LSO/Rattle - Jolas and Messiaen, 15 June 2023

Barbican Hall

Betsy Jolas: Ces belles années
Messiaen: Turangalîla-Symphonie

Faustine de Monès (soprano)

Peter Donohoe (piano)

Cynthia Millar (ondes Martenot)

London Symphony Orchestra

Sir Simon Rattle (conductor)

Images: Mark Allan

Simon Rattle’s tenure as Music Director of the LSO has been cruelly cut short by English nationalism. The United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, together with Theresa May’s spiteful quashing of a new concert hall project on the grounds that it had been supported by her political enemy George Osborne, ultimately proved too much. And who can blame him, with a family in Berlin? There is only so much fighting one can do. If a great city such as Munich made me an offer, I should be off like a shot. Not that London in general or the LSO in particular has seen the last of Sir Simon; he will return as Conductor Emeritus, not least to continue the Janáček opera series whose Katya Kabanova this January was so resounding a success. The world is grim right now; Britain is grim right now. Perhaps, though, we should not entirely despair. Even in straits as dire as these, the LSO and many of our cultural and intellectual institutions continue to punch far above the weight our miserable, philistine rulers accord them. And a concert such as this, Rattle’s last at the Barbican as Music Director, can still prove the equal, even the envy, of the musical world.  

The first part – one can hardly say ‘half’ when it must have come to about a sixth the length of the rest – was a new work by Betsy Jolas: Ces belles années. Given its first performance the night before, so not strictly a premiere, it proved typical of the composer, arguably typical of the musical and broader culture in which she is rooted, in both proving eminently ‘approachable’ and yet reticent in yielding its secrets. The opening, untuned percussion ceding, or perhaps transforming/being transformed into, the sounds of an orchestra neither small nor large, sounded ominous, harmony either playing a surprisingly ‘traditional’ role or pretending to do so. Whether that were play or something more ‘late’ and reconciliatory remained, at least for me, in the balance. It is difficult, of course, not to think of the work of a composer well into her nineties as ‘late’, just as one did with Elliott Carter at that stage and beyond. (With Carter, one found oneself resorting to ‘late late…’ and eventually simply to ‘most recent’.) But here there did seem, however, obliquely, to be a sense of looking back on a life or lives well lived, perhaps as much a tribute, intentional or otherwise, to Rattle as anything else. There was unease in the petering out of rejoicing: sung words and lines, delivered with laser-like, charismatic artistry by soprano Faustine de Monès, and also orchestral applause and foot-tapping.

Were the soprano’s words, ‘for the occasion and without pretension’, quite so straightforward, even anti-literary, as they might seem? ‘Oh, la joie de ces beaux jours. Célébrons sans cesse ces beaux jours, toutes ces belles années, venez, venez, amenez vos amis. Et toi le tout petit dans ton berceau tu viendras aussi. Et vous là-bas qui passez, venez aussi. Chantons tous ensemble, chantons la joie.’ Perhaps, or was there at least a hint of despair or resignation in having reached this stage, whoever the subject may be, only to fall back on them. Who knows? That may be more a question for the listener than the performer. Not everyone, after all, immediately resorts to Beckett or Mahler. The finely crafted precision of Jolas’s writing is difficult not to stereotype as ‘Gallic’. In a way, why should one try, so long as it does not save one the effort – and rewards – of actually listening. If I found less of an infectious sense of play than I often have with Jolas’s music, maybe I shall just have to try harder—and/or listen differently. I should certainly welcome the opportunity. 

No such doubts here concerning Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, though many have had them over the years, not least Pierre Boulez, first among equals in Messiaen’s galaxy of great pupils. Boulez celebratedly or notoriously performed only the three ‘Turangalîla movements’ out of the complete ten, in a 1973 Proms performance of what he once derided as ‘brothel music’. Some brothel! Whilst in many ways a conductor in Boulez’s own line – Rattle’s exploratory programming and collegiality surely bear Boulez’s stamp – Rattle, not so far as I am aware a composer, has broader and also younger sympathies. Indeed, as Boulez once pointed out, prior to conducting an Olga Neuwirth premiere, whilst it might once have made sense for him to declare Schoenberg dead, that was hardly a pressing concern for Neuwirth and her generation.

 

There were hints, in a good way, of a Boulezian way in Rattle’s performance here. Further laser clarity, ironically helped by the difficult, dry Barbican acoustic which, miraculously, did not overwhelm, was certainly one of them. One could hear every note, every line, every balance—or at least fancied one could. (There is Klingsor-Ravelian magic to Boulez too, after all.) And there were at times signs of a Boulezian ‘modern classicism’, to borrow from Arnold Whittall, which one does not necessarily expect from Rattle. The final movement, indeed, sounded and functioned far more like a traditional symphonic finale than I can recall, earlier performances by Rattle included. Indeed, the work’s unfolding, pli selon pli if you like, was not only remarkably patient and inevitable; it made perfect sense of form and structure in a way I have not always found from Rattle in Austro-German repertoire.

The warmth, though, even in the Barbican was entirely Rattle’s own—well, his, Messiaen’s, and the superlative performers’. Temperature could cool, as in those three ‘Turangalîla’ movements, but the base line was higher, could rise, and did. (Not that Boulez could not be warm too, but in a different way.) The sheer big-heartedness of Messiaen’s vision, as well as its paradoxically earthy mysticism, reaching for the stars and yet penetrating – certainly penetrating – deeper, did not merely came across; it grabbed one by the throat and anything else that took its fancy. Peter Donohoe’s pianism would have been spellbinding in itself, cadenzas scintillating and plumbing depths that brought affinities to Russian composers such as Mussorgsky to vivid light. As part of this orgiastic rite and riot it was all the more so. Likewise Cynthia Millar’s ondes Martenot: so much more than a strange ‘effect’, akin to a continuo gone rogue, whose duetting and ensembles with all manner of other instruments was quite something aurally to behold. Much the same could be said of Elizabeth Burley on celesta and Zeynep Özsuca on keyed glockenspiel. Melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, and a sheer joy in creation to rival Bach or Haydn were both determined and radically free. There were no soloists here; rather all took their place in a zany cosmology both developmental and static, for no and for eternity, of Messiaenic love.

Both LSO concerts were filmed for future broadcast on Marquee TV and Mezzo; this, the last of the two, was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

Benedetti/LSO/Wigglesworth - Piper, Witter-Johnson, Jolas, Stevenson, and Simpson, 13 June 2021

Barbican Hall

Charlie Piper: Flēotan (2007)
Ayanna Witter-Johnson: Fairtrade? (2008)
Betsy Jolas: Well Met Suite (2016)
George Stevenson: Vanishing City (2020, world premiere)
Mark Simpson: Violin Concerto (2020-21, world premiere with live audience)

Nicola Benedetti (violin)

London Symphony Orchestra

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

Another return to old musical friends at an old musical haunt: in this case the LSO at the Barbican. It proved as moving and thrilling as any other, although quite different in nature, the earliest music here being the first of three LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme commissions, Charlie Piper’s Flēotan, from 2007, the newest two premieres of works from this year and last. Patricia Kopatchinskaja and François-Xavier Roth having been unable to travel here on account of interminable travel restrictions, the British premiere of Francisco Coll’s Violin Concerto had to be postponed, replaced with the live audience premiere of Mark Simpson’s Violin Concerto. The rest of the programme was unchanged. Ryan Wigglesworth stepped in at five days’ notice to learn and conduct five pieces new entirely new to him. Wigglesworth, Nicola Benedetti, and the LSO did all five pieces—and themselves—proud.


Flēotan’s title comes from an Old English word, meaning ‘to float’ or ‘fleeting’. (It would later form the foundation for a larger LSO work, The Twittering Machine.) Its glistening, somewhat metallic colours, seemingly born as much of French orchestral tradition as anything closer to home, were married, both in work and performance, to a sharply rhythmic profile. It came across as an extended fleeting moment: perhaps evoked more than merely represented. It was followed by Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s Fairtrade?, which aims to bring to the audience’s attention the high cost of ‘fast fashion’, encouraging us ‘to consider our economic choices and the cost of our convenience at others’ expense’. Whirring, whirling, the machine-like sounds here, aptly enough, came across as necessity rather than choice. A sense of going inwards, of highlighting humanity crushed by such processes, concluding this unsettling, finely crafted piece.

 

Betsy Jolas’s Well Met Suite transforms four pieces from her 2004 Well Met 04 – Pantomime for 12 strings, into a suite for strings. Sharply etched, even contagious (a word for our times!) the material maintained a keen sense of narrative, though not necessarily one that could be put into words. Relationships between instruments took on a life of their own: double bass pizzicato inciting solo cellos, in turn inciting strings above. Stamping of feet was no gimmick, coming across instead as light yet necessary reminder of theatrical roots. Were those shades of Bartók we heard at times? Perhaps, but there was no suspicion of imitation. Scurrying development imparted its own identity and justification.


George Stevenson’s Vanishing City remembers those who, over the winter of 1941-2, successfully undertook the well-nigh incredible task of camouflaging Leningrad’s skyline against German attack. A hard-edged opening gave way, via Russian-sounding brass, to fantasy and still darkness. Bells recalled to us not only what was being lost, but what was being kept. Like everything else heard here, there was fine command of the orchestra as instrument and as collective of instruments: testament to the excellence of performances from the LSO and Wigglesworth, as well of course as to that of the work of composers young and old.

The second half was given over to Mark Simpson’s Violin Concerto. Its scale, but also its emotional impact, were palpable, an audience starved of music for so long responding with enthusiasm to a performance that had kept them on the edge of their seats. Simpson had begun work on the piece just before lockdown last year, and had found, ‘as the pandemic worsened … that it was impossible to “carry on as normal”,’ that ‘the work would need to explore a different set of responses’. It certainly seemed to be the case that audience, composer, and performers alike were responding to shared experience. Its roots, aptly enough, lay in what had gone before, not least in Simpson’s strikingly fantastical violin writing: Szymanowski a hundred years on? Foreboding was recognisable, yet content was new. Tension between a past world in which we already had enough to be angry about and that which we wished—perhaps still wish—to conserve from it came to the boil, shaped and sustained through a keenly felt and projected narrative of five movements (Lamentoso, Dance, Andante Amoroso, Cadenza, Presto con fuoco – Finale). That second movement sounded just as the composer described it: ‘a fast, energetic dance that is in essence a response to having a huge amount of pent-up energy that I was unable to release during the period of lockdown restrictions.’ It and its successors likewise drew freely on ‘tradition’, whatever that may be, without sounding (or feeling) remotely hidebound. Benedetti’s virtuosity captivated throughout, nowhere more so than in a cadenza that was almost a solo violin work in itself—until one began to appreciate its dependence on earlier material, the Dance subdued, perhaps, and sublimated. The hectic frustration of the fifth movement, the LSO at inimitable full throttle, led to final release: much needed and much celebrated.

For International Women's Day

Trifonov/LSO/Rattle - Rameau, Ravel, Poulenc, and Jolas, 17 February 2019

Barbican Hall

Rameau: Les Indes galantes: Suite

Ravel: Piano Concerto in G major

Betsy Jolas: A Little Summer Suite

Poulenc: Les Biches: Suite

Ravel: La Valse

Daniil Trifonov (piano)

London Symphony Orchestra

Simon Rattle (conductor)

An evening of French delights from Simon Rattle and the LSO? Certainly, even if some – not necessarily those one might have expected – delighted more than others. First among not-quite-equals stood the earliest and latest works: a dance suite from Rameau’s Les Indes galantes and a parallel Little Summer Suite, composed in 2015 by Betsy Jolas for Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic.

One silly, at least borderline offensive, newspaper ‘article’ and a host of tedious imitators notwithstanding, Betsy Jolas and her music have not recently been ‘discovered’. Her music deserves to be better known, more frequently performed; that, however, is a different matter entirely. The best response to such nonsense is to do what Rattle and the LSO did here: perform it – and perform it with such excellence. Seven vividly etched miniatures abound with echoes and correspondences, but does not all music when one is acquainting oneself with it? A few Messiaenesque harmonies, even the odd marriage of rhythm and instrumentation recalling Boulez’s Notations, speak not of overt ‘influence’ but perhaps of kinship – and what kinship. The scoring is much sparer than that for the latter. Although the orchestral forces are relatively large – certainly not so large as Boulez’s – the writing is more often ensemble-like. Four of the movements echo – consciously, I presume – Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. ‘Strolling’ movements – ‘Strolling away’, ‘Strolling about’, ‘Strolling under’, and finally, ‘Strolling home’ – they offer continuity and connection; a dark, menacing, almost nineteenth-century Russian bass suggests that honoured predecessor, before taking in Ligetian ‘Knocks and clocks’, responsorial (to that) ‘Shakes and quakes’ and similarly post-liturgical ‘Chants and cheers’, suspended, it seems, in musical mid-air. Succinct, witty, with a nonchalant sign-off suggestive, as noted in Jeremy Thurlow’s booklet note, of Debussy’s Jeux, one was left wanting more, yet admiring of the taste and judgement that had the music end when it did.

The very opening of Jolas’s suite had, at least in context, intriguingly echoed the chains of Rameau’s opening ‘Air pour les esclaves africains’. If Rameau’s (relative) battery of percussion veered in danger of the wearisome, taken out of dramatic context (for a review of a Munich performance of the entire work, click here), the relief of such enlightened Baroque music-making was eminently worth the slight wait. Each of the five movements danced with colour, grace, and a refreshing lack of doctrinaire ‘authenticity’. String vibrato was withdrawn at the opening of the ‘Air pour l’adoration du soleil’, but with good reason, that anticipation prefiguring sunrises in Haydn (both The Creation and The Seasons). The most celebrated number, the ‘Air pour les sauvages’, proceeded with splendid swing. It may be problematic to our postcolonial minds, yet it is far from unprogressive by Enlightenment standards. The closing Chaconne stood, rightly, worlds away from our one-sided notions of the dance, too influenced by Bach and his Romantic successors. The world of Les Indes Galantes, not unlike the Tiepolo frescoes for the stairwell of Würzburg’s Balthasar Neumann Residenz, present a Eurocentric world, to be sure, but one that attempts to embrace, even in small way to elevate, other cultures as surely as did Montesquieu and Voltaire. Trumpets and drums rejoiced, without effacing a tenderness that spoke both to Rameau’s age and our own. For all Rattle’s evident, longstanding belief in ‘period’ performance practice, this did not sound so very distant from the Rameau of forebears such as Raymond Leppard and Jean-François Paillard – and was all the better for such kinship.

Daniil Trifonov joined the orchestra, post-Rameau, for Ravel’s G major Piano Concerto. He appeared transfixed at the opening. Whose spell? Ravel’s or his own? It was unclear, as was much of the rest of his performance. There were delights aplenty in such pellucid pianism, but much of the first movement was indulgent, lacking line and, on occasion, connection with Rattle’s – and the LSO’s – able accompaniment. Harp-led washes of sound were duly gorgeous, likewise woodwind solos seemingly harking back to the Rameau we had just heard, but Trifonov appeared oblivious, pursuing instead, so it seemed, his own rêveries. The slow movement nevertheless proved bewitching. Here, Trifonov’s exquisite modulation of dynamics, silken touch, and above all, endlessly long-breathed phrasing were quite the match for Ravel’s not entirely un-self-regarding writing. There was here a chamber intimacy, pent up with emotion that never quite dared speak its name that revealed darker undercurrents than I can hitherto recall: a tragic Tombeau de Rameau composed before our ears. If only the first movement and an often oddly-balanced – at least from my seat – finale had matched such extraordinary music-making. Still, Trifonov’s closing exuberance reaped its own rewards – even if he again occasionally parted company from the orchestra. What I believe to have been his own transcription from Rachmaninov’s cantata, The Bells, made for a richly exploratory encore.

Poulenc’s Les biches, here given in suite form, has its admirers. Love much of Poulenc’s music though I do, I cannot help but find much of this ballet music somewhat thin gruel. At any rate, it is very much a period piece. Rattle and the LSO did what they could to point up Stravinskian correspondences, the opening of the ‘Andantino’ very much a case in point, likewise the Pulcinella-like writing of the ‘Final’. (If only the latter benefited from Stravinsky’s – and Pergolesi (attrib.)’s – concision. At its best, for instance in the opening ‘Rondeau’, there was a charming air of an imaginary vieille France: not Rameau’s, but why should it be? Ravel’s La Valse proved a similarly mixed bag: not, of course, as work, but as performance. Rattle certainly captured the dark strangeness of the opening, likewise a later, hallucinogenic nausea to the strings. I was less convinced, though, by the driven, almost vulgar quality to climaxes and other passages. A militaristic subtext? Perhaps; this, however, sounded close to Shostakovich. An odd performance, discontinuities to the fore, was played as well as one would expect; it certainly had me think.

For International Women's Day

Proms Satuday Matinée 1 - BCMG/Ollu - Boulez, Usui, Jolas, and Lee, 25 July 2015

Cadogan Hall

Boulez, arr. Johannes Schöllhorn – Notations II, XI, X (1945, arr. 2011, United Kingdom premiere)

Schöllhorn – La Treizième (2011, United Kingdom premiere)
Shiori Usui – Ophiocordyceps unilateralis s.l. (2015, world premiere)
Betsy Jolas – Wanderlied (2003, United Kingdom premiere)
Joanna Lee – Hammer of Solitude (2015, BBC commission, world premiere)
Boulez – Dérive 2 (1988-2006, rev.2009)

Ulrich Heinen (cello)

Hilary Summers (contralto)
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
Franck Ollu (conductor)

It might seem churlish to complain about the BBC Proms coverage of Pierre Boulez’s 90^th anniversary. After all, there are a few performances dotted around – although some seem rather oddly programmed, as if embarrassed at the presence of new or newish music. (That could certainly not be claimed in the present case.) Yet I cannot help but wish that someone had shown the imagination and necessary determination to programme Boulez’s electronic masterpiece, Répons: for once, surely a work that might have been revealed to good advantage in the Royal Albert Hall. For that, one alas – as so often – has not only to go elsewhere, but abroad: be it to Paris, Amsterdam, Salzburg… (I have opted for Salzburg next month, and look forward to the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Matthias Pintscher revealing the work in the flesh to me for the first time.)

Anyway, missed opportunities aside – by the way, how about some Stockhausen? I’ve never heard a better-suited ‘RAH work’ than Cosmic Pulses – we heard a well-, often very well-performed Proms Matinée at Cadogan Hall, with no shortage of music that was either new to the country or new to the world. First up were three of Johannes Schöllhorn’s arrangements for ensemble of Notations (the piano originals, not Boulez’s extraordinary orchestral expansions). The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group under Franck Ollu sounded slightly unfocused to start with, but Notation X had a very keen rhythmic sense. La Treizième was a nice surprise: one bar from each of the twelve added together, to form another, intriguingly unified twelve-bar piece. It actually put me a little in mind of the revisiting of earlier waltzes in Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, though perhaps I am just being a little sentimental there. I liked Schöllhorn’s sous-bois very much when I heard it at the Wigmore Hall last year; we need to hear more of him in this country. A Proms performance of a larger-scale work would be greatly appreciated another season.

Shiori Usui’s Ophiocordyceps unilateralis s.l. will surely face little competition for the foreseeable future in the world of nomenclature. We learned from a brief conversation between the composer and Tom Service that the piece is named after an infectious fungus which works its negative magic upon ants. (Whilst I remember, the printed programmes for the Saturday Matinées are, quite simply, a disgrace: not a single word on either the works or the non-Boulez composers. Can something equivalent to the evening concerts, or at least something better than that not be managed?) In five very short movements – ‘Camponotus leonarci’, ‘Spores’, ‘Pathology’, ‘The Grip’, and ‘Hyphae’ – we heard a considerable array of ensemble colour, very different in each case. There was perhaps a sense of Boulezian éclat, albeit more overtly, or at least conventionally, thematic, and also sometimes more tonal in language. It was elevating to see one newspaper critic rise from his seat and leave after that performance; it will be interesting to see whether his review covers the rest of the concert.

Betsy Jolas is but a year younger than Boulez. We seem to hear her music very little in this country; the United Kingdom premiere of Wanderlied was therefore especially welcome. Wanderlied was inspired by the idea of an old woman (the cello) travelling from town to town as storyteller, the tile borrowed from a 1943 poem by Jolas’s father. Crowds gather around the woman and comment, but two people in the crowd do not like her, yet continue to follow. What emerged was a long-breathed, humorous piece, assure both of craft and emotional expression, timbre not surprisingly an important connecting force between the two, insofar – a big ‘insofar’ – as they may be separated. I thought of it as, in a way, a song without words, or perhaps better a cantata without words. Jolas looked, by the way, almost incredibly sprightly on stage, so we have every reason to hear a good deal more from her, programming permitting.

I wish I could be so enthusiastic, or indeed at all enthusiastic, about Joanna Lee’s Hammer of Solitude. The idea fits, clearly a reference to Le Marteau sans maître – and the participation of Hilary Summers fitted too. Summers proved her usual self, that most individual of voices as communicative with words and notes as one could ask for. Alas, the three movements – ‘The hammer alone in the house’, ‘A presentiment’, and ‘A suicide’ – seem strangely childish, which is not to say childlike, in construction and expression. Word-painting is obsessive, yet basic, almost as if following a guide in a compositional exercise. The (very) sub-Berberian noises at the opening hint at a greater ambition, which yet remains unrealised. The final line: ‘Release complete, relief’. Quite.

 

Finally, Dérive 2. It is the Boulez work I still find the most difficult to come to grips with; I cannot claim to ‘understand’ it and indeed find it almost disconcertingly ‘pleasant’ in its progress. Boulez’s constructivism, albeit a flowing constructivism, came across clearly and, crucially, with structural as well as expressive meaning. The ghost of Messiaen seemed intriguingly to hover, or rather to fly, at times, not least in some of those gloriously splashy piano chords. The ‘lead’ taken by different instruments at different times was, perhaps, more than usually apparent, suggesting almost an updated sinfonia concertante, whereas, for instance, Daniel Barenboim’s performances (see here and here; number three will come in Salzburg next month) have emerged, at least to my ears, as more orchestrally conceived. As is the way with even half-decent performances of such music, I noticed things I had never heard before. Something that especially struck me on this occasion was the timbral similarity – surely testament to Boulez’s work as conductor – to a passage in The Rite of Spring. I shall have to look at the scores to find where and when, or perhaps I shall never re-discover what my ears were telling me on that occasion. Such is a good part of the mystery and the magic of live performance.