Pierre Boulez Saal
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| Images: Peter Adamik |
Muffat: Apparatus musico-organisticus: Passacaglia in G minor
Rzewski:
Dreams
II
Kerll:
Passacaglia in D minor
Busoni:
Fantasia
contrappuntistica
I have heard a good number of
ambitious musical performances, ambitions fully realised, from Igor Levit,
ranging from his Wigmore Hall Beethoven sonata cycle to a landmark modern performance of Henze’s Tristan in Salzburg. None of
those, however, would outstrip the ambition, again fully realised, of this, his
Pierre Boulez Saal debut recital, culminating in Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica, a work which, he owns, is a ‘borderline
piece’, which ‘takes me to the limits of my abilities – mentally,
intellectually, physically’. Those limits, if limits they were, were thrilling
to explore.
Two seventeenth-century passacaglias,
from Georg Muffat and Johann Caspar Kerll, rarely if ever heard on the modern
or indeed any other form of piano, proved not the least of the recital’s
achievements. Georg Muffat’s G minor piece, from his 1690 Apparatus musico-organisticus, revealed kinship with music from contemporary
clavecinistes, early keyboard
composers (Frescobaldi came to mind more than once), and later composers from
Bach to Brahms, and perhaps even beyond to Busoni. Delicate, responsive,
variegated in a developmental sense, Levit’s performance had one feel as well
as observe the composer’s balance between detail and longer line: not so
different, after all, from Beethoven. Harmony was relished; harmonic motion was
meaningfully conveyed. So too were the surprises Muffat sprang for us: no
underlining, ‘just’ musical understanding and communication. It had all the
inevitability of Hegel’s owl of Minerva taking flight, yet none of that old
bird’s baggage. Levit’s performance of Kerll’s piece had all the virtues of his
Muffat and likewise all of its particularity. Voice-leading, quite without
narcissism, was nonetheless to die for. Its directed freedom created form
before our ears. We travelled from intimacy to exultancy, the latter never
failing to nurture continuation of the former from within.
In between came Frederic
Rzewski’s 2014 Dreams II, written for
Levit (and previously heard by me at
the Wigmore Hall in 2015). Its four movements did, whether as work or
performance, what they said in their titles – ‘Bells’, ‘Fireflies’, ‘Ruins’, ‘Wake
up’ – without conforming to mere expectation, without questioning as well as
fulfilling. Indeed, questioning seemed to be very much part and parcel of their
fulfilment. The first movement seemed to relate both to Debussy and to Webern,
but that was never the point, not even the starting point, in a performance of calibrated
drama. Increasingly seductive warmth proved anything but antithetical to
crystalline clarity. Febrile and flickering, the second movement burned with
mercurial heat. The pianist’s riveting virtuosity once again spoke from
apparently Debussyan roots, yet who speaks or thinks of roots in relation to
fireflies? Rzewski’s ‘Ruins’ seemed known – ruins tend to – yet the more one
listened, the more one realised one had not known them at all. Again, ruins
tend to be like that. Their (re)discovery was a wayward process that built on
the previous two movements, yet was very much its own thing. The final movement
was shaped, dramatised as keenly as Beethoven – or Muffat. Somehow, it seemed
already to be hinting at Busoni, not least in its dynamic form and its
toccata-like qualities. In its improvisatory reminiscence-cum-creation of
whimsical childhood memories it spoke too of dreams, of their magic, of their
power.
Like Doktor Faust, Busoni’s fantasia has the quality of a summa, even a summa theologica. Levit’s ‘Preludio corale’ seemed already to
encompass the entirety of his instrument in considerably more than mere
compass. Questing, like Faust, like Busoni, to bring order out of chaos, the
process was never complete, yet no less real like that. Good German (convert)
that he was, Busoni believed in werden
rather than sein. Beethoven and Liszt
flashed by, the pianist-composer’s battle with Bach but one of the dramas, the theologies
at stake here. With lightly-worn – insofar as possible! – virtuosity and veiled
clarity, Levit proved a sure guide, though whether to the inferno or to
paradise was rightly never clear. Busoni’s Sonatina
seconda from two years later (1912) hung in the air, suspended, yet somehow
also flayed alive. The fugal path was soon upon us, the first of Busoni’s four
a further, developmental prelude in miniature (not-so-very miniature)
Transition was, it seemed, everything; so too was that journey to the limits of
which the pianist had spoken in the programme. Alternative paths to a twentieth
century that never quite was, Schoenberg be damned, opened up before us in the
Intermezzo and Variations. This, it seemed, was veritable necromancy, but
whose? What was the cadenza, and what was the following fugue? The answer was,
on one level, perfectly clear; yet it seemed to miss the point entirely.
Transition, again, was all. Neo-Lisztian peroration pointed more to the
impossibility of completion than Bach could ever have done. If a ‘point’ there
were, perhaps it was that. Or perhaps it was the melting encore, the
Bach-Busoni Chorale Prelude, ‘Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland’. Mephistopheles does
not always have the last word.
