Wigmore Hall
Webern – Four Pieces for violin
and piano, op.7
Sohrab Uduman – “Dann klingt es auf…” (London premiere)
Schoenberg, arr. Steuermann – Verklärte Nacht, op.4
Thomas Gould (violin)
Caroline Dearnley (cello)
Diana Ketler (piano)
Lunchtime concerts present an
attendance problem. Had my teaching (though certainly not my university!) term
not come to an end, I should most likely not have been able to hear this Wigmore
Hall concert. That would have been a great pity, since it offered just the
right sort of reinvigoration I needed for the afternoon. Whatever the reasons,
it was sad to see so small an audience, but no matter: the box office has
nothing to do with artistic concerns. Schoenberg, of all composers, knew that
very well, when founding his Verein für
musikalische Privataufführungen. I shall draw a veil over his prohibition
on critics; or rather, I shall deflect it, trusting that I qualify as a
Schoenberg scholar too…
It was with Eduard Steuermann’s
arrangement of what, sadly, remains perhaps the composer’s most popular work, Verklärte Nacht, that the concert
closed. Here, the opening was given to piano (Diana Ketler), cello (Caroline
Dearnley) responding as if that were how we always heard it, violin (Thomas
Gould) likewise. D minor sounded all the more obsessive, somehow, in this
re-scoring, as if a Brahmsian pedal-point were being further underlined. (Maybe
it is the strength of the piano bass?) Richly Romantic tone was offered from
all, especially the strings. The narrative form of Richard Dehmel’s poem seemed
especially to the fore, structurally determinative, not just pictorial, in a
reading that was highly dramatic, highly rhetorical. Gurrelieder, quite rightly, did not seem so very far away. Too sectional? No, I do not think so;
there is more than one way to perform the work, and motivic integrity was never
in doubt. Moreover, Schoenberg’s harmonies always seemed, again rightly, on the
verge of vertical and horizontal disintegration: Tristan and late Brahms working together as well as in conflict. Occasionally,
the arrangement brought, perhaps paradoxically, congestion at climaxes. On the
whole, though, I was struck by how little I missed the original. The new
instrumentation sometimes brought, to my ears, an almost Gallic (or perhaps
Flemish!) air. The piano could suggest shimmering strings surprisingly well; in
the bass, it offered something new, but no less welcome. I was especially
intrigued by the ability of both Gould and Dearnley to give what were,
originally, first violin/first cello and second violin/second cello parts
different ‘voices’. The closing section, save for a few bars which probably
defy transcription, sounded duly fulfilled, even transfigured.
Another of Schoenberg’s pupils
opened the concert. Gould and Ketler gave a spellbinding performance of Webern’s
Op.7 Pieces. Violin harmonic, answered by piano chord, somehow incited a melody
somewhere between languor and sadness, yet ever-changing. In reality,
especially in this first piece, any description of either work or performance
would pertain at best for one note or one interval. A passionate, late Romantic
response came in the second: Brahms ultra-distilled. Such an array of colour
was to be heard. Later playfulness eventually – ‘eventually’ is relative, in
Webern! – returned us, sonata-like, to the ardent quality of that earlier
material, although it was not, of course, a ‘mere’ return. The violin opening
to the third seemed to point us towards Nono, the piano clearly joining up the
notes; however much Stockhausen may have learned from Webern, there was a great
deal he did not learn, or did not want to. A nineteenth-century inheritance sounded
stronger still in the fourth and final piece, suggestive of a sonata finale. Indeed,
it is no exaggeration to say, that at its close, I felt as though I had heard a
work far longer, at least equivalent to a sonata by Brahms.
In between Webern and
Schoenberg-Steuermann came not quite the premiere of Sohrab Uduman’s “Dann klingt es auf…”, for that had
taken place in Norwich on 9 December, but its first London performance. The
title comes from a Hildegard Jone poem, used in Webern’s exquisite Second
Cantata. (Now when shall we hear a performance of that in London, or indeed
anywhere else?) ‘Shimmering colours’, suggested by the title, looked both
forwards and backwards. In context, at least, the opening had something of a sense
of a much ‘busier’ version of the opening of Webern’s set of pieces. There was,
throughout, a true sense of three voices, interacting in all manner of ways;
indeed, the transformation of such interaction – Uduman refers to ‘fusion and
disentangling of the contrasting timbres of the piano and strings’ – seemed to
lie at its heart. So too, however, did some sense of narrative, even if it
could not be put into words (and why should it be?) Sections within its
ten-minute span seemed not unlike those we should hear in the Schoenberg. A
sudden slowing, without letting up of tension, suggested something akin to a
slow movement, in a Liszt-Schoenberg tradition (movement within a movement); or
perhaps that was just my idiosyncratic way of making sense of a new work.
Material was still being developed, it seemed, from what had gone before, and would
continue to be; transformation, another Lisztian concept, seemed a not entirely
inappropriate way of considering what may well have been quite a Romantic
journey from darkness to light. The piece was played with all the confidence,
none of the staleness, of a repertory stalwart. Three cheers, once again, to
the ever-enterprising Britten Sinfonia!
