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

Wigmore Hall

Cathy Milliken: Bright Ring (UK premiere)

Christian Mason: Layers of Love

Dallapiccola: Piccola musica notturna

Benjamin: Into the Little Hill

Anu Komsi (soprano)

Helena Rasker (contralto)
Ensemble Modern

George Benjamin (conductor)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ligeti Quartet - 'Melodicles’: Ligeti, Mason, Harrison, Diabété, Bartók, 17 February 2017

Hall Two, Kings Place
 

Ligeti – String Quartet no.1, ‘Métamorphoses nocturnes’

Christian Mason – Tuvan Songbook
Lou Harrison – String Quartet Set: ‘Estampie’
Fodé Lassana Diabaté (arr. Jacob Garchik) – Sunjata’s Time: ‘Nana Triban’
Bartók – String Quartet no.5, Sz.102

Mandhira de Saram, Patrick Dawkins (violins)

Richard Jones (viola)

Val Welbanks (cello)

 

‘Melodicles’, the title given to this concert as a whole, was a concept of Lou Harrison’s, referring to short motifs, inverted or reversed – perhaps one of the few signs in his music of his study with Schoenberg – to create musical modes. It is Harrison’s centenary this year, so it was especially good to have the Ligeti Quartet play some of his music. (I am not sure I have ever been to a concert in which he was featured before.) I wish I could have been more enthusiastic about this ‘Estampie’ dance from his 1978-9 String Quartet Set. Its simplicity has something to be said for it, I am sure, but I was glad that it did not go on any longer, beginning to tire of its single line melody, shared between first violin and viola, accompanied – for once, very much the right word – by busier, melody-less rhythm on the second violin and percussive use of the cello (knocking on its case, and so on). It was clearly very well played, though, and not at all unpleasant to hear; I was grateful for the opportunity.

 

On either side of the Harrison piece, which one might think of as imagined folk music, came two other folkish pieces. Christian Mason’s 2016 Tuvan Songbook is a transcription (and, to a certain extent, it seems, recomposition) of four traditional Tuvan songs. Two incorporated actual singing – although I was somewhat disappointed that it was not of the throaty variety one might have expected. The sharp rhythmic profile of the first, ‘Dyngylday’, strong on syncopation, augured very well, but I did not find its promise consistently realised. In the fourth, ‘Exir-Kara’ (‘Black Eagle’), it was intriguing to hear singing anticipated by some string extended techniques. Having said that, I found more to capture and retain my attention in the encore, Mason’s Mongolian-inspired Racing Horses, which seemed to me more a composition in its own right.

Perhaps I had just not been on the right wavelength, or in the right mood, for I felt similarly about ‘Nana Triban’, transcribed and arranged for string quartet by Jacob Garchik, from the Malian balafon player, Lassana Diabaté’s 2016 Sunjata’s Time (a Kronos Quartet commission). Cellist Val Wellbanks had the tune, the rest the accompaniment. It was pleasant enough, but I could not help wondering how much had been lost in transcription.

 

On either side of those works – as if the programming itself were conceived as a Bartókian arch – were works by Ligeti and Bartók. Ligeti’s First Quartet revealed itself as a typical mixture of, or dialectic between, ‘process’ and ‘expression’. Its many short sections are highly contrasted indeed – and so they sounded here in performance. Violent, Bartókian outbursts were especially well handled, as was the bizarre waltzing section – and its humour. Subsiding into nothingness at the close was again very well achieved, so much so that the audience seemed unaware that the piece had ended.

 

Bartók’s Fifth Quartet is, by any standards, a towering masterpiece. Itself in the arch form I observed in the programme as a whole, it received an estimable performance (albeit not always helped by the less than ideal acoustic of Kings Place’s Hall Two). The first movement showed a true sense of musical obsessiveness, and not a little wildness, which yet never degenerated into lack of discipline. Night music and Bulgarian meter were in general vividly portrayed in the inner movements. In the finale, Beethovenian purpose, perhaps even method in the motivic working, was unquestionably apparent: inspiration in the very best sense.

Proms Saturday Matinée 4: London Sinfonietta/Fischer - Boulez, Grime, and Mason, 29 August 2015

Cadogan Hall

Boulez – Mémoriale (‘…explosante-fixe…’ Originel)

Helen Grime – A Cold Spring

Boulez – Domaines

Christian Mason – Open to Infinity: A Grain of Sand (United Kingdom premiere)

Boulez – Eclats/Multiples

Michael Cox (flute)

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

London Sinfonietta

Thierry Fischer (conductor)

 

And so, the Proms celebration of Pierre Boulez’s music drew to a close. I have previously lamented the lack of Répons, but otherwise, we have much for which to be grateful. Here, three of Boulez’s works were interspersed with works by two admiring young British composers, Helen Grime and Christian Mason.

First up was Mémoriale, hot on the heels of the Albert Hall performance of …explosante-fixe.... It was interesting to hear the two works in close succession, not least since that experience offered a reminder that the ear can sometimes play tricks: is one hearing electronic sounds or not? Clearly not on this occasion, but I might have guessed so, had I not known otherwise. The flute’s trills, the general contours: all were quite familiar by now; yet of course, they sounded different in a different performance (Michael Cox first among London Sinfonietta equals) and in a very different acoustic, that of Cadogan Hall. The ensemble here seemed to offer something of an aural shadow, reminiscent perhaps of Dialogue de l’ombre double. Boulez’s short piece sounded somewhere in between, or rather somewhere beyond, Debussy and Stravinsky, mediated by hints of the Bergian labyrinth. The horns’ final dying away into nothingness was not the least magical moment.

Helen Grime, in conversation with Tom Service, said how struck she had been, even at music college, by Boulez’s ear for harmony and colour. Her ear is formidable too, in no sense replicating, but happy to admit inspiration. The three movements of A Cold Spring (after a poem by Elizabeth Bishop) offer highly virtuosic writing, each having a featured solo instrument or pair of soloists. The first opens teeming with melody, as if paying updated homage to The Rite of Spring, albeit very much in its own voice. I thought also of Schoenberg – a work such as the First Chamber Symphony – in its melodic profusion, although I am unsure whether such associations are merely my affair. The stiller, second movement (‘Calmo’) brought to me a colouristic hint or two of Birtwistle, perhaps a hint too of a melancholy not entirely dissimilar to his. Dark bass lines (cello and double bass) seem to colour the invention above. Calmness is transformed into something else, prior to a final enchantment, blessed, so it seemed, by all instruments, but perhaps especially the harp. The transition to the third movement is led by the double bass, that movement itself sounding very much as a development of what has gone before, not least in its darkness – melody and harmony, as well as its instrumentation.

In Domaines, the number six is prevalent: the clarinettist, here the excellent Mark van de Wiel, plays from six different stands, each with an original page and a ‘mirror’ thereof, each of those twelve pages having six musical fragments, thus totalling seventy-two in all, ranging in length from forty seconds or so to – temporally speaking, at least – little more than the twinkling of an eye. The collision, navigated by the performer, between ritual theatre and a single instrument’s kaleidoscopic array of colours is not the least of the piece’s claims to drama. And that particular instrument, the clarinet, perhaps inevitably has one listen – and, indeed, watch – mindful of kinship with Birtwistle. Indeed, I could not help but think there was something, whether coincidental or otherwise, of Punch and Judy, albeit suaver, to this performance. One would certainly never have guessed the textual complexity of this assemblage of ‘single’ lines in a performance of such  mesmerising musical theatre. Was Boulez’s aspiration – sorry, not in the Liz Kendall sense – to unendliche Melodie even at this stage perhaps born of Wagner (Parsifal at Bayreuth)? And/or Pelléas? Every so often, there seemed also to be an instrumental, even melodic, reminder of Webern. At any rate, score and performance seemed endlessly generative. The idea of ‘mirrors’ offered other, French resonances, whether with respect to Ravel or even old, Baroque ‘doubles’. One could hear, or fancy one heard, such connections, but this was above all Boulez’s own path, the performer’s, and the listener’s.

Open to Infinity: A Grain of Sand (the title, I assume, inspired by Blake) is the second of Christian Mason’s works dedicated to Boulez, and intended as a tribute. As Mason put it, all three movements were as yet at the ‘grain of sand’ stage, but were open to expansion: a highly Boulezian conception. (Boulez acted as mentor to him at Lucerne.) Another nod to Boulez lies in the use by all fourteen players of crotales, intended as a reference to Le Visage nuptial. In each movement, one can hear, even in a first encounter, the varied working out of the same pitch material (almost Berg-like in its audible presence).  The éclat of the first, ‘In a Grain of Sand’, though it could not be mistaken for Boulez, could certainly be heard as homage. The second, ‘In a Wild Flower’, has almost jazzy inflections: perhaps a touch, dare I suggest it, of Boulez’s would-be antipode, Henze? Whatever the truth of that, there is certainly revealed a keen ear for colour and its relationship to rhythm (which, I admit, could equally be inspired by the orchestral Notations: pure speculation on my part). Dramatically insistent figures characterise the third, ‘In the Palm of Your Hand’, with the London Sinfonietta offering, in a true array of colours, all the performative commitment one would expect.

Eclats/Multiples depends upon split-second decisions from the conductor, not the first and certainly not the last of Boulez’s insistence on the importance of performance. It certainly received a splendid performance from the Sinfonietta and Thierry Fischer. The opening piano éclat announced its Messiaenic inheritance; hearing John Constable, one could almost imagine the ghost of Yvonne Loriod. Such resonances, even echoes, again began to make their own way, however: to construct, perhaps even to destroy, and to suggest further creative-destructive connections (whether thinking of the Second Piano Sonata or the endlessly misquoted interview with Der Spiegel). The illusion and the construction of line familiar from Domaines took on new life in ensemble. The ‘pointillism’ of 1950s serialism has generally been exaggerated, give or take an odd Stockhausen piece; this seemed an object lesson in compositional and performative constructivism from the following decade. (Just, one might say, as in Boulez’s conducting of Webern.) It was a joy to meet in new garb old aural friends from the world of Le Marteau sans maître: to know, with hindsight, where they might lead – or not. Why is this wonderful work not more often performed?