Wigmore Hall
John Adams: Hallelujah Junction
Schumann, arr. Debussy: Six Studies in Canonic Form, op.56
Debussy: En blanc et noir
Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring
Leif Ove Andsnes, Marc-André Hamelin (pianos)
Two-piano recitals look, feel, and are very
different from piano-duet recitals. Sometimes we have a mixture, but even then,
performances look and sound very different, for obvious logistical reasons.
Leif Ove Andsnes and Marc-André Hamelin offered four (five, if one counts the
encore) works for two pianos, ultimately taking us to the very limits—sometimes,
it seemed, beyond—of what is possible, even with two instruments and four
hands, in The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky’s arrangement is actually for piano
duet, but Andsnes and Hamelin reinstate some of the lines necessarily missing,
at times giving a full orchestra a run for its money. A deservedly well
attended, well appreciated concert heated up an otherwise dismal, late May evening.
Maybe the gods were exacting revenge for a strange spring rite of unwitting
lèse-majesté at Stonehenge.
First, though, was neither Neolithic Wiltshire
nor the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, but Hallelujah Junction, a truck
stop on the border between California and Nevada. I am afraid John Adams’s
piece does nothing for me. I could find nothing to signal compositional achievement
beyond that of a generic, mid-1990s Channel 4 soundtrack, mixed with all-too-obvious
‘Americana’. As for the sentimental pseudo-Romantic harmonies of the central
section, I presumed they were ‘ironic’, though perhaps not. The performance,
though, was masterly, rhythmic tests passed with flying colours, not least in
the final section in which the two pianists finally came into sync with one
another, only to fall out again, ‘like a great malfunctioning mechanical player
piano’, to quote Edward Bhesania’s evocative note. That I found diverting
enough; the rest was evidently admired by most in the audience and enjoyed by
both players.
Adams over, I could breathe a sigh of
relief and had no reservations whatsoever. Debussy’s 1891 arrangement for two
pianos of Schumann’s Studies in Canonic form for pedal piano rarely
disappoints, but here sheer ‘naturalness’ of musical response was second to
none. Bach rightly emerged as the guiding spirit of the first, which
paradoxically had one hear all that is not Bach all the more acutely. A melting
performance, utterly pianistic, would surely have delighted Schumann and
Debussy equally; Bach too, no doubt. From this ‘prelude’, greater pathos
followed in the second study, its harmonic riches revealed with wisdom and ese.
A winningly impetuous third study, harking back to the wide-eyed Romanticism of
Schumann’s ‘Year of Song’ five years previously, filled one’s stomach with the
loveliest of butterflies. Limpid, heartfelt, and noble in response, the fourth
showed, in the building and subsiding of its more darkly involved central section,
the truest virtues of such antiphonal performance. The fifth was resolute in a nicely
post-Schubertian way, whilst the concluding study proved both developmental and
summative: once more, a fine tribute to Bach.
Debussy’s own En blanc et noir
opened as if paying brief homage to Schumann, then pressed on beyond. Its first
movement offered clarity, direction, pianistic abandon and control, in as
finely complementary duo playing as one could imagine—and then some. Tragedy
penetrated necessary abstraction in the second movement, dedicated ‘ au Lieutenant
Jacques Charlot tué à l’ennemi en 1915, le 3 mars’. Angels (la vielle France)
and demons (war, Ein’ feste Burg) did battle, albeit with due ambiguity.
This is music, not a tract, and so it sounded here. Anger, though, was barely
suppressed, and why should it be? The scherzando, dedicated to Stravinsky,
proved more elusive still, all the more so for resting on a rock-solid rhythmic
base, above and sometimes beneath which passes all manner of musical
entanglements.
Debussy and Stravinsky gave a celebrated
private performance of The Rite in the composer’s duet version. What it
would have been to have heard that, though it is difficult to imagine it
surpassing what we heard from Hamelin and Andsnes. Whenever one hears a good
performance of the piano version, it is striking just how readily the opening
bassoon lines, apparently so tied to their timbre, transfer. Who knows what
wizardry is involved therein, but it was close to definitively unleashed on
this occasion. More flexible at times than is possible (perhaps desirable) for
orchestra, the performance lacked nothing in rhythmic solidity where it counted,
its primitivism shockingly immanent. So too was clarity that enabled one to
hear me manner of things I had never imagined were there, or so I fancied.
Passages sounded closer to Petrushka than usual, surely in part on
account of the medium. Others emerged hieratic enough to give Boulez a run for
his money. Virtuosity took us to its limits and extended them. Yet for all the
pounding, there was much delicacy too, and above all melody, which must lie at
the heart (yes, the heart) of any Rite. What emerged more strongly than
in any performance I can recall was the sheer tragic impulse of the second part,
rooted harmonically, the radicalism of Stravinsky’s cellular organisation likewise
becoming all the clearer as it progressed. Hamelin and Andsnes made the Rite
strange again whilst remaining true to it: surely the ultimate goal of any
performance worth our time.
As an encore, we heard a tango composer by
Hamelin himself, perfectly conceived for and realised on two pianos. Catchy and
playful, it engaged in Ravel’s trick of having one ask what might lie beneath
the beguiling, glittering surface, before immediately turning the joke on us by
pointing out the silliness of the question.
