Stankiewicz/LSO/Roth - Schubert and Zimmermann, 19 February 2023

Barbican Hall

Schubert: Rosamunde, Overture and Entr’actes to Acts I and III
Zimmermann: Oboe Concerto
Schubert: Mass no.5 in A-flat major, D 678

Olivier Stankiewicz (oboe)

Lucy Crowe (soprano)

Adèle Charvet (mezzo-soprano)

Cyrille Dubois (tenor)

William Thomas (bass)

London Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Gregory Batsleer)

London Symphony Orchestra

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

Trenchant opening chords giving way to a delightful oboe solo (Juliana Koch): the beginning of the so-called Rosamunde Overture, really the overture to Der Zauberharfe, offered a version in miniature of the first half of this LSO concert, arguably even of the concert as a whole. The introduction was undeniably on a grand, Romantic scale, though a fizzing ‘Allegro molto moderato’ proved more suggestive of Rossini than of Mendelssohn. François-Xavier Roth took it very fast, but crucially it worked, proving both nimble and full of incident, and if the lack of string vibrato surprised my ears, they (more or less) adapted. Ultimately, it put a smile on my face and proved a fine curtain-raiser. For the darker first entr’acte likewise proved suggestive of the theatre, of stage action about to commence. Its successor’s episodes offered delectable woodwind solos: not only oboe, but clarinet (Sérgio Pires) and flute (Gareth Davies) too. More veiled than sweet, the outer sections offered a different kind of intimacy given Roth’s non-vibrato approach. Signing off with string quartet rather than full strings proved a lovely idea. 

Olivier Stankiewicz joined the orchestra for Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s 1952 Oboe Concerto. Its first movement, ‘Hommage à Stravinsky’, pulled the older composer’s neoclassicism in multiple directions: homage, yes, but also embroidering and deconstructing. It was all despatched, as throughout, with the cleanest of lines, good humour, and a sign or two of something darker, carried forward into the central ‘Rhapsodie’, full of post-Bartókian night music. Magical solo (and other) evocations helped construct – for there was no ultimate doubt of the composer’s constructivism – a postwar pastoral, hinting at least at so much of what that historically might imply. Stankiewicz played this as the repertoire piece it should be, ably partnered by the LSO and Roth, the finale presented as a brilliant clash and reconciliation between serial and neoclassical tendencies: not only the earlier Stravinsky but Hindemith too. Passages of dissolution suggested men and machines, mannequins too, threatening to break down yet surviving—perhaps a metaphor for the work as a whole and, indeed, much of Zimmermann’s œuvre. 

What a joy, in the second half, it was to hear Schubert’s Mass in A-flat major. Why we do not hear Schubert’s masses all the time, I really do not know. It is a tremendous loss, and many will surely have been encountering this work for the first time. I doubt they will have been disappointed, especially in so sensitive and exultant a performance as this, a fine team of soloists and the excellent London Symphony Chorus now partnering Roth and the LSO. The opening exhortation for mercy sounded with humility, preparing the way for each of the soloists to introduce themselves with distinction in response: ‘Christe eleison’. This Kyrie as a whole had a splendid developmental quality, lightly worn, yet nonetheless telling: not the least example of Roth’s discerning musical judgement. Schubert sounded as a child of Mozart, yet with undeniable affinity to Beethoven, even to his Missa solemnis, as characteristic textures, ultimately to be reduced to no case of ‘influence’, were revealed before our ears. 

A whirlwind of praise was unleashed in the first section of the Gloria, incessant fiddling offering a flickering, moving halo to the choral company of heaven. Those cries of ‘Gloria’ could hardly fail to recall Beethoven, but not to the detriment of a more general impression of abiding, Austrian (perhaps rather than Viennese) loveliness. Lucy Crowe’s soprano duet with clarinet, paving the way once more for the entry of other soloists, in the second section, ‘Gratias agimus tibi…’ was not the least example of that; likewise Adèle Charvet’s rich mezzo solo a little later on, again entwined with clarinet, as well as bassoon. Once again, the LSO’s wind excelled themselves. Roth’s ear for orchestral colour suggested, in that well-worn cliché, a sensitive restoration of an old master painting, for instance in the Credo’s unusually colourful profession of faith. All concerned understood the task, varying in difficulty, of reconciling theological and musical imperatives, the ‘Crucifixus’ section’s pivotal ambiguity erupting in the glorious release of resurrection. Roth directed and shaped, without ever giving the impression of undue moulding. The censer swung in suggestion again of a characteristically Austrian otherworldliness in the Sanctus, both personal and beyond the personal. The Benedictus’s heavenly solo trio, soprano, mezzo, and tenor (an ardent Cyrille Dubois) must surely have had a few hearts skip a beat or two. Then the return of William Thomas’s dark-hued bass for the Agnus Dei rightly imparted a sense of completion: sadness and hope, even before the call to grant us peace.

BPO/Petrenko and Wood: Stravinsky, Zimmermann, Rachmaninov, and Grisey, 15 February 2020

Philharmonie

Stravinsky: Symphony in Three Movements

Zimmermann: Alagoana: Caprichos Brasilieiros

Rachmaninov: Symphonic Dances, op.45

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

Grisey: Le Noir de l’Étoile

Raphael Haeger, Simon Rössler, Jan Schlichte, Wieland Welzel, Matthias Kessler, Laura Melero Beviá (percussionists)

James Wood (conductor)

Reviewing the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony last month, I referred to the ‘monstrously metronomic’ quality of its opening march, ‘by design: of course’. I might almost have used the same phrase for the opening of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements from the same forces, save for the implication of life in ‘monstrous[ly]’. ‘Brutal’ would perhaps be better here, for whatever humans were perpetrating the wartime images said to have inspired the composer’s musical gestures, they seemed to have become practically disembodied, automated in their robotic quality. Not only in this first movement, but certainly here, it was rhythm above all that had become dramatically generative, music thereby projecting its own motion picture. There was as much darkness, moreover, in the cracks between the music’s chamber dialogue and in its self-automated retransformation into fuller orchestral music. In what sense, however, is this a symphony, is this a symphonic movement? That, probably rightly, remained as unclear as ever. Balletic? Perhaps; it certainly had an iron structure that it does not always. The second movement was possessed of an uneasy yet – in its way – delightful interiority: another form of balletic self-automatic, Marie-Pierre Langlamet’s harp here as crucial as Majella Stockhausen’s piano in the first movement. A mechanistic brutalism that cannot fail to voice historical and political resonances once more characterised the finale, the goose-stepping soldiers of whom Stravinsky spoke coming vividly to death, all the more so for the music’s infernal catchiness. Desiccated woodwind clucking showed how an allegedly Haydnesque gesture could be transformed into something so dramatically lifeless. Repetition and even transformation, yet without development; the mysterious fugal combination, at last, of solo piano and harp: such were the Stravinskian riddles brought so vividly to our attention, yet rightly never solved.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s ‘ballet suite’ – actually a ballet in its own right, for there is no further material – Alagoanoa: Caprichos Brasilieros followed. The first of its five movements, the Overture, benefited from similar rhythmic precision, albeit precision which could now be bent, indeed swung – and its was. Delightfully grotesque yet ultimately seductive instrumental combinations shone through, Hendrik Heilmann’s harpsichord instructively, even wittily, quizzical. The following ‘Sertanejo’ likewise caught a fine balance between observation and involvement, all the while dancing – or being danced. More ‘human’ than Stravinsky, yet not necessarily less inscrutable, there was something undeniably chilling to its weird climax. Foreboding in the ‘Saubade’ was founded on, yet not restricted to, cello and double bass pizzicato. Repeated guitar figures; strange woodwind solos; percussion machinations, tuned or untuned: all contributed to an unease both general and specific. The ‘Cabachio’ was jazzier and relished as such, bass pizzicato once more put to excellent use, Wenzel Fuchs’s clarinet solo; yet compositional and performative control necessarily also emphasised distance, even alienation. A hallucinatory interlude seemed to foretell the suspense prior to brutal climax in the finale. Its fallout – this was, after all, music for the nuclear age – spoke both humanly and enigmatically. Die Soldaten lay just around the corner.

It was welcome to hear a performance of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances that did not sentimentalise the score, though whether the music might sometimes have yielded a little more will remain mostly a matter of taste. Certain exaggerations will have overstepped the mark for some. At any rate, Petrenko seemed to understand rhythmic precision rather than harmony as the ultimate key, not only in the first movement but throughout. Even the string sound spoke with poignant alienation of a composer long in hopeless exile: familiar sounds, yet uprooted. The opening of the second movement had more than a hint of Debussy both to its brass fanfares and waltzing response. Some will perhaps have found the orchestral solos a little distant, but I rather liked the continuing sense of exile. Far better this, certainly, than the sort of muddy chaos one might hear from the likes of Valery Gergiev. Petrenko declined to coerce the finale into answering questions, thereby permitting it to ask a few more of its own. Materials, even the composer’s life and career, were once again revisited from a different standpoint: enigmatic and, like Stravinsky and Zimmermann, not without reference to a brutal external world.

There followed a bonus downstairs in the Philharmonie’s foyer. Six percussionists, four from the Berlin Philharmonic, two from the orchestra’s Karajan-Akademie, and James Wood performing Gérard Grisey’s Le Noir de l’Étoile. Inspired, as we heard from an introductory recorded text (Andreas Sparberg) by the 1967 discovery by a young astronomer of, to quote the composer ‘a rapidly varying radio signal, in the form of periodic impulses 1.3 seconds apart’, this performance, aided by simple yet powerful lighting and projection, seemed to tread a line between the initial suspicion that the irregularity betokened signals from an extra-terrestrial civilisation and the subsequent discovery of ‘a truth … just as surprising: the signals were being emitted by a pulsar, the fantastic compact residue created by the supernova explosions that long ago disintegrated the massive stars.’ We listened intent, following the signals, trying to make sense of them, making connections that may or may not have been there – not so very unlike what we had done in the evening’s earlier performances. Just as a pattern, be it rhythmic, timbral, spatial, emerged, it transformed itself so as to confound lazy and even informed expectations. There was an undeniably powerful sense of forces beyond our comprehension at play: like the gods of old, yet unlike them too. This was a vision, an experience, not so much without hope as beyond it. Our world would do well to remind itself more often of such concerns; that is, if it is not too late already.

Aimard/ Gürzenich Orchestra/Roth:.‘Alleyn Freyheit: Eine Beethoven-Séance’ – Mundry, Beethoven, Lachenmann, Filidei, and Zimmermann, 10 February 2020

Philharmonie, Cologne

Images: Holger Talinski

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

All music once was new: uncontroversial statement, one might have thought, however much one sometimes imagines having heard its particular strains before. ‘Es klang so alt und war doch so neu!’ as Hans Sachs muses to Walther of the latter’s melody. New music needs, after all, to be performed if not as if it were old music, then with at least as much commitment and understanding, both ‘in itself’ and of whence it has come. A celebrated concert, entirely Beethoven’s music, with no fewer than four world premieres, took place on 22 December 1808 at the Theater an der Wien, Beethoven both playing and conducting. How might we have heard it? We can never know – and probably should not want to, not least on account of what seems, given but a single rehearsal, to have been an unsurprisingly poor orchestral performance. We faint-hearted would-be-modernists can only marvel, however, at a programme that ran: Symphony no.6 (premiere); Ah, perfido; Mass in C major, ‘Gloria’; Piano Concerto no.4 (premiere); Symphony no.5 (premiere); Mass in C major, ‘Sanctus and Benedictus’; solo piano improvisation; Choral Fantasia (premiere).

There have been occasional repetitions of the programme of this particular ‘academy concert’, which experience will of course be entirely different from that of its first audience. Cologne, however, has presented something quite different for the composer’s anniversary year, a ‘new Beethoven Academy’, entitled ‘Alleyn Freyheit: Eine Beethoven-Séance’. The city’s Gürzenich Orchestra, Pierre-Laurent-Aimard, and François-Xavier Roth, invited us to this séance of freedom with what, through the offices of infidelity, may actually have proved in some senses a more faithful or at least imaginative recreation of its spirit. We were told nothing of the music to be performed other than its composers – and that pieces by Isabel Mundry and Francesco Filidel would receive their first performances. What we had heard would be revealed to us only at the end, on a programme insert to be collected as we left the hall. With that in mind, I have uniquely placed details at the close rather than the opening of this review, following not only that chronology but also that of Debussy in naming his piano Préludes. The impatient or merely curious are of course free to skip the following paragraphs, but I thought it might be more valuable to record my impressions as they came to me rather than to edit with inevitable hindsight. I thus took notes during the performance and shall make do with as little editing as possible, doing little more than turn them into full sentences (usually). The reader will have to take my word for it that I correctly identified Beethoven’s scores and matched composers to music. works by Helmut Lachenmann’s and Bernd Alois Zimmermann I knew; the others I could not possibly. However, after a little metaphorical head-scratching, I worked out that Isabel Mundry’s music – orchestral fragments, as I learned later on – was interspersed with Beethoven and Lachenmann. For what it is worth, I have also refrained from reading interviews and notes in the actual programme, although I shall certainly take a look after posting this.

A large orchestra, soloist, and conductor having assembled onstage, it was perhaps surprising – although what here would qualify as unsurprising – for the concert to open to the strains of the Moonlight Sonata, yet from afar. It made sense, though, if this were to be a retrospective appreciation of the composer, for this was not only from afar. A second pianist and Aimard began to collaborate with what we had heard – recorded, or was it? and for the soloist as such to assume his proper role. Immediately memories, ears, the imagination started to play tricks – as did orchestral percussion. Musicians turning, bowing their heads, and so on acknowledged the billing of choreographer Jörg Weinöhl. The orchestra grew, though it took longer for relatively conventional – non-extended? – techniques to be employed. There was no doubting, however, the éclat of Lachenmann’s contribution, nor of the orchestra’s performance, gradation of attacks and resonance both precise and visceral, waves of sound passing across the orchestra so as to send shivers down the spine.

A change in lighting (Bernd Purkrabek) heralded something different: a new piece, so it seemed, although not for long. [This, to avoid confusion, was the second of Mundry’s Fragments, Lachenmann having followed Beethoven.] It used both pianos and orchestra, calling on six horns and two oboes to stand; at least the choreography did. Then suddenly, without warning came something familiar yet strange: the introduction to the first movement of Beethoven’s First Symphony. Or was it? So disoriented had my expectations become that I found myself asked the occasional question about Beethoven’s scoring. (‘Did he really write that phrase for the flute?’ is one I recall, and afterwards recall Beethoven having been criticised for supposedly excessive use of wind in this work.) I think I was wrong to have done so, but to be enabled to listen critically in that way concerning music I allegedly know so well was a fascinating experience in itself. It was an unfashionably large orchestra we heard for this symphony, or however much of it we were going to hear – and all the better for it: it had bite and heft, colour and…

… then the light changed, downward orchestral glissandi were heard, and Aimard and his page-turner solemnly left the stage. So too did a number of other musicians from the orchestra, those six horns and two oboes included. This mysterious Mundry (?) interlude – was it a continuation of what we had heard previously? – led us to another Beethoven introduction, that of the Fourth Symphony, darkly expectant. This time, it was my sense of pitch that I did not quite trust. Was it at modern pitch? A nagging doubt remained. After all, I told myself as the exposition progressed, context is all: this means something different here and now, if indeed it ‘means’ anything at all. Departed wind players reappeared on the balcony above to signal to us friends nicht dieser Töne, but something again unexpected: the transition to the finale of the Fifth; and then the opening of the portals of heaven itself. Those trombones! The rest of the orchestra too, of course, not least the excellent Cologne timpanist, but those trombones: what a thrilling Beethovenian moment it was once more, ‘authentic’ in the best sense. I could after all be excited by this music again when conducted by someone other than Furtwängler, Klemperer, or Barenboim. (There are others, I admit, but a list would be beside the point right here.) Moreover, I could do so without the tonal preparation of the rest of the symphony, which I should otherwise have insisted was necessary. How long, I wondered, would it go on? When would it be transformed into something else? The scherzo reprise came and went; heaven reopened. Wind were again especially prominent, hinting perhaps at the contemporary music – to Beethoven – of French Revolutionary processionals. Was I merely romanticising? If I were, why should I not, given a tradition dating back at least so far as ETA Hoffmann? On this occasion, at least, we reached the end, thus signalling the interval.

Upon returning to the hall, it was clear that some audience members had left. My initial reaction was to wonder why, but perhaps just as valid a question would be ‘why not?’ It is difficult, for whatever this may be worth, to imagine that some did not in 1808 – and their departure did no harm to anyone. It was not the full orchestra that was back on stage, although Aimard was back. The opening piece [the fifth and final of Mundry’s Fragments] played with piano and orchestral response. Cellists, percussionists, others shone in ways traditional and not. [Alas my memory deserts me here with regard to precisely what.]  We were invited, even compelled, to listen and indeed to watch. Was that Aimard playing a ‘light’ version of Beethoven? It took me a few seconds to realise that such lightness, as ever with the Bagatelles, was largely deceptive; hearing them at the same time as other music, seeing them at the same time as other actions was undeniably strange. The orchestra, intriguingly, seemed at times almost asleep and needed to be roused.

‘Warmer’ lighting signalled an impending change; as if by magic, we were part way through the first movement of the Emperor Concerto, somewhere in the development, leading us to the recapitulation. Aimard offered some delightful leaning into phrases, blinding clarity too, not least in trills reminiscent of Pollini in his prime. Once the movement had come to a close, a further dialogue between piano and orchestra began, piano seemingly querying the chordal responses it received, responses that nevertheless led it – and us – away from Beethoven, whether we liked it or not, initial memories disintegrating. This different voice fashioned music to metamorphose into a new concertante work: hectic, rhythmically insistent, playing on the ruins of tonality with a fine sense of the sardonic that occasionally brought Prokofiev to mind. Childhood and even childish memories, clockwork machinations, other, darker remembrances of things past or imagined fascinated in a veritable riot of invention, after which Aimard left the stage. The second movement of the Seventh Symphony followed, as compelling a processional as ever, after which Aimard and missing orchestral players returned. The orchestra stood and the lights went down. There was, notably, no applause, although it seemed like a moment when there might have been. What was Aimard, seated, about to play?

It was the final movement [ultimately only part of it] of the final piano sonata, op.111, exalted yet also strangely exultant. Oddly, given the elements of choreography throughout, I started to wonder about the silhouetted organist’s head, sometimes still, sometimes moving, I saw to the side of the stage. Was it, too, part of the performance? It was difficult to see how, yet once seen, I could never quite forget my wondering. The music led without a break into something new – and yet perhaps not quite so new. By this stage, I had forgotten that Zimmermann was on the programme, and it took me again a little while to realise that this music, with its unnervingly oscillating opening, an oscillation seemingly retained yet transformed into a dialectic between precision and vagueness, was indeed what it was. So this was why an organist had appeared: for the horrific fragments of musical remembrance – how apt! – of Photoptosis. Yet there was no ‘O Freunde…’ moment; the finale to the Ninth had been revoked, as in Mann’s Doctor Faustus, or at least averted. Truly this was a nightmare from which we might never awake. Parsifal, The Nutcracker, and, for some reason the most unsettling, Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy took their bows, but for what? Did they, did the Bach and plainchant, ‘mean’ anything any more? Do we not hear them all now in the shadow of Beethoven, which is to say of our construction(s) of ‘Beethoven’? Does not all music, old and new, Beethoven’s included, stand in that shadow? As if it had not been with us all along, darkness fell.

Isabel Mundry: Orchestral Fragments to Beethoven I-V (2020, world premiere), interspersed with (and on occasion played simultaneously with):

          Beethoven: Piano Sonata no.14 in C-sharp minor, op.27 no.2, 1^st movement (1801)

          Lachenmann: Tableau (1988/9)

          Beethoven: Symphony no.1 in C major, op.21, 1^st movement to bar 109 (1800); Symphony no.4 in B-flat major, op.60, 1^st movement to bar 333 (1806); Symphony no.5 in C minor, op.67, 3^rd movement from bar 324 and 4^th movement (1804-8); Bagatelles, op.119: nos 7,9, 10, and 11 (1820-22); Piano Concerto no.5 in E-flat major, op.73, 1^st movement from bar 258 (1809-10)

Francesco Filidei: Quasi una bagatella, for piano and orchestra (2019, world premiere)

Beethoven: Symphony no.7 in A major, op.92, 2^nd movement (1811-12); Piano Sonata no.32 in C minor, op.111, 2^nd movement to Variation IV (1821-2)

Zimmermann: Photoptosis (1968)

Performances of the Year, 2018

Anniversaries too often prove a lazy way to programme. Sometimes, though, especially in the case of composers in need of rediscovery, they afford excellent opportunities. Such has been in the case of Karlheinz Stockhausen, latterly overlooked in favour of other post-war avant gardists. His ninetieth birthday has brought forth a number of outstanding performances. (One excellent thing about Stockhausen’s music in performance is the consistently high quality of performance. Either you can do it well, it seems, or you do not do it at all.) A standing rebuke to those who would fashionably claim that the later Stockhausen, the Stockhausen of the Licht operas, had gone off the boil – usually one discovers that they do not even know the later music – was provided by Paris’s Opéra Comique and Le Balcon, in an unforgettable staging of Donnerstag. Two concerts in particular from this year’s Musikfest Berlin had the composer from Sirius shine almost as brightly as his star itself: Mantra from Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich, and a truly once-in-a-lifetime – I hope I am wrong – performance from Aimard of the first eleven Klaverstücke.

Another anniversary composer, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, in this case celebrating his hundredth birthday, featured in an altogether magnificent concert from Håkan Hardenberger, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, and John Storgårds in Vienna, Gunther Schuller and Dvořak the other composers. Debussy may be less in need of special exposure, but the centenary of his death brought a good number of excellent performances, from which I shall choose first a January concert from the LSO and François-Xavier Roth, Jeux in as comprehending an account as that is never something to be taken for granted. Debussy, Zimmermann, and Roth came together in a concert at least its equal with the Berlin Philharmonic. Debussy’s Images interspersed with works by Ligeti: no gimmick, genuine illumination.

Returning to opera, the Festival d’Aix en Provence offered a splendid staging, broadly what one might call ‘modern conventional’, yet excellent of its kind, of Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel. Katie Mitchell had gone one further the previous night, with a long overdue feminist reassessment of Ariadne auf Naxos, also notable for a superlative performance of the title role from Lise Davidsen. Over to Salzburg and Hans Neuenfels showed that he very much still has ‘it’ in his new production of The Queen of Spades, Mariss Jansons and the Vienna Philharmonic in the pit, a fine cast to boot. Indeed, this proved a vintage year for Salzburg opera – an appalling Magic Flute notwithstanding – with excellent new stagings of Henze (The Bassarids, Krzysztof Warlikowski) and Monteverdi (L’incoronazione di Poppea, Jan Lauwers). Mozart's operas are perhaps the most difficult of all to bring off. Even to consider including one here speaks volumes: volumes should certainly be spoken of a magical Così fan tutte from Opera Holland Park this summer.

Earlier in the year, the Royal Opera House’s world premiere performances of George Benjamin’s Lessons in Love and Violence revealed another towering operatic masterpiece from the composer. Fashionable voices said otherwise; they are no more to be heeded than in Stockhausen’s case. The Royal Opera’s new From the House of the Dead (Warlikowski again, in a long awaited house premiere) also shone, not least on account of Mark Wigglesworth’s typically first-rate conducting. Frank Castorf’s Munich production of the same work may ultimately have eclipsed it – it would have eclipsed most things – but what a year it was in which to see both. Daniel Barenboim conducted Tristan und Isolde in a new, truly thought-provoking production – sad to say, much misunderstood – by Dmitri Tcherniakov. Also at the Berlin Staatsoper, now rightly returned to its home on Unter den Linden, came a further Neuenfels hit: Salome that announced to all the world in neon lights: ‘Wilde is Coming’.

I always look out for Schoenberg performances. This year, the Dresden Semperoper offered perhaps the finest staging I have yet seen of Moses und Aron, directed by Calixto Bieito. What a joy, moreover, to hear the great Staatskapelle Dresden in such music! Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Philharmonia in Gurrelieder sent shivers down the spine and brought (many) tears to the eyes: another outstanding performance from a consistently excellent team.

The Wigmore Hall is reliably the best concert venue in London, arguably the greatest chamber music venue in the world. Highlights included a wonderful evening of string quartet music by Schubert, Webern, and Haydn from the Hagen Quartet, and more than one evening of Bach from Mahan Esfahani. From the latter, I shall somewhat arbitrarily choose this concert in June. Esfahani’s survey of the complete Bach harpsichord works continues next year. Igor Levit’s concert for Frederic Rzewski’s eightieth birthday, including a Rzewski premiere, cannot fail to be included in any such survey. Pavel Kolesnikov’s wonderfully imaginative – and coherent! – programme of piano works from Louis Couperin to Lachenmann also lingers long in the mind. So too do a recital of Haydn from the Jerusalem Quartet and an evening of Fauré, Brahms, and Schumann from Stéphane Degout and Simon Lepper

Other instrumental and chamber highlights included hearing the Alban Berg Ensemble Wien (drawn from the Vienna Philharmonic) at the inaugural BERGfrühling festival by Carinthia’s Lake Ossiach. From that, I shall opt for a concert of Debussy, Webern, and Mozart. Quite a year then: onwards and upwards…

Hardenberger/Gewandhaus/Nelsons - Zimmermann and Mahler, 8 October 2018

Royal Festival Hall

Zimmermann: Trumpet Concerto, ‘Nobody knows de trouble I see’

Mahler: Symphony no.5

Håkan Hardenberger (trumpet)

Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra

Andris Nelsons (conductor)

Images: Southbank Centre/Mark Allan

One can only be grateful for the performances that Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s centenary year has occasioned. This was my second hearing this year of his Trumpet Concerto, ‘Nobody knows de trouble I see’, the first also having been from Håkan Hardenberger, albeit in Vienna, with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under John Storgårds. One fears that 2019 will bring nothing at all, but then, as things stand, 2019 seems destined to bring catastrophes far worse than that. We should, I suppose, enjoy the visits of fellow European orchestras whilst we can; soon enough it will be wall-to-wall Vera Lynn tribute acts, a spot of scavenging at the local rubbish dump, and the occasional rat thrown our way by hedge-fund billionaires for gastronomic delectation.

The Zimmermann was certainly the more successful performance on the programme, not only for Hardenberger, but also for the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and, especially, its new Kapellmeister, Andris Nelsons. Its opening was taut, full of suspense, germinative – and not just the opening. Hardenberger, virtuoso musician that he is, played his part as the repertoire work it is for him and should be the rest for us. Both the pleasure and the difficulty of giving birth to the full chorale/spiritual tune were apparent and, crucially, felt. The menace of dark jazz sounds and the fantasy of ballet, and vice versa, paved the way for a full-scale riot of orchestral polystylism, tensions boiling over into chaos somewhat beyond the ‘Ed Miliband variety’, if perhaps less alien, alas, to those of us remaining, as it were, in the land of Theresa May and her multiple hostile environments. Zimmermann’s instrumental doublings, triplings, and so forth sounded more revelatory than I can recall, every bit as integral to work and performance as if they had come from Bach or Bartók. Swing rhythms did their work, of course, but so too did quite magnificent control of the orchestral volume, as if he were twisting the dial on a hi-fi system, by Nelsons. There was something uncanny to that evocation of both ‘real’ and the ‘recorded’ things: a positioning of ourselves and our music in what Zimmermann would later call the ‘sphericity of time’. Hardenberger’s final statement of the spiritual in full bore witness, as it must. But who in our time, any more than in Zimermann’s, will listen, truly listen?

The Nelsons way with Mahler’s Fifth Symphony proved remarkably popular with the audience, many of whom rose to their feet at the close. I could not help but recall Thomas Beecham’s quip that the English do not like music, but rather the noise that it makes. It had some wonderful moments, even passages, but I struggled in vain to hear a sense of irony, a sense of Vienna, even, for some of the time, much sense of coherence. This is an extraordinarily difficult symphony to bring off convincingly; not the least of the conductors I have heard fall considerably short here has been Daniel Barenboim. Of the many intimations of the Second Viennese School, I heard nothing.

Nelsons, not unlike Barenboim, seemed determined to turn it into something that is not, albeit in this case something stranded between a generic nineteenth-century symphony and Shostakovich.

The first movement perhaps fared worst. Insofar as there were a basic tempo at all, it felt incredibly slow: quite a trudge, yet it was never clear to what end. Then suddenly, an eruptive first episode went to the other extreme, contrast entirely supplanting connection. Symphonic thread, what symphonic thread? Nelsons seemed intent on micromanaged moulding of phrases too, reminiscent of Simon Rattle over the past few years. Conductors as different as Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez have shown that there are many ways to have this music work as a symphony; Nelsons, apparently, had other ideas. That said, a few liminal passages – a magical timpani solo, for instance – truly told: in themselves, though, without necessary context. The second movement proved similarly contrast, except back to front in terms of material, which is as it should be; it also proved more coherent, if still less so than one would have hoped. Again, it was Mahler at his most introverted who convinced most. Nelsons’s brutalising, proto-Shostakovich sound of a brass-led orchestra at full throttle simply sounded mistaken to my ears.

Nelsons certainly grasped, however, the structural role of the third movement, the symphony’s second ‘part’, its ambiguity relished. Even here, however, a tendency to hold back phrases to no particular end sounded indulgent and, frankly, irritating. The movement’s closing bars, taken hell for leather without evident preparation, proved merely bizarre, however well played.

The Adagietto was taken at an unfashionably slow speed, or so it felt. (I have never been one to consult my watch on such matters.) Nelsons seemed determined to make a meal out of it, often entirely losing its sense, however illusory, of loving simplicity. However gorgeous its final climax may have sounded, I could not help but suspect he might have preferred it to have been by Bruckner. The skies well and truly lifted for the finale, the problem being that there had been almost no preparation in the preceding movement. The Gewandhaus Orchestra relished the controlled abandon of Mahler’s neo-Bachian counterpoint, his good humour – or perhaps his impression thereof. Best of all, the movement unfolded without mannerism. Did the performance add up to more than the sum of its parts, though? At that, as perhaps at our present, seemingly hopeless worldly condition, Mahler laughed. He, after all, knew what it was to be, in that celebrated anti-Semitic phrase, a ‘citizen of nowhere’.

Musikfest Berlin (3) – Widmann/BPO/Roth - Stravinsky, Zimmermann, Debussy, and Ligeti, 14 September 2018

Philharmonie

Stravinsky: Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1947 version)

Zimmermann: Violin Concerto
Debussy: Images, interspersed with:
                 Ligeti: Lontano, Atmosphères

Carolin Widmann (violin)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

 

One could hardly go wrong with a programme and musicians such as this; I am delighted to report that expectations were at least confirmed and in many ways exceeded. I could moan, I suppose, about the decision to use the 1947 revision of Symphonies of Wind Instruments, both in itself and given what I took to be the implied tribute to Debussy, but even that had its advantages. Indeed, so puzzled was I by the difference in what I was hearing, without initially having known why, that I perhaps listened with still greater attention, making moreover connections to later works such as The Rake’s Progress and Cantata which I might otherwise not have done. There was certainly no doubting its opening spiky aggression, which in context of the festival as a whole – or at least that part of it I had heard – offered a thought-provoking follow-up to George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill. Chordal responses, in the liturgical sense, hinted as much at the Rake as the Rite; perhaps more than ever, this emerged as a threshold work. With the Berlin Philharmonic and François-Xavier Roth, it lost neither its violence nor its rare beauty; indeed, the two were strongly confirmed as two sides to the same coin.

 

How to follow that? With a violin concerto, of course, in this case Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s. The orchestra’s inheritance from Stravinsky remained clear, even if the soloist’s response was initially – this is far too protean a work for such generalisations to hold for long – closer to Berg. And so, Carolin Widmann, Roth, and the BPO took us on a thrilling, wayward journey, the first movement sardonic yet unquestionably ‘felt’, its final peroration earth-shattering. Piano incited, invited the violin’s central fantasia, that movement’s celesta enigmatic as ever. Orchestral depth in string unison resounded just as it might have done in Bruckner. Here as elsewhere, Roth’s expert, unassuming handling of climaxes proved second to none. It was rather as if late Prokofiev had taken a trip. Much the same might be said of the finale, although here it was an earlier Prokofiev of the Second Violin Concerto rather than Cinderella. The echoes – one might, uncharitably, put it a little more strongly – of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements came through loud and clear, but they were gone before one knew it, xylophone having launched into a solo Danse macabre for a new age that had not yet forgotten its pre-war roots. Bach too was to be heard, certainly in the cadenza. What an exhilarating, polystilistic mix!

 

The second half engagingly interspersed the three panels of Debussy’s Images, in the order ‘Gigues’, ‘Rondes de printemps’, and ‘Ibéria’, and two works by Ligeti: Lontano and Atmosphéres. ‘Gigues’ offered mystery that was clear and clear-eyed, rather in the line of Boulez’s Debussy, yet certainly not to be reduced to that. Roth struck a typically fine balance between what Boulez and his generation would call musical ‘parameters’: rhythm against – or with? – insidious harmonies, and so on. Lontano seemed to pick up with respect to pitch, timbre, and more; this was a Klangfarbenmelodie of sorts, with roots. Even a strange electronic interference – a hearing aid? – with the tuba seemed curiously apt, all the more so when I realised that it was in fact the violins! ‘Music of the spheres’ is a cliché, but here it seemed the right cliché. This was as well shaped, balanced, and played a performance as I have heard – at least.

 

What could not be changed by such listening (and performance)? ‘Rondes de printemps’ certainly seemed to have been. I found myself better able than ever to make connections with ‘Gigues’ too, perhaps especially with respect to relationships between harmony, rhythm, melody, timbre, and so on. Debussy here positively demanded to be heard with hindsight. And yet, his music remained as elusive as ever in a truly mesmerising performance; this is and was no zero-sum game. Atmosphéres again offered the challenge only to connect, its woodwind unquestionably Stravinskian, chords emerging that I could have sworn I recognised from Debussy. Did I? Does it matter? Swarming double basses suggested electronic viols. Transformations and contours were once again expertly shaped by Roth – and, of course, by this great orchestra. It closed with one of the most magical fadings a niente I have ever heard.

 

Not, of course that ‘Ibéria’ is nothing; this was definitely something. ‘Par les rues et par les chemins’ proved sly, sinuous, and razor sharp. That did not mean that lines could not blur, but there was no doubting the intent, the musical meaning behind such blurring. Much the same might be said of ‘Les Parfums de la nuit’, albeit with different colours, temperature, and of course languor. The precision of playing in this atmosphere was just as impressive as in Atmosphères. ‘Le Matin d’un jour de fête’ seemed to unite so many tendencies over the evening as whole: a true conclusion. It was never, however, anything other than itself. The subtle swagger of opposing forces that might confront each other or might dissolve, transmute proved a typical Debussian, yes painterly joy.

Hardenberger/ORF SO/Storgårds: Schuller, Zimmermann, and Dvořák, 6 April 2018

Musikverein

Gunther Schuller: Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee

Bernd Alois Zimmermann: Trumpet Concerto, ‘Nobody knows de trouble I see’
Dvořák: Symphony no.9 in E minor, op.95, ‘From the New World’

Håkan Hardenberger (trumpet)

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

John Storgårds (conductor)

 

Much – not all, but much – of the United States’s Western art music tradition is (Austro-)German in origin. ‘You would say that, wouldn’t you?’ might come the reply to someone awaiting publication of his Schoenberg biography. And yes, I suppose I should – yet not only on that count. Consider the (new) worlds of performance, composition, musicology, musical institutions: less so, now, of course, and rightly so; their roots, however, will often be found embedded in Teutonic soil. To appreciate that, one only need consider the childish, often downright bizarre anti-German sentiment encountered today amongst certain anti-modernist composers and musicologists alike. ‘I’m so daring to write/analyse a tune; Wagner/Schoenberg/Adorno/Stockhausen would never have let me do that.’ ‘Yes, neoliberalism has no tunes; you truly cannot move for total serialism in the world of the Culture Industry…’

 

Not that the traffic has ever been one-way, of course; more complex interchanges have deep roots too. George Whitefield Chadwick, trained in Leipzig and subsequently director of the New England Conservatory, which he re-organised on European lines, for instance instituting an opera workshop, pre-empted Dvořák’s use in his ‘New World’ Symphony of ‘negro’ pentatonic melodies in the Scherzo to his Second (1883-5) Symphony. Interestingly, however, Boston audiences reacted far less favourably than New York to Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, the critic William Apthorp notoriously decrying its use of ‘barbaric’ plantation songs and native American melodies, resulting in a ‘mere apotheosis of ugliness, distorted forms, and barbarous expressions’, He might have been a typical Viennese critic ten years later, fulminating against Schoenberg; racism, after all, is common to both attacks.

 

Here in Vienna’s hallowed Musikverein, home to more than one such attack in the past, we had a splendid opportunity to hear some of that more complex interchange. Gunther Schuller, born in Queens, to German parents, has always struck me, albeit from a position of relative ignorance, as an especially interesting example of a musician, both performing and compositional, able to straddle ‘jazz’ and ‘classical’ divides; not, of course, that such a ‘divide’ has ever been so clear as many, for varying, even opposed, ideological reasons, might have claimed. In the work heard here, moreover, he turned to Paul Klee (a Swiss painter, of course, whom many of us are fond, sometimes all too fond, of comparing to Webern). Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee was heard for the first time at the Proms three years ago (almost), under Oliver Knussen. It was a joy to reacquaint myself with the music, and not only to find my admiration for it undimmed, in so fine a performance as this, from the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and John Storgårds, but also to observe it so warmly received in the hall which, just over a century earlier, had played host to the notorious Skandalkonzert, at which anti-modernist protests against the Second Viennese School had landed some of the participants in court. (Would that… No, I had better stop there.)

 

The first movement, ‘Antique Harmonies’, certainly had an air of the undefinable antique to it. That can cover a multitude of sins and virtues, ranging from Debussy to Birtwistle; there is little point in attempting definition of such a ‘mood’ or ‘air’. Fineness of orchestral balance surely helped, though. The following ‘Abstract Trio’ seemed almost to take us from Schoenberg to Stravinsky; I even fancied that I heard premonitions of the later work of Boulez in its motivic working. Coincidence, doubtless, if indeed that, but intriguing nevertheless, for this Old World listener. The cool jazz of ‘Little Blue Devil’ seemed almost as distilled as Mahler does in Webern; it was also just as recognisable. Muted trumpet set up a connection with the Bernd Alois Zimmermann work to come. Febrile, seething, yes, ‘The Twittering-machine’ indeed, came next, with perhaps a little touch of post-Webern Klangfarbenmelodie. A flute solo from above (rather than off-stage in the conventional, unseen sense) beguiled in ‘Arab Village’: simple, yet never predictable, with a true sense of narrative, almost as in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. ‘An Eerie Moment’ lived up to its name too, Webern perhaps distilling Stravinsky’s Rite, prior to the unsettling – did it or did it not unify what had gone before? – ‘Pastorale’, which again benefited from expert orchestral balancing by Storgårds and his players.

 

Zimmermann’s hundredth anniversary falls this year. (Click here for my feature on the composer in the New York Times.) There is jazz inspiration to his trumpet concerto too, of course, as well as that of the spiritual, ‘Nobody knows de trouble I see’. Zimmermann was adamant that the work, originally entitled ‘darkey’s darkness’ – thank goodness, from our twenty-first standpoint, that that was ditched – played with elements of progressive rather than ‘commercial’ jazz. I think that may be adjudged a perfectly reasonable claim. (We should always remain on our guard concerning what composers say their music may or may not ‘be’. Why might they be making such a claim?) So, at any rate, it sounded here, Håkan Hardenberger – who else? – joining the orchestra.

 

Varying ‘atmosphere’, almost as varying as that of the Schuller Studies, suffused this outstanding performance – played as the repertory work it almost is, and certainly should be. The long line, both for Hardenberger’s trumpet arabesques and for the orchestra, somewhere between ‘jazz’ and ‘symphonic’, was effortlessly maintained, or so it seemed – until, that is, it was no longer required. Controlled riot might then be the order of the day – or something else. Zimmermann’s later, more overt polystilism was almost there, already; perhaps it actually was instantiated, right there, right then. Rightly, neither score nor performance could be pinned down. And yet, there was ultimately, just as rightly, an almost Nono-like sense of bearing witness – even if one were never quite sure who, or what, the ‘subject’ might be. A hushed close did not comfort, nor should it have done.

 

And so, for the second half, we returned to the ‘New World’ Symphony, bastion of many a more conservative concert programme – despite its rocky initial reception in Boston. There was no routine comfort, however, to Storgårds’s performance. One really had the sense, as the cliché has it, that every note had been rethought – and it probably had. The introduction to the first movement sounded unusually dark, almost as if from Weber’s Freischütz Bohemian Woods. So did much of the rest of the movement, although the symphonic dialectic necessitating contrast, even at times negation, was not only observed but dramatised. Ultimately, a good deal of Brahms was revealed beneath the surface, although much that was not him, even opposed to him, too. Indeed, the contrast between first and second groups proved so great, especially in the exposition, as to sound almost Mahlerian. None of that was achieved at the expense of traditional lilt, which propelled rather than inhibited new worlds to come.

 

The second movement’s celebrated, all-too-celebrated cor anglais solo was taken beautifully, yet never just beautifully, likewise other solos. That Largo had all the time in the world to unfold, yet not a second more than necessary. It never forsook the quality of song, of Europeanised spiritual. Fast, insistent, almost brutally so, the Scherzo proved exhilarating, brought into still greater relief by (relative) woodland relaxation and charm. The finale proved a finale in the emphatic sense, as it must, with fury not only in the first but the second group too. Sometimes it can relax a little too much, but not here. Its dynamic telos was maintained until the end, as terse as the first movement, and yet, crucially, utterly different too. Brahms, again, remained, if never without ambiguity. This was a fine conclusion indeed, to an outstanding ORF concert. More soon, please!