Wigmore Hall
Lachenmann:
Ein
Kinderspiel: ‘Schattentanz’
Debussy:
Children’s
Corner, interspersed with:
Lachenmann: Ein Kinderspiel: ‘Akiko’
Chopin: Mazurka
in C-sharp minor, op.30 no.4; Etude in F minor, op.25 no.2
Liszt: Etude
in G-sharp minor, ‘La campanella’, S 141/3
Lachenmann: ‘Schattentanz’
Bach: Prelude
in C-sharp major, BWV 872
Lachenmann: Ein Kinderspiel: ‘Filter-Schaukel’
Debussy:
Préludes, Book II: ‘Feux d’artifice’
Louis
Couperin: Tombeau de Mr de Blancrocher
Schumann:
Fantasie in C major, op.17
Pavel Kolesnikov (piano)
This was anything but an
ordinary recital. Sometimes, however, an inventive programme can fail in
practice, either because it is too inventive for its own good, or because the
performer is less than equal to its strenuous demands – or both. Here, Pavel
Kolesnikov, whom I had been looking forward to hearing for quite some time –
alas, I had to cancel attendance at a Visions
de l’Amen with Samson Tsoy – triumphantly, elegantly, even insouciantly swatted
like flies any doubts I might have entertained, and proved equal to the task he
had set himself not only in his programming, but in his spoken (recorded)
introduction, prior to coming on stage. Kolesnikov acknowledged that the
programme might have looked like Schumann with a stuffed version of Debussy’s Children’s Corner, but winningly avowed
that he would rather the audience have gone hungry than set such a meal before
it. Instead, he said, these ‘musical pieces are characters in a play’, all
connected by ‘extreme purity of the musical language’. (Again, my ideological
alarm bells started ringing; performance and listening would prove me wrong.)
Dedicated to Debussy, the recital aimed to show the ‘magical chemical reaction’
his music in particular enjoyed with the music of other composers.
It was with Helmut Lachenmann,
however, that the recital proper began: with the ‘Schattentanz’ from his 1980
suite, Ein Kinderspiel. Not with that
work’s opening ‘Hänschen Klein’ – perhaps that would have been too easy, too
redolent of ‘child’s play’ – but with its closing ‘Schattentanz’. Its opening
Nibelheim gallop in the extreme treble of the instrument – typically, the piano’s
highest two notes, B and C – was judged, as it must be, with the utmost
precision and ease of dynamic gradation: not unlike Mozart, or indeed Debussy.
Was that Nibelheim or was it the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh
Symphony, or an apotheosis of something or somewhere in between, perhaps, as it
were, of the Schattentanz? It could
be any of those things, or none. Already, I began to understand, or think I
did, what Kolesnikov had meant by ‘extreme purity of the musical language’: not
exclusive, but something irreducible. Perhaps Stravinsky had not been wrong after
all; nor, however, had Liszt, for there was surely something of Mephistopheles
here too. Childhood is not for children, not really. Or, as Lachenmann put it,
quoted in Jessica Duchen’s programme note, ‘Although it was written for my son
David and partly played in public by my daughter Akiko, who at that time (1980)
was seven years old, Kinderspiel is
not a pedagogical music or a music intended specially for children either.
Childhood and musical experiences related to it are an essential part of every
adult’s inner world.’
On, then, to Children’s Corner and its sly wit, Debussy
awakening from the shadows of the shadow-dance. Interestingly, ‘Doctor Gradus’
sounded, for all its C major ‘purity’ and for all Kolesnikov’s teasing rubato,
all the more modernist in its radical resort to and/or play with tonality. And
yes, there was a true sense of a new character being introduced, whether in a
play or a novel. ‘Jimbo’s Lullaby’ again
offered character, not caricature, returning one’s thoughts to those of Lachenmann,
and so many others, on ‘childhood’, and to those of Kolesnikov on musical
purity. For each pitch, each dynamic gradation, one could imagine a
quasi-serialist value. ‘Total serialism’, after all, surely owed at least as
much to Debussy as to the Second Viennese School, even Webern. Emerging from
Debussy, Lachenmann’s ‘Akiko’ sounded almost Romantic: only, of course, because
it is. The sense of a strong relationship between pitch and other parameters
remained – not despite, but because of its Romanticism. Returning to Debussy,
for the ‘Serenade of the Doll’, it worked just as beautifully ‘in itself’ as
because of any images that may or may not have been provoked. I especially
loved the way Kolesnikov leaned into phrases: related, yet never the same.
Chopin’s C-sharp minor Mazurka,
Op.30 no.4, might have sounded mannered in
abstracto – but not if one knew some of the great Chopin pianists of the
past, and certainly not if one listened to it in context. Here it sounded truly
magical, not despite the sometimes extreme level of play with its dance
rhythms, but partly on account of that. Was this perhaps itself a form of musique concrète instrumentale?
Certainly the way in which Chopin’s harmonies dissolved spoke of Debussy and
beyond. The F minor Etude, op.25 no.2, suggested Debussy’s doll returning to
stage, dancing a pas de deux with the
subject, whoever or whatever it may be, of Lachenmann’s ‘Akiko’. And then the
Snow Danced too, Debussy’s harmonic ambiguities as eloquent, as mysterious as I
have heard, intensified by Chopin’s preparation. We seemed to be in a state of
semi-suspended animation – which, when one thinks about it, we should have to
be, for the snow to be dancing. Liszt’s ‘La campanella’ had something of the
ballet to it to, albeit a ballet without dancers, like Wagner’s ironic –
although how ironic? – late desire for an invisible theatre. The notes
themselves were the dancers, perhaps, returning us to Kolesnikov’s æsthetic
credo. Liszt, at any rate, was not played to the gallery, but music that
brought the gallery to the keyboard itself. In similar vein, the keyboard
almost expanded before our ears at the close, an aural equivalent to the growth
of the Christmas Tree in The Nutcracker.
Lachenmann’s ‘Schattantanz’ returned: the same, different, or both? It was
difficult to tell, and that was surely the point.
‘The Little Shepherd’ trod the
boards next, seemingly transformed by those experiences, both ‘musical’ and ‘characterful’.
The experience was unsettling, rendering necessary our listening – not unlike
the music of Luigi Nono, Lachenmann’s teacher. The Bach Prelude that followed
(C-sharp major, Book II) sounded as if Dr Gradus had returned, tonally
upgraded, as it were, having both learned and spurned the lessons in between,
nevertheless taking it all in his stride. Kolesnikov’s playful legato and sheer
delight in the music were infectious indeed. ‘Golliwogg’s Cakewalk’ answered
the final phrase of the closing fugato, the Tristan
music apparently ‘without hammers’. Lachenmann’s ‘Filter-Schaukel’ then sounded
the alarm – both against premature applause and as ‘pure’ sonority, its
clusters all the weirder in context. It played with both our hearing and our
listening. ‘Feux d’artifice’ closed this extraordinary first half, with
fireworks that were far from only visual, far from mere display, mere ‘artifice’.
Performance is alchemy too.
Louis Couperin’s Tombeau de Mr de Blancrocher opened the
second half: more languid and improvisatory than Debussy. And yet, there was a
not entirely dissimilar sense of play with the basic musical materials. Dr
Gradus, perhaps in a new disguise? Perhaps in a late-night lockdown, at last
able truly to let his hair down? For there was, it seemed, something of the
jazz world to Kolesnikov’s performance, to this tribute to a lutenist, a relish
of its dissonances that yet declined unduly to underline.
For all we know of the
connections between Schumann and Debussy, they had rarely sounded so close as
here, in the opening to the C major Fantasie. Perhaps that was all the stranger
given Kolesnikov’s grand Romantic manner, only rarely unleashed earlier on. The
music could melt, of course, quite unlike Debussy’s snow, yet never as anything
but an expression of Schumann’s formal dynamism. The characters here? Florestan
and Eusebius, of course, yet they were joined by, even changed by reappearances
from the earlier cast. Schumann here needs relatively little encouragement to
sound like Liszt, yet the encouragement he did receive was beautifully judged,
guiding one to hear one composer’s transformational anticipations of another.
Brahms was here too, of course: for once, neither too late nor too early. The Innigkeit, however, was entirely Schumann’s own. A kinship with Beethoven – quite absent
from the earlier music, I think – was unquestionably apparent – in the second
movement, yet its caprice was quite different. Likewise the ‘late Beethoven’
rarity of the closing Adagio, shaped
with a true mastery of musical narrative. What a special piece this is, and
what a special performance this was. And then, as if to confirm yet also
affectionately to mock my construction of the play we had heard, ‘Dr Gradus’ bis: like the Lachenmann repeat in the
first half, both the same and anything but the same. There was something rather
wonderful to a new beginning, a new limbering up; and there was also a warning,
which perhaps I should have taken to heart earlier, that perhaps only music
could tell this tale after all.
(This recital was recorded for future broadcast by BBC Radio 3.)
