Komsi/BBC SO/Oramo - Howell, Weill, and Mahler, 16 April 2025

Barbican Hall

Dorothy Howell: Lamia
Kurt Weill: Der neue Orpheus, op.15
Mahler: Symphony no.4 in G major

Anu Komsi (soprano)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Sakari Oramo (conductor, violin)

Placing little-known music with a Mahler symphony might be thought both a sensible and high-risk strategy. It will almost certainly result in the music gaining a wider audience. In the case of Dorothy Howell, though, it is difficult to imagine many wishing to extend that acquaintance. To be fair, she was young when she wrote Lamia, premiered (1919) and championed by no less than Henry Wood. Maybe there are better pieces from later on in her career. The muted reception accorded to a committed performance from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo said it all, alas. I cannot imagine anyone would have divined inspiration in Keats without being told so. An opening two-flute figure intrigued; like everything else, it led nowhere in particular. This was a tone poem that might just about have appealed as to those for whom Delius’s music is too goal-oriented and too radical in musical language. If introductions to introductions to introductions were your thing, you might still find it featureless, though there usually seems to be an English ‘enthusiast’ market for rhapsodic expanses of lateish-Romantic sound. 

Weill came, then, as a relief, in a rare opportunity to hear his 1925 cantata Der neue Orpheus. It continued a vaguely Grecian theme, yet is anything other than nostalgic, setting Yvan Goll’s ironic, surrealist – perhaps ironically surrealist – poem in a witty set of musical parodies taking us from Clementi to Wagner via Stravinsky, Mahler, and other milieux. And that is only one central section of its twenty-minute span. (Howell, apparently, was significantly shorter, yet felt longer.) Can one hear absence? Almost certainly, if only contextually. The absence of violins in the chamber orchestra was surely felt in that sense at least, in typically wind-led sound, adopted with immediate security and conviction of idiom by the BBC SO. The orchestral introduction, imbued with a keen sense of drama, might have been the opening to an opera. Vividly communicative, Ana Komsi’s account of the text relished its surrealism but also the humanity seemingly gained (shades already of the uneasy collaboration between Brecht and Weill?) by its alchemic conversion into vocal music. . ‘Everyone is Orpheus. Who does not know Orpheus?’ Such apparently lofty universalism was immediately deflated, even alienated, by banal detail of his vital statistics and personality. Increasing presence of Busoni in the orchestra was splendidly brought out by Oramo, reminding us not only of the identity of Weill’s teacher, but of the conductor’s recent outstanding account of his Piano Concerto, Pierrot- as well as Orpheus-like, Oramo took up his violin, as sounds of the circus took us closer to the world of Mahagonny and, especially notable, that of The Soldier’s Tale. 

If Goll and Weill’s Orpheus moved its audience in performance of a Mahler symphony, so did his interpreters. Not quite what I was expecting, this Mahler Fourth was arguably more dramatic in a stage sense and less Classical than most. It was not so much that movements in themselves and in relation to one another seemed to have been conceived separately as that conception apparently having been born more of contrast than line, even continuity. The first movement’s opening was more deliberate than usual, really holding back before launching into a spirited first subject. It had charm, style, precision, heart, and heavily inverted commas. Flexibility is written as well as called for interpretatively, but both varieties seemed emphasised here and throughout in a notably nightmarish reading, in which sardonic presentiments of the Fifth Symphony took precedence over those of neoclassicism. It was doubtless more context than anything else, but Weill at times seemed only to be just around the corner. And the music certainly breathed: not always regularly, but it breathed. 

Weird, childish, all things in good measure, the second movement got a move on without being hurried. If Oramo loved it a little too much from time to time, it was a fault in the right direction. And here a certain sort of neoclassicism did come to the fore; there were passages in which Schoenberg’s Serenade, op.23, was unquestionably a kindred spirit. It seemed to foretell both movements to come, the third unfolding ‘naturally’, almost in reaction, without trying to turn it into Bruckner. There remained in such contrast a highly modern subjectivity. Mahler’s inheritance from Beethoven was neither overlooked nor overplayed in a passionate yet far from overblown performance whose climax proved properly moving. So too did the advent of the finale, palpable as it must be in sincerity that is childlike yet never childish. Komsi’s singing contributed a further level of intercession as intermediary between us and the saints. This was rightly more Styrian than Sienese, in voice and orchestra alike. I am not sure I have ever felt more immediately involved, mediation notwithstanding, as if a definitive, magical link had been forged in the Great Chain of Being.

Ensemble Modern/Benjamin - Milliken, Mason, Dallapiccola, and Benjamin, 5 March 2019

Wigmore Hall

Cathy Milliken: Bright Ring (UK premiere)

Christian Mason: Layers of Love

Dallapiccola: Piccola musica notturna

Benjamin: Into the Little Hill

Anu Komsi (soprano)

Helena Rasker (contralto)
Ensemble Modern

George Benjamin (conductor)

This week, the Wigmore Hall presents two concerts from George Benjamin and Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern, the first ‘at home’ on Wigmore Street, the second moving north to Camden’s Roundhouse. For the first, we heard Benjamin’s now classic first opera, Into the Little Hill, prefaced by three ensemble works by Cathy Milliken, Christian Mason, and, for the evening’s spot of ‘early music’, Luigi Dallapiccola.

An Ensemble Modern commission, here receiving its United Kingdom premiere, Milliken’s Bright Ring spoke, to quote the composer, of ‘fields of energy that I perceived whilst performing with the Ensemble Modern,’ an energy ‘of collaboration and interaction, whether pulsing or still (or both)’. I initially read such lines with a degree of scepticism, but having heard the piece, they made a good deal of sense, the idea furthered by the title reference to the line, ‘Bright is the ring of words’, from a Robert Louis Stevenson poem, and the rings of Saturn. Two violins vied with each other at the opening, joined by viola and intermittently others, in music that seemed to depict and/or express both pent-up rhythmic violence and something (ring-like?) more numinous, often led by flute or tuned percussion. There was, I think, a sense of something akin to an extra-terrestrial landscape and narrative, not in a filmic way, but perhaps more akin to the tone poems of the past. The close, in which a flickering cello line initiated a final explosion, thereafter subsiding, seemed once again to encapsulate that tension between ensemble and solo instrument, planet and ring, pulse and its withdrawal.

Christian Mason’s 2015 Layers of Love, written for and recorded by Klangforum Wien, announced itself with slithering, mysterious microtones. Movement in various ways, rhythmic and harmonic, was initially slow and hard won, yet undeniable. There was a strangeness that seemed more of this world than Milliken’s other, but I am not sure I could explain what, practically, I mean by that. Certainly there was drama, albeit less pictorial than in the previous work. More than once, Bernd Alois Zimmermann came to my mind: again, I am not entirely sure why, but think it may have had something to do with the ultimately achieved rhythms and their relationship to sound, not least from the double bass.

Dallapiccola’s Piccola musica notturna spoke with the distilled mastery of a true classic, as perfectly formed in work and performance as a piece by Mozart, Schoenberg, or Debussy. Indeed, rather to my surprise, I found something naggingly Debussyan, if only in correspondence, to the turns of several phrases, however different the serial method one could hear and feel as clearly as if chez Schoenberg or his pupils. It was not difficult to understand what might have attracted Benjamin to so exquisitely logical, warmly expressive a miniature. If ever there were a composer whose music we should hear far more often…

I had last heard Into the Little Hill only in September, in Berlin, also conducted by the composer, albeit with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Its small performing forces (two vocal soloists and ensemble), formal perfection, and dramatic power render it a highly attractive work for regular performance, whether on stage or in concert; yet possession of such qualities does not always translate into such (relative) popularity. In this case, as with Benjamin’s two subsequent, larger-scale operas, Written on Skin and Lessons of Love and Violence, it is heartening to report that widespread enthusiasm continues. Stravinskian incision, violence, and economy, marked the opening – not just for itself, but as the opening to this complete (compleat) drama of modern political life, more bitingly relevant, so it seems, with every hearing. Whether it were the cool hieratic (Symphonies of Wind Instruments?) quality to the Minister’s addressing the crowd; the latter’s controlled yet increasing hysteria; the deathly tension of electric woodwind lines as the Minister meets the Stranger; or the latter’s wheedling, seductive way (heightened no end by Anu Komsi in particular, likewise her bloodcurdling cries ‘Swear by your sleeping child’): one could have cut the air with a knife – and that only in the first scenes to Part One.

As so often, operatic mastery shows itself particularly in the interludes between scenes. What a composer says and does not, unconstrained by words and indeed voices, will often – not always – penetrate to the heart of his or her musical dramaturgy. Such was certainly the case here, both in work and performance; so too in orchestral writing and playing elsewhere, as for instance in the terror of the intricately inviting processional that underlies the scene between Mother and Child. ‘The rats will stream like hot metal to the rim of the world.’ Indeed, they would – and did. A similar observation might be made of the division into two parts, the latter’s opening sounding and feeling strongly as if a new act, as if marking the return from an interval for the opera’s final, fatal events to unfold. ‘And music?’ ‘All music – smiles the minister – is incidental.’ Not at all. For the true rodent ghosts were now in the machine; so too, led by far-from-incidental music, was the child whose grasping, mendacious politician of a father had stolen its future. The will of the people had been enacted: The Little Hill meant The Little Hill.

Komsi/Kopatchinskaja - Kurtág, 7 February 2016

Royal Festival Hall

Kafka Fragments, op.26

Anu Komsi (soprano)

Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin)

György Kurtág is the last man standing. Although not quite a member of the ‘post-war avant-garde’ in the sense that composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Berio, Ligeti, et al. were, he is of that generation, and has had much in common with them. When, as a boy, I first became seriously interested in music, all of those composers, bar Nono, was alive; now, following the death of Boulez, only Kurtág remains. If his international star perhaps burned a little less brightly to begin with, that was probably because, unlike his fellow student Ligeti, he remained in post-1956 Hungary. Kurtág’s aphoristic style, however, owes arguably as much to Webern as does the music of any other of those composers; indeed, Kurtág learned a great deal from copying out Webern’s scores. Kafka Fragments is one of those Kurtág works constructed out of, yes, fragments; in 1985, it was the largest such to date. Although it has received a good few performances recently, this was my first opportunity to attend one, intriguingly programmed as part of the Southbank Centre’s Changing Minds 2016 weekend mental health festival.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who had performed Schumann’s Violin Concerto as part of this same festival, the night before, was joined by Anu Komsi to perform this work of forty fragments. My impression was that this was an unusually broadly-conceived performance; even allowing for having started five-or-so minutes late, and for pauses, it lasted considerably longer than advertised. The work’s progress did not, however, drag; indeed, on both a micro- and a macro-level, one was drawn in, Nono-like, to listen. Collaboration between the two artists was, as it would have to be, extremely close; this was a performance that partook of the gestural, indeed almost of the staged, as much as of the musical, without in any sense minimising the musical achievement. The fine booklet note by Bruce Hodges offered an excellent simile, which, to me penetrated to the heart of the performance as well as the work: ‘The singer and the violinist are equal partners, like two gnarled branches, intertwining as they age, each subtly affecting the growth of the other. (Kurtág loves the strange trees in the Parc Montsouris in Paris.)’ From the weary tread of the violin’s Schritt in the opening ‘Die Guten gehn im gleichen Schritt’, the voice itself emerged. Or had it been there all along, silent? Such thoughts were not, I hope, just pseudery, although you may think otherwise, but rather a consequence of the closeness of collaboration, both musicians playing from a single score.

Mood – perhaps, given the circumstances, an especially important consideration – ranged widely, whilst rarely, if ever, registering as unambiguously bright. The texts are, after all, by Kafka. Violinistic ferocity in ‘Ruhelos’, followed by the whispering of the fragment’s single word, might have led anywhere; only after the event did it seem necessary for Kopatchinskaja to have taken up her own challenge, in the next-but-one fragment, ‘Nimmermehr (Excommunicatio)’, with virtuosic descending figuration, quickly responded to by its inversion, or something close thereto. The ultra-melismatic writing of ‘Die Weissnäherinnen’ was relished by Komsi, just as was the alternation between Sprechstimme and song in ‘Zwei Spazierstöcke (Authentisch-plagal)’. Dance rhythms from old Mitteleuropa haunted the ‘Chassidischer Tanz’ as they did ‘Szene in der Elektrischen’, its kinship with Bartók especially resonant. Webern naturally came to mind on several occasions, none more strongly than in the high-altitude stillness of ‘Träumend hing die Blume (Hommage à Schumann)’; so, however, perhaps did the mountain-lake tranquillity, that yet moves, of the slow movement to the Hammerklavier Sonata. My own fancies? Perhaps; who knows? The openness of work and performance was, I suspect, not entirely neutral, though, in provoking such reflection.

Liszt in Mephisto-mode had swiftly followed in the closing number of the first part, ‘Nichts dergleichen’, preparing the way, or perhaps not, for the single number in the second part, ‘Der wahre Weg (Hommage-message à Pierre Boulez)’. This seemed, and I mean this not at all in a negative sense, to last quite some time; as for minutes on the clock, I have not the faintest idea. However, as something akin to a still, small voice of calm spoke, we experienced the arduous nature of the path that ‘goes by way of a rope that is suspended not high up, but rather just above the ground’. As if, paradoxically, rejuvenated through the exhaustion that entailed, the third part changed tack in nervy yet bright fashion with its opening ‘Haben? Sein?’

Was it just the language of ‘Der begrenzte Kreis’ that provoked a momentary thought of Pierrot? Difficult to say, but I think it was something more, however difficult or impossible to put into words; the musico-dramatic prowess of the performers almost certainly played a part too. When it came to the fourth and final part, the opening ‘Zu spat (22 Ocktober 1913) sounded ‘too late’ indeed: no hysteria, just quiet despair, all the more deadly for its soft-spoken motion. The line ‘Ich lebe rasch’ in the ensuing ‘Eine lange Geschichte’ seemed to burn itself out, almost as if delivered by Don Giovanni himself. It was the ecstasy, the extremity of the post-Gurrelieder Wild Hunt that seemed to haunt ‘In memoriam Robert Klein’: almost, yet not quite, necessitating the measured diagnosis of ‘Aus einem alten Notizbuch’. I say ‘almost, yet not quite’, since the relationship between the fragments is often difficult to describe; one feels it, yet one seems not really to know it. The halting progress one makes in that respect as listener is perhaps not unlike that the performance evoked in ‘In memoriam Joannis Pilinszky’. The closing ‘Es blendete uns die Mondnacht’ provoked all manner of conflicting reactions concerning the fragments and their assembly. Such is surely as it should be, given the centrality of the fragment to any consideration of the modernism whose flame yet flickers and burns in Kurtág’s art.