller, well-nigh ‘Classical’ orchestra. The grave
beauty of the opening truly sounded as the scenario has it: ‘Orpheus weeps for
Eurydice. He stands motionless…’. Already, there were to be heard in this work
(1946-7) intimations of The Rake’s
Progress, yet seemingly without its polemical aggression. Orpheus’s violin
solo inevitably rekindled memories of The
Soldier’s Tale (again) and indeed the Violin Concerto. Rather to my
surprise, I also fancied I heard a balletic kinship with Prokofiev. Perhaps it
was Jurowski’s ‘Russian’ conducting? I cannot help but feel that some of the
later music finds the composer a little on auto-pilot, but maybe it is more a
matter of the ultra-neo-Classical æsthetic still presenting problems for me. At
any rate, other of Stravinsky’s works from around this period seemed unusually
present: the Symphony in Three Movements,
Dumbarton Oaks, the Concerto in D.
The LPO offered frozen beauty in the final scene, those descending harp scales
ritually yet newly combined with lines from horns and trumpet. ‘Orpheus is
dead, the song is gone, but the accompaniment goes on.’ That comment from Stravinsky,
cited in Anthony Burton’s programme note, was perhaps not without relevance to
Birtwistle too.
