Musikfest Berlin (4) - Ensemble Musikfabrik/Cassidy and Poppe, 5 September 2021

Philharmonie


Ann Cleare: mire/…/veins (2013); ore (2016); Fossil Lights (2020-21, world premiere); the physics of fog, swirling (2018-19); on magnetic fields (2011-12)

Enno Poppe: Prozession (2015-20)

Hannah Weirich (violin)

Sara Cubarsi (violin)

Michele Marelli (clarinet)

Ensemble Musikfabrik

Aaron Cassidy, Enno Poppe (conductors)

Images: Astrid Ackermann

For my final visit to this year’s Musikfest Berlin: two concerts, morning and afternoon, from Ensemble Musikfabrik. The first was devoted to the music of Ann Cleare, the two ensemble pieces conducted at frighteningly short notice by Aaron Cassidy; the second, conducted by the composer, was devoted to Enno Poppe’s Prozession, begun in 2015, then set aside after eight minutes’ worth of music, to be resumed during lockdown and extended to about fifty in total.

The morning’s Ann Cleare portrait suggested a communicative interest, variety notwithstanding, in instrumental sound as sculpted material. mire/…/veins for wind quintet imparted, from its muted brass opening, a sense of masked volatility, of activity located somewhere just below a geological surface—and rising. Febrile oscillations were observed and felt, the horn seemingly adopting a central, even mediating, role between the other pairs of instruments: trombone and tuba on one side, two trumpets on the other. 

ore is written for string trio and high reed instrument, here clarinet, whose opening shrillness against glassy strings suggested a more important role for pitch than its predecessor. Different sections offered a different sense of materiality, as interested in combination as opposition. Indeed, the closeness of clarinet to string timbre was at times surprising. The first performance of Fossil Lights followed, clarinet, violin, and cello remaining, now joined by piano. It proved a haunting piece. Atmosphere may not have been the point; it nevertheless had plenty. Aural beams and slight rotations (whether of pitch, dynamics, etc.) helped me work towards a sense of bifurcation, of two aural visions, connections growing in different ways, according to vantage point: musical work or subject.

 

Two works for ensemble followed, the physics of fog, swirling commencing with an almost ‘traditional’, Romantic horn call, sound soon changing all manner of ways, both for horn and greater ensemble. Each part of the title gained importance: fog and swirling, of course, but physics too with respect to method. There is, of course, a myriad ways to swirl, but this was not a catalogue, more a quasi-scientific narrative, even an experiment, which eventually went into reverse, unravelled. Finally, on magnetic fields, for two violins and ensemble, once again offered at least a way in through its title, seemingly realised spatially too by different instrumental groups led by the soloists. It seemed to speak of and with magnetism, fields opposed but also interacting and thus engendering movement. There were moments of galvanising drama, a crackling conclusion to a fascinating programme.

 

Was Poppe’s Prozession to be a work of music theatre? No, at least not straightforwardly. The musicians stayed where they were, although the slightly unusual make-up of the ensemble had a visual element too: percussion at the back joined by two electronic organs and electric guitar. Its opening seemed almost pictorial, at least in the way a procession by Berlioz or Mahler might be, albeit in a world of spectralism. The procession seemed to be getting under way, or perhaps in preparation, coming to life from drums to solo instruments, to combinations. There was certainly a sense of movement that, however irregular its parts, resulted in something more regular. It died down, returned to its beginnings, then started up again, albeit differently—and again, all the more differently. Instruments picking up the figurative baton from one another seemed, intriguingly, to pick up characteristics too: clarinet from electric guitar, trumpets from saxophone, and so on. The process began to mesmerise, or perhaps one began to realise that it had mesmerised all along. Double bass out of the debris, with others in its penumbra: here was another different path, more shadowy, more distant. Microtonal disorientation became more intense. At some point, the procession began to head away and/or subside, depending on who or what was its subject. What had it meant? That was not really the question: it had been a rite, so it seemed, from another world.

Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, 7 June 2019

Prinzregententheater

Images: Stefanie Loos

Annesley Black: Tolerance Stacks: excerpts (2016/19)

Ann Cleare: on magnetic fields (2011/12)

Mithatcan Öcal: Ein musikalischer Spaß (2017-19): ‘Birds with Beards’ (world premiere)

Rebecca Saunders: Skin (2016)

Juliet Fraser (soprano)

Ensemble Musikfabrik

Enno Poppe (conductor)

The first woman composer to receive the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize could not have been a worthier candidate. From the first time I heard Rebecca Saunders’s music, in a 2012 Arditti Quartet concert at the Wigmore Hall, I have been intrigued, fascinated, and thrilled by it. At this ceremony and concert in Munich’s Prinzregententheater, we heard not only Saunders’s Skin (given in London this January by the same soloist, Juliet Fraser, with the Ensemble Modern and Vimbayi Kaziboni), but also music by the three winners of Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Composers’ Prizes: Annesley Black, Ann Cleare, and Mithatcan Öcal. When three out of four of the composers are women and the other a Turkish man, perhaps the tide is finally beginning to turn. In addition to prize money, the three recipients of composers’ prizes will also receive portrait CDs from the Kairos label, to be released at the end of this year – so helping others to discover their music for themselves.

First we heard excerpts from Black’s Tolerance Stacks, followed by a greeting from Peter Rusicka and a short film showing the composer at work. (Each composer received such a film, in other cases seen before her or his music was performed.) Fraser was the soprano soloist here too, excellent as ever. Piano, responded to by clarinet and percussion, in turn responded to by piano, set the scene, the pianist thereafter moving across to one of two electronic mixing desks in preparation for the vocal entry. Was it pain or pleasure being evoked? Why choose, amidst such a colourful, dramatic frenzy? Might one characterise what we heard as post-Stockhausen in a meaningful rather than merely chronological sense? I think so, but am not sure quite how much that would matter. The sense of electronic and vocal play was keen throughout. So too was an intriguing relationship – which I could not yet put my finger on to describe, let alone analyse, yet could certainly perceive – between sound and structure.

Cleare’s and Öcal’s works were both for ensemble without voice, all in the superlative care of Enno Poppe and Ensemble Musikfabrik, longstanding Saunders collaborators. Cleare’s on magnetic fields added to the ensemble what I presume was an instrument of her own, hybrid instrumental design being a particular musical interest of hers. (I do not even know what it was, or what it was called, but such is part of the fun!) At any rate, three chamber groups conversed, collaborated: made music, two violins from two separate groups coming across as first among equals in dialogue and competition. Sounds were often metallic, mechanical, industrial, creative, but they were no mere sounds: this was a true musical narrative, finely paced both in writing and performance. Likewise every note, attack, timbre, and duration seemed deeply considered and dramatically necessary.

Öcal’s ‘Birds without Beards’ was prefaced by a duly entertaining film, in which a member of his Istanbul Composer Collective remonstrated with him for having included a pitch, C-sharp, he had expressively ruled out, whether in itself or even as suggested by harmonic structure. Repeated pitches and their implications, perhaps rhythmic as well as harmonic, seemed to be one of the concerns from the outset here, wind notes jabbed and intoned, initially set against scurrying string figures. One was intended, I think, to notice just as keenly when those pitches were repeated and varied. Öcal offered on occasion an almost Mahlerian sense of echoed reminiscence of ‘found’ material, actually found or imagined. But those were just two aspects of an absorbing, colourful, witty showcase for the composer’s work, types of material coming into intriguing collaboration and conflict – just, perhaps, like the Collective itself.

‘It sounds how it’s played,’ as Robert Adlington once put it, cited in trumpeter Marco Blauuw’s oration, as intelligent as it was heartfelt, for Rebecca Saunders and her music ‘Stay stubborn, self-willed,’ Saunders advised her three predecessors on this evening, having dedicated receipt of her prize to her undoubtedly stubborn and self-willed predecessor as composer, Galina Ustolvskaya. Those and many other aperçus helped guide our appreciation of the performance of Skin; but mostly, like Samuel Beckett, another guiding spirit, this music spoke with a bleakness and humanity, the two quite indivisible, of its own. If the opening starkness, at least in the context of Saunders’s words, obliquely brought Ustolvskaya to mind, the poetry of music and silence, music as silence, distillation in instrumental combination, and that combination in distillation, bore Beckettian witness more strongly than ever. Breath and cries from voice and instruments alike, often in tandem, both formed and inhabited landscape and narrative. (Sometimes we need such metaphors to speak about music, but we should always be wary of ascribing them importance that is greater than whatever that music may be ‘itself’). As ever, properties of instruments, the voice included, indeed the voice foremost among them, were both respected and extended, testament to the composer’s searching, collaborative way with performing colleagues. No silence, though, was more pregnant, more magical than that following Fraser’s final, solo ‘skin’. It rightly proved a prelude resistant to, then part of, that warmest of applause that ensued.