Musikfest Berlin (5) - Aimard/BPO/Nott - Mazzoli, Eötvös, and Ives, 8 September 2024

Philharmonie

Missy Mazzoli: Orpheus undone
Peter Eötvös: Cziffra Psodia (German premiere)
Ives: Symphony no.4

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

Ernst Senff Choir (chorus master: Steffen Schubert)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Gregor A. Mayrhofer (co-conductor)

Jonathan Nott (conductor)

Images: Stephan Rabold

This was, by any standards, a varied programme, though I am not quite sure what connected the three works on offer. That all received excellent performances from the Berlin Philharmonic and Jonathan Nott – Pierre-Laurent Aimard joining not only for Peter Eötvös’s Cziffra Psodia for piano and orchestra, but also as one of the pianists for Ives’s Fourth Symphony – will doubtless not surprise, but is nonetheless worth celebrating. The concert, dedicated by orchestra, soloist, and conductor to Eötvös’s memory, displayed an open-mindedness he would surely have approved. 

First up was Missy Mazzoli’s 2019 two-part suite, Orpheus undone, from her ballet Orpheus Alive. With American minimalism, I try, genuinely. Yet, having some sense of the aesthetic behind it in its admittedly varied manifestations has yet to help me respond as many others do. The piece began, like much of its school, in obviously post-Stravinskian mode rhythmically; here, there were also Stravinskian tendencies in something approaching melody. It offered compelling writing for trombones and playing from them; a strong sense of musical narrative; and, I think, an equally strong sense of personal warmth. I can imagine it working well for dancers, as of course does much Stravinsky. Otherwise, I regret that, for now, I shall simply have to keep on trying. 

Cziffra Psodia was first performed in 2021, by János Balázs, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and Mikko Franck, and has garnered a few performances since. This, I imagine, will have gained Eötvös, like Mazzoli, some new admirers, not least for its frank engagement with the piano and orchestral tradition of Bartók. It is neither pastiche nor epigonal, but the affinities, as with the hypervirtuosity of György Cziffra, are surely no coincidence. There were other affinities, naturally: some almost Debussyan chord sequences from piano and cimbalom, but the greater sense was of an organicism one could hardly fail to think of as post-Romantic, despite or perhaps in some ways even on account of the rhapsodic qualities suggested in Eötvös’s punning title. Incisive, substantial, and involving, this was music founded on harmonic progression as much as on melody and rhythm: again, not unlike Bartók. Its four movements and half-hour span offered vivid, helter-skelter writing, married to a keen sense of fun; solo sections that suggested a string of black pearls; a fascinating relationship between piano and orchestra in which the former often seemed to ignite the latter; pealing tubular bells; and more, both to thrill and delight. Rhythms propelled yet also, intriguingly, on occasion found themselves bent. In the enigmatic closing violin solo, was that a conscious echo of both Bach and Berg, or just another instance of the composer writing with unfailingly idiomatic command? 

Ives’s Fourth Symphony received its first Berlin Philharmonic performance nearly fifty years ago, in 1975, under Seiji Ozawa; it was last heard from them thirty years later, in 2005, conducted by Sakari Oramo. The Philharmonie will have added an important spatial dimension then too; Ives’s ‘extra’ solo strings were here placed up by the organ. But that is not really the point of a work that famously, according to Henry Bellamann’s 1927 programme note (in which Ives probably had a hand), seeks to ask ‘the searching questions of What? and Why? which the spirit of man asks of life’. This was ‘particularly the sense’ of the first movement Prelude then and now, given to us with warmth, depth, and astonishing translucency of tone. Yes, it sounded like a prelude, and yes, it sounded ‘Maestoso’. The combination of orchestra and choir, Nott joined by co-conductor Gregor A. Mayrhofer, matched apparent ease in performance with unease of harmonic and other undercurrents.   

The second movement ‘Comedy’ seemed to extend such characteristics in its mysterious introduction. Its stretching of pitches, even of pitch itself, sounded wonderfully fresh—almost as much as it must have done when written and first performed (these first two movements alone) in the 1920s. It rumbled, and continued to rumble, its frustration of unambiguous eruption deeply telling. The whirling vortex briefly put me in mind of Ravel’s La Valse and, more spiritually, of Mahler. Ives’s extraordinary multimetrics, though, were entirely his own, shockingly so. As in Aimard’s Concord Sonata of a few nights earlier, it was the vision, if not the finish, of a James Joyce that came closer as a comparison. Ives, unruly, untamed, and untameable, never took anything for granted. Nor did his interpreters here or in the rich, cultivated string playing of the Fugue, whose corners as well as its counterpart, its emotional import as well as its aesthetic ambition, again suggested kinship with Mahler. 

The fourth movement’s strangeness and conviction – doubtless, for many of us, also strange conviction – built and built, infecting and inspiring the whole. First, I thought it nightmarish, but its quality of apotheosis was not in the slightest negative, nor was it even really dreamlike. It stretched our ears, as Ives’s father told his son music must do. It stretched them, moreover, in multiple directions, more than might even be counted. If the build-up – though to what? – was masterly, so was the winding down, though words are beginning more than usually to fail me. This is music whose categories may not be mine, may not be ours; we probably do not even know what its categories are. At the close, I had no doubt that, whatever its imperfections and its impossibilities, or rather through and on account of them, this was a masterpiece we had just heard and in which, in some sense, we had participated.

Musikfest Berlin (4) - Prohaska/MCO/Manacorda - Ives, Kloke, Mahler, and Dvořák, 5 September 2024

Philharmonie

Ives, arr. Eberhard Kloke: Seven Songs from the collection ‘114 Songs’ (world premiere)
Kloke: The Answered Question, op.131 (world premiere)
Mahler, arr. Kloke: Seven Early Songs
Dvořák: Symphony no.9 in E minor, op.95, B.178, ‘From the New World’

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

Antonello Manacorda (conductor)

Images copyright: Berliner Festspiele / Fabian Schellhorn

Musikfest Berlin’s focus on the Ives sesquicentenary continued with two commissions from Eberhard Kloke, one an arrangement of seven Ives songs for soprano and chamber orchestra, the other ‘an alternative experimental arrangement’ of Ives’s The Unanswered Question, ‘in which a differently posed question from Ives’s work is answered anew’. Kloke’s compositional activity, long focused on existing music by other composers – as conductor and composer alike, he considers himself above all an ‘interpreter’ – here also took in his arrangements of seven early songs by Mahler, dedicated, like those of Ives, to Anna Prohaska. 

In all three cases, ‘originals’ drifted in and out of consciousness: sometimes straightforwardly present, sometimes changed (whether by arrangement or otherwise), sometimes as underlay, and sometimes as a starting-point for other music by either composer. Ives’s own mysterious piano opening to ‘Thoreau’ prefaced, as in the original song, the spoken voice, ultimately leading to our first hearing of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra’s wind, directed by Antonello Manacorda, melodrama turning into song. Here, as elsewhere, Kloke’s orchestration proved sympathetic for voice and original material, musical and verbal. ‘Élegie’ offered a taste of Ives in French, both composers seemingly responding in kind, Kloke’s use of cello pizzicato almost more harp-like than the also present harp. His chamber writing permitted Prohaska to scale down her voice in singing of great subtlety that could also soar to climax—and did. Sharper-edged sonorities and harmonies in ‘His Exaltation’; a keen sense of the waters in ‘Grantchester’; and a jaunty, unmistakeably Americanism – accent to match, spoken and sung, with and without microphone – in ‘Charlie Rutlage’ were among other highlights, leading us to the closing question, already familiar from the encore to a song recital a few nights earlier: ‘Is life anything like that?’ 

Other questions, actually posed and might-have-beens, emerged in The Answered Question, partly submerged by a barrage of audience coughs. The MCO’s performance drew one in to listen, as did the spatial arrangement: two trumpets above, winds below, a further group (flute, oboe, clarinet, piano) at the back of the latter, as if in limbo. Questioning was questioned, as indeed was that questioning of question, in what came across as a post-transcendentalist refusal to accept easy answers, and accompanying unease as a result. Manacorda’s balancing and reconciliation of the instrumental parts proceeded with an ease belying the difficulty of his task, patient direction amply rewarded.  

For the Sieben frühe Lieder, title echoing Berg and perhaps Berio too, cowbells appeared: a temptation doubtless too difficult to resist. Here, Kloke offered quotation, allusion (thematic and timbral), and perhaps also illusion from Mahler’s Wunderhorn symphonies, already closely related to his song output, to produce a work I should guess extended to about twice the length of the songs alone. As the work progressed, memory, accurate and faulty, increasingly played a role of its own. A ‘Bruder Martin’ introduction to ‘Nicht wiedersehen!’ albeit with celesta and harp alongside double bass (first solo then duo) set the scene, the klezmer music of the First Symphony’s third movement joining later, surfacing in a way not dissimilar to that of the Mahler material in Berio’s Sinfonia. Saxophone was but one of the other instruments to be heard, all beautifully, expertly played by the musicians of the MCO; just as welcome, Prohaska treated the songs throughout as songs, not as would-be arias. The posthorn solo from the Third Symphony unsettled ‘Es ritten drei Reiter’. A purely vocal, folksong-like opening to ‘Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald’, elicited a sly instrumental response again evoking the First Symphony. Sleighbells from the Fourth framed ‘Das Mägdlein trat aus dem Fischerhaus’. The idea of resurrection, capitalised and otherwise, helped shape ‘Selbstgefühl’. It made for an unexpected, fascinating journey, and a surprisingly apt bridge between Ives and Dvořák.

 

Hearing the ‘New World’ Symphony from a chamber orchestra is different; it would be idle to pretend otherwise. In a well-conceived performance such as this, hard-driven at times but with undeniable drama, losses were surprisingly few. There was, moreover, unquestionable advantage in the Abbado-like sense of an orchestra of soloists coming together. Contrasts, as in the first movement introduction, were in some ways greater; nothing was prettified; and there was no doubting the symphonic integrity of the whole, whether as work or performance, a welcome change from an incoherent Mahler Sixth two nights earlier. Manacorda’s single-minded determination made for a concise, not un-Beethovenian experience, the first movement seemingly over almost before it had begun. In the slow movement, that solo and others were magically taken: as if heard for the first time, nothing taken for granted. (An extended cadenza for mobile telephone was less welcome.) Songful, soulful, yet never sentimental, the music spoke more of Bohemian words than an imagined ‘America’, and was all the better for it. Bubbly and boisterous, the scherzo teemed with life and not a little fury. I was less sure about the solo-string transition to the trio, though whether it was a strangeness too far is more a matter of taste than anything else. It had me listen, though. The finale sometimes had me miss a greater complement of strings, but the better course of action was to value what one did hear here, vehement, direct, and gripping. There was heart-rending exhilaration to the second group too, born of the material rather than imposed upon it. The struggle, once more, was unquestionably symphonic.

Musikfest Berlin (3) - Lynch/BRSO/Rattle: Hindemith, Zemlinsky, and Mahler, 3 September 2024

Philharmonie

Hindemith: Rag Time (wohltemperiert)
Zemlinsky: Symphonische Gesänge, op.20
Mahler: Symphony no.6 in A minor

Lester Lynch (baritone)

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Simon Rattle (conductor)

Image copyright: Berliner Festspiele / Astrid Ackermann

In a concert of two unequal halves, the first, shorter part proved the better bet. Incisive accounts of Hindemith’s Rag Time and Zemlinsky’s Symphonische Gesänge sat unfortunately with a performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony that suggested Simon Rattle’s lengthy post-Birmingham spell, amply demonstrated in Berlin and London, of pulling music, Mahler’s included, around to no discernible end has some way to go in Munich too. One aspect of interest was of course simply to hear Rattle with his new orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony. There was some excellent playing to be heard. To my ears, though – it was not only the hall, since I have heard Rattle and the LSO sparkle at the Philharmonie – the Mahler sound proved strikingly similar to that from the Berlin Philharmonic during its last, somewhat truculent days with the conductor. This new partnership, enthusiastically acclaimed by many in the audience – as seems to be the case for any old Mahler performance, good, bad, or indifferent – seemed as yet a work-in-progress. 

Hindemith’s Bach-inspired Ragtime made its point without overstaying its welcome. As with much music of the 1920s, the ghost (even when alive) of Busoni hovered over harmony and orchestration. Hard-edged and not a little outrageous, it made for an apt prelude to Zemlinsky’s 1929 settings of texts from the collection Afrika singt. Lester Lynch made for an eloquent, sincere, often moving soloist, sympathetically accompanied by Rattle, in a work that, musically, seemed to take up where the composer’s Lyric Symphony left off, albeit sparer and darker. The first song’s opening woodwind lines, excellently performed by BRSO principals, were a case in point. The deep sadness of one of several Langston Hughes settings (in translation) set the tone for much to come in music whose invention proved thoroughly equal to the task, Zemlinsky’s brass writing (and the BRSO’s playing) in ‘Erkenntnis’ striking indeed. When dark, it was a multicoloured darkness, as in ‘Totes braunes Mädel’; when contrast came, as in the scherzo-like ‘Übler Bursche’ and the defiant menace of ‘Afrikanischer Tanz’, it registered as meet and right. The final ‘Arabeske’ offered Twenties’ Neue Sachlichkeit with a heart, solidarity with a fine intellect, crystallised in performances that exulted without naïveté. 

It was a brisk funeral march that opened the Mahler: nothing wrong with that, although in this symphony, few have matched and surely none will surpass the incendiary results of Pierre Boulez’s more measured opening, both on record and in concert. With Boulez, as with few others, the whole of Mahler’s tragedy is implicit, even inevitable in the first bars. With Rattle, there was certainly much, though the general ‘tone’ seemed odd: a ‘midsummer night’s Mahler’ perhaps. Rattle’s way with the chorale that connects the first and second subjects was truly a thing of wonder, turning mysteriously inward. The aftermath of the second, ‘Alma’ theme, lost all momentum, slowing to the point of exhaustion, although picking up for much of the development. Moreover, the hard-edged, Weill-like sonorities that had characterised performances before the interval, seemed increasingly out of place here. There was something else missing, though. Once I realised what it was, its fatal precedent the work as a whole could not be escaped: an unwillingness to let harmony in general and harmonic rhythm in particular ground, inform, and incite the music’s progress. What we heard was a series of unconnected passages, some more nightmarish than others, in a somewhat loud and overbearing stream of consciousness. This is a symphony and Mahler’s most Classically conceived symphony at that; lose that and you lose much of its point. 

There was an irony, then, to Rattle’s insistence on placing the ‘Andante’ second: a common pseudo-literalism nowadays, one that rarely if ever convinces. It benefited from excellent solo playing, horn and violin in particular. Quite a head of steam was whipped up at the close, arguably excessively so. What it all might mean, regardless of whether that can or should be put into words, eluded me. Despite its placing third, the scherzo fared better, at least to begin with. Its opening had a stronger sense of rhythm, harmonic rhythm included, and the orchestral playing displayed a broader range of colour. Alas, Rattle’s inclination to pull material around soon got the better of him; the deliberate became merely mannered. 

The finale had its moments, but it needs more than moments. It needs to be heard as a single, unbroken span, or will ultimately be little more than a waste of time. A nightmarish opening augured well, but Rattle failed to establish a fundamental pulse. Listlessness may have been the idea, but general ‘mood’ was no substitute for what was lacking. That might work, or fail to work less badly, for two or three minutes, but for thirty? The movement’s form and structure were simply not there; nor were those of the symphony as a whole. People visibly thrilled to the two hammer-blows and, to be fair, the first for a while seemed literally to have knocked the music into shape, but why was it there? In any case, the old listlessness soon reasserted itself and the second went for less. A pity.

Musikfest Berlin (2) - Schoenberg and Ives, 2 September 2024

Kammermusiksaal

Schoenberg: Three Piano Pieces, op.11; Six Little Piano Pieces, op.19; Five Piano Pieces, op.23; Piano Pieces, op.33a and op.33b; Suite for Piano, op.25
Ives: Piano Sonata no.2, ‘Concord, Mass., 1840-1860’ (1947 version)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)  

For most pianists, to present the complete (non-posthumous) piano œuvre of Schoenberg or to perform Ives’s Concord Sonata would be enough for a tough yet rewarding recital. To offer both, in twin homage to composers whose 150^th birthday is being celebrated this year, is by any standards a feat, let alone to do so in such searching and comprehending performances. But thenm Pierre-Laurent Aimard has never been ‘most pianists’. Apparently, he had performed the complete Schoenberg in a single recital only once before, as a teenager, followed by the Hammerklavier Sonata . 

Schoenberg’s piano music is not exactly absent from the recital hall, though the number of pianists who perform it is not great, and they tend to concentrate on the op.11 Three Piano Pieces and the op.19 Six Little Piano Pieces. One might have thought works that unquestionably changed the history of music – the op.23 Five Piano Pieces including the first published twelve-note piece, and the op.25 Suite both including Schoenberg’s first twelve-note composition and forming his first entirely twelve-note work – might be heard a little more often, but no. Once, one might have said they were more written about and read than heard; now, it is difficult even to make that claim. As for the two op.33 pieces, this was, I think, the first time even I, as a Schoenbergian of reasonable enthusiasm and commitment, had heard them in concert. Given that Aimard also performed the Piano Concerto earlier this year, might we hope for a recording of that with the solo œuvre? We are still far from spoiled for choice in either. 

The first of the op.11 Pieces registered with radical, far from arbitrary, freedom, indicative of many years’ internalisation. Here was a fantastical Schoenberg, affinities lying as much with Schumann as with Brahms, though never to be pinned down to one particular ‘flavour’. Indeed, kaleidoscopic range, whether in dynamics or such reference, was not the least of this recital’s virtues. If this is ‘freely atonal’ music – one can register doubts concerning the label, whilst conceding it is unlikely either to be replaced or bettered – then perhaps this was also ‘freely atonal performance’. The opening of the second struck me as insisting less on remnants of D minor than often; that is, until it did. Somehow, that all-important figure insisted on its ostinato procedure as if all depended upon it, and in a way it did. Again, all seemed to be in motion, according to a distinctly Romantic sensibility that immediately extended beyond ‘mere’ Romanticism. The third piece was as furious and as capricious, and so much more in between, as anyone could hope for. 

In the op.19 Six Little Piano Pieces, thinner textures were immediately apparent; they could hardly fail to be. Likewise Schoenberg at his most aphoristic. It was, though, his sheer single-mindedness that shone through the exquisite spinning of a near-single line, however much shadowed on either side (pitch) and other sides (other parameters). The sheer magical quality to the final chord of the second, the almost vocal eloquence of the third, and the darting will-o’-the-wisp movement of the fourth: none of it, for once, required great virtuosity, but it required the fiercest of musical intelligence, which is what we heard. A distinctly unsentimental reading of the sixth piece sounded recollections of the Mahlerian funeral bells; above all, here as elsewhere, it sounded as music, programme or no programme. 

The op.23 Pieces gained greatly from being heard in this context. One immediately sensed an impulse to constructivism, even – perhaps particularly – on such elusive foundations. Kinship to other Schoenberg music of a similar time, as well as to more ‘freely’ atonal predecessors – the still-more-seldom heard Four Orchestral Songs, op.22, a case in point – was immediately apparent; so too were the reinvention and reintegration of polyphony. With Schoenberg, as with Bach, it is never either/or. Each piece sounded as a response to its predecessor, the second for instance as vehement as it was protean. Aimard less argued than demonstrated beyond doubt that this music mattered. The third was characterised by a splendidly Schoenbergian combination of obstinacy and whimsy; the fourth’s eloquence of utterance evoked Beethoven; and the fifth, of course, marked another bridge, to the twelve-note music to come, reminding us as much of its dancing, its smiling, and its open-heartedness, as its rigour. 

If I was brought up sharply by the beginning of op.33a, it was because I had been expecting the Suite. It was a nice jolt, as it was to return to the Suite for the conclusion of the first half: an invitation to listen differently. Schoenberg’s very particular mixture of expressionism and the Bauhaus glowered and glistened. In its successor, op.33b, from two years later (1931), we seemed to hear an attempt to create a new centre, its abandonment, and a new freedom that resulted from both. In performance, as in work, music never went quite where one expected. One needed to listen—and that was good. 

The Suite, op.25, emerged as quite a reckoning with Bach: harmonic as much as in ‘style’. We all know, after all, that Schoenberg had little patience with ‘style’ as a would-be substitute for Idea; it was certainly Idea we heard – and felt – here. The white intensity of the ‘Präludium’ and its Bachian ambition set out a new world before us, enabling one to hear this music as never before and, again, above all as music. Schoenberg’s need to communicate and the sheer abundance of that communication came to the fore in the Gavotte’ and Musette that followed; so too did a sense of delight, even of fun, as well as that trademark, ever-productive obstinacy. The Intermezzo, here the work’s beating heart, attained a well-nigh Mahlerian intensity of utterance, without forsaking an equally characteristic sense of childlike delight. All the while, through the Menuett and Trio, to the Gigue, line and development were pursued as one, the latter signing off with an éclat to foreshadow and even to rival Boulez. 

If one naturally heard passing resemblances, especially harmonic, with Schoenberg in Ives’s Sonata – there are, after all, only twelve notes in the chromatic scale – it was more the composer’s particular belief and integrity in his own inimitable utterance that characterised what we heard. Aimard’s eloquence and understanding as guide in turn enabled us as listeners to place greater confidence in our own listening—and thus to reap rewards in response. The beginning of the first movement, ‘Emerson’, had a proper sense of mapping out of space to come, even if it could only offer a foretaste at most. Familiar melodies came through, though here that did not really seem to be the point as perhaps it sometimes may have been later on. The multiplicity and obduracy already familiar from Schoenberg took on new guise of expression and form. Line is perhaps more difficult to trace here than in Schoenberg; it may again not even be the point. Being able to place such confidence in our guide to this most singular of divine comedies was nonetheless at least part of the battle. Moreover, for all the craggy masculinity of utterance, there was tenderness too, nowhere more so than at the close of this movement. 

‘Hawthorn’ was possessed of a very different character, heard with an unmistakeable sense of release and propulsion. Clusters were magical, even Debussy-like, to be savoured almost in themselves, yet rigour and struggle ultimately remained the thing. The plain-spokenness of ‘The Alcotts’, building Romantic momentum in work and performance, and the newly enigmatic quality to ‘Thoreaux’, however different its material and implications would soon prove, seemed to speak of an almost Joycean musical universe, albeit one rooted in particular, unmistakeably American transcendentalism. Summation seems reductive; perhaps summa comes a little closer, if a little ‘foreign’. Then, inevitably, all turned again more wayward. Like Schoenberg, Ives can never be pinned down. Why, indeed, would anyone try?

Musikfest Berlin (1) - Prohaska/Aimard: Ives, Stravinsky, and Debussy, 1 September 2024

Kammermusiksaal

Ives: 25 songs from the collections 114 Songs and Eleven Songs
Stravinsky: Four Russian Songs; Three Songs from William Shakespeare: ‘Full Fadom Five’
Debussy: Prose lyriques

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

Image copyright: Berliner Festspiele, Foto/photo Fabian Schellhorn

My visit to this year’s Musikfest Berlin began with a fascinating, brilliant recital from Anna Prohaska and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, weaving five selections of songs by Charles Ives, like Arnold Schoenberg 150 this year, amongst a set apiece from Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy. There may be about 400 Ives songs to choose from, but the selections were anything but random, whether in themselves or in combination with the other works. I doubt many in the audience will have been familiar with more than a few, but they will surely have won a good few converts: just what an anniversary celebration is for. 

The first Ives set, running into Stravinsky, offered songs of remembrance and autumn, the latter often being a time when minds turn to the former. Yet, just as memories are not always what one might expect, nor was the opening ‘Memories’, written when Ives was still a student at Yale. In two sections – what appear to all intents and purposes to be two separate songs – the first offered a seamless transition from pre-concert hubbub into recital, Aimard arriving on stage to put his music on the piano, declining applause, suddenly joined on the piano stool in a little coup de théâtre by Prohaska. The two then launched into ‘We’re sitting in the opera house, the opera house, the opera house…’. Aimard’s own delivery of the line ‘Curtain!’ brought proceedings, as beautifully acted as sung by Prohaska, to a close, swiftly to be followed by a distinctly New England languor for the second section, ‘Rather Sad’. Just when one thinks one might have begun to get to grips with Ives, if hardly to pin him down, he throws everything up in the air again, whether through the absorbing piano writing – very much Aimard’s thing – of ‘A Farewell to Land’, one line seemingly multiplying in a radical alternative to Schoenberg; the bracing, disquieting liberty of the night in ‘The “Incantation”’; or the tricky, jaunty, yet unerringly ‘true’ speech rhythm, captured by Prohaska to a tee, of ‘September’. Indeed, that sense of ‘truth’, ponderous, even portentous though it might sound, seemed to ring, well, true throughout, in Ives’s harmonies, the obstinacies of his rhythms, and much else. 

It is perhaps more usual to hear Stravinsky’s Four Russian Songs for voice and instrumental ensemble, although frankly one is lucky ever to hear them in any form. I am not sure I have had the opportunity before in concert, likewise with ‘Full Fadom Five’ from the Three Songs from William Shakespeare. In the former, the voice in particular captured once more to a tee this world of Les Noces in miniature. The ease with which Prohaska summoned up the right ‘voice’ for each section of the recital made it all seem so easy, art concealing art, Aimard’s command of metre and its transformation equally fundamental to the performance’s success. A whole new world was brought into life with great personality, alongside and indeed dependent on accuracy and musicality. The late, serial Stravinsky, time-travelling as widely and wildly as ever, was represented by the Shakespeare song: another jewel combining Webern-like process with ghosts of another past, in this case that of English music. Intervallic and harmonic flashes of that world beguiled yet also warned, prior to the celebrated Tempest tolling: ‘Ding dong bell’. 

That song was followed by Ives’s Shakespeare setting of the same text, ‘A Sea Dirge’ richly post-Romantic, for want of a better word, yet still admirably concise. Prohaska’s ‘Hark now’ haunted like a siren, recording an earlier recital and album of hers. Not for the first time, traces of Schoenberg also haunted proceedings, but it was Ives and no one else who set us truly along the path of contrasts between town and nature. ‘The Swimmers’ evoked worlds physical and metaphysical, culminating in a strikingly declamatory declaration that the protagonist was the sea’s master, not its slave. ‘Soliloquy’ proved increasingly expressionist, continuing that at least intermittent Schoenbergian thread. Modern life and its contrasts – alienation is more Mahler’s world – was the stuff in performance as well as text for ‘the New River’, followed by a poignant account of the Matthew Arnold setting, ‘West London’, unusually expansive in this company. The wry ‘Ann Street’ and ‘In the Alley’, the latter’s musical and verbal twist nicely – or naughtily – relished led us to a circus band full of surprises in the song of that name, seemingly aching to be staged and responding well to the soprano’s natural scenic gifts. 

Following the interval, a more impressionist or at least Debussyan Ives evoked ‘Evening’, ‘Mists’ and, in between, the ‘Evidence’ of his own words, preparing the way for spellbinding performances of Debussy’s Proses lyriques. The post-Wagnerian harmonies of ‘De rêve’ breathed a different air, leading us by the hand into a kaleiodoscopic dream world that emerged all the better for its clear-sightedness. The crepuscular tumult of ‘De grève’ and the Yniold-like shift (apparently without Pelléas’s catch) in the final ‘De soir’ offered further instances, as did ‘De fleurs’ in between, of subtle, imperceptible shaping, songs growing out of words and harmony, which in turn seemed to grow out of the shifting light they had themselves engendered. 

Ives’s ‘Berceuse’ made for a nice bridge to the final set, its lack of perfume and striking straightforwardness – which is certainly not to say simplicity – announcing a different voice and path, one leading perhaps from childhood, through battle, and ultimately to the strange heaven of General Booth. ‘Tom Sails Away’ suggested a world somewhere, aptly, between the whimsical and the visionary, that sense of liminality carried through into the next-but-one ‘Slow March’, its quotation of the ‘Dead March’ from Handel’s Saul both comforting and jarring. The closing ‘General Booth Enters into Heaven’ one might call a scena in itself, were such Italianate ways not so alien to Ives. It seemed to capture the composer’s brazen individuality and individualism: complex and straightforward, familiar and strange, old and new. Like a Mahler symphony, it seemed to embrace everything, to be like as well as of the world. Aimard gave the last of his own vocal interjections here, ‘Hallelujah!’ Yet it was Prohaska’s question that lingered, unsettlingly: ‘Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?’ It was quite a climax, to be followed only by a taste of the soprano’s upcoming Musikfest concert with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, in which she will sing more Ives songs, this time orchestrated by Eberhard Kloke. ‘The Cage’ left us asking, quite properly: ‘Is life anything like that?’ If only it were.