London Sinfonietta/Kemp - Boulez and Cage, 9 March 2025

Purcell Room

Cage: Six Melodies
Boulez: Improvisé—pour le Dr. K
Cage: Credo in US
Boulez: Dérive 1
Boulez: Domaines
Cage: Variations I

Francesca Amewudah-Rivers (actor)

Michael McCarthy (director)

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

Sarah Nicolls (prepared piano)

London Sinfonietta

Thomas Kemp (conductor)

Images: Monika S Jakubowska

This London Sinfonietta concert, ‘innovative’ in the best rather than the debased, trivial way, framed performances of works by Pierre Boulez and John Cage with engaging readings from their correspondence by Francesca Amewudah-Rivers and short filmed contributions. It made for an enthralling and enjoyable evening at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room, precisely because the level of performance was so high, ‘additions’, though they were far more than that, genuinely complementing rather than substituting for musical excellence. It was a delight, moreover, to see a sold-out venue, once again giving the lie to claims that no one is interested in hearing this music. Many of us have a deep thirst for it; the only reason we do not go more often is a lack of opportunities to do so. Many do not, just as many do not like all manner of things, whether Mozart, Beethoven, the Beatles, or anything else; there is no reason to be dishonest and substitute one’s own preferences and interests for the voice of the world-spirit. And there is every reason to welcome an all-too-rare opportunity to hear, rather than simply talk about, this music, especially in so illuminating a juxtaposition, which offered great musical contrasts as well as points of mutual historical fascination. 

The first reading came not from the correspondence as such, although it is included in the Cambridge University Press Nattiez-Samuels edition as its first item. It was instead taken from Boulez’s 1949 spoken introduction – both manuscript and a rough draft are part of the Paul Sacher Stiftung – to the performance he helped organise of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, given at Suzanne Tézanas’s Paris salon. A brief filmed excerpt was juxtaposed with a live excerpt from Boulez’s own Second Piano Sonata of the previous year. Different worlds indeed, though the excerpted correspondence that followed suggested genuine interest in mutual exploration too, Boulez’s apology for sometimes writing in French – ‘my [English] grammar is still too shaky’ (3/11/12 January 1950) – typical of a humility for which he is still too infrequently credited. 

Cage’s Six Melodies for violin and keyboard (piano) from this same year were given a delightful performance by Clio Gould and Elizabeth Burley, the rhythmic progression Boulez admired strongly yet far from didactically to the fore. Initially un-, even anti-‘violinistic’, the music seemed to grow both as music and as violin music, the third and fourth pieces in particular splendidly ‘fiddling’. It felt like a gateway to the meditative sensibility as well as to the chance operations that would increasingly characterise Cage’s music in the years to follow. Boulez’s 2005 revision of his 1969 tribute for the eightieth birthday of Aldred A. Kalmus of Universal Edition, Improvisé—pour le Dr. K, opened with typical piano éclat. A very strong initial sense of Schoenberg – and he is there somewhere – faded slightly when I realised: ‘of course: like the other Kalmus pieces, this was written for the Pierrot ensemble’. Flute trills and their generative tendency seemed prophetic of later explorations, not least … explosante-fixe …, though its progress was very different. It was over in a flash, as ever leaving one wishing for more. 

A clip from the film Works of Calder, also from 1950, followed, including Cage’s music: ‘the first time I have felt the music to be necessary to a film’ (Boulez, 30 December 1950). Although Cage’s Credo in US was written earlier (1942) it seemed here to pre-empt the composer’s growing interest in chance operations through its use of radio music. Rhythm and sounds of percussion were truly infectious, leading up, so it seemed, to those Sonatas and Interludes. Boulez’s Dérive 1 (1984) offered more contrast than complement, though was no less welcome for that; it seemed to take up the baton from his earlier piece, the SACHER reference’s generative quality seductively palpable. Febrile, ever-transforming, a feast of Messiaenic colour, it spoke of and through Debussy rather than Cage’s Satie, and in its woodwind arabesques, similarly proclaimed a Stravinskian inheritance thoroughly internalised and transformed. 

Mark van de Wiel’s performance of the solo version of Domaines (1961-8) proved a stunning tour de force. Whatever Boulez’s intention, the element of choice and mobility, the clarinettist selecting the order in which the pages, each on a different stand, are played, brings an inescapable element of what soon would be called music theatre to proceedings, the performer’s one-man show extended to two, counting his instrument. Apart from – though who could it be apart from? – van de Wiel’s equally outstanding virtuosity and musical understanding, one of Boulez’s triumphant reinstatements of the performer, what truly stood out was an almost Wagnerian unendliche Melodie. One felt vividly as well as merely heard the procedures at work in all parameters, attack included, in the longest of constructed lines.   

Is Cage’s layering of transparencies in Variations I (1958) – to be performed by any number of performers on any instruments and any number thereof – more radical? Perhaps. Less ’Western’? Perhaps. Less ‘musical’? Perhaps. Given the presentation, it is hardly unreasonable to have felt led to ask such questions. Again, though, it was the contrast brought by something no less triumphantly ‘itself’ that was truly the thing. It brought with it a breath of the fresh air many felt Cage had imparted to Darmstadt.

Uchida - Beethoven, Schoenberg, Kurtág, and Schubert, 7 March 2025

Royal Festival Hall

Beethoven: Piano Sonata no.27 in E minor, op.90
Schoenberg: Three Piano Pieces, op.11
Kurtág: Márta ligaturája
Schubert: Piano Sonata no.21 in B-flat major, op.posth., D 960

Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

An evening with Mitsuko Uchida is rarely less than a privilege, and this was no exception. One audience member at the start seemed to take the idea a little too far, resolutely continuing to film her despite verbal and gestural requests to stop. An usher had to walk across the hall and point a sign forbidding use of telephones in the person’s face. Extraordinary! What with that and an onslaught of coughing that again occasioned requests in vain from the platform to desist, we certainly experienced the worst of live performance. Fortunately, there was enough of the best to compensate. 

The first item on the programme, Beethoven’s E minor Sonata, op.90, took a while properly to get going (a state of affairs perhaps not entirely unrelated to the case of the manic telephone user). Contrasts, especially dynamic contrasts, were immediately present. More broadly, the strange, wonderful world of Beethoven on the cusp of ‘lateness’ was with us. If some of the first movement in particular was a little brittle, that was not entirely inappropriate for this fractured world. Accentuated by very sparing use of the pedal, much of it entirely unpedalled, here was a Beethoven that was anything but comfortable or routine, even if I sometimes felt a slight lack of the continuity that underlies discontinuity. An almost Schubertian intimacy to the close, presaging the second half of the recital, came close to erasing any such reservations. The second movement seemed to breathe the air already of the late Bagatelles, in particular their lyricism, even when turned outward. Occasional technical faltering was of little import; the crucial things were engagement with and expression of Beethoven’s truculent humanism. 

Voice-leading in the first of Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces seemed in context to take its leave not only from Brahms but directly from Beethoven. So, indeed, did much else: contrasts now here become fully dialectical; melodic fragments wending their necessary yet sometimes difficult way; and harmony, yes harmony, too. Above all, there was here a not entirely dissimilar obstinacy—and nobility of spirit. Formal command was unquestionable, as founded on harmony as, say, the Beethoven of Daniel Barenboim (or Wilhelm Furtwängler). Much the same could be said of the second piece, over which the spirits of Wagner and Liszt hovered still more clearly. The third felt very much like the final movement of a ‘sonata’ of a dark variety that was yet possessed of magical chiaroscuro. 

The second half opened with Kurtág’s 2020 miniature Márta ligaturája, written for cimbalom, but here played directly from what seemed to be small manuscript pages (presumably copies), rendering the tribute to the composer’s beloved wife Marta all the more moving. Again, harmony and voice-leading seemed to pick up from where we had left off, only all the more distilled. If kinship with Schoenberg’s op.11 came across with particular strength, the emotional import came closer to his evocation of funeral bells for Mahler in the last of the Six Piano Pieces, op.19. Harmonies, not least pristine major chords, surprised and beguiled. 

Schubert’s final piano sonata followed less attacca than might have been the case, given the audience’s inability to keep quiet. The opening was nevertheless a thing of magic, possessed of seemingly intimate dynamic gradations, strength lying in intimacy and fragility, in persistence. This movement, indeed the sonata, as a whole reminded us what happiness can be built on pain, and vice versa. The last thing one needs here is a maudlin path, tempting though it may be. (I recall my own youthful attempts.) Instead, Schubert’s nobility of utterance was treasured, allowing it to speak ‘for itself’, however illusory that performative idea might be in practice. Ambivalence ran deep, especially in oscillation between major and minor. The recapitulation was, quite properly, a second development: one of a very different nature from those of Beethoven, one that seemingly never gave him a moment’s thought. The sound of Uchida’s chords in the coda would have been worth the price of admission alone 

Beautifully judged in tempo, as in all else, the slow movement neither dragged nor was rushed. It built; it sang; it said what needed to be said. The revelation of C-sharp major silenced any questions about how to understand it enharmonically and in relation to the tonality of the piece as a whole; Schubert, Uchida, and we knew.  A light-footed scherzo, if not quite lifting the clouds, suspended them for a moment. Its trio’s ambiguity, strange even by Schubert’s standards, duly registered, thus paving the way for the manifold, still deeper ambiguities of the finale, its decidedly non-Beethovenian subjectivity simply present, immanent. That said, there was here too a decidedly human, as well as humanist, obstinacy that seemed to bind together all the compositional voices on this programme: in this case, both aptly and surprisingly, in the returns of the rondo theme and the alternative, fleetingly Mahlerian vistas of the episodes.

Lortie - Chopin, 27 February 2025

Barbican Hall

Études, op.10
Trois Nouvelles Études, B130
Études, op.25

Louis Lortie (piano)  

I do not think I had previously heard all of Chopin’s piano studies given on a single evening. Fortunately, Louis Lortie’s recital was not one of those occasions on which one ends up thinking that might have made more sense as a CD than a concert programme; there is certainly much to be gained by hearing the works together, not only the two celebrated sets, but also the Trois Nouvelles Études written in 1839 as a contribution to Ignaz Moscheles and François-Joseph Fétis’s Méthode des méthodes de piano. It is not unusual in a piano recital to feel that the music following the interval flows more freely; if that was the case here, that is not to say that the first half was without interest, far from it. And whatever quibbles one might have – there will always be something – there is something heroic to the very attempt, let alone to its navigation with such success. 

Indeed, Lortie’s way with the op.10 Études was in some ways surprising. Often, the technical difficulties underlying the idea of a study came across more strongly than usual as essence as opposed to mere starting-point. In the opening C major piece, fingerwork and basic figuration very much were the music material. In the F major Étude, all was generated from tightly sprung rhythms. Voice-leading very much did its work in the E-flat major and minor studies. There was a keen sense of progression too, the C-sharp minor study vehement, torrential even, and notably proceeding from its two immediate predecessors. That is not to say there was not lyricism, as for instance in the E major study, given not without rubato yet enough simplicity; but even there, the technical ‘point’ of the piece shone through. Whether the balance tilted too much in that direction is doubtless in part a matter of taste, though for me sometimes it did. I certainly felt the loss of subjectivity in the ‘Revolutionary’ Study, an odd anti-climax whose detachment felt at odds with ‘problem’ and material alike. 

The three Nouvelles Études seemed to strike a better overall balance, as did the op.25 set. In the former, Scarlatti’s ‘ingenious jesting with art’ came to mind, Lortie uncommonly successful even among great pianists in transforming the ‘problem’ into music from the outset. The first in particular can readily sound more an ‘exercise’ than anything else, but here was deeply involving; as, in its necessarily lighter way, was the second. The A-flat major opening study of op.25 built and sang, its trajectory beautifully plotted. Slightly odd hesitations in the second piece of the op.10 set were nowhere to be heard in the long line of its counterpart here, whilst the richness of texture in the succeeding F major study proved duly engrossing. Technical demands were not banished, but there was a more consistent, conventional sense of these as miniature tone poems proceeding from a technical question: nowhere more so than in the G-sharp minor Étude. A delectable G-flat major Étude dug just deep enough. The concluding C minor piece of this set worked considerably better to my ears as a conclusion than its counterpart prior to the interval, very much a profound utterance of the soul. 

The first encore – alas, I missed the second – a generous G minor Ballade, was oddly dream-like: not necessarily how I think of it, but successfully reimagined on Lortie’s own terms. This was, then, anything but a run-of-the-mill Chopin recital. I was often thrilled and, even where slightly puzzled, found myself at least intrigued.