Grosses Festspielhaus
 |
| Image: Salzburger Festspiele / Marco Borrelli |
Schoenberg:
Three
Piano Pieces, op.11
Schoenberg:
Six
Little Piano Pieces, op.19
Nono:
…..sofferte
onde serene…
Beethoven:
Piano Sonata no.31 in
A-flat major, op.110
Beethoven:
Piano Sonata no.32 in C
minor, op.111
Maurizio Pollini (piano)
André Richard (sound direction)
Much to admire here, as ever,
from Maurizio Pollini. If not everything we heard spoke quite with the control
it might once have done, and some of Schoenberg’s op.11 Three Piano Pieces sounded a little neutral, the sense not only of
musical understanding but of music’s ethical role remained undimmed, arguably
even heightened in the latter case. Motivic insistence was to the fore in the
first of those Schoenberg pieces: Brahms singing through post-Wagnerian
harmony. If the hyper-Romanticism one often finds here were not so prominent,
anticipations of the serial Schoenberg, especially the Piano Concerto, were
more so. The second piece received a performance of unusual intimacy; even at
its starkest, sounds dissolving before our ears. The nagging obstinacy of
Schoenberg’s ostinato seemed very much to attain an ethical dimension: an
integrity closely allied to that of the pianist himself. If the third piece
confounded Busoni, when sent the music by Schoenberg, it did not Pollini, whose
clarification of texture and structure again seemed to look forward to the
later Schoenberg.
The Six Little Pieces, op.19, received a wonderful performance. (Or should
that be ‘wonderful performances’? I am never quite sure, a problem which
perhaps tells us something about the ambiguity of such ‘pieces’ and their part
in a greater whole.) The first, distilled, more intimate still – audience
bronchial activism notwithstanding – displayed such variety of articulation,
all at the service of the phrase and its place in the greater structure, as to
further the illusion of a ‘natural’ outpouring. The starkness of obstinacy was
again to the fore in the second, the third and fifth pieces offering, in work
and performance, music as perfectly chiselled as Mozart. There came further
contrast in between them, in the fourth, but also synthesis: latent violence and grace. And the sixth, famously
inspired by Mahler’s funeral, ‘wie ein Hauch’: one could almost see and feel
the graveyard and its chill: then and now. Magical.
In Nono’s …..sofferte onde serene…, written for Pollini, we heard the sounds
of the city (Venice), its sights, fears, possibilities surrounding us. It was,
of course, a human city, no mere collection of buildings or even waterways,
though those played their parts. More strongly than ever, I was put in mind of
the wonderful 2001 film by Bettina Ehrhardt, A Trail on the Water: Abbado – Nono – Pollini. This was ultimately
a world not of conflict, but of cooperation: a vision of what might be, as well
as a reflection of what is (or was). Such an imperative to listen, and joy in
doing so, offered a communion that, if not strictly theological, was not
without its religious impulse. The music’s unfolding proved as inevitable as it
was surprising.
Simple yet proliferating, never
quite to be reduced to either, the first movement of Beethoven’s op.110 sonata,
was taken relatively swiftly. The marriage we heard of the intractable and
serene, whilst unmistakeably Beethovenian, also made connections with the
Schoenberg pieces heard earlier. Much the same might be said of the second
movement, a few technical difficulties in the trio notwithstanding. The mystery
of the third movement’s opening harmony – where were we? – led inexorably to the sadness of that final song, to the
fugue, both ways up, and somewhere beyond. If, towards the close, one might
have wished for a little more of the clarity of Pollini’s earlier years,
direction and, again, ethical imperative remained undimmed.
Finally, op.111: one of those
works in which we feel we have ventured as far as it is possible for us to go. (‘Caminantes, no hay caminos. Hay que
caminar,’ as Nono read in a monastery inscription, inspiring him at the
end of his life to continue to travel, a lack of paths both necessity and
inspiration.) Beethoven’s reckoning, perhaps not final yet certainly late, with
his life-long C minor daemon, sounded with all the impetuosity of his youth,
the development section in particular a battle both fierce and tender, two
sides of the same humanist coin. The second movement was possessed by a noble
simplicity that yet contained so much within it. Here, Pollini sounded to me
unquestionably at his greatest, continuing to question and to relish the
strangeness of Beethoven’s variations, as early as the first. Transformation
was very much a numinous thing of wonder, no mere ‘process’, just as in
Schoenberg and Nono. And yet, there was always grit in the oyster: this was
human music, not entirely transcendent, whatever that may mean. The sheer
energy with which Pollini scaled this most extraordinary of peaks offered a
standing rebuke to his dreary detractors, thrilling to an almost unbearable
extent (in the very best way). ‘Sublime’ may be a word overused, but it is
unavoidable here, the music’s close so pure, so gossamer white. Deconstruction
we can leave until another day. As for the idiot who immediately disrupted the
spell with a puerile shout of ‘Bravo!’…
