Conservatoire Darius Milhaud
Ligeti: String Quartet no.1
Respighi: Il tramonto
Schoeck: Notturno, op.47
Stéphane Degout (baritone)
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| (Picture taken by me) |
For a second outstanding concert at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, the Quatuor Diotima was joined by Stéphane Degout, another musician whom I have never heard give anything other than an excellent performance. Degout joined the quartet for what must count almost as ‘early music’ for them: two rarities, both entirely new to me, by Ottorino Respighi and Othmar Schoeck. First, however, we heard the Diotima on its own, in what is, by comparison, almost a repertoire work – it certainly is in the particular field of twentieth-century quartet writing – the first of György Ligeti’s two string quartets.
Written in 1953-4, two years before Ligeti departed Hungary for Vienna in the dread year of 1956, the First Quartet emerged here very much out of Bartók’s soundworld, the first of its twelve short movements sharing and extending clearly recognisable – yet not reducible – melodic impulse and unease, its scalic writing unnervingly strange. From those seeds, the rest of the quartet seemed to spring, as if on a coil. Expressive intensity; riotous invention; humour in the tipsy waltz, captivatingly swung; and many other hallmarks of the ‘mature’ Ligeti were all present and thrillingly correct, a little string swarming too. The disconcerting nature of the composer’s Bartókian inheritance continued to make itself manifest, though, not least in unearthly harmonics and a final movement that threatened at least to transcend. Such a Romantic notion, however, was never going to proceed unchallenged, the Diotima players brining us back to earth, if we had ever left it, at the close.
1914 has inevitable connotations of war for European and indeed world history. I am not sure one could hear much of that in Respighi’s Il tramonto, nor is there any reason one should. Many fancy we hear presentiments at least as far back as Mahler’s Sixth Symphony; yet. Essen, Krupp, and Kaiser notwithstanding, what does that actually mean? It concerns a sunset, of course, in translation from Shelley, but in some ways it seems more forward-looking – no value judgement – than, say, the ‘Ausklang’ from Strauss’s Alpine Symphony (1911-5), though there is what sounds to be, at least in retrospect, an obvious kinship with Strauss. Ripe, not over-ripe, it offers quartet writing as rich as that for voice, instruments here speaking as much as baritone or poet, in performances that took nothing for granted. Tristan und Isolde was, perhaps unsurprisingly, present for much of it, Puccini too, Respighi showing that his scenic gift need rely neither on large orchestras nor on obvious word-painting. It naturally helps to enjoy a performance of such distinction, Degout’s colouristic transformation on the exclamation ‘Pace!’ so much more than mere diminuendo.
1933 is likewise a year so laden with doom for European history one can forget it did not necessarily seem so at the time—even to many in Germany, however much it should. Switzerland was of course a longstanding haven for refugees and exiles from there and elsewhere, Wagner and Busoni in Zurich included. It could prove a haven for modernist music too, Berg’s Lulu receiving its first performance in 1937, also in Zurich. Othmar Schoeck, who owed much to his sometime mentor Busoni, did not exactly cover himself with glory in the years to come. No Nazi himself, he nonetheless had his Eichendorff opera Das Schloß Dürande – to a libretto by an undisputed Nazi (before that, a longstanding member of the extremist DNVP), Hermann Burte – premiered at the Berlin State Opera in 1943. It was a decision that not unreasonably enraged many Swiss. Ten years earlier, though, that was some way off.
Schoeck’s Notturno from that year, later championed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, proved quite a discovery (at least for those of us for whom it was), one could well understand being admired, at least in part, by Berg, not least in the long first movement. It was a very different soundworld, as one would expect, offered by Schoeck to Nikolaus Lenau and Gottfried Keller, and by the Quatuor Diotima and Degout to them all (and each other). Again, clarity of words, line, and harmonic motion was matched by palpable emotional commitment and ‘atmosphere’. Voice and instrument – for instance, Alexis Descharmes’s eloquent cello – duetted as well as other combinations in what often seemed as much quasi-symphony as song cycle. Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony came to my mind more than once, not least encircling words such as ‘So ganz, wie unsre Liebe, zu Tränen nur gemacht’. It is a work of assured mastery, and sounded so, which never did quite what one expected without ever seeming to court surprise, rhythm in the second movement a case in point. If not quite Bergian, the third movement, ‘Es weht der Wind so kühl’, ushered in a wind of riches, if one can imagine such a thing, not so distant. The musicians’ musical and dramatic shaping were rightly as one. It felt like the emotional centre as well as simply being the third of five movements. Likewise, the fifth felt like a finale from the outset. A finale can take many forms – in more than one sense – but this was one of them. The path was never obvious, yet made good sense: sometimes more direct than one expected, sometimes less so. It put me a little in mind of late Schreker. Perhaps more to the point – my point, anyway – it made me keen to hear Degout in Wagner.
