Barbican Hall
Helen
Grime: Woven Space
(world premiere)
Mahler:
Symphony no.9
No doubting the important
performance here: the world premiere of Helen Grime’s Woven Space, commissioned by the Barbican for the LSO and Simon
Rattle. Alas, Rattle’s recent way with Mahler and indeed with much central
repertoire prior to Schoenberg continued: not so extreme as some performances,
yet still highly mannered, and for the most part lacking in direction. The
Barbican Hall does not help, of course: too small, the sound constricted, yet
another indication of why London so desperately needs a decent large concert
hall. Yet that would not, could not have changed the fundamental problems with
the performance, lapped up, needless to say, by the audience. I was left
longing for something along the lines of Bernard Haitink with the same orchestra.
The good news, however, was
very good. Grime’s piece, in three movements, had apparently been offered in a
sneak aural glimpse last autumn, the first movement, ‘Fanfares’ heard at the
opening of the LSO’ season. Its opening éclat, hard-edged (tuned percussion and
strings in particular), even icy, yet inviting, proved not only to be éclat,
soon developing, perhaps not entirely unlike later Boulez. At the same time,
there is something fantastical to it too, almost akin to a tone poem in the
Dukas line; her Virga,
written for the same orchestra in 2007, performed again by them in February,
did not seem so entirely distant in that sense at least. Tautness of rhythm,
unity of purpose from Rattle and the LSO could hardly be faulted. Bells and solo
cor anglais – I could not help but think of Berlioz – may not have been
reducible to a narrative; nor, however, did they rule it out. For there are
fanfares, certainly, but as part of something more, be it a narrative as such
or something which, in performance, fulfils a similar function: perhaps the
structure by Laura Ellen Bacon, a 2009 Chatsworth Park aenclosure within an enclosure,
after which Woven Space is named. There
is stillness too, unease, I think, and consequently something darker.
Fascinating in its multivalence – again, perhaps not entirely unlike Boulez’s Notations, albeit with a smaller
orchestra – it must have whetted the appetite for more in September.
More we now heard. ‘Woven Space’
is also the name given to the second of the three movements. It seems to pick
up, loosely – not, I think, necessarily in terms of material as such – from the
‘uneasy’ section of the first movement. There are similar sonorities, ‘hard’
and ‘softer’, yet this is no mere repetition. I fancied, looking ahead aurally,
that some of the string lines, whilst more tangled, might be hinting at late
Mahler, but perhaps that was nothing more than my own personal fancy. At any
rate, the harmonies have little in common. There is a strong sense of descent,
in the sense of downward motion, played out amongst three competing choirs,
distinct yet not unvarying: roughly, strings, woodwind and percussion, and
brass. What initially seems to be the still heart of the work reveals itself to
be at least as much its dramatic cauldron. I liked the way it simply stopped
once it had no more to say: less shattering than Wozzeck – what is not?! – yet perhaps in its line. ‘Course’, the
third movement, presents different motion and different forms of motion:
upwards, this time, swirling and perhaps even swarming, yet with other forces
competing against that primary tendency. At a certain point, the tension built
up starts to dissipate, preparing the way for a telescoped, binding (that woven
structure again?) conclusion that is no mere return. New lines, new
developments open up, or seem to: the uncertainty is part, I suspect, of the
fascination. Again, the music stops; again, we are left wanting more.
I feared the worst at the very
opening of the first movement of the Mahler, yet once the second violins
entered, Rattle engendered a far greater sense of momentum. Indeed, the unease
that pervaded roughly the first half of the movement, pervading in particular
its progress, was enlightening in its suggestion of the implacable. Mahler’s
music was made stranger without merely sounding perverse. We were made to
listen, especially in its hushed, liminal passages, their exaggerations
notwithstanding. Ultimately, though, it became clear that these were more
passages, even sections, of interest than building blocks within a structure,
let alone dialectics within its formal elucidation. The sense of connection,
however complex, Rattle had brought to the first half generally eluded him here.
The dawn of the recapitulation sounded duly monstrous in its combination of beauty
and ugliness; alas, its disintegration proved all too distended.
The second movement proved
strong of heft, yet heavy, in more than one sense, in stylisation. Fair enough,
one might say, and initially I did. But do we not need something behind the
parody of a parody, perhaps of a parody? At best, some of the Schoenbergian
transformation of rhythms – seemingly, intriguingly, founded in rhythm and then
extending itself to melody – had one listen anew. In the absence of
Schoenbergian, or indeed other discernible method, though, the performance
began to sound merely bloated. There is much to be said for problematizing repertoire
in performance; Boulez, for instance, often did just that. Yet Boulez’s clarity
of purpose, whatever one might have thought of it and its underlying ideology,
proved once again elusive here. Structure and form less dissolved – an
enticing, almost Debussyan prospect – than lost their way. It was above all the
loss of impetus that concerned most, far more than slowness of tempo as such.
Alas, I remained resolutely unmoved.
The ‘Rondo-Burleske’ fared
better, especially to start with, as if the music had come back into focus: not
tamed, thank goodness, yet with a guiding thread to help us through the
labyrinth. The LSO responded, so it seemed, in kind. Again, later on, there
seemed to be some loss of way, yet to a lesser extent. And so, when the violins
dug into the opening phrase of the final ‘Adagio’, it seemed to mean something.
Rattle could not resist moulding the theme that emerged, yet not unreasonably
so. He certainly did not take the easy way through this movement, which is to
be applauded; its extremities were acknowledged, without abandonment of a sense
of harmonic motion. A passage in which string vibrato was withdrawn made its
chaste point; so too did the relative rarity of giving the strings their heard.
If the final goodbye were perhaps unduly prolonged – it takes a Boulez not to
succumb – then such a reluctance is eminently comprehensible. Even here,
though, I longed for the relative straightforwardness of a performance Rattle
gave with the same orchestra round about 2000. There is much to be said for
letting musical contradictions overflow into performance; Mahler should never
sound too easy, let alone bureaucratic. At the same time, however, his music
too needs its ‘woven space’.
