Stefanovich/Dennis/BBC SO/Brabbins et al. - Boulez Total Immersion Day, 30 March 2025

Milton Court Concert Hall and Barbican Hall

Domaines for solo clarinet
Piano Sonata no.2
Dialogue de l’ombre double

Deux Études de musique concrète
Douze Notations
Incises
Cummings ist der Dichter
Pli selon Pli

Beñat Erro Díez, Lily Payne (clarinets)

Hannah Miller (recording engineer)

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)

Anna Dennis (soprano)

BBC Singers

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

Images: BBC/Mark Allan

Boulez at 100. It does not seem long since we were celebrating his 90^th here at the Barbican, with another BBC Total Immersion Day, likewise culminating in Pli selon pli, from Yeree Suh, Thierry Fischer, and (neither for the first nor the last time) the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It even does not seem so very long since, as a student, I came down to London to hear Boulez himself conduct the work at the Festival Hall for his 75^th. Strangely, it very much does seem like another world thinking back just five years earlier, to when I bought my first Boulez CD, having heard on Radio 3’s Building a Library the first movement of his now legendary Mahler Sixth with the Vienna Philharmonic and rushed out to spend a good few pennies I barely had, knowing this was something I must hear and have. It remains the recording closest to my heart (and mind) of the Mahler symphony closest to my heart (and mind). Given Boulez’s long association with the BBC, it was fitting and enlightening to begin the day with a cinema showing, first of a deftly assembled compendium of BBC material, presentationally fronted and fused with typical verve and light-worn learning by Tom Service, followed by a film from the late, greatly lamented Barrie Gavin. 

A quick break for lunch was followed by an equally fitting and enlightening panel, chaired by Jonathan Cross, discussing Boulez at the BBC, musicians (harpist Sioned Williams and Daniel Meyer) and former Controller Nicholas Kenyon sharing memories, experience, and acute critical ears for what made those years so extraordinary and some aspects of their legacy. Every path to what increasingly seems to have assumed, Répons and Le Marteau sans maître notwithstanding, the stature of Boulez the composer’s popular masterwork – in its final form, it is unmistakeably finished, or at least seems so – will be different. This was no exception, but there was, even before the event, a sense of heading in that direction: appropriately enough from all directions, temporal and other. In a nod to his work with young musicians – we saw and heard tantalising excerpts from his National Youth Orchestra Gurrelieder on both films – and a statement of belief in the future of his music and his vision, we moved to Milton Court for a concert involving Guildhall School musicians, two clarinet works sandwiching the Second Piano Sonata, pli selon pli. Tamara Stefanovich, who has very recently issued her recording of the work, heroically stepped in at the shortest of notice for an indisposed Guildhall student, to add to a not inconsiderable workload later in the day (and a demanding programme, Structures II included, the previous night in Cologne). 

We had heard Domaines but three weeks earlier in London, in a London Sinfonietta programme juxtaposing Boulez and Cage. Lily Payne’s performance had little to fear even from such an exalted comparison (Mark van de Wiel). Indeed, save for the different layout, music stands arranged in a line, aptly highlighting symmetry (Original-Miroir) rather than the circular (centrifugal) approach spatialised at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, thoughts did not turn at all to comparison. One concentrated, rather, on the here and now. Crystal clear in the Milton Court acoustic, it was as beautiful as it was meaningful, line spun, indeed created, with seemingly infinite variegation. 

As it triumphantly reinstated the role of performance and the performer in Boulez’s music, so  did Dialogue de l’ombre double from Beñat Erro Díez and his taped self (with Hannah Miller as recording engineer, and a little help from piano resonance too). Lights off signalled a distinctly later proliferation of sound in the shadow not only of the clarinet (and clarinettist) but of Répons too. It was a wondrously ‘achieved’ experience, both as work and performance, clarity of line, however complex, as strongly to the fore as in Domaines. Boulez’s ‘invisible theatre’ seemed born as much of Wagner as of Claudel, the magic of Bayreuth reborn in a strikingly different environment—ironically, perhaps, given his own lament that Wagner’s theatrical innovations had been so resolutely ignored by the actually existing theatrical ‘business’ of the opera houses whose destruction he (as Wagner) had once suggested. Here, perhaps, was the Boulez opera we never had, in darkness, light, and shadows.   

This was a welcome reminder from both clarinettists that, for young players, Boulez’s music is first and foremost music, not an object of controversy. It never really was for my generation either; we all knew, which doubtless separates us from those who truly had to fight (in that case either), though we surely must continue to fight for it to be heard, given the ever-more-deplorable cultural reaction around us. It makes little sense, in any case, for young musicians to declare ‘Boulez est mort’. They relish its challenges, which will remain in one form or another, just as those of Bach and Beethoven do, but their essence will change, as Boulez takes his place in his own fabled ‘Museum’ of musical history. The Royal Academy of Music’s performance of sur Incises a few nights earlier, on Boulez’s birthday itself, was by all accounts a splendid, enriching experience for all concerned. It stands now at the heart of the repertoire of Berlin’s Boulez Ensemble, founded by Daniel Barenboim. There is cultural reaction, yes, as there is political reaction, but there is also hope. 

As indeed there was in Stefanovich’s spectacular performance of the Sonata. I have a confession to make here. When I first heard the pianist perform it, I was too much in thrall to my won preconceptions of what it ‘should’ sound like. It was not even that I did not ‘like’ it; I did, very much, but part of me, brought up above all on Maurizio Pollini, unconsciously wondered whether I ‘should’, when it sounded so very different. Memories of that 2015 encounter remained with me, though, marinating in the ombre of conscious and unconscious alike, and I slowly realised it had begun to change my understanding of the work and its possibilities. What a joy, then, to celebrate the composer’s centenary not only with a new recording, but with so magnificent and, in the circumstances, unexpected a performance, which spoke of Boulez’s own advice to Stefanovich to think of reaching into a beehive. 

The first movement ignited and transformed those memories, revealing a far more ‘universal’, less specifically ‘French’ Boulez, its molten lava that of the composer’s fire-breathing youth, its logic all the more clearly post-Schoenbergian. In fidelity was born the most personal expression, Boulez’s claim that he would be the first composer without a biography almost touchingly forlorn. The tumult of a trill, the momentum of a repeated note, the terror of a silence: all these and more were not only to be heard but to be felt in a rich slow movement that celebrated parenthesis yet nonetheless ‘cohered’, not entirely unlike late Beethoven (as well as quite unlike it). The scherzo’s making music through intervallic and other parameters fused through astonishing willpower a marriage of Debussy and Webern we only take for granted now on Boulez’s account. It gazed into the abyss and something – reflection, shadows, something else? – stared back. The fourth movement unleashed a very particular character, again from within, exultant in its Artaud-inspired cruelty, Beethoven annihilated and yet in some sense reborn, like Boulez himself in its after-shock. 

Further discussion, led by Kate Molleson, Jonathan Cross joined by Gillian Moore, a longstanding, leading figure in Boulez’s later London appearances, offered a substantial, duly provocative apéritif for the evening concert. It also reminded us just how much London and the world’s appetite for such enrichment activities owed to Boulez’s own example. I myself learned more from his own pre-concert discussions than from a host of other concerts, even festivals. There would doubtless have been other paths and they can be interesting to speculate about. ‘Virtual’ history can have its own, well, virtues, in helping us refine understanding of what did happen. But Boulez, IRCAM, and more did, just as Beethoven, Wagner, and Mahler did. We were reminded, quite properly, of more awkward encounters and memories too. Was Boulez’s return to France at the expense of figures such as Xenakis? Perhaps. There is always danger in schematicism, although in practice that is more likely to come from the derrière than the avant garde (and despite the arrant nonsense one hears from some, even now, on Boulez and William Glock).

Heard partly in that light, the opening number in the Barbican concert reminded us of a path Boulez did not really take, though it was perhaps not entirely without issue in later encounters with tape and indeed live electronics. Two 1951-2 Études for tape suggested to Boulez above all the limitations of existing technology, as well as ‘Pierre Schaeffer’s “do-it-yourself” studio methods,’ to quote Caroline Potter’s informative programme note. There is always, at least for me, the oddity of hearing purely electronic music, without performers, in a concert setting. How will, even should, the audience react? Here in awkward silence, before Stefanovich returned for more piano music. It was a fascinating opportunity nonetheless to hear these serial manipulations of percussion sounds from the eve of Le Marteau sans maître. Whether intended whimsically or not – I doubt it, at least consciously – there was a winning air of that spirit, which certainly characterised some of Boulez’s difficult diplomacy with musicians and institutions, as we had heard in the first of the two talks. 

Stefanovich renewed and extended our appreciation of Boulez the composer for piano. Dull souls will claim the earlier Boulez was the ‘real’ Boulez, or some such nonsense. They are perfectly entitled to their preferences; we all are. But if you cannot hear wonders in Incises and indeed sur Incises, to your taste or otherwise, just as you can in the Second Sonata, you are probably not hearing them in either. It was unmistakeably later, though far from late, Boulez—just as Dialogue de l’ombre double had been. The toccata-quality of the score was immediate, immanent even, in a scintillating journey suggestive also of earlier piano fantasias, Bach and beyond, and every bit as protean as the Sonata, just differently so. The twelve Notations that preceded it enabled us to hear another, similarly absorbing example of post-Romanticism, the bagatelle spirit of late Beethoven reborn and reheard via Bartók, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and others. The dialectic between mystery (IX) and mechanism (X) penetrated, both in work and performance, to the heart of the whole. 

It would, given their long, incredibly productive association with Boulez, have been a great pity not to hear from the BBC Singers on such a day. That we can do so at all is, of course, no thanks to the corporation itself; for now, let us give thanks that we can, whilst remembering how strong the forces Boulez and so many others, aesthetic foes included, have had to fight against. Joining Martyn Brabbins and the BBC SO, their pinpoint precision was, in proper Boulezian style, never an end in itself, but rather the foundation of a exquisite, multi-directional (in that centrifugal, serialist and post-serialist sense) account of Cummings ist der Dichter. Warmth, as in Boulez’s own later performances of his music, was a hallmark, so was a hyper-expressivity that surely had its roots in Schoenberg as much as Webern, Debussy too.  Given in a single, endlessly variegated whole, this offered opera-less drama that emerged almost like a tapestry that spoke and sang: a fusion, if you like, of Boulez’s earlier dark surrealism and his late fascination with Szymanowski, seeds of which one could imagine one heard here.

And so, to Pli selon pli. Memories, whether of that earlier Second Sonata performance or of other readings of this ‘portrait of Mallarmé’, are necessarily part of our experience. ‘Must I once again sing the praises of amnesia?’ Boulez once asked, and the answer in context – out of which the rhetorical question has too often been shamelessly extracted – is of course yes. Memories will never be obliterated, but they can too readily become Mahlerian ‘tradition’ as Schlamperei, to invoke once more one of Boulez’s most illustrious composer-conductor predecessors. This performance, from Anna Dennis, the BBC SO, and Brabbins, seemed to me the equal of any I have heard, probably surpassing that of ten years ago, even approaching the fina lencounter I heard from Boulez himself, in 2011 conducting Barbara Hannigan. That is not really the point, though. The past cannot be obliterated, nor did one of the most penetrating of all conductors of works from the ‘Museum’ ever think or wish it to be. He simply wished us to turn attention to the present – even the ‘present’ of the Museum’ – as we could and did here.

The opening of ‘Don’ issued an invitation to enter that none could refuse, trademark éclat followed by the seduction (and seductive birth!) of a ‘nuit d’Idumée’. Beautifully voiced and connected, this was a performance led by a conductor who, in quiet, unflashy security not unlike that of Boulez, showed that he ‘got it’, that he could and would be our guide to the work’s unfolding. Nowadays particularly, we hear much other music folding in but this is infinitely more than synthesis; it is a personal ‘voice’ that yet extends far beyond mere ‘personality’. Mesmerising in Mozartian qualities that already announced a period of ‘modern classicism’ (Arnold Whittall) in Boulezian works, in its seduction it no more brooked dissent than Così fan tutte (or Szymanowski). We had entered a  Bergian labyrinth and never wished to leave.

The first of the three central ‘Improvisations’ brought Webern and Debussy more evidently to the fore, but intriguingly also the very idea of a composed improvisation, recreated before our ears. In a sense, that is simply ‘performance’, though one can too readily lose sight of that, especially in an age still haunted by the ‘authenticity’ Boulez abhorred. Dennis’s way with the words was all: their sound as much as alleged ‘meaning’. As humans, we naturally wish to interpret, but sometimes we need simply to enjoy too. The wide range of her line and performance in a magical second ‘Improvisation’ (‘Une dentelle s’abolit’) seemed both to incite and be incited by the orchestral tapestry woven and re-woven around her—and us. Was that an echo of Prélude à l’après-midi I heard in the third? Perhaps—and perhaps it pointed to another fold to incorporate. There is no single ‘right’ answer, nor ever could there be. That sonic recreation of textures before ears and minds alike was the thing—and what a thing. Webern’s influence so thoroughly assimilated one barely noticed, until one did, both in and across the orchestra. It also felt haunted by the vocal and instrumental laboratory of Bach’s cantatas, a world that also exerted great fascination for Boulez, though, in a further indictment of current compartmentalisation of musical life and history, seldom do we hear about it. 

This, then, was a world of ever-shifting, ever-transforming folds of silk, transposed into music—and/or vice versa. Its culmination in ‘Tombeau’ was the culmination of an intense orchestral drama with voice: that invisible theatre once again, conceived before Boulez’s incursions into the operatic world, revised after them. Maybe it was the chance connection of the moment, yet Pelléas and Parsifal seemed more than usually present. There will always be ghosts at any musical feast, not least Boulez’s own. Not the least of this performance’s wonders was both to hear and to feel how his music is now taking on new directions in his absence. Boulez est mort; vive Boulez.

BBC SO/Gardner - Berlioz, L'Enfance du Christ, 17 December 2018

Barbican Hall

Karen Cargill (mezzo-soprano)

Robert Murray (tenor)

Etienne Dupuis (baritone)

Matthew Rose (bass)

Members of the BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Neil Ferris)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Edward Gardner (conductor)

L’Enfance du Christ is not an Advent work, but since most of this country’s musical institutions shut down over Christmas, Advent is probably the only chance we shall have to hear it – and even then, only on occasion. But then Messiah is a Lenten work, and yet… There was certainly much for which to be grateful in this BBC SO performance. An initial tendency, heard for instance in the first scene’s Marche nocturne, for Edward Gardner to drive Berlioz’s music too hard, was mercifully not maintained. Indeed, as time went on, Gardner’s tempi relaxed more, greatly to the music’s benefit. The BBC Symphony Chorus’s singing, at the outset a little woolly, sharpened up too. If orchestral colours tended to be stronger on individuality then on blend, that was only a tendency, with plenty of exceptions, not least the opening woodwind recitative, in which the orchestra, Robert Murray, a fine Narrator, drew us in, his entry and that of the strings having the drama gather pace nicely and without exaggeration.

There is something enduringly and endearingly strange to any ‘sacred’ or perhaps better ‘religious’ work by Berlioz. Just as much as with the Requiem, it is perfectly clear, without his needing to say so, that he does not believe a word of it. If that stands very much in a grand, public, ceremonial tradition ultimately as empty as Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being, this becomes an illustrated children’s story that is yet not for children. The vividness of the writing and, one hopes, the performance too has characters, scenes, even locations stand out from the pages, but the lack of belief – not hostile, just ‘as it is’ – remains. That presents its own very particular challenges to the performers, challenges to which they rose very well. Herod’s Aria, for instance, sung darkly and clearly by Matthew Rose, ‘accompanied’ by due orchestral darkness too, might have been sung by a Shakespearean king; it was difficult not to think of parallels in the writer Berlioz loved above all others. In the ensuing scene with the soothsayers, the clarinet first commenting on, then seemingly confirming, the king’s dream, much must be accomplished by instrumental means alone, the ‘stage directions’ acting ‘as if’ there were a stage, written explications to musical ‘illustrations’. Such was certainly the case with the ‘cabalistic’ movements of the soothsayers as they moved to conjure the dark spirits to be ‘appeased’. A dark, Theresa May-like tyrannical resolve was inculcated, heedless of the consequences: infanticide meant infanticide. Just after the Strong and Stable One had flounced out of Parliament ‘in real life’, so too did Herod walk offstage: ‘Malgré les crie, malgré les pleurs de tant de mères éperdues, des rivières de sang vont être répandues, je serai sourd à ces douleurs.’

Pastoral innocence was just what we needed as balm to such malevolence, and so we heard – even saw – it at the Bethlehem stable. Karen Cargill’s beautifully floated lines as Mary remained alert to Berlioz’s idiosyncracies. Joined by Etienne Dupuis, whose suave, stylish, yet heartfelt singing proved very much one of the evening’s highlights, this Holy Family gave us something we might or might not believe in, but which could certainly enchant. Berlioz’s tone-painting did likewise, although it had me think his strictures against Haydn in The Creation not without double standards. Joined by offstage members of the BBC Singers as angels, singing very much in a choral tradition of French semi-archaism, this was a scene not just of contemplation but of readiness to depart. It prepared us as well as the Holy Family well for the short second part: ‘La fuite en Egypte’, its Overture having me wonder again – as I had during Herod’s music – whether Mussorgsky knew the music and unconsciously had it in mind when at work on Boris Godunov. The Russian composer certainly cherished Berlioz’s treatise on orchestration. Sometimes a correspondence is just a correspondence; at any rate, parallels, such as they be, may be worth consideration. The celebrated ‘Shepherds’ Farewell’ flowed nicely, integrated rather than a ‘set piece’. Murray’s narration reminded us how stylish and meaningful his French singing could be; sweet toned too, it was really rather wonderful.

The third part, entitled ‘L’Arrivée à Saïs’, is indeed an arrival in more than a strictly narrative sense. The Holy Family, following malevolent calls, as May would have it, to GO HOME – ‘Arrière, vils Hébreux,’ shout the Roman and Egyptian Tories de leurs jours – nevertheless find shelter with fellow ‘migrants’: an Ishmaelite and his family. And yet – something that came across gently yet strongly in performance – this is not the end of the story. Anticipatory narration, clearly, vividly delivered by Murray and the BBC SO alike, is never quite fulfilled, events and sentiments in the Ishmaelite house – Berlioz’s fugal chorus especially relished – a challenge to us, to the readers of his picture-book to respond or, like many self-styled ‘Christians’, to cross to the other side of the road, with or without ‘citizens of the world’ abuse. Berlioz’s closing chorus, euphonious to a degree, sounded a gentle warning: ‘O mon cœur, emplis-toi du grave et pur amour qui seul peut nous ouvrir le céleste séjour.’ Will any of us heed it?

Prom 65 - Conquer/BBC Singers/EIC/Brönnimann: Bartók, Boulez, and Carter, 2 September 2016

Royal Albert Hall

Bartók – Three Village Scenes

Boulez – Anthèmes 2
Carter – Penthode
Boulez – cummings ist der Dichter

Jeanne-Marie Conquer (violin)

Andrew Gerzso (IRCAM computer music design)

Carlo Laurenzi (IRCAM computer music production)

Jérémie Henrot (IRCAM sound engineer)

BBC Singers

Ensemble Intercontemporain

Baldur Brönnimann (conductor)

2016 opened with the death of Pierre Boulez; alas, it has only got worse. One might have wished for more from the Proms, at which he conducted about seventy concerts, from 1965 to 2008: a much-needed London Répons, for instance. Let us not, however, be ungracious; this was nevertheless a moving and necessary tribute. It was, moreover, definitely a tribute to Boulez at the Proms, both as conductor and composer.

Bartók always featured heavily in his programming, here and elsewhere; indeed, out of the three previous performances of the Three Village Scenes at the Proms, two, in 1974 (the first ever) and in 1979, the latter with the newly formed Ensemble Intercontemporain, were conducted by him. It is always a great pleasure to welcome the EIC to London. Does it ever give a less than excellent performance? That was certainly not a question that occurred this evening, under Baldur Brönnimann, even if I wondered whether the frenetic passages in the opening ‘Svatba’ (‘Wedding’) were a little too driven. Perhaps it was just the acoustic, or the time needed to come to terms with it. At any rate, the contrast with the broader, weightier passages was stark. The second scene, ‘Ukoliebavka’ (‘Lullaby’) sounded as a lullaby indeed, but not an easy one. Languor, whether from the instrumental ensemble or the female voices of the BBC Singers, was always shot through with unease, even urgency. Woodwind echoes of Bluebeard’s Castle – a work I heard Boulez conduct both here and elsewhere – proved as mesmerising in their way as the ‘real thing’. Echoes of Les Noces, another favourite Boulez work, were clear throughout too, nowhere more so than in the ‘Tanec mládencov’ (‘Lads’ Dance’). It was raucous, yet controlled: art music, not folk music, and rightly so. Precision and spirit, rhythm and harmony: all contributed, as they might have done under Boulez himself, to a splendid performance.

 

Anthèmes 2 was heard here in 2012, as part of Daniel Barenboim’s Beethoven and Boulez series. The violin soloist was then Michael Barenboim; here, Jeanne-Marie Conquer proved an excellent, perhaps even superior, successor. The Royal Albert Hall truly came into its own, as much a partner, so it seemed, as the ever-excellent IRCAM sound team. A truly spatial work emerged, a successor as much to Gabrieli as to Stockhausen in that sense; above all, however, this was a performance whose material and its proliferation could only have been that of one composer. At times, we heard a celestial band of violins in sweet harmony across the hall; at others, we heard individual responses from a host of individual pizzicato strings (or so, of course, it seemed), ricocheting in endless variety, endless variegation, serial processes rendered as immediate, as immanent as anyone might imagine. New vistas opened up, the timbral equivalent of one of those moments in a Mahler symphony. Bach’s example seemed perhaps unusually present, but so did difference from that (unacknowledged?) model, that figure we know and love from ‘…explosante-fixe’ taking on roles both familiar and new (even to those of us who thought we knew the work quite well). ‘Mesmerising’ again seemed the word.

 

Boulez and the EIC gave the premiere of Elliott Carter’s Penthode at the Proms in 1985. It does not, sad to say, seem to have been performed there since; it was certainly the first time I had heard the work live. What a work it is, though, and what a performance it received too! The opening viola solo, gorgeously played, sounded almost Bergian in its inspiration, its melodic path, even some of its harmonic implications; likewise when the violin took over, only underlining a perhaps surprising closeness to the world of Berg’s Violin Concerto. As in a work by Boulez, the line was in a state of constant development, the mode of development itself constantly developing. Energy might have been less overtly to the fore than in some of Carter’s works, but was no less crucial, if anything more so, in what I sometimes thought of as a state of rapt development. It was not unlike, if you will forgive me the fancy, a great Beethoven Adagio, in which variegated (Carter’s equivalent to Boulez’s ‘proliferating’?) material above wove its particular magic, yet remained, however intangibly, dependent upon the slower movement – a geological metaphor did not seem inappropriate – below, movement that remained, one felt, in some sense fundamental. I wished it might have gone on longer, even forever.

 

Likewise with Boulez’s cummings ist der Dichter, for which the BBC Singers, this time male and female, returned to the stage: twenty-seven singers and twenty-seven instrumentalists, the three harps pointing to the future of sur Incises. Although it has featured four times at the Proms, the first time (1972) conducted by the composer, this was, I think, the first time I had heard the work in concert. Rectification of a rare omission was all the more welcome in so sensitive, so wondrously clear a performance. One is on dangerous ground, pointless ground perhaps, saying that the composer would surely have approved, but it was difficult not to do so, and surely harmless to think in such terms. I had the impression of a combination of certain qualities of Boulez’s earlier choral music – think of the ravishing world of Le Visage nuptial – with the different concerns of somewhat later musical language. Words were admirably clear, even when, especially when, broken up: it is not a Nono-like path that is followed. There was a true sense, nevertheless, of cummings-like wonder. The work sounded, if not unusually generative in its processes, than perhaps unusually traditional in the nature of those processes. Such things are highly relative, of course, but the impression of anchoring was not at all unwelcome. Brönnimann’s strong sense of direction was palpable, as was the security of every performer. Such qualities sounding as a given, a gorgeous tapestry indeed could be woven above, within, without, beneath. There were passages of relative stillness (again, relative), but there was always something brewing, somewhere. As with the preceding works, the scale, as well as the stature, of work and performance had little or no connection with its mere duration.

London Sinfonietta/Volkov: James Dillon, Stabat mater dolorosa, 21 January 2015

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Stabat mater dolorosa (London premiere)

BBC Singers
London Sinfonietta
Sound Intermedia
Ilan Volkov (conductor)

James Dillon’s ‘cantata’ – his own description – Stabat mater dolorosa had its first performance at last November’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival; this was its London premiere. Co-commissioned by the HCMF, BBC Radio 3, and Casa da Musica, Porto, it is quite unlike any ‘setting’ of the poem I have heard, despite the surprising direct quotation from Pergolesi that surfaces some way through its hour-and-a-quarter duration. Why the inverted commas? Only some of the poem is set; apparently, Dillon went so far as he felt able and then stopped. Perhaps more importantly, the text is not always readily audible; more than once, I thought of Nono’s Il canto sospeso, and indeed of Stockhausen’s (misplaced?) criticism of it in Die Reihe: the effect seemed somewhere between Nono’s intention and Stockhausen’s reception, albeit with a far greater sense of restraint. However, there were times when the text was readily audible, for which considerable praise should be offered to the BBC Singers.

The background ‘chatter’ of ancillary texts is deliberately not perceptible in its detail, presenting an interesting comparison and indeed synergy with the relatively sparing use of electronics. Picasso’s idea of the ‘weeping woman’ melds with the philosopher Julia Kristeva’s Héretique de l’amour, a text in which she considers the Stabat mater in relation to her experience of child birth and her thoughts upon the Virgin Birth. (I am relying on Dillon for that information, since I have yet to read any Kristeva.) Rilke’s Visions of Christ and Donne’s A Valediction of Weeping are also present. We only know that because we are told. Does that matter? I am instinctively suspicious (reactionary that I am?) of conceptual art, but in this case, I really could see no harm, nor could I hear it, in a little background – in more than one sense. The idea of a ‘canonical’ text, a term Dillon used more than once in a brief post-concert discussion, being mediated by later writing is after all difficult to avoid in any non-fundamentalist consideration of texts as developing works.

The score really does, rather to my surprise, come across as a reimagining of a Baroque cantata. One senses something akin to ritornello form and sub-divisions not entirely dissimilar to those of the old ‘cantata mass’. (Perhaps incongruously, perhaps not, it was Haydn’s post-Baroque Missa Cellensis in honorem Beatissimae Virginis Mariae that sprang to my mind both during and after the event.) Picasso’s ‘weeping machine’ and what one might think of its predecessors in earlier Spanish painters such as Murillo also featured strongly in my initial response. To quote the composer, whom I read afterwards, ‘Picasso’s strange but fascinating metaphor of a “weeping machine” becomes a central image in the work, whereby I cast the mechanics of mourning as a slow machine, a music which unfolds in slow motion.’ That ‘slow motion’ might take some getting used to, but actually one’s ears adjust – or at least mine did – reasonably quickly. There are moments, passages of considerable beauty, not entirely unlike Baroque obbligati. Various instrumentalists from the splendid London Sinfonietta took their opportunities to shine, without any hint of standing out too boldly. Alastair Mackie’s trumpet lingered especially in the memory. The caesuras challenged too, but productively: there still seemed to be an overarching modernist structure, rather than a mere post-modernist assemblage for us to make of what we would.

The work clearly requires more than a single listening, so I am reluctant to say much more, but I have little doubt that such listening would be well rewarded. Insofar as I could tell, Ilan Volkov directed his forces with remarkable sympathy and understanding. The London Sinfonietta has long excelled in such repertoire; long may that excellence continue.

 

Prom 28 - D'Orazio/BBC SO/Oramo: Beethoven, Brett Dean, and Stravinsky, 7 August 2014

Royal Albert Hall

Beethoven – Egmont, op.84: Overture

Brett Dean – Electric Preludes

Stravinsky – Oedipus Rex

 
Francesco D’Orazio (electric violin)

Oedipus – Allan Clayton

Jocasta – Hilary Summers

Creon – Juha Uusitalo

Tiresias – Brindley Sherratt

Messenger – Duncan Rock

Shepherd – Samuel Boden

Speaker – Rory Kinnear

BBC Singers, BBC Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Stephen Jackson)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Sakari Oramo (conductor)

I admit that I came to this concert mostly with the second half in mind. It was a more than pleasant surprise, then, also to find a good deal more to enjoy before the interval than I had expected. It is not, of course, that I do not think the world of the Egmont Overture, but I have increasingly become weary of the state of present-day orchestral Beethoven performance. (Oddly, the problems bedevilling symphonic Beethoven seem less apparent or at least far less widespread in solo and chamber music.) Sakari Oramo’s account with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, then, came as a breath of fresh air. The introduction was full of suspense and foreboding, unfolding at a tempo that simply sounded ‘right’ (which is not, of course, to say that another could not). Already there was a proper sense of the mystery of Beethovenian development. The transition to the main Allegro was well handled, and throughout there was a good sense of formal dynamism. Characterful woodwind and forthright brass (admittedly, not always ideally precise) added a great deal. The ‘Victory Symphony’ at the end – I know that it is not actually entitled as such here – was perhaps a touch harried, but if a shortcoming, it was one that was readily forgiven. This was a real Beethoven performance.

 

Brett Dean’s Electric Preludes, for electric violin and orchestral strings, received its first Proms performance, Francesco D’Orazio joining the orchestra. In six ‘character pieces’, some of them continuous, Dean’s work explores, in his words, ‘the intersection between high instrumental virtuosity of a “classical” nature on the one hand and sound-worlds that are only possible with electronics on the other, all commented upon by an essentially “unplugged” string chamber orchestra’. As a summary, that seemed to me to tally very well with what I heard. The first movement, ‘Abandoned Playground’ is scurrying, at times almost filmic in quality and ‘atmosphere’, though perhaps a little repetitive. Despite its inspiration by indigenous painting from around Papunya, in Australia’s Northern Territory, the second movement sounded – at least, impressionistically, to me – more ‘abstract’, though perhaps matters would be different if one knew the art.  The short ‘Peripetea’ that follows, fast and highly rhythmical, had a sense, both as work and performance, of providing what it says, a dramatic turning-point. A slow movement, ‘The Beyond of Mirrors’, seemed more fully to emphasise electronic sounds, and yet at the same time to engage in ‘traditional’ violin and string fantasy. So too, in another mood, did the following ‘Perpetuum mobile’, which put me in mind almost of electric Prokofiev (the finale to the Second Violin Concerto). Its lengthy cadenza seemed perhaps to outstay its welcome, but there could be no gainsaying, here or elsewhere, D’Orazio’s command of technique, idiom, and expression. Likewise, the BBC SO sounded reinvigorated under its new Principal Conductor. The final ‘Berceuse’ traces an unhurried path from a dark, almost growling opening to quiet ecstasy – or so it sounded here in what seemed to me an excellent performance.

 

There followed an equally excellent performance of Oedipus Rex, in which the singularity of this ‘opera-oratorio’ announced itself as only it can, whether through form, language, or that oppressive atmosphere engendered by the pervasive minor third and its implications. The orchestra and Oramo continued to be on fine form, now joined by soloists, men’s voices from both the BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Chorus, and Rory Kinnear, a splendid narrator throughout, declamatory without a hint of the excessive ‘ac-tor-li-ness’ which often comes into play here. Stravinsky’s opening chorus was splendidly attacked by chorus and orchestra alike, truly plunging us into the drama. Motor rhythms and ostinato made one all the more aware than usual of Poulenc’s blatant plagiarism in Dialogues des Carmélites (not that Stravinsky, given his record, need have disapproved). The aggression of neo-Classicism was as apparent in Oedipus’s ensuing claim of deliverance as in, say, the Octet; there is nothing placid about this æsthetic. I especially liked the clearly questioning choral ‘Quid fakiendum, Oedipus, ut liberemur?’ There soon followed what for me was the only real blot on the performance, the dry, wooden solo from Juha Uusitalo’s Creon, not helped by a pronounced vocal wobble. An intriguing, quasi-liturgical sense of versicle and response between ensuing chorus and Oedipus (‘Solve, solve, solve!’ ‘Pollikeor divinabo!’ etc.) swiftly compensated. Brindley Sherratt’s Tiresias sounded ‘old’ in character but without detriment to his fine musical delivery, precise and clear of tone, declamatory yet most definitely ‘sung’. The oddness of Stravinsky’s tenor writing constantly forced itself upon one’s attention, at least as much here as in, say, The Flood, but Allan Clayton coped – indeed, more than coped – very well.

 

The second act brings the extraordinary entrance of Jocasta. I mean it as no disrespect to the rest of the cast when I say that Hilary Summers truly stole the show with her unmistakeable contralto, somehow wonderfully archaic in a Mediterranean sense. Stylistically, she sounded just right, ‘operatic’ in Stravinsky’s utterly personal way (all the more so, the more ‘impersonal’ he might try to be). Oramo’s urgent yet spacious pacing seemed well-nigh ideal here, whilst choral imprecations of Fate hammered home their ritualistic point. Jocasta being joined by Oedipus, we heard what registered wonderfully as both parody and instantiation of the operatic duet. Indeed, it was a strength of the performance as a whole that issues of genre seemed, in unforced fashion, to come so strongly to the fore. Duncan Rock’s arrival as Messenger had one wishing he might have sung Creon too: his was a thoughtful, expressive performance, as was that of Samuel Boden as Shepherd, whose sappy tenor dealt so well with the vocal awkwardness of Stravinsky’s writing as almost to vanquish it. (It should not be entirely vanquished, of course, since it is a crucial part of the work and its ‘expressive’ – to use a loaded word in any Stravinskian context – power.) The weird jauntiness of the chorus, ‘Mulier in vestibulo’ led inexorably, as in performance it must, to the stone death of ‘Tibi valedico, Oedipus, tibi valedico’. Oramo and his forces had much to be proud of in this concert.

Nash Ensemble/Kok - Birtwistle, Carter, and Adams, 26 March 2014

Wigmore Hall

Birtwistle – Fantasia upon all the notes (2012)

Carter – Enchanted Preludes (1988)
Esprit rude/Esprit doux (1985)
John Adams – Shaker Loops (1978)
Carter – Mosaic (2004)
Birtwistle – The Moth Requiem (2012)

Nash Ensemble

BBC Singers

Nicholas Kok (conductor)

A funny programme this: not the combination of Harrison Birtwistle and Elliott Carter, for they provided refreshing, invigorating contrast, but the presence of John Adams’s Shaker Loops, which really did not seem to have anything to do with either, and whose poverty of invention sounded all the more glaring in such august company. I am not sure how long it lasted, but it seemed interminable; waiting for the music to start proved a futile experience. Doubtless whatever objections one may level will be countered with an all too easy ‘but that is the point’. ‘Process music’ is all well and good – well, perhaps – in theory, but this does not even have the courage to be truly unbearable, in the ‘Yes, I’ll confess, just please let me out’ mode of Philip Glass. It seems more soft-centred, more pandering, and yet ultimately there seems at that centre to be nothing but a vacuum. The seven string players – two violins, two violas, two cellos, and double bass – of the Nash Ensemble could not be faulted in the incisive commitment of their response under Nicholas Kok. How on earth one keeps one’s concentration in such conditions I do not know. Still, at least it was good to be reminded of the æsthetic nullity of music too insubstantial even for a Michael Nyman soundtrack.

 

Enough of that! Birtwistle’s 2012 Fantasia upon all the notes, for flute, clarinet, harp, and string quartet, was given its world premiere by the Nash Ensemble, also at the Wigmore Hall. Its title does not refer, as one might have expected, to Purcell, but rather, in Bayan Northcott’s words, ‘hints at how, each time the harpist shifts a pedal between sharp, natural, or flat, a new scale is set up, and … how a shifting sequence of harp modes can interact with and guide the harmonies of a surrounding ensemble’. That said, there remains a typical, if somewhat intangible, evocation of an older England: real, not sepia-tinted, all the more moving for it. And beyond that, there is a still more typical sense of the archaic, Birtwistle’s sound world – the phrase may be clichéd, but here seems unavoidable – announcing itself unmistakeably at the very opening. Ghosts haunt the machine: is that a hint of Ravel’s Daphnis? (The work was commissioned by the Nash Ensemble and the Wigmore Hall, to fulfil Amelia Freedman’s desire for a companion piece to Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro.)  There certainly seem to be points of contact with, though not necessarily derivation from, Birtwistle’s own Punch and Judy and, of course, Stravinsky. But the ecstatic climate sounded here, again in an exemplary performance, as very much part of a post-Minotaur world. The final unwinding returns us ambiguously to a world of earlier mechanisation: almost like a parody of Webern.

 

Carter’s Enchanted Preludes for flute and cello followed, thereby sounding more mercurial, even flighty, though certainly substantial. It emerged as a true duet (not unlike Bach’s fascinating, strange BWV 802-5 pieces). Shifting of mood, for instance to slower material, adorned with cello harmonics, was highly accomplished. And the composer’s own genius in transformation of material shone through throughout – redolent, perhaps surprisingly, of Liszt. Esprit rude/esprit doux, for flute and clarinet, was written for Boulez’s sixtieth birthday. It sounds closer to Boulez – not just in the instrumentation, but also in the clarinet’s apparent announcement of reconciliation between Stravinsky and Schoenberg: Pierrot and Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Again, it proved a real duet, in a truly haunting performance.  

 

Following Adams’s piece and the interval, Carter returned with Mosaic, for flute, oboe, clarinet, harp, string trio, and double bass, another Nash Ensemble commission. Perhaps the presence of the harp could not fail to evoke the Stravinsky of Symphony in Three Movements, yet that haunting was again not simply a matter of instrumentation, but also of musical mechanisms. Soon, however, the material and its development takes a very different path. One sensed, even without necessarily knowing precisely what they were, the guiding presence of the ‘unusual developments in harp technique … too infrequently explored in recent times’ by Carlos Salzedo, whom Carter cited as an inspiration. Bursting with invention in more than one sense, Bach and Haydn did not seem so very far away either. Full of magical twists and turns, new vistas, there might also perhaps be sensed a distant kinship with the world of Romanticism. And, even if less overtly than Birtwistle, Carter also imparts – again, keenly realised in this excellent performance – a sense of unfolding drama. Instruments may sometimes be imagined almost to be characters, sometimes as narrators, sometimes as expression of character and narration. And yes, in the panoply of tesserae-like sounds, a mosaic was constructed – whether entirely or no – before our ears. Wonderful!

 

Birtwistle’s The Moth Requiem, for twelve female singers, three harps, and alto flute, was premiered in Amsterdam, coming to the Proms last year. I must have been away, for I cannot imagine that I should otherwise have missed it. At any rate, it received a highly accomplished performance. Interested in the mysterious beauty of moths from his teenager years Birtwistle offers a magical lament, which appears both to summon up childhood and yet also to touch upon death. A list of moth names – Scopula immorata, Depressaria discipunctella, Leucodonta bicolaria … – coexists with, is confronted by The Moth Poem (2006) by Robin Blaser, librettist for The Last Supper. (John Fallas, in his programme note, made a telling connection with the a cappella interludes from that work.) The nocturnal ‘moth in the piano’ makes itself felt, yet we are haunted by a melancholy induced by knowledge of the deaths of a number of those species. The alto flute, here played by the excellent Philippa Davies, seems almost to echo – whether intentionally or otherwise – the fairy world of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet, whatever the fantastical element, the hieratic, incantatory, perhaps surprisingly homophonic choral writing is at least equally important, once again expressing an archaic sense of loss. It is – and, in performance, was – one of the most striking acts of remembrance I have heard in quite a while: not, perhaps, entirely removed from the world of Stockhausen, or at least our memories thereof. Moreover, in its once-again-undefinable sense of ‘Englishness’, spirits one might have thought less than kindred – Britten, Vaughan Williams – seem also intangibly to incorporated into backstory and present. At the end, we had experienced both the sadness of loss and the exhilaration of experience.

 

Boulez wins the Golden Lion

Congratulations to Pierre Boulez on the award of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, which he will receive at the 56th International Festival of Contemporary Music on 6 October. For further details from Universal Edition, click here. Below are the first three movements from his wonderful Berlin Philharmonic recording of Webern's Cantata no.2, with Christiane Oelze, Gerald Finley, and the BBC Singers.

Liszt Discovery Day, Wigmore Hall, 8 October 2011

Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth, S 382
La lugubre gondola, S 134
Die drei Zigeuner, S 383
La notte, S 377a
Tristia - Vallée d’Obermann, S 723
Hungarian Rhapsody no.9, ‘Le carnaval de Pesth,’ S 379

Pax vobiscum! S 64
Cinq Chœurs, S 18
Salve Regina, S 66
Psalm 116, S 11/33
Das deutsche Vaterland II, S 74b
Es war einmal ein König, S 73
Weimars Volkslied, S 87/2b
Magyar királyi-dal, S 93b

Six Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano duet, S 621
Zwei Episoden aus Lenaus ’Faust’, S 599
Hungarian Rhapsodies S622/2, S623a
Rákócsi-Marsch, S 608


As many of us have lamented (for instance, here and here), Liszt still cries out for advocacy. There are still anti-Wagnerians, anti-Brahmsians even, yet no one takes such people seriously. Many who should know better nevertheless continue to denigrate Liszt, recycling puritanical platitudes about showmanship, even womanising, doubtless incredulous that someone who, despite the lack of recordings, is almost universally considered to be the greatest pianist of all time could also be a great composer – all the more bewilderingly when one considers the testimony of composers from Wagner through Schoenberg, Bartók, Debussy, even Stravinsky, to Boulez and beyond. When Liszt’s works are performed, choices tend to be drawn from a narrow repertoire. This anniversary year should surely have brought forth London performances of his two completed oratorios (ideally St Stanislaus too), yet the silence has been deafening. Some musicians and venues have done their bit. We heard the two concertos from the dream team of Boulez, the Staatskapelle Berlin, and Barenboim (now recorded). Amongst other offerings, the Wigmore Hall’s programming of Liszt song has been especially welcome. One can understand, however, why Lisztians would wish to point to unsung aspects of the composer’s œuvre, and Leslie Howard, curating this Liszt Discovery Day, certainly took full advantage, in programming recitals of chamber music, small-scale choral music, and music for piano duet. Alas, the results, especially following the excellent chamber recital, were mixed, and seem unlikely to have won Liszt many converts. He would benefit from a more nuanced approach, which both advocates the neglected and yet also recognises that not everything is of equal interest, for Liszt, more inclined to create another version or another piece than to destroy something that perhaps does not work, is certainly not a cruel self-critic in the mode of Brahms. Moreover, entirely to omit solo piano music was arguably self-defeating: a top-flight pianist (and musician) is surely what one needs to dispel doubts.

Let us start with the best: two works apiece for cello and piano, violin and piano, and piano trio. Rarely if ever does one hear Liszt’s chamber music, doubtless partly a consequence of general hostility, but also, I suspect, a matter of unfounded suspicion concerning its provenance. None of the chamber works is ‘original’ in the sense that they all existed in earlier versions for other forces. Yet that need not matter at all, especially when dealing with an inveterate arranger and transformer, and in most cases, it does not here. Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth, despite its origins in a song of 1841, at times, especially in the piano introduction, sounds very much of the date of its rewriting: c.1883. Tristan Lee provided a rapt account of the piano part. Joris van den Berg captured the right note of ecstasy, though his tone could be a little wiry and was not always ideally centred in terms of intonation. That may, however, have been a matter of nerves, for La lugubre gondola emerged as stronger in performance. La lugubre gondola, one of Liszt’s many Wagner tributes, sounds more vocal in this version than in either of its piano incarnations, the opening in particular sounding still closer to recitative. Had I to choose, I should unhesitatingly opt for the darker solo piano, but I do not. The cellist’s fast vibrato will not have been to all tastes, yet I think it is a matter of taste rather than hard and fast judgement. Eva Thorarinsdottir proved an excellent violinist, one of whom I should like to hear much more. Both she and Lee exhibited impressive virtuosity in Die drei Zigeuner, another recomposition of a song (this time by Nikolaus Lenau). There was a fine display of rhythmic freedom, especially from the violinist, who throughout beguiled with rich, generous tone. This, rightly, was treated as ‘concert’ music but nevertheless laid idiomatic claim to a helping of ‘gypsy’ charisma. Lee’s piano tone was splendidly full for La notte, derived from the second of the Trois Odes funèbres, and ultimately from ‘Il penseroso,’ from the second book of the Années de pèlerinage. We heard here a fine account of the latter work, dignified and moving, with the violin ‘accompaniment’ adding menace, as well as splendid advocacy for the new and transformed material Liszt subsequently provided. If the central section is more conventional, a little too littered with ‘Hungarianisms’ (whatever Bartók et al. might have said of them), it is attractive enough and was attractively performed. Tristia – La Vallée d’Obermann also, as one might expect, has its birth in the Années de pèlerinage, though the first, Swiss book. It received a heartfelt, warmly Romantic performance from all three musicians, a winning vocal quality imparted to both violin and cello parts: songful and soulful. I should be keen to hear the piece again in this unexpected guise. Le carnival de Pesth was a little disappointing, plodding at times: as if, understandably, it were slowed in order to fit in the multitude of piano notes. It is a much less interesting piece than La Vallée d’Obermann, whose memory lingered welcomely.

The BBC Singers and David Hill, joined by Coady Green on piano, presented a true programme of rarities, to be broadcast across Europe on 23 October as part of the EBU Liszt Day. I could not help but think that it was too much of a not very good thing: larger choral pieces, other works by Liszt, or indeed by contemporaries, predecessors, or successors, might have leavened the load. The opening Pax vobiscum! would probably make a reasonable grace for a College feast or some such occasion, but is not the most interesting of pieces. At least it does not outstay its welcome, however, unlike the following Cinq Chœurs. The first of the choruses has some mildly Berlioz-like writing – reminiscent of, or rather foretelling, L’Enfance du Christ – but the monotony of much of the subsequent strophic writing was unfortunate. I suspect the music is more interesting to sing than to listen to; the BBC Singers certainly made a good job of it, with an impressive standard of French diction. Entered for a competition in 1845, I am not entirely surprised, however, that the pieces did not win Liszt a prize. The 1885 Salve Regina, S 66, would make a good addition to a cappella repertoires: generally simple, but with some intriguing chromaticism, not least in the bass line, and some moments in which tonality veers towards the suspended. That and Es war einmal ein König, a setting for baritone, four-part male voice choir and piano of the ‘Flea Song’ from Faust, were the musical highlights, the latter’s baritone solo well taken, if a little on the camp side. It was a relief, though, to hear proper Lisztian piano writing after the orchestral reduction – the full orchestra part no longer exists – of the vocal score version of Liszt’s setting of a text by the nationalist writer, Ernst Moritz Arndt, is barely more distinguished than the frankly appalling verse, which goes on and on and on in a vein that ought to have been intolerable in 1848 but certainly is now. Here is the first stanza (of nine, each set in essentially strophic form):

Was ist des deutschen Vaterland?
Ist’s Preußenland, ist’s Schwabenland?
Ist’s, wo am Rhein die Rebe blüht?
Ist’s, wo am Belt die Möwe zieht?
O nein! nein! nein!
Sein Vaterland muß größer sein.

It does not get any better. The BBC Singers sounded little more engaged than I felt, their performance sometimes veering towards unmusical shouting, and some of the solo lines sounding under strain, a tenor towards the end especially prominent in that respect. Desperately casting around for something of interest, I wondered whether there might be a little hint of Lohengrin in the seventh stanza, but it would surely have been better for Liszt’s reputation had vocal and orchestral score been lost. The two closing anthems were well sung, and less dull. Weimars Volkslied actually proved quite catchy, helped by a lively performance, whilst the Magyar Király-dal offered a more varied response to its text.

Sadly, the three talks of the day were still less likely to help the Lisztian cause. Howard’s own introductory address was an exception: generalised, but well delivered, with a palpable enthusiasm for the composer. Meirion Hughes on ‘Liszt the politician’ did not really address the subject, but gave a naïve sketch of nineteenth-century nationalism, into which Liszt was awkwardly shoehorned; the talk would not have passed muster from an undergraduate, let alone an alleged expert in the field. It was, moreover, disingenuous to omit without comment an anti-Semitic remark from a Liszt quotation. Imagine if someone had done the same with Wagner! Nevertheless, there remained a gulf between mere incompetence and the standard attained by the final talk, Michael Short’s ‘Liszt as conductor’. Having heard a considerable number of lectures, papers, presentations, seminars, etc., in a variety of contexts and venues, I can say that this was unquestionably the most hapless of my experience. If delivery were not the speaker’s strength, nor were ideas and argument. An audience, visibly restless, was treated to a mere listing, apparently read out word for word from a laptop screen, of programmes Liszt had conducted, along with monotonous readings, most of the material entirely irrelevant, from a few letters. Given the plethora of interesting, animated, and well-informed scholars and performers who could have contributed productively to such an event, the selection of speakers mystified.

Sadly, the programme of music for piano duet would have been unlikely to win over any Liszt-sceptics. It seems a funny way to persuade people to take Liszt seriously to programme six Hungarian Rhapsodies in a row (plus a couple more in the second half). This must be some of the least interesting, most meretricious, music he ever wrote. What might dazzle as a solo piece in isolation merely numbs the mind when performed in succession as here. Had Liszt himself been at the piano, one can imagine wishing to hear still more, but Howard’s pianism turned out to be still more ploddingly heavy-handed than his performance at a solo recital from the beginning of the year. There were a few glaring slips too, one repeatedly so in the first, F minor piece. At best, Howard’s performance was reliably mechanical, at worst bludgeoning. His partner, Bobby Chen, was in a different league, lighter of touch, though certainly not without power, and effortlessly superior in his shaping of phrases. The Two Episodes from Lenau’s ‘Faust’ were much better, largely because the music is so much better, though the difference between Chen and Howard was still highly audible. I am afraid I had to miss the final Rákócsi-Marsch, a transcription from the orchestral version, but could not help but notice the earlier departure of a good few non-coughing members of the audience, the bronchially challenged seemingly determined to stay until the bitter end. Results, then, were mixed, but I was delighted to have heard both the chamber recital and the musicians who performed in it. I also hope to hear Chen on another occasion, as a soloist.

Prom 50: Fidelio - West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Barenboim, 22 August 2009

Royal Albert Hall

Leonore – Waltraud Meier
Florestan – Simon O’Neill
Don Pizarro – Gerd Grochowski
Rocco – Sir John Tomlinson
Marzelline – Adriana Kučerová
Jacquino – Stephan Rügamer
Don Fernando – Viktor Rud
First Prisoner – Andrew Murgatroyd
Second Prisoner – Edward Price

BBC Singers, Geoffrey Mitchell Choir (chorus master: Tim Murray)
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Fidelio is not just any opera. But then, Beethoven is not just any composer. His only opera – unless one counts Leonore as a work in itself – confounds bureaucratic expectations. The unimaginative and the plain uncomprehending are led to decry it and sometimes, quite staggeringly, to account it a dramatic failure. Even Wagner, who should have known better, could be dismissive, for instance telling Cosima that a German theatre would be better off opening with Weber’s Euryanthe – admittedly, a wonderful work, but certainly a problematical one – ‘rather than with Fidelio, which is much more conventional and cold.’ Conventional? Hardly, given the boldness of substituting for the operatic expectations of conventional ‘characterisation’ the instantiation of an unutterably noble idea, ‘freedom’, itself liberated from the confines of bourgeois expectations. Wagner either could not see, or did not want to see – the latter, I suspect, more likely – that the ‘rescue opera’ was here both transcended and granted its enduring memorial. Cold? This work veritably blazes with heat, and it certainly did on this occasion, ‘occasion’ being truly the operative word. Still worse, we read Cosima a few years later record, again contrasting the work with Richard's beloved Euryanthe: ‘Then we start discussing Fidelio, which R. describes as unworthy of the composer of the symphonies, in spite of splendid individual passages.’ Suffice it to say, however, that there were here many ‘splendid individual passages,’ yet Fidelio was found not only to be worthy of the composer, but to speak directly of and to that all-too-real modern-day catastrophe to which the very existence of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra bears witness.

So much for what one might call the meta-performance, but what of the performance itself? Daniel Barenboim has rightly chided those who speak only of the context to this orchestra and not of its musical accomplishments. One cannot and should not forget the former, but the greatness of the enterprise shows in the extraordinary artistic results; disentangling the two is a fool’s game, and never more so than in a work such as this. I am delighted therefore to report that the expectations built up from the previous night’s two Proms (see here and here) were more than fulfilled. Indeed, the orchestral playing had a greater edge than it had during the first half of the first of those concerts. The strings once again demonstrated a depth that would be the envy of many a professional orchestra – at least it would, were the absurd authenticist fashion not to decry such tone. Occasionally the woodwind might have proved fallible, but so what? One does not expect Klemperer’s Philharmonia, astonishing in a different way. This work is about humanity, warts and all: just, in fact, what Beethoven is about. There were in any case ample compensations in the Harmoniemusik blend. The timpanist, a star from the previous night, once again shone brightly. The brass was often magnificent, nowhere more so than in those treacherous horn parts in Leonore’s first-act aria. They were not outshone by Waltraud Meier, which is saying something. And then, of course, there was that trumpet call. The thoughts and associations that rushed through one’s mind at that point were myriad, but I can certainly report that it brought tears to my eyes.

Barenboim’s direction was vigorous, unfailingly engaged, attentive to singers and orchestra, without ever letting concerns for the possible detract from the necessity of the utopian. Some of the overture – unwisely, I thought, Leonore III – was impetuous rather than climactic in a Furtwänglerian sense. (The performance these musicians gave of the overture ‘as itself’ in Salzburg two years ago was manifestly superior.) But his remained a signal achievement, not least in terms of orchestral training, discipline, and of course inspiration. The other cavil I should register is with the version of the score employed. Messing about with Fidelio seems to be all the rage at the moment. The Paris Opéra recently commissioned new dialogue and re-ordered the opening sequence, beginning moreover with Leonore I. Barenboim did something similar, in eschewing almost all of the dialogue – is it really that bad? – and putting Marzelline’s aria before her duet with Jaquino (without, moreover, the tonal justification for this put forward by Sylvain Cambreling in Paris). But then, I realise that I was speaking above about confounding of expectations, so perhaps I am just lacking in imagination myself. There was, in any case, a reason for replacement of the dialogue, since it was replaced by Edward Said’s English narration for Leonore. On this of all occasions, to do so was quite understandable and it certainly provides a genuinely interesting and in some respects disquieting perspective upon the work. Hearing Leonore recount what had taken place from a chronological distance, and with clear implications that her hopes had since been dashed or at least significantly tempered, warns us against any move towards easy non-solutions. Don Fernando could never have put everything right.

Waltraud Meier, mostly recorded but also partly live, presented the narration vividly, in delightfully accented English. However, it was her vocal-dramatic performance that stole the show. She is of course a true stage animal; this shone through in her facial expressions, her gestures, as well as her voice. Yet, even though this was a concert performance, her performance was certainly notout of place. She actually brought us into the most important theatre of all, that of the imagination. And her account of Abscheulicher! ... Komm, Hoffnung was simply spellbinding. Simon O’Neill was an excellent Florestan. He could not efface memories of Jonas Kaufmann in that Paris performance last December, but to have hoped for that would have been entirely unreasonable. O’Neill proved himself fully capable of the testing demands of this cruel role and even brought the odd hint, if only a hint, of Jon Vickers to his timbre and projection. Gerd Grochowski was a late replacement for Peter Mattei as Pizarro. I have recently heard him both in Berlin and London as Telramund, and this performance was rather similar, evincing commendable attention to musical and verbal text, but remaining underpowered. This was undoubtedly exacerbated by the presence of Sir John Tomlinson as Wotan, sorry, Rocco. Tomlinson’s voice might be showing its age on occasion, but this is as nothing compared to the dramatic truth and commitment he shows. It was, however, somewhat unfortunate that Rocco should from the outset be so much more powerful a presence than Pizarro. Evil might or might not be banal, but we need to believe in the very real power this wicked man wields. The other parts were decently taken, Adriana Kučerová showing to good effect a beautiful voice, of which I should be more than happy to hear more. And it would be unforgivable not to mention the truly outstanding singing from the combined forces of the BBC Singers and the Geoffrey Mitchell Choir. Every note, every word, was audible, but just as immediate was the dramatic effect, whether of imprisonment, of hope, or of jubilation. The legendary Wilhelm Pitz’s Philharmonia Chorus for Klemperer is the gold standard here, but these musicians, if not so great in number – or at least that is how it sounds – have little to fear from such a comparison.

Wagner was doubtless right to prefer the Ninth Symphony for the laying of the foundation stone at Bayreuth. Yet the Ring, the sometime artwork of the future, is not the only nineteenth-century work that speaks immediately to our present condition. Fidelio does too (which is not, of course, to say that many other works do not). And so, still more so, does a performance of Fidelio such as this. Barenboim seems to me both right and wrong to say that when this orchestra comes together, politics disappear, since everyone must concentrate exclusively upon the music. For that coming together in the service of something far greater is unavoidably political. It shames those who create division and worse; it holds up an alternative. Such, after all, was the original intention of Barenboim and Said. To the orchestra, mere congratulations upon a tenth anniversary few, least of all its founders, could ever have anticipated, seem pitifully inadequate. And to Blair, Bush, Olmert, Ahmedinejad, Mugabe, Putin, et al., one wants, indeed needs, to say once again, with Horace, ‘Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur’ (‘Change but the name, and the tale is told of you’). Even if we cannot quite bring ourselves to believe that present-day tyrants and war criminals will be brought to justice, we must hope – and hope that at least some of their victims will be rescued. Beethoven and these inspirational young musicians help us do that. Komm, Hoffnung...