Wigmore Hall
Bach, arr. Kurtág – Cantata: Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV
106: Sonatina
Chorale Prelude: Alle Menschen mussen sterben, BWV 643
Chorale Prelude: Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV
687
Busoni – Fantasia contrappuntisca, BV 256b
Manoury – Le Temps, mode d’emploi (UK premiere)
Andreas Grau, Götz Schumacher (pianos),
Experimental Studio des SWR (José Miguel Fernandez (sound direction), Dominik Kleinknecht (technician))
We do not get to hear music for
piano duet or for two pianos nearly so often as we should (although yours truly
is already looking forward to a date in March with Daniel Barenboim and Martha
Argerich). There are many excellent works, and if the duet repertoire is often in
some respect ‘players’ music’, it loses little when transferring to the realm
of public performance; much the same might, after all, be said about the string
quartet, or at least Hans Keller claimed so. It was especially welcome to hear
a concert in which a major new work, new to these shores at any rate, was
performed – and it could certainly not be considered a work for the private
sphere.
In the first half, though, we
heard two very different sides to the existing repertoire. First, for piano
duet, were three of Kurtág’s Bach transcriptions. (I have yet to attend one of
his and his wife’s recitals, always having been in the wrong place at the wrong
time.) They were well chosen and well played by the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo,
treated as piano music, yet retaining their essential – if you will forgive me,
just this once, such an ontological assumption – modesty. The Sonatina from the
Actus Tragicus might perhaps have
been imbued with a greater sense of mourning, but such is of course hardly the
fashion today, when we are fortunate to hear Bach played with any manner of
gravity at all. The pair of alto recorders sang out beautifully – I am tempted
to say rather more beautifully than in ‘real life’ – against a rock-solid ‘continuo’.
Two Chorale Preludes once again provoked sadness that this music is so little
known outside organ circles; there really is no excuse for any who consider
themselves music lovers not to explore its riches. What one can learn from
studying the Orgelbüchlein, and what
Kurtág undoubtedly must have, his transcription of ‘Alle Menschen müssen
sterben’ simple, straightforward, and perhaps all the better for it; that, at
least is how it sounded here. The left-hand (in the original) thirds and sixths
sounded smooth but not too smooth, as if attempting, and if so successfully, a
sense of legato organ-style. The
somewhat backward-looking style of ‘Aus Tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir’ showed
what nonsense ‘backward’ and ‘forward’ are in Bach’s case, and how irrelevant ‘style’
alone is in any case. Its rhythmic complication, or perhaps better enhancement,
of counterpoint shone through clearly and without mannerism.
Busoni was thus well prepared.
His Fantasia contrappuntistica was
here heard, for my first time, I think, in its version for two pianos. Like, on
a much smaller scale, the Fifth Sonatina – as close as I shall get to this
extraordinary work as a performer in concert – it marries Bach and Busoni in
fascinating and unexpected ways. One can tell the difference, then one cannot;
one cares, and then one does not. And yet it coheres with more than a hint of
Mephistophelian necromancy; indeed, Doktor
Faust came to mind on more than one occasion. So did the still surprising
harmonic world of the Sonatina seconda,
‘senza tonalità’, so un-Schoenbergian, a tantalising glimpse of worlds that
perhaps have yet to be discovered. There were times when I found the players a
little stiff, a little short on magic, but there were others in which
neo-Lisztian virtuosity swept all before it. Perhaps it is difficult to know
how to approach Busoni’s music; it is certainly some of the most scandalously
neglected of the twentieth century. Any niggles I might have had were firmly
put in their place by gratitude at the opportunity to hear the workings of this
grossly-misunderstood compositional – and musicological – mind.
I did not consult my watch, but
I suspect that Philippe Manoury’s Le
Temps, mode d’emploi exceeded three-quarters of an hour, and perhaps did
not come so very far from an hour. I say that not as a complaint, nor indeed as
praise, Webern turning in his grave, but simply to give an indication of its
scale. It was written for Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher, who with the ever-wonderful
Experimentalstudio des SWR, gave what seemed to me a hugely compelling
performance, its commitment and, insofar as I could tell, understanding
palpable throughout. That this is piano
music is never in doubt; there is a joy in exploration of the piano, its
capabilities, and its sonorities, often old, and occasionally newer (for
instance, by placing a finger on strings inside), which speaks just as it does
in the music of Liszt or Busoni. The live electronics are just as important; as
Manoury puts it, ‘The two pianos are surrounded by four virtual pianos,’ via ‘a
very complex system of sound synthesis, signal processing and spatialisation’.
The spatial element cannot help but be felt, of course, and how interesting it
is to hear that in the Wigmore Hall, but equally, immediately apparent was its
musical quality. Some sort of kinship with what I have thought of as the magic
squares of instrumental placing in Boulez’s sur
Incises suggested itself, although whether that be simply a sign of my own
personal preoccupations I cannot say. Across the span of the work,
transformations apparently accomplished, according to Paul Griffiths’s note, by
means of Markov chains (‘a process in which movements from one state to another
are determined by probabilities’), a dialectic was dramatised, in performance
as well as work, between relatively simple, irreducible material (perhaps an
arpeggio, bringing Répons,
unsurprisingly, to my mind, or a scalic figure) and what sounded to me, trying
to make sense of what I heard, as complex yet ‘inevitable’ procedures with
respect to tempo, texture, structure, and much else. I half expected the
players to begin signalling their decisions to one another, as in the second book
of Structures.
Indeed, the drama of Manoury’s
work possessed a sheer excitement not dissimilar, although – and I do not
intend this as a cavil, merely description – it is probably somewhat less concentrated.
The possibilities of expansion still inherent in Boulez’s work struck me as, if
not entirely, then at least to a greater extent already explored here. The
language also sounds more ready to incorporate elements of tonality, perhaps a
little after Messiaen, although that I say simply to ‘place’ it, rather than to
impute influence. I hope that I shall have opportunity to hear the work,
whether from these performers or others, soon, to further an exploration which,
for me at least, has only just begun.
