Royal Albert Hall
Bridge – Isabella
Birtwistle – Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (United Kingdom premiere)
Holst – The Planets
Christian Teztlaff (violin)
Holst Singers
BBC Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson (conductor)
More odd programming at the Proms. It is not irrelevant to see Birtwistle in an English context, there being a strong vein of melancholy in his music to trace back at least as far as Dowland; it was nevertheless unclear that Frank Bridge and Gustav Holst were best choices as supporting composers for the British premiere of the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. (The first performance took place in Boston earlier this year.) This is the first piece Birtwistle has explicitly named a concerto, despite forerunners in pieces such as Antiphonies for piano and orchestra. What I shall say is based upon but a single hearing, with all the caveats that must imply, but I was left in no doubt that we heard a masterpiece. The increasing importance of strings to Birtwistle’s tonal palette, as remarked upon in Jonathan Cross’s model programme note, was in evidence from the outset. Cross notes the precedent of Mendelssohn, of whose concerto Birtwistle is fond, in particular its ‘sparkle’ and the way in which the soloist throws the listener straight into the work. I also heard surprisingly strong echoes of Berg, both intervallic and harmonic, and not just at the opening. There also seemed to be reminiscences, whether conscious or otherwise, of Gawain, not least in terms of Birtwistle’s very personal use of metallic percussion. The violin part was throughout performed with outstanding musicality and virtuosity by Christian Tetzlaff; it is in many respects soaringly lyrical, though doubtless it will not have seemed so to tone-deaf reactionaries. For a composer who has long been associated with his native woodwind, it was delightful to realise how gratefully written for the instrument the piece is. Solos spark off orchestral strings and indeed the rest of the orchestra; there is, needless to say, some haunting woodwind writing too. There is an especially exquisite – yes, Birtwistle can be exquisite – not-quite-duet between violin and bassoon, the latter more shadow (Boulezian ombre, albeit in a non-electronic context?) than partner. Rhythm is a predictably strong driving force, but we also hear ravishing oases of reflection: bizarre though this may sound, I was put in mind of the precedent of Szymanowski. At other times, however, the listener is treated to a post-Messiaen world of wind and percussive sonorities, which never, however, sound as harsh as much of the composer’s earlier writing. Above all, as one would expect from the greatest English musical dramatist since Purcell, there is a true sense of the violinist as Faustian protagonist, at least as much so as, arguably still more so than, the soloist in Henze’s Third Violin Concerto (which presents three portraits from Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus). A subsiding, moving, tuba line leads us to the final solo pizzicato, completing a tapestry of unusually gorgeous quality. Teztlaff and David Robertson, conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra on excellent form, presented the work as the repertory piece it must become.
It is difficult to begrudge an occasional performance of Bridge’s symphonic poem, Isabella, not least since it was premiered by Sir Henry Wood at the Proms in 1907 and has not been heard in these concerts since. On the other hand, I cannot say that I am surprised by its absence. A quiet opening for violas and kettledrums sounds promising, if a little blatantly modelled upon Liszt’s Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe, the final symphonic poem written by the form’s inventor. Influences thereafter come thick and fast: Tchaikovsky, Elgar, Strauss, Debussy. Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet is clearly a model for much of the brass writing, but Bridge has none of the Russian composer’s melodic genius. The form appears to follow quite closely the example of Keats’s poem, Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil. I wished that it had done so rather more quickly.
The Planets received a good performance: at its best the BBC SO sounded very good indeed, though there were moments when it sounded a little lacklustre, if never so much as it tends to under its principal conductor. ‘Mars’, surely the finest movement in the score, was also the finest in performance: seething in its menace, mechanical in its barbarism, a true premonition of war so swiftly to come. The Royal Albert Hall organ, here and elsewhere, made a fine impact. Alas, elements in the audience elected to applaud after this and every other movement – save, of course, ‘Uranus’, though I am not sure that I should have put it past them then too. ‘Venus’ and ‘Mercury’ benefited from a nicely French sound, perhaps more Ravel than Debussy, and an excellent solo from leader, Andrew Haveron; both movements do, though, tend to overstay their welcome. We heard a bright and breezy ‘Jupiter’, bringing jollity as required; if parts of the score sounded a little like a concerto for orchestra, then that is really Holst’s doing. The ‘big tune’ hit home, sounding noble rather than mawkish. Robertson handled the onward tread of ‘Saturn’ well, also pointing up intriguing consonances with Parsifal. ‘Uranus’ mixed jovial magician with sorcerer’s apprentice to good effect. Perhaps, however, after ‘Mars’, the highlight was the expert, imperceptible way in which the off-stage female voices of the Holst Singers stole into the hall: that was really rather beautiful.
Showing posts with label David Robertson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Robertson. Show all posts
Wednesday, 7 September 2011
Monday, 19 January 2009
Total Immersion: Stockhausen Day, 17 January 2009
Barbican Centre and Jerwood Hall, LSO St Luke’s
Tuning In (Omnibus film by Barrie Gavin, introduced by Barrie Gavin)
--------
Stockhausen – Adieu, for wind quintet
Stockhausen – Klavierstücke, nos. I-IV, VII, and IX
Stockhausen – Kontra-Punkte
Stockhausen – Choral
Stockhausen – Chöre für Doris
Stockhausen – Litanei 97
Nicolas Hodges (piano)
Emma Tring (soprano)
Guildhall New Music Ensemble
BBC Singers
Richard Baker (conductor)
David Hill (conductor)
---------
Stockhausen – Inori
Kathinka Pasveer (dancer-mime)
Alain Louafi (dancer-mime)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson (conductor)
--------
Stockhausen – Hymnen
The first of three BBC Symphony Orchestra ‘Total Immersion’ days was devoted to Karlheinz Stockhausen. Last year’s Stockhausen Day at the Proms and the KLANG Festival at the Southbank would have provided an ideal context for many although, given the size of the ferociously hard-working composer’s œuvre, there remains much more music to be discovered. Barrie Gavin’s 1978 Omnibus film on the composer provided a stimulating appetiser, the director proving a diverting speaker in his introduction to this introduction. Centred around excerpts from a Songcircle performance of Stimmung and from Stockhausen’s fascinating lecture at the Oxford Union, it was sad to reflect – as Gavin did – that it would be inconceivable for such a film to be made today, let alone shown on BBC One. It might, he joked, just about make it onto a putative BBC Thirty-two at midnight. What most surprised me was how witty a speaker the composer proved to be. In my experience, his music, whatever its other virtues, is singularly lacking in humour; yet here, he was able to employ that very quality not for its own sake, not as a dubious means of acquiring popularity, but to grant insights into his music.
The first of the day’s three concerts was to my mind the most rewarding in ‘purely’ musical terms, the presence of some interesting but hardly representative juvenilia notwithstanding. LSO St Luke’s Jerwood Hall provided the setting, whilst the two evening concerts would take place in the Barbican Hall. Adieu (1966) was one of the few non-electronic works Stockhausen wrote during the 1960s, prompted by a request from the oboist Wilhelm Meyer for a memorial to his son, Wolfgang Christian. I had never heard the piece before but was instantly taken by how well Stockhausen wrote for wind quintet (flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon). For a composer who was often most keen of all his contemporaries to forge ahead, apparently to sever links with tradition, there was a surprising degree of Mozartian reference or at least consonance, albeit with a typical fearlessness in creating something quite new. An opening cadence hinted at what was to come, sounding like a Mozartian objet trouvé, followed by mesmerising airborne material, which put me in mind of Ligeti’s Lontano. Such a pattern would continue throughout the piece, with a more ‘traditional’ gesture, always conducted, followed by freer, exploratory material, often of a similar nature to that mentioned, although one episode displayed considerable violence. Paul Griffiths’s helpful notes explained that the durations of events were given by the Fibonacci sequence (1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144) and that ordered increase, both in composition and in performance, was palpable: something more stratified, hierarchical even than, for instance, the fantasy of Boulezian proliferation. The ending, when it came, was charming, almost Classical. Richard Baker and members of the Guildhall New Music Ensemble proved excellent guides in this initial exploration.
Next were six of Stockhausen’s seminal Klavierstücke, expertly performed by Nicolas Hodges. I-IV were performed as a group, followed by V, then VII. It was a while since I had heard any of Stockhausen’s piano music in concert, the previous occasion having been a spellbinding recital by Maurizio Pollini, when, heard in the context of Brahms, Webern, and subsequently Beethoven, my ears had readily related Stockhausen’s music to German tradition. I suspected that this would be less the case in an all-Stockhausen concert but, for whatever reason, I was mistaken, probably a sign that this music is now truly taking its place in the repertoire but also surely a sign of the pianist’s genuine musical artistry. Written in 1952 and 1953, the first four pieces fit very well together; when performed in this way, as Griffiths noted, we can hear them almost as four brief sonata movements. I also thought of the single-movement/four movement duality of the Liszt B minor piano sonata or the Schoenberg Chamber Symphony no.1. The first piece displayed a gleaming, crystalline sound: neo-Bauhaus, if you like. Hodges’ performance drew attention to the crucial importance – as signalled by the composer himself – of the duration of pauses in relation to the serialised dynamic contrasts. Everything sounded – as indeed it is – both fantastical and absolutely logical. The same could be said for the other three pieces, the flowing, Andante-like second ‘movement’, the ‘scherzo’ of Webernesque concision, and the pointillistic ‘finale’, in which one could almost see the stars from which Stockhausen would soon draw such inspiration – and indeed descent. In the fifth piece (1954), some chords – which were most definitely heard as chords – could have come straight out of a set of Schoenberg Klavierstücke. Hodges imparted a true sense of continuity and seemed to refer back to the ‘cascade of gestures’ (Griffiths) that had characterised the first piece. Indeed, I heard the fifth almost as an expansion of the possibilities of the first, not least in the clearly audible demonstration of serialised dynamics as an integral part of composition, dynamic contrasts no longer being relegated to the realm of ‘expression’ of some higher-level material. The composer’s exploration of different registers of the piano, with different consequences for sustaining and ‘natural’ resonance was expertly projected here and in the seventh piece, although the latter certainly presented its own character, ‘personality’ even: more abrupt, more austere, yet spun with a similar musical line. There was violence too, all the more telling given that it followed such attention to detail in making every one of the repeated sounds different in its attack and dynamic projection. Intervals, pauses, and the relations between them were anything but hermetic abstractions. Stockhausen had a narrative to tell and Hodges told it. Something one often forgets – or perhaps never knew in the first place – about Stockhausen is that, whilst working in the Norwestdeutscher Rundfunk’s Studio for Electronic Music, he pursued doctoral studies in phonetics and communication theory, subsequently describing his supervisor, Werner Meyer-Eppler as the best teacher he ever had. Stockhausen may have been an intrepid explorer but always in the service of communication.
For Kontra-Punkte (1952, revised 1953), Baker and the Guildhall New Music Ensemble (here flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, piano, harp, violin, and ’cello) returned. Widely considered to be his ‘breakthrough piece’ – the composer himself made it ‘no.1’ in his cataloguing system – it has lost none of its lustre. It was most interesting to hear it with memories of Punkte, the piece ‘against’ which it is to some extent written, not yet faded from the Gürzenich Orchestra’s Proms performance last year (albeit in the last of the composer’s heavily revised versions). Baker and his players imparted not only a ‘technical’ musical sense of points giving way to groups – Stockhausen’s work is partly a commentary, intentional or otherwise, upon the progression of his own compositional technique – but also a poetic sense of how this might be understood as blossoming. I was impressed by the way in which each instrument retained, arguably acquired, its own character, again rather like a star in the night sky, whilst forming part of a greater constellation. There is another shift within the work, towards predominance of the piano part, somewhat helped by the similar tones of the harp, but largely the product of a Herculean effort on the part of the ensemble’s pianist. Here, Richard Uttley’s effort was not in vain, helping Baker to shape the dramatic trajectory of this wonderful work. No wonder that the notoriously demanding Boulez entertains no reservations about it.
The second half opened with the early Choral, from just two years earlier, 1950. It certainly does what it says on the tine, the line-by-line treatment standing in direct descent from Bach, albeit without any sense of compositional originality. David Hill shaped the BBC Singers’ mellifluous response to the text very well, including a telling pause between stanzas. I fancied that I heard something of another of Stockhausen’s teachers, Frank Martin, as I also did in the following Chöre für Doris, settings in translation of Verlaine, also from 1950. Three contrasting choruses, ‘Die Nachtigall’, ‘Armer junger Hirt’, and ‘Agnus Dei’, again displayed considerable aplomb in the handling of choral forces and again seemed singularly lacking in intimations of what was to come. I was, however, rather taken with the way in which different vocal parts displayed different vocal characters – in more senses than one – in the middle number, telling of a poor young shepherd and his love. The line, in which Verlaine, in Rilke’s translation, beseeches the Lamb of God to grant us peace, not war, was aptly imploring, both in composition and in performance.
Hodges then returned with the ninth of the Klavierstücke (1954-5, revised 1961). He was fully equal to the implacable opening with its long diminuendo of repeated and almost-repeated notes. Once heard, this cannot be forgotten, certainly not whilst the rest of the piece vainly attempts to break free of its oppressive shadow – not unlike the horrendous discord towards the end of the first movement of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony – and certainly not in this fine performance. Except, of course, it is not merely a memory, for it recurs, foreshortened and punctuated, until finally some provisional escape is attained. Once again, Hodges conveyed not only the musical but also the dramatic substance of Stockhausen’s vision.
Finally, we heard the extraordinary Litanei 97, Stockhausen’s 1997 reworking of ‘Litanei’, one of the ‘text compositions’ making up the 1968 Aus den sieben Tagen. Here the composer sets his original text, for speaking chorus and Japanese rin (bowl-shaped gongs from temple rituals, here struck by the conductor). This is ritual and difficult to judge in musical terms, but the spectacle, replete with blue and silver robes, was captivating. The singers formed a circle with the priestly conductor in the centre, the circle – later two concentric circles – sometimes rotating, eventually turning outwards and dispersing. Bells added both a haunting sound in themselves and a resonant punctuation. Members of the choir rather than the conductor intoned; I was not quite sure why this was the case, but it did no particular harm. There were two unfortunate interventions, one from a member of the audience in the balcony, who dropped a programme from on high, and the other from David Hill, who knocked over one of the bowls. It is, of course, easy to mock, but the question of the purpose of music in a modern, all-too-secular world is of crucial importance, and one Stockhausen, unlike so many others, was not afraid to address.
This nicely set the scene for the first of the evening performances, that of Inori (1973-4). Stockhausen’s decisive return to the ‘formula’-melodic method of composition, first broached in Mantra, was admirably described in David Robertson’s clear yet far from patronising spoken introduction. In these ‘adorations’, the basic elements of music – rhythm, dynamics, melody, harmony, and polyphony – are brought into being, one by one, each of the five sections devoted to one of the five sections of the composer’s generative formula. The mime-dancers, acting according to Stockhausen’s precise instructions, mirror – or do they lead? – the musical development and once again impart an undeniable sense of ritual to the unfolding proceedings. Certainly the basic, primæval opening aptly presented the ‘invocation’ of the work’s title. Oddly enough, the monotone G, pervading almost the entire work, is not ‘monotonous’ in the popular sense, although it proved impossible to shift it from my memory at the end of the performance. This is process music but not minimalism, as ultra-serialist as anything Stockhausen wrote during his Darmstadt years, both maddening and beguiling in its inexorable simplicity. Robertson and the BBC Symphony Orchestra could not, I suspect, have been bettered as advocates, understanding all of this perfectly. Their handling of the several crucial echoes was especially impressive, quite magical. It was unfortunate that, occasionally, the mime-dancers fell a little out of sync, a failing that drew attention away from the ritual. As the work became louder and the orchestra was given its head, there were sounds which, taken in isolation, would not have been totally out of place in Mahler, but context is all, or almost all. We were being led, visually as well as musically, towards an entrance into a mysterious temple. Applause was, I suppose, inevitable at the end, but I found the experience unsettling. Either this was a ritual of quite a different nature from conventional concert-going, in which case the reaction seemed inappropriate, or, given the supreme lack of irony, it was charlatanry, in which case...
But on to the final performance, returning to the mid-sixties for the internationalist tape-work, Hymnen (1966-7). There are actually two versions for musicians too, yet it was the ‘pure’ original we heard here. Hymnen is quite a testament to Stockhausen’s unique imagination, a montage of four ‘regions’ – I to IV, dedicated respectively to Boulez, Pousseur, Cage, and Berio – in which we hear various national anthems, shortwave radio signals, voices, crowds, aircraft, Stockhausen in discussion with his assistant, and so on, until finally reaching some sort of peace with the composer’s breathing. There is much that is of great interest – and, as ever with Stockhausen, it never seems that the concept is more important than the result. The distortions, intersections, and juxtapositions are genuinely compelling. Yet I could not help but wonder whether it needed to last two hours (one might answer, ‘but why should it not?); or, if it did, whether the Barbican Hall without lights was really the place for such a ‘performance’. No use was really made of the space, in sharp contrast, say, with the imaginative deployment of the Royal Albert Hall for last year’s British premiere of COSMIC PULSES. Yet in suggesting to us that a conventional concert hall may not really be an appropriate setting for his music, in disturbing our ideas about what a ‘concert’ might be, Stockhausen is doubtless performing a great service. That he is not merely doing that but is creating something utterly new elevates him from the merely Cageian.
Tuning In (Omnibus film by Barrie Gavin, introduced by Barrie Gavin)
--------
Stockhausen – Adieu, for wind quintet
Stockhausen – Klavierstücke, nos. I-IV, VII, and IX
Stockhausen – Kontra-Punkte
Stockhausen – Choral
Stockhausen – Chöre für Doris
Stockhausen – Litanei 97
Nicolas Hodges (piano)
Emma Tring (soprano)
Guildhall New Music Ensemble
BBC Singers
Richard Baker (conductor)
David Hill (conductor)
---------
Stockhausen – Inori
Kathinka Pasveer (dancer-mime)
Alain Louafi (dancer-mime)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson (conductor)
--------
Stockhausen – Hymnen
The first of three BBC Symphony Orchestra ‘Total Immersion’ days was devoted to Karlheinz Stockhausen. Last year’s Stockhausen Day at the Proms and the KLANG Festival at the Southbank would have provided an ideal context for many although, given the size of the ferociously hard-working composer’s œuvre, there remains much more music to be discovered. Barrie Gavin’s 1978 Omnibus film on the composer provided a stimulating appetiser, the director proving a diverting speaker in his introduction to this introduction. Centred around excerpts from a Songcircle performance of Stimmung and from Stockhausen’s fascinating lecture at the Oxford Union, it was sad to reflect – as Gavin did – that it would be inconceivable for such a film to be made today, let alone shown on BBC One. It might, he joked, just about make it onto a putative BBC Thirty-two at midnight. What most surprised me was how witty a speaker the composer proved to be. In my experience, his music, whatever its other virtues, is singularly lacking in humour; yet here, he was able to employ that very quality not for its own sake, not as a dubious means of acquiring popularity, but to grant insights into his music.
The first of the day’s three concerts was to my mind the most rewarding in ‘purely’ musical terms, the presence of some interesting but hardly representative juvenilia notwithstanding. LSO St Luke’s Jerwood Hall provided the setting, whilst the two evening concerts would take place in the Barbican Hall. Adieu (1966) was one of the few non-electronic works Stockhausen wrote during the 1960s, prompted by a request from the oboist Wilhelm Meyer for a memorial to his son, Wolfgang Christian. I had never heard the piece before but was instantly taken by how well Stockhausen wrote for wind quintet (flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon). For a composer who was often most keen of all his contemporaries to forge ahead, apparently to sever links with tradition, there was a surprising degree of Mozartian reference or at least consonance, albeit with a typical fearlessness in creating something quite new. An opening cadence hinted at what was to come, sounding like a Mozartian objet trouvé, followed by mesmerising airborne material, which put me in mind of Ligeti’s Lontano. Such a pattern would continue throughout the piece, with a more ‘traditional’ gesture, always conducted, followed by freer, exploratory material, often of a similar nature to that mentioned, although one episode displayed considerable violence. Paul Griffiths’s helpful notes explained that the durations of events were given by the Fibonacci sequence (1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144) and that ordered increase, both in composition and in performance, was palpable: something more stratified, hierarchical even than, for instance, the fantasy of Boulezian proliferation. The ending, when it came, was charming, almost Classical. Richard Baker and members of the Guildhall New Music Ensemble proved excellent guides in this initial exploration.
Next were six of Stockhausen’s seminal Klavierstücke, expertly performed by Nicolas Hodges. I-IV were performed as a group, followed by V, then VII. It was a while since I had heard any of Stockhausen’s piano music in concert, the previous occasion having been a spellbinding recital by Maurizio Pollini, when, heard in the context of Brahms, Webern, and subsequently Beethoven, my ears had readily related Stockhausen’s music to German tradition. I suspected that this would be less the case in an all-Stockhausen concert but, for whatever reason, I was mistaken, probably a sign that this music is now truly taking its place in the repertoire but also surely a sign of the pianist’s genuine musical artistry. Written in 1952 and 1953, the first four pieces fit very well together; when performed in this way, as Griffiths noted, we can hear them almost as four brief sonata movements. I also thought of the single-movement/four movement duality of the Liszt B minor piano sonata or the Schoenberg Chamber Symphony no.1. The first piece displayed a gleaming, crystalline sound: neo-Bauhaus, if you like. Hodges’ performance drew attention to the crucial importance – as signalled by the composer himself – of the duration of pauses in relation to the serialised dynamic contrasts. Everything sounded – as indeed it is – both fantastical and absolutely logical. The same could be said for the other three pieces, the flowing, Andante-like second ‘movement’, the ‘scherzo’ of Webernesque concision, and the pointillistic ‘finale’, in which one could almost see the stars from which Stockhausen would soon draw such inspiration – and indeed descent. In the fifth piece (1954), some chords – which were most definitely heard as chords – could have come straight out of a set of Schoenberg Klavierstücke. Hodges imparted a true sense of continuity and seemed to refer back to the ‘cascade of gestures’ (Griffiths) that had characterised the first piece. Indeed, I heard the fifth almost as an expansion of the possibilities of the first, not least in the clearly audible demonstration of serialised dynamics as an integral part of composition, dynamic contrasts no longer being relegated to the realm of ‘expression’ of some higher-level material. The composer’s exploration of different registers of the piano, with different consequences for sustaining and ‘natural’ resonance was expertly projected here and in the seventh piece, although the latter certainly presented its own character, ‘personality’ even: more abrupt, more austere, yet spun with a similar musical line. There was violence too, all the more telling given that it followed such attention to detail in making every one of the repeated sounds different in its attack and dynamic projection. Intervals, pauses, and the relations between them were anything but hermetic abstractions. Stockhausen had a narrative to tell and Hodges told it. Something one often forgets – or perhaps never knew in the first place – about Stockhausen is that, whilst working in the Norwestdeutscher Rundfunk’s Studio for Electronic Music, he pursued doctoral studies in phonetics and communication theory, subsequently describing his supervisor, Werner Meyer-Eppler as the best teacher he ever had. Stockhausen may have been an intrepid explorer but always in the service of communication.
For Kontra-Punkte (1952, revised 1953), Baker and the Guildhall New Music Ensemble (here flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, piano, harp, violin, and ’cello) returned. Widely considered to be his ‘breakthrough piece’ – the composer himself made it ‘no.1’ in his cataloguing system – it has lost none of its lustre. It was most interesting to hear it with memories of Punkte, the piece ‘against’ which it is to some extent written, not yet faded from the Gürzenich Orchestra’s Proms performance last year (albeit in the last of the composer’s heavily revised versions). Baker and his players imparted not only a ‘technical’ musical sense of points giving way to groups – Stockhausen’s work is partly a commentary, intentional or otherwise, upon the progression of his own compositional technique – but also a poetic sense of how this might be understood as blossoming. I was impressed by the way in which each instrument retained, arguably acquired, its own character, again rather like a star in the night sky, whilst forming part of a greater constellation. There is another shift within the work, towards predominance of the piano part, somewhat helped by the similar tones of the harp, but largely the product of a Herculean effort on the part of the ensemble’s pianist. Here, Richard Uttley’s effort was not in vain, helping Baker to shape the dramatic trajectory of this wonderful work. No wonder that the notoriously demanding Boulez entertains no reservations about it.
The second half opened with the early Choral, from just two years earlier, 1950. It certainly does what it says on the tine, the line-by-line treatment standing in direct descent from Bach, albeit without any sense of compositional originality. David Hill shaped the BBC Singers’ mellifluous response to the text very well, including a telling pause between stanzas. I fancied that I heard something of another of Stockhausen’s teachers, Frank Martin, as I also did in the following Chöre für Doris, settings in translation of Verlaine, also from 1950. Three contrasting choruses, ‘Die Nachtigall’, ‘Armer junger Hirt’, and ‘Agnus Dei’, again displayed considerable aplomb in the handling of choral forces and again seemed singularly lacking in intimations of what was to come. I was, however, rather taken with the way in which different vocal parts displayed different vocal characters – in more senses than one – in the middle number, telling of a poor young shepherd and his love. The line, in which Verlaine, in Rilke’s translation, beseeches the Lamb of God to grant us peace, not war, was aptly imploring, both in composition and in performance.
Hodges then returned with the ninth of the Klavierstücke (1954-5, revised 1961). He was fully equal to the implacable opening with its long diminuendo of repeated and almost-repeated notes. Once heard, this cannot be forgotten, certainly not whilst the rest of the piece vainly attempts to break free of its oppressive shadow – not unlike the horrendous discord towards the end of the first movement of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony – and certainly not in this fine performance. Except, of course, it is not merely a memory, for it recurs, foreshortened and punctuated, until finally some provisional escape is attained. Once again, Hodges conveyed not only the musical but also the dramatic substance of Stockhausen’s vision.
Finally, we heard the extraordinary Litanei 97, Stockhausen’s 1997 reworking of ‘Litanei’, one of the ‘text compositions’ making up the 1968 Aus den sieben Tagen. Here the composer sets his original text, for speaking chorus and Japanese rin (bowl-shaped gongs from temple rituals, here struck by the conductor). This is ritual and difficult to judge in musical terms, but the spectacle, replete with blue and silver robes, was captivating. The singers formed a circle with the priestly conductor in the centre, the circle – later two concentric circles – sometimes rotating, eventually turning outwards and dispersing. Bells added both a haunting sound in themselves and a resonant punctuation. Members of the choir rather than the conductor intoned; I was not quite sure why this was the case, but it did no particular harm. There were two unfortunate interventions, one from a member of the audience in the balcony, who dropped a programme from on high, and the other from David Hill, who knocked over one of the bowls. It is, of course, easy to mock, but the question of the purpose of music in a modern, all-too-secular world is of crucial importance, and one Stockhausen, unlike so many others, was not afraid to address.
This nicely set the scene for the first of the evening performances, that of Inori (1973-4). Stockhausen’s decisive return to the ‘formula’-melodic method of composition, first broached in Mantra, was admirably described in David Robertson’s clear yet far from patronising spoken introduction. In these ‘adorations’, the basic elements of music – rhythm, dynamics, melody, harmony, and polyphony – are brought into being, one by one, each of the five sections devoted to one of the five sections of the composer’s generative formula. The mime-dancers, acting according to Stockhausen’s precise instructions, mirror – or do they lead? – the musical development and once again impart an undeniable sense of ritual to the unfolding proceedings. Certainly the basic, primæval opening aptly presented the ‘invocation’ of the work’s title. Oddly enough, the monotone G, pervading almost the entire work, is not ‘monotonous’ in the popular sense, although it proved impossible to shift it from my memory at the end of the performance. This is process music but not minimalism, as ultra-serialist as anything Stockhausen wrote during his Darmstadt years, both maddening and beguiling in its inexorable simplicity. Robertson and the BBC Symphony Orchestra could not, I suspect, have been bettered as advocates, understanding all of this perfectly. Their handling of the several crucial echoes was especially impressive, quite magical. It was unfortunate that, occasionally, the mime-dancers fell a little out of sync, a failing that drew attention away from the ritual. As the work became louder and the orchestra was given its head, there were sounds which, taken in isolation, would not have been totally out of place in Mahler, but context is all, or almost all. We were being led, visually as well as musically, towards an entrance into a mysterious temple. Applause was, I suppose, inevitable at the end, but I found the experience unsettling. Either this was a ritual of quite a different nature from conventional concert-going, in which case the reaction seemed inappropriate, or, given the supreme lack of irony, it was charlatanry, in which case...
But on to the final performance, returning to the mid-sixties for the internationalist tape-work, Hymnen (1966-7). There are actually two versions for musicians too, yet it was the ‘pure’ original we heard here. Hymnen is quite a testament to Stockhausen’s unique imagination, a montage of four ‘regions’ – I to IV, dedicated respectively to Boulez, Pousseur, Cage, and Berio – in which we hear various national anthems, shortwave radio signals, voices, crowds, aircraft, Stockhausen in discussion with his assistant, and so on, until finally reaching some sort of peace with the composer’s breathing. There is much that is of great interest – and, as ever with Stockhausen, it never seems that the concept is more important than the result. The distortions, intersections, and juxtapositions are genuinely compelling. Yet I could not help but wonder whether it needed to last two hours (one might answer, ‘but why should it not?); or, if it did, whether the Barbican Hall without lights was really the place for such a ‘performance’. No use was really made of the space, in sharp contrast, say, with the imaginative deployment of the Royal Albert Hall for last year’s British premiere of COSMIC PULSES. Yet in suggesting to us that a conventional concert hall may not really be an appropriate setting for his music, in disturbing our ideas about what a ‘concert’ might be, Stockhausen is doubtless performing a great service. That he is not merely doing that but is creating something utterly new elevates him from the merely Cageian.
Saturday, 2 August 2008
Prom 20: Stockhausen, 2 August 2008
Royal Albert Hall
Stockhausen – GRUPPEN
Stockhausen – KLANG, thirteenth hour: COSMIC PULSES, for electronics (British premiere)
Stockhausen – KLANG, from the fifth hour: HARMONIEN, for solo trumpet (BBC commission: world premiere)
Stockhausen – KONTAKTE
Stockhausen – GRUPPEN (repeat performance)
Marco Blaauw (trumpet)
Nicolas Hodges (piano)
Colin Currie (percussion)
Kathinka Pasveer (sound projection for KLANG)
Bryan Wolf (sound projection for KONTAKTE)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson (conductor)
Martyn Brabbins (conductor)
Pascal Rophé (conductor)
Stockhausen is dead; long live Stockhausen! After a lengthy period in which he and his music – and especially his later music, for which, read the gargantuan LICHT cycle – became distinctly unfashionable in many circles, the composer’s death at the end of last year seems to have triggered a reappraisal. This is just the kind of effort to which the Proms should be contributing; the advent of Roger Wright at its helm may yet rescue the series from its Kenyon-era doldrums. KLANG, or ‘sound,’ will be the title of the Southbank Centre’s forthcoming week-long tribute in November. It refers to his post-LICHT cycle of works, projected to cover the twenty-four hours of the day. Cut short by his death, two sections were given here: the thirteenth ‘hour’ receiving its first British performance and part of the fifth hour its first anywhere. The word ‘Klang’ also points to one of Stockhausen’s greatest achievements –although far from the only one – namely, his manifold pioneering explorations in terms of sound.
GRUPPEN was the Alpha and Omega of this concert. A welcome development of recent Stockhausen ‘performance practice’ has been a tendency to perform the work twice in a single concert. Performances of this tremendous work for three orchestras are unsurprisingly rare, so a second audition grants a welcome opportunity to experience and to comprehend further. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra will adopt the same practice, in a September concert at Tempelhof Airport, which will mouth-wateringly include Messiaen’s Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorem. An important thing to remember concerning GRUPPEN is that it was not intended as a spatial work; rather, the division of the large – though hardly unprecedentedly so – orchestra of 109 players results from the impossibility of directing the musicians in several different metronomic tempi at once. Virtue was made of necessity, however, and Stockhausen’s fascination with the movement of sounds in space was furthered, which in turn furthered his move away from composition with ‘points’ (Punkte) towards ‘groups’ (Gruppen), in which the former parameters of sound – pitch, duration, volume, and timbre – combine and in which some may once again begin to predominate over others. (It is a characteristic of Stockhausen’s works that their names are often extremely helpful in delineating their principal concern. PUNKTE will be performed later this season.) Having stripped not just music but even sound itself down to their constituent elements, he begins, indeed is almost compelled, to put them back together. In the act of re-combination, however, we experience something genuinely new.
The overlapping presentation of groups – 174 of them in total – performed at different tempi is, then, the material of the work. These present performances accomplished that magnificently, for which all three conductors – David Robertson, Martyn Brabbins (at very short notice), and Pascal Rophé – and all members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra should be praised. Something was lost through the positioning of the orchestras, in that very few members of the audience would have been surrounded by them, yet one could nevertheless hear them separately and together, with a reasonable degree of spatial transfer and dialogue. Moreover, timbral clarity was often extremely impressive, especially so given the cavernous acoustic of the Royal Albert Hall, which somehow actually seemed to benefit the work. Percussion instruments and even the harps were often strikingly loud, although never un-variegated. Indeed, I was struck not only by confirmation of the importance of the percussion section for so much twentieth-century music, but also by the sheer tonal variety contained and expressed within. Spatial dialogue between the brass instruments of the three orchestras put me in mind of the Gabrielis, although this music grew overwhelmingly with a spellbinding intensity quite foreign to Venetian forebears. The work and performances as a whole exhibited a range from the utmost delicacy to teeming cacophony, rendering us closer to Messiaen than I might have expected. Stockhausen rarely nods to tradition but the dying away of the final horn call presented a perhaps unexpected reference back to German Romanticism. Yet, whatever odd references one might make for oneself – cowbells and Mahler, for instance – the overriding impression was of original genius, in what many still consider to be the composer’s towering masterpiece.
GRUPPEN was composed more than fifty years ago (1955-7, with its premiere in 1958). It remains an enthralling contemporary experience, yet Stockhausen’s concerns would unsurprisingly lead him further and further into the electronic realm. COSMIC PULSES (2006-7), here receiving its British premiere, is a purely electronic work. It may, as Robert Worby writes in his programme notes, ‘be the most spatially complex piece that Stockhausen ever produced’. Stockhausen told Worby in an 1997 interview:
Already in 1958 to 1960 I made a lot of experiments in a special hall in order to find out what speed I could composer for different sounds, what speed they could pass through the space, from one speaker group to the other, and most of the time one is not aware of the loudspeakers any more, but the sounds moving with different speeds in diagonal directions or in a circle, in rotation left-wise, right-wise, or the sound is coming from only one of the angles, et cetera. All the variations became part of my composition as harmony and melody, rhythm and dynamics.
Developments in technology and in Stockhausen’s compositional technique eventually led him to the situation at which he could write COSMIC PULSES. It is made up of twenty-four pitch and rhythm ‘loops’, themselves made up of one to twenty-four pitches, in twenty-four different registers. They rotate at twenty-four different speeds around eight loudspeakers and are ‘successively layered together from low to high and from the slowest to the fastest tempo’. (The clarity of Worby’s notes was most helpful here.) Sound projection was by one of the composer’s two surviving companions, Kathinka Pasveer but this was essentially not a human ‘performance’ at all, something which at the end renders applause a little odd. In the meantime, however, we underwent an extraordinary experience.
Many of the lights were turned off, which enabled one all the better to concentrate upon the sonic extravaganza. (Some of those that remained on, needless to say, were the hideous green ‘Fire Exit’ signs. I should have been tempted to consider ‘Health and Safety’ the three most depressing words in the English language, had not ‘replacement bus service’ blighted my journeys to and from London.) The sounds were of course ever changing yet sometimes, at least, strangely familiar. Purely electronic, one could yet discern the impression – especially at the outset – of an organ. Soon bells or their equivalent could be heard and even, a little later, the hint of a helicopter, which inevitably reminded me of the composer’s notorious string quartet. Sound was constantly moving and swirling, behind, in front, and above. One gained a sense of some great cosmic drama unfolding. We were spectators, or rather auditors, rather than participants, yet it would somehow affect us, even if we knew not how. Was this Zukunftsmusik? Sometimes it seemed more real – i.e., what was actually happening – than art, sometimes less so. It was fantastically, almost fanatically, detailed, yet there was a broader discernible development too; it teemed with strange, new life, or was it death? Of course, it needs no images, yet I wondered how it would work in a state-of-the-art cinema. If Wagner had wished, having created the invisible orchestra, to create an invisible theatre, Stockhausen might have invisible screen action. (It is interesting nevertheless to speculate what a Stanley Kubrick might have done with such music.) I also wondered what the children at the previous week’s ‘Doctor Who Prom’ would have made of this. Free of many adult preconceptions, I suspect they would have been utterly bowled over by it. Was this the TARDIS (‘Time and Relative Dimensions in Space’: oddly Stockhausen-like) I heard before me at one point? At the end, it was as if whatever form of alien intelligence had visited us was taking its leave, not simply in terms of it coming to an end, but in a musical sense of leave-taking and disappearance into some strange beyond.
How on earth – or wherever we might be – might one be able, I asked myself, to deal with twenty-four ‘hours’ of such music? HARMONIEN (‘Harmonies’) rendered the question redundant, for this piece, receiving its world premiere, was very different indeed. Here the sound projection was unobtrusive, simply a matter of projection, for this was to all intents and purposes a solo work. Together with versions for bass clarinet and for flute, it forms the fifth hour of KLANG. It was an opportunity for solo trumpeter, Marco Blauuw, to shine and he took it – with mesmerising musicality, theatricality, and virtuosity. A slow introduction of four intoned notes, between which the trumpeter recites the words, ‘Lob’, ‘Sei’, ‘Gott’ (‘God be praised’), is followed by twenty-four – that number of hours again – melodies, each of which is repeated at different pitches in a loop, which is then in turn repeated different numbers of times, becoming slower and quieter. Such provides the harmonic – yes, harmonic: once again, the clue lies in the title – structure for the work and the entire basis for the trumpeter’s address to what seemed to be treated more as a congregation than a mere audience. For the almost liturgical presentation not only of the words but also of the music, not unlike the call of a shofar, reminded us of the world of LICHT. The various mutes, affixed like a belt around Blauuw’s waist, had a visual as well as a sonic impact. Pitches were circled but, in the midst of considerable pitch repetition, something else was always changing: duration, volume, etc. Once I fancied I could discern a reminiscence of a Bach chorale: not strictly true of course, yet the correspondences one makes are not always merely absurd, for this was clearly a mysterious rite of some kind. Likewise the appearances towards the end of a perfect fifth call inevitably put me in mind of other trumpet calls. And then the observance was concluded.
KONTAKTE (1959-60) was given in its version for piano, percussion, and electronics. (There is also a purely electronic version.) This is another work concerned with the spatial construction of sound. The composer invented a ‘rotation table’, upon which a loudspeaker was placed, whose rotation would enable it to face four microphones placed in a square around it; the microphones were connected to the four tracks of the tape, thereby permitting – albeit with much less elaborate technology – a precursor to the movements in space we had previously heard in COSMIC PULSES. Stockhausen is also concerned here with the relationship between parameters of rhythm and pitch, in the sense that increases in tempo eventually permit the creation of a definite pitch, which becomes higher the faster with greater frequency of the fundamental clicks (or pulses) from the speakers. Nor one should forget – one certainly could not do so in the hall – the premium placed upon virtuosity, not for its own sake, but necessary to further Stockhausen’s explorations. Colin Currie and Nicolas Hodges, with Bryan Wolf on sound projection, presented a veritable tour de force. The music, unsurprisingly, sounded more abrasive, more pointillistic – more human? – than COSMIC PULSES. Webern is still, just about, a discernible starting ‘point’ – in more sense than one. The piano is treated in a largely percussive fashion, rendering this far more a ‘percussion’ than a ‘piano’ work, even when one bears in mind Stockhausen’s preceding Klavierstücke. Hodges sometimes had to play additional percussion as well as his piano part. I could hear the scene being set for pieces such as Helmut Lachenmann’s Interieur I for solo percussion, his first acknowledged work, yet Stockhausen’s spatial concerns added – again in more than one sense – at least one extra dimension. There is a bright, metallic quality to the music, very much of its time. One could almost see through the sound alone a post-war West German radio studio. Indeed, I was slightly taken aback as to how evocative of its time KONTAKTE now sounded. Whether that suggests that it is becoming dated or classicised remains to be discerned. At any rate, the music faded away splendidly into a prolonged silence. That silence might well have come about from the audience’s uncertainty as to whether the piece was finished, but the effect was nevertheless appropriate. It was certainly followed by vigorous deserved applause for the performers. The reprise of GRUPPEN then almost took on the quality of an encore, with musicians and audience alike less tense, more ready to enjoy themselves: a fitting conclusion to a bold and successful concert.
Stockhausen – GRUPPEN
Stockhausen – KLANG, thirteenth hour: COSMIC PULSES, for electronics (British premiere)
Stockhausen – KLANG, from the fifth hour: HARMONIEN, for solo trumpet (BBC commission: world premiere)
Stockhausen – KONTAKTE
Stockhausen – GRUPPEN (repeat performance)
Marco Blaauw (trumpet)
Nicolas Hodges (piano)
Colin Currie (percussion)
Kathinka Pasveer (sound projection for KLANG)
Bryan Wolf (sound projection for KONTAKTE)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson (conductor)
Martyn Brabbins (conductor)
Pascal Rophé (conductor)
Stockhausen is dead; long live Stockhausen! After a lengthy period in which he and his music – and especially his later music, for which, read the gargantuan LICHT cycle – became distinctly unfashionable in many circles, the composer’s death at the end of last year seems to have triggered a reappraisal. This is just the kind of effort to which the Proms should be contributing; the advent of Roger Wright at its helm may yet rescue the series from its Kenyon-era doldrums. KLANG, or ‘sound,’ will be the title of the Southbank Centre’s forthcoming week-long tribute in November. It refers to his post-LICHT cycle of works, projected to cover the twenty-four hours of the day. Cut short by his death, two sections were given here: the thirteenth ‘hour’ receiving its first British performance and part of the fifth hour its first anywhere. The word ‘Klang’ also points to one of Stockhausen’s greatest achievements –although far from the only one – namely, his manifold pioneering explorations in terms of sound.
GRUPPEN was the Alpha and Omega of this concert. A welcome development of recent Stockhausen ‘performance practice’ has been a tendency to perform the work twice in a single concert. Performances of this tremendous work for three orchestras are unsurprisingly rare, so a second audition grants a welcome opportunity to experience and to comprehend further. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra will adopt the same practice, in a September concert at Tempelhof Airport, which will mouth-wateringly include Messiaen’s Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorem. An important thing to remember concerning GRUPPEN is that it was not intended as a spatial work; rather, the division of the large – though hardly unprecedentedly so – orchestra of 109 players results from the impossibility of directing the musicians in several different metronomic tempi at once. Virtue was made of necessity, however, and Stockhausen’s fascination with the movement of sounds in space was furthered, which in turn furthered his move away from composition with ‘points’ (Punkte) towards ‘groups’ (Gruppen), in which the former parameters of sound – pitch, duration, volume, and timbre – combine and in which some may once again begin to predominate over others. (It is a characteristic of Stockhausen’s works that their names are often extremely helpful in delineating their principal concern. PUNKTE will be performed later this season.) Having stripped not just music but even sound itself down to their constituent elements, he begins, indeed is almost compelled, to put them back together. In the act of re-combination, however, we experience something genuinely new.
The overlapping presentation of groups – 174 of them in total – performed at different tempi is, then, the material of the work. These present performances accomplished that magnificently, for which all three conductors – David Robertson, Martyn Brabbins (at very short notice), and Pascal Rophé – and all members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra should be praised. Something was lost through the positioning of the orchestras, in that very few members of the audience would have been surrounded by them, yet one could nevertheless hear them separately and together, with a reasonable degree of spatial transfer and dialogue. Moreover, timbral clarity was often extremely impressive, especially so given the cavernous acoustic of the Royal Albert Hall, which somehow actually seemed to benefit the work. Percussion instruments and even the harps were often strikingly loud, although never un-variegated. Indeed, I was struck not only by confirmation of the importance of the percussion section for so much twentieth-century music, but also by the sheer tonal variety contained and expressed within. Spatial dialogue between the brass instruments of the three orchestras put me in mind of the Gabrielis, although this music grew overwhelmingly with a spellbinding intensity quite foreign to Venetian forebears. The work and performances as a whole exhibited a range from the utmost delicacy to teeming cacophony, rendering us closer to Messiaen than I might have expected. Stockhausen rarely nods to tradition but the dying away of the final horn call presented a perhaps unexpected reference back to German Romanticism. Yet, whatever odd references one might make for oneself – cowbells and Mahler, for instance – the overriding impression was of original genius, in what many still consider to be the composer’s towering masterpiece.
GRUPPEN was composed more than fifty years ago (1955-7, with its premiere in 1958). It remains an enthralling contemporary experience, yet Stockhausen’s concerns would unsurprisingly lead him further and further into the electronic realm. COSMIC PULSES (2006-7), here receiving its British premiere, is a purely electronic work. It may, as Robert Worby writes in his programme notes, ‘be the most spatially complex piece that Stockhausen ever produced’. Stockhausen told Worby in an 1997 interview:
Already in 1958 to 1960 I made a lot of experiments in a special hall in order to find out what speed I could composer for different sounds, what speed they could pass through the space, from one speaker group to the other, and most of the time one is not aware of the loudspeakers any more, but the sounds moving with different speeds in diagonal directions or in a circle, in rotation left-wise, right-wise, or the sound is coming from only one of the angles, et cetera. All the variations became part of my composition as harmony and melody, rhythm and dynamics.
Developments in technology and in Stockhausen’s compositional technique eventually led him to the situation at which he could write COSMIC PULSES. It is made up of twenty-four pitch and rhythm ‘loops’, themselves made up of one to twenty-four pitches, in twenty-four different registers. They rotate at twenty-four different speeds around eight loudspeakers and are ‘successively layered together from low to high and from the slowest to the fastest tempo’. (The clarity of Worby’s notes was most helpful here.) Sound projection was by one of the composer’s two surviving companions, Kathinka Pasveer but this was essentially not a human ‘performance’ at all, something which at the end renders applause a little odd. In the meantime, however, we underwent an extraordinary experience.
Many of the lights were turned off, which enabled one all the better to concentrate upon the sonic extravaganza. (Some of those that remained on, needless to say, were the hideous green ‘Fire Exit’ signs. I should have been tempted to consider ‘Health and Safety’ the three most depressing words in the English language, had not ‘replacement bus service’ blighted my journeys to and from London.) The sounds were of course ever changing yet sometimes, at least, strangely familiar. Purely electronic, one could yet discern the impression – especially at the outset – of an organ. Soon bells or their equivalent could be heard and even, a little later, the hint of a helicopter, which inevitably reminded me of the composer’s notorious string quartet. Sound was constantly moving and swirling, behind, in front, and above. One gained a sense of some great cosmic drama unfolding. We were spectators, or rather auditors, rather than participants, yet it would somehow affect us, even if we knew not how. Was this Zukunftsmusik? Sometimes it seemed more real – i.e., what was actually happening – than art, sometimes less so. It was fantastically, almost fanatically, detailed, yet there was a broader discernible development too; it teemed with strange, new life, or was it death? Of course, it needs no images, yet I wondered how it would work in a state-of-the-art cinema. If Wagner had wished, having created the invisible orchestra, to create an invisible theatre, Stockhausen might have invisible screen action. (It is interesting nevertheless to speculate what a Stanley Kubrick might have done with such music.) I also wondered what the children at the previous week’s ‘Doctor Who Prom’ would have made of this. Free of many adult preconceptions, I suspect they would have been utterly bowled over by it. Was this the TARDIS (‘Time and Relative Dimensions in Space’: oddly Stockhausen-like) I heard before me at one point? At the end, it was as if whatever form of alien intelligence had visited us was taking its leave, not simply in terms of it coming to an end, but in a musical sense of leave-taking and disappearance into some strange beyond.
How on earth – or wherever we might be – might one be able, I asked myself, to deal with twenty-four ‘hours’ of such music? HARMONIEN (‘Harmonies’) rendered the question redundant, for this piece, receiving its world premiere, was very different indeed. Here the sound projection was unobtrusive, simply a matter of projection, for this was to all intents and purposes a solo work. Together with versions for bass clarinet and for flute, it forms the fifth hour of KLANG. It was an opportunity for solo trumpeter, Marco Blauuw, to shine and he took it – with mesmerising musicality, theatricality, and virtuosity. A slow introduction of four intoned notes, between which the trumpeter recites the words, ‘Lob’, ‘Sei’, ‘Gott’ (‘God be praised’), is followed by twenty-four – that number of hours again – melodies, each of which is repeated at different pitches in a loop, which is then in turn repeated different numbers of times, becoming slower and quieter. Such provides the harmonic – yes, harmonic: once again, the clue lies in the title – structure for the work and the entire basis for the trumpeter’s address to what seemed to be treated more as a congregation than a mere audience. For the almost liturgical presentation not only of the words but also of the music, not unlike the call of a shofar, reminded us of the world of LICHT. The various mutes, affixed like a belt around Blauuw’s waist, had a visual as well as a sonic impact. Pitches were circled but, in the midst of considerable pitch repetition, something else was always changing: duration, volume, etc. Once I fancied I could discern a reminiscence of a Bach chorale: not strictly true of course, yet the correspondences one makes are not always merely absurd, for this was clearly a mysterious rite of some kind. Likewise the appearances towards the end of a perfect fifth call inevitably put me in mind of other trumpet calls. And then the observance was concluded.
KONTAKTE (1959-60) was given in its version for piano, percussion, and electronics. (There is also a purely electronic version.) This is another work concerned with the spatial construction of sound. The composer invented a ‘rotation table’, upon which a loudspeaker was placed, whose rotation would enable it to face four microphones placed in a square around it; the microphones were connected to the four tracks of the tape, thereby permitting – albeit with much less elaborate technology – a precursor to the movements in space we had previously heard in COSMIC PULSES. Stockhausen is also concerned here with the relationship between parameters of rhythm and pitch, in the sense that increases in tempo eventually permit the creation of a definite pitch, which becomes higher the faster with greater frequency of the fundamental clicks (or pulses) from the speakers. Nor one should forget – one certainly could not do so in the hall – the premium placed upon virtuosity, not for its own sake, but necessary to further Stockhausen’s explorations. Colin Currie and Nicolas Hodges, with Bryan Wolf on sound projection, presented a veritable tour de force. The music, unsurprisingly, sounded more abrasive, more pointillistic – more human? – than COSMIC PULSES. Webern is still, just about, a discernible starting ‘point’ – in more sense than one. The piano is treated in a largely percussive fashion, rendering this far more a ‘percussion’ than a ‘piano’ work, even when one bears in mind Stockhausen’s preceding Klavierstücke. Hodges sometimes had to play additional percussion as well as his piano part. I could hear the scene being set for pieces such as Helmut Lachenmann’s Interieur I for solo percussion, his first acknowledged work, yet Stockhausen’s spatial concerns added – again in more than one sense – at least one extra dimension. There is a bright, metallic quality to the music, very much of its time. One could almost see through the sound alone a post-war West German radio studio. Indeed, I was slightly taken aback as to how evocative of its time KONTAKTE now sounded. Whether that suggests that it is becoming dated or classicised remains to be discerned. At any rate, the music faded away splendidly into a prolonged silence. That silence might well have come about from the audience’s uncertainty as to whether the piece was finished, but the effect was nevertheless appropriate. It was certainly followed by vigorous deserved applause for the performers. The reprise of GRUPPEN then almost took on the quality of an encore, with musicians and audience alike less tense, more ready to enjoy themselves: a fitting conclusion to a bold and successful concert.
Monday, 28 July 2008
Prom 15: Daniel/BBC SO/Robertson - Beethoven and Carter, 28 July 2008
Royal Albert Hall
Beethoven – Grosse Fuge, Op.133
Carter – Oboe Concerto
Beethoven – Symphony no.5 in C minor, Op.67
Nicholas Daniel (oboe)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson (conductor)
There are doubtless all sorts of connections to be made between Beethoven and Elliott Carter, to my mind the greatest American composer to date. However, I am not so sure that they were really made in this programme, notwithstanding the presence of that most ultra-modernist of Beethoven’s works, the Grosse Fuge. Instead, we had a well balanced if relatively short programme: nothing wrong with that, but it felt like a bit of a missed opportunity when one thinks what one might have chosen to follow the first two items. Perhaps the Fifth Symphony was there to boost the audience; if so, the ploy seemed to have worked, for there were few empty seats.
‘Though intended for string quartet,’ Barry Cooper wrote in his note for the Grosse Fuge, ‘the work can have an even more overwhelming effect when played, as tonight, by orchestral strings.’ I hesitate to disagree with so distinguished a Beethoven scholar, but disagree I do and strongly too. For me, some – though by no means all – of Beethoven’s radicalism is lost when the piece is transferred from a quartet, audibly and visibly straining at the bounds of what is possible, to the plusher sound of an orchestral string section. It is similar to the problem I have with the transcription of Verklärte Nacht; whilst I am happy to hear alternative versions, the real bite remains with the original. A Klemperer perhaps can make me change my mind momentarily when it comes to the Beethoven. However, despite this performance’s virtues, David Robertson is no Klemperer when it comes to Beethoven. The signs were promising: no half-hearted compromise with a chamber-size section, but full Romantic strings; if one is going to do this, one might as well do it properly. Violins were split, which paid off in conveying the echoes, imitations, and contrasts between the two violin parts. There was some beautifully hushed playing in the second of the three principal sections of the work: mysterious yet, unfortunately, also a little mushy. The double basses made a treasurable impact when they were included. And there was, in the final, compound duple section, an encouraging sense of fragmentation, of Beethoven bringing us to the very modern problematic of the unity of the work of art itself. The syncopations were well handled here, which added to the instability. And yet, the performance could have done with more of this throughout. It was good, yet it suffered a little from understatement. Whatever the Grosse Fuge may or should be, understated does not spring to mind.
Carter’s Oboe Concerto was written in 1986-7, shortly before he was eighty, so doubtless qualifies as relatively ‘early’, given the composer’s extraordinary late fecundity. It is written for solo oboe, a concertino group of four violas and percussionist, and orchestra, actually more of a chamber ensemble, comprising flute, clarinet, horn, trombone, two percussionists, and viola-less strings. Written in one continuous stretch, its twenty minutes or so nevertheless comprise something akin to the classical fast-slow-fast three-movement-structure of a concerto. The performers, all of them, did Carter proud. Indeed, it sounded as if this were a repertory piece, in which the players were as much at home as the composer with its modernity: just what a performance of new(-ish) music should be. Nicholas Daniel drew upon considerable twin reserves of musicality and virtuosity and blended them. He did not mask the sometimes extreme demands – the concerto was written for and inspired by Heinz Holliger, no less – but nor did he allow them to become his principal concern. Throughout, as with all of the players, there was sense to be made of the ever-changing and yet ever-present compositional line. Carter’s polyrhythms came across, as they should, although this is no mean feat, as the equivalent of melody in rhythm. Time played its tricks and kept its command, for which Robertson must be apportioned a great deal of credit. Carter’s skills as a colourist were not denied, the percussionist from the concertino group deserving especial mention in this respect. The sense of temporal progress and sonorous transformation as he switched from vibraphone to glockenspiel was an object lesson in rescuing his orchestral section from the charge of being mere purveyors of ‘effects’. But it was with the oboe alone that the concerto so memorably faded into nothingness.
What is one to do with Beethoven’s Fifth, given that most of us will have performances from Furtwängler, Klemperer, the Kleibers, Karajan, Böhm, etc., etc., burned into our memories? Robertson was quoted in the programme as saying, quite correctly, that we have ‘lost all sense of how radical Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony really is’. I wish that he had made it sound more so, for what I heard was a perfectly decent account, better than many of the merely perverse treatments it would receive today, yet never shocking and never truly inspiring. Once again, we had a good-sized orchestra, with sixteen first violins and other strings in proportion. Perhaps this should be partly attributed to the hall’s acoustic, but it rarely sounded as if we had so many. There was once again, I felt, a certain understatement to the performance, which is certainly not a quality for which I seek in this work. The first movement hurried along reasonably eventfully, but the splendidly implacable coda did not really seem to arise from what had gone before. Its true vehemence ought to have been unrelentingly present from the outset. And by vehemence I do not mean the unpleasant blaring we sometimes had to endure, here and during the scherzo, from the horns. The Andante was unquestionably con moto, perhaps a little much so, but there is plenty of room for different interpretations here. When it occasionally sounded too driven, I thought that Robertson overstepped the boundaries, but I suspect that many would have felt differently. He was successful in eliciting a sense of mystery from the orchestra and eventually a fine sense of momentum was built up. The scherzo followed immediately and at quite a breakneck tempo. This just about worked but the same tempo was simply too fast for the trio, in which the ’cellos and double basses sounded breathless. (A certain pay off, arguably, was the sense of connection with the Grosse Fuge.) Second – and rightly, final – time round, the scherzo purveyed an excellent sense of the ghostly, forcing one to listen closely to Beethoven’s still-wondrous scoring.
Unfortunately, mystery was quite absent from the humdrum transition to the finale, when this should sounds as one of the most extraordinary passages in all music. Day broke forth effectively enough, if a little on the fast side once again. However, the orchestra soon sounded somewhat tired. This was less so when repeated. There were some exultant moments in the finale and the piccolo shone as it should, yet there were equally some moments that were faltering or merely nondescript. I speak deliberately of ‘moments’, since the whole never quite added up, nor did it speak of the metaphysical. Karajan once advised Simon Rattle to ‘throw away’ his first hundred Beethoven Fifths, testament to what a difficult work this is to bring off. I have heard worse, much worse, but I have also heard much better, if mostly from great recordings of the past. Sometimes I wonder whether we really know Beethoven at all, although there is always Daniel Barenboim to put me right on that score.
Beethoven – Grosse Fuge, Op.133
Carter – Oboe Concerto
Beethoven – Symphony no.5 in C minor, Op.67
Nicholas Daniel (oboe)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson (conductor)
There are doubtless all sorts of connections to be made between Beethoven and Elliott Carter, to my mind the greatest American composer to date. However, I am not so sure that they were really made in this programme, notwithstanding the presence of that most ultra-modernist of Beethoven’s works, the Grosse Fuge. Instead, we had a well balanced if relatively short programme: nothing wrong with that, but it felt like a bit of a missed opportunity when one thinks what one might have chosen to follow the first two items. Perhaps the Fifth Symphony was there to boost the audience; if so, the ploy seemed to have worked, for there were few empty seats.
‘Though intended for string quartet,’ Barry Cooper wrote in his note for the Grosse Fuge, ‘the work can have an even more overwhelming effect when played, as tonight, by orchestral strings.’ I hesitate to disagree with so distinguished a Beethoven scholar, but disagree I do and strongly too. For me, some – though by no means all – of Beethoven’s radicalism is lost when the piece is transferred from a quartet, audibly and visibly straining at the bounds of what is possible, to the plusher sound of an orchestral string section. It is similar to the problem I have with the transcription of Verklärte Nacht; whilst I am happy to hear alternative versions, the real bite remains with the original. A Klemperer perhaps can make me change my mind momentarily when it comes to the Beethoven. However, despite this performance’s virtues, David Robertson is no Klemperer when it comes to Beethoven. The signs were promising: no half-hearted compromise with a chamber-size section, but full Romantic strings; if one is going to do this, one might as well do it properly. Violins were split, which paid off in conveying the echoes, imitations, and contrasts between the two violin parts. There was some beautifully hushed playing in the second of the three principal sections of the work: mysterious yet, unfortunately, also a little mushy. The double basses made a treasurable impact when they were included. And there was, in the final, compound duple section, an encouraging sense of fragmentation, of Beethoven bringing us to the very modern problematic of the unity of the work of art itself. The syncopations were well handled here, which added to the instability. And yet, the performance could have done with more of this throughout. It was good, yet it suffered a little from understatement. Whatever the Grosse Fuge may or should be, understated does not spring to mind.
Carter’s Oboe Concerto was written in 1986-7, shortly before he was eighty, so doubtless qualifies as relatively ‘early’, given the composer’s extraordinary late fecundity. It is written for solo oboe, a concertino group of four violas and percussionist, and orchestra, actually more of a chamber ensemble, comprising flute, clarinet, horn, trombone, two percussionists, and viola-less strings. Written in one continuous stretch, its twenty minutes or so nevertheless comprise something akin to the classical fast-slow-fast three-movement-structure of a concerto. The performers, all of them, did Carter proud. Indeed, it sounded as if this were a repertory piece, in which the players were as much at home as the composer with its modernity: just what a performance of new(-ish) music should be. Nicholas Daniel drew upon considerable twin reserves of musicality and virtuosity and blended them. He did not mask the sometimes extreme demands – the concerto was written for and inspired by Heinz Holliger, no less – but nor did he allow them to become his principal concern. Throughout, as with all of the players, there was sense to be made of the ever-changing and yet ever-present compositional line. Carter’s polyrhythms came across, as they should, although this is no mean feat, as the equivalent of melody in rhythm. Time played its tricks and kept its command, for which Robertson must be apportioned a great deal of credit. Carter’s skills as a colourist were not denied, the percussionist from the concertino group deserving especial mention in this respect. The sense of temporal progress and sonorous transformation as he switched from vibraphone to glockenspiel was an object lesson in rescuing his orchestral section from the charge of being mere purveyors of ‘effects’. But it was with the oboe alone that the concerto so memorably faded into nothingness.
What is one to do with Beethoven’s Fifth, given that most of us will have performances from Furtwängler, Klemperer, the Kleibers, Karajan, Böhm, etc., etc., burned into our memories? Robertson was quoted in the programme as saying, quite correctly, that we have ‘lost all sense of how radical Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony really is’. I wish that he had made it sound more so, for what I heard was a perfectly decent account, better than many of the merely perverse treatments it would receive today, yet never shocking and never truly inspiring. Once again, we had a good-sized orchestra, with sixteen first violins and other strings in proportion. Perhaps this should be partly attributed to the hall’s acoustic, but it rarely sounded as if we had so many. There was once again, I felt, a certain understatement to the performance, which is certainly not a quality for which I seek in this work. The first movement hurried along reasonably eventfully, but the splendidly implacable coda did not really seem to arise from what had gone before. Its true vehemence ought to have been unrelentingly present from the outset. And by vehemence I do not mean the unpleasant blaring we sometimes had to endure, here and during the scherzo, from the horns. The Andante was unquestionably con moto, perhaps a little much so, but there is plenty of room for different interpretations here. When it occasionally sounded too driven, I thought that Robertson overstepped the boundaries, but I suspect that many would have felt differently. He was successful in eliciting a sense of mystery from the orchestra and eventually a fine sense of momentum was built up. The scherzo followed immediately and at quite a breakneck tempo. This just about worked but the same tempo was simply too fast for the trio, in which the ’cellos and double basses sounded breathless. (A certain pay off, arguably, was the sense of connection with the Grosse Fuge.) Second – and rightly, final – time round, the scherzo purveyed an excellent sense of the ghostly, forcing one to listen closely to Beethoven’s still-wondrous scoring.
Unfortunately, mystery was quite absent from the humdrum transition to the finale, when this should sounds as one of the most extraordinary passages in all music. Day broke forth effectively enough, if a little on the fast side once again. However, the orchestra soon sounded somewhat tired. This was less so when repeated. There were some exultant moments in the finale and the piccolo shone as it should, yet there were equally some moments that were faltering or merely nondescript. I speak deliberately of ‘moments’, since the whole never quite added up, nor did it speak of the metaphysical. Karajan once advised Simon Rattle to ‘throw away’ his first hundred Beethoven Fifths, testament to what a difficult work this is to bring off. I have heard worse, much worse, but I have also heard much better, if mostly from great recordings of the past. Sometimes I wonder whether we really know Beethoven at all, although there is always Daniel Barenboim to put me right on that score.
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