Wigmore Hall
Eötvös – Korrespondenz (String Quartet no.1)
Debussy – String Quartet in G
minor, op.10Eötvös – The Sirens Circle (world premiere)
Piia Komsi (soprano)
Benjamin Jacobson, Andrew Bulbrook (violins)
Jonathan Moerschel (viola)
Eric Byers (cello)
The world premiere of Peter
Eötvös’s The Sirens Cycle was
preceded by the composer’s first string quartet, Korrespondenz (1992) and Debussy’s early-ish work, from almost a
century earlier (1893). The fascinating dramatic concept of Eötvös’s work lies
in the correspondence of Mozart with his father, Leopold, from Wolfgang’s time
in Paris: it is, the composer writes, ‘a mini opera for string quartet’. Does
the concept offer more than it delivers? Perhaps. Once beyond the first of three
short movements – scenes, perhaps? – I did not pay much attention to the ‘programme’,
nor really to the viola as son and the cello as father, the two violins
watching over ‘as two protective spirits or observers’. But is that not what we
generally, rightly or wrongly, say makes for good programme music? At any rate,
the characterisation, whether tied to that initial conception or no, endured as
the instruments’ lines progressed. The excellent Calder Quartet offered
confident performances, ‘language’ of whichever nature internalised – and then
externalised. If they were gestural performances, they remained
musico-gestural. And if the musical language spoke of the Expressionist past at
times, there was also something of Stockhausen and Ligeti, at least to these
ears.
Debussy’s Quartet benefited
from a warm, Romantic, yet far from un-Gallic opening. The nature of the string
sound, and its possibilities, became increasingly variegated as the first
movement progressed. Hearing it after Korrespondenz,
certain figures emerged as having something in common. There was also a
continuing sense of drama to be heard, to be felt, arguably more so, or rather
more conventionally so, than in Pelléas
et Mélisande, the opera shortly to come. Climaxes were very well shaped
indeed. Characterful playing, with a fine sense of rhythm, marked the scherzo,
although certainly not to the detriment of other parameters. Indeed, dynamic
gradations proved splendidly expressive of the movement’s contours, both
directly and indirectly. The opening of the slow movement seemed to speak of a ‘vieille
France’ not entirely different from that of the Schola Cantorum, but the
response, sweetly yet far from sentimentally post-Romantic, brought Pelléas to mind. Those tendencies and
others intertwined productively, until the finale emerged, at least initially,
as perhaps the most modern, even modernist, of the movements. Bartók
occasionally came within aural view. At other times, the work’s cyclical nature
reasserted itself with a glance to the recent past, but never as ‘mere’ return.
The
Sirens Cycle was
co-commissioned by the Zurich Tonhalle Society, the Frankfurt Alte Oper, Madrid’s
Centro Nacional de Difusion Musical, IRCAM, the Paris ProQuartet-Centre
européen de musique de chambere, the Südwestrundfunk, and the Wigmore Hall,
with the support of André Hoffmann: just the sort of thing, then, to gladden
the hearts of our blessed government. To quote the composer, it is again ‘the
outcome of an operatic idea, that of putting forward a solo soprano accompanied
by a string quartet as if by a choir’. His starting point was Kafka’s Das Schweigen der Siren. ‘This subject
so engaged me that I drew in also, and thematically connected to the Kafka,
siren motifs from Homer and Joyce.’ Here, I felt the ambition more fully,
consistently realised than in Korrespondenz.
I could not help but feel the
shadow, far from exhausted yet, of Pierrot
lunaire, not oppressively so, but perhaps more as a guardian angel. Some of
the characteristics, comparisons, I observed in Korrespondenz, announced themselves in the first part, that drawn
from Joyce, but in the context of an extraordinary coloratura performance from
Piia Komsi, and, of course, of Joyce’s words, they did not detain me. The string-only
opening to the third short movement (in this first part), ‘O Rose!’, sounded
almost as if a response to Debussy, although, of course, Simon Dedalus – and,
it seems, Eötvös too – brought us also, or instead, the light opera of Balfe (The Rose of Castille) and Flotow (Martha). Then, ‘O Rose!’: for me, a brush with Mahler’s ‘Röslein’,
although what followed, turned out differently indeed. Words, their resonances,
the new use to which they may be put: such, after all are part of the business
of Ulysses. The éclat of ‘Snack la
cloche!’ and the downward vocal glissando on ‘Jingle bloo’ spoke of a
different, yet connected, and yes, sirenic world. ‘Liszt’s rhapsodies’ in no.6
briefly, tantalisingly, evoked all manner of personal correspondences, without
ever standing out unduly. Komsi’s ecstasy in the final of these seven
movements, upon ‘Pray for him!’ offered a truly operatic climax.
With Homer, of course, the
language switched to Greek. Retuning too, was necessary, for an interlude in
which the first violin, now briefly the vocalist, is ‘accompanied’ by music on
three instruments, but six staves (so, at any rate, I learned, from Paul
Griffiths’s programme note). Double-stopped trills led us to Homer himself, to
soprano recitative (with chimes). Scherzo-like writing – something almost
neo-Schoenbergian, which I could not quite put my finger on – gave way to a
more overtly sirenic close. The string opening to the final, Kafka part,
sounded as if a fusion of quartet and operatic interlude. Kafka’s absence of sirenic song made its point
just as powerfully as had its presence. Eötvös shaped a highly convincing
musico-dramatic trajectory here, even upon a first hearing. The instrumental
close spoke, at least to me, of a post-Romantic melancholy which yet again
brought Schoenberg to mind: in this case, with quasi-concertante writing for
the first violin, superbly realised by Benjamin Jacobson, the Phantasy for violin and piano, op.47.
