Alban Berg Saal,
Carinthian Music Academy, Ossiach
Debussy, arr. Michael Webster: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune,
for flute, clarinet, and piano
Webern: String
Quartet (1905)
Mozart: Clarinet
Quintet in A major, KV 581
Alban Berg Ensemble Wien (Sylvia Careddu (flute), Alexander Neubauer (clarinet), Ariane Haering (piano), Sebastian Gürtler, Régis Bringolf (violins), Subin Lee (viola), Florian Berner (cello))
Continuing
to echo, rather to imitate, Schoenberg’s Society for Private Performances, BERGfrühling’s
second concert opened not with Benno Sachs’s arrangement of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, but
with a version for flute, clarinet, and piano by Michael Webster. It worked
very well, I thought, for which much of the credit must of course go to the
performers: Sylvia Careddu, Alexander Neubauer, and Ariane Haering. The opening
solo goes to the flute, of course; Careddu played it in wonderfully free
fashion, as if new, as if without bar lines. She was answered by Neubauer, equally
impressive, opening up a fascinating flute-clarinet duet – usually statement
and response, but sometimes together – with piano ‘accompaniment’. I am not
sure that I did not prefer it to the Sachs ensemble version – or perhaps it was
the excellence of the performance.
London
buses famously take their time and then appear in twos. Such has certainly been
my experience with Webern’s 1905 String Quartet, one of the many works
discovered by Hans Moldenhauer after the composer’s death. I heard it for what
I think was the first time ‘live’ only this January, from the Hagen Quartet at London’s Wigmore Hall. If anything, I think this performance
from members of the Alban Berg Ensemble, resident here at BERGfrühling, was
better still. It certainly had me think and think again about this
extraordinary early work. (Which, one might well ask, of Webern’s works is not
extraordinary? The over-performed Im
Sommerwind, perhaps, but that has undeniable charms too.) The first of the
single-movement-work’s three sections opened perhaps not unlike it had with the
Hagens: still, and yet it moved. Warm yet febrile – an almost unavoidable word
with much Webern – this performance had nothing generically ‘late Romantic’ to
it. This may not be the Webern of his op.28 Quartet, but it is undeniably
Webern.
The
players shaped the music’s progress as if it were a repertoire work, which it
undoubtedly should be, and perhaps is for them, without taking anything for
granted. Schoenbergian tendencies were clear without being overwhelming,
thereby mirroring and interpreting the work itself. Then came sweet, yet not
too sweet, serenity, which also yet moved. Schoenbergian development soon had
the better of that serenity, both in work and performance, furthering a sense
of something at least approaching transfiguration (Verklärung). Such was enabled, it seemed to me at least, by a
performance that was spacious not in the sense of being slow, but in the sense
of an inviting clarity that permitted us to take in the music and its
implications: to travel, as it were, with the players, interpreters ourselves.
The return to stillness at the close was in essence not a return at all, for
this, quite rightly, proved a very different, quite wondrous stillness, finely
won.
The
Hagen Quartet, joined by Jörg Widmann, had also given us Mozart’s Clarinet
Quintet in that Wigmore concert. One can never hear that work too often, of
course, at least when performed with the distinction it not only deserves but
requires. Musical performance is not a competition; at least it should not be.
If I give the Alban Berg Ensemble the edge in Webern and the Hagens the edge in
Mozart, the important thing is that both offered much – and indeed offered
quite different performances. The first movement, not inappropriately for a
festival of this name, perhaps evoked spring rather than autumn; there was
certainly no hint of sepia, Romantic or otherwise. Perhaps that was partly a
matter of our hearing Mozart through Webern, more through programming than
performance as such, yet none the less welcome for that – not unlike Christoph
von Dohnányi’s revelatory Cleveland recordings pairing the two composers.
Developing variation did not, after all, start with Brahms. Neubauer’s liquid
tone did not preclude the most alert of musical responses. Indeed, the two
incited the other, nowhere more so than in a development section which, with
true grit and vehemence, truly developed, before subsiding into a
recapitulation in which the old became new.
Serenity,
this time more or less unbesmirched, characterised the slow movement. That is
not to say that it was without incident, far from it, but that its own
developing variation was heard in an almost Wagnerian unendliche Melodie. (The two, as Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern would
all show, have far more in common than ‘Brahmsian’ and ‘Wagnerian’ partisans
would ever have admitted, or indeed appreciated.) A tone of hushed awe quite
rightly drew us in. The minuet flowed swiftly, as if in a single breath. Its first
trio relaxed, yet intensified; here, the players seemed to say, is the truly ‘learned’
music. The second trio tellingly mediated between both tendencies. If the
finale can readily be taken too insouciantly, we were here reminded that this
is serious music, long before the turn to the minor mode. Not that this was
unsmiling, but it was perhaps champagne rather than prosecco. Given the
location, it was perhaps inevitable that I should think of a mountain lake when
we came to the Adagio variation. This
was, however, a Lake Ossiach situated in a greater Carinthian landscape, and
thus all the more beautiful for it. Before, that is, Mozart-as-not-quite-Papageno
rounded things off.