Philharmonie
Missy Mazzoli: Orpheus undone
Peter Eötvös: Cziffra Psodia (German premiere)
Ives: Symphony no.4
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
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| 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.
