Kozhukhin - Widmann, Schubert, Ligeti, and Liszt, 16 May 2024

Pierre Boulez Saal

Widmann: Idyll and Abgrund (Six Schubert Reminiscences for piano)
Schubert: Piano Sonata in G major, D 894
Ligeti: Études, no.13: ‘L’Escalier du diable’
Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor, S 178

Denis Kozhukhin (piano)

With this intelligently programmed and performed recital, Denis Kozhukhin reminded us what an interesting musician he is. Both halves presented a major piano sonata – two of the most celebrated and, in different ways, difficult in the repertoire – preceded by a more recent work either, in the first case, paying explicit reference to the earlier composer or, in the latter, holding something diabolically transcendental in common. 

Jörg Widmann’s 2009 Idyll and Abgrund, subtitled Six Schubert Reminiscences for piano, opened the programme. If its first ‘reminiscence’ certainly had melodic roots in Schubert, its harmonic world initially seemed closer to late Liszt, before heading in another direction altogether, heavy dissonant interventions in the treble sounding oddly like Schnittke. That composer also came to mind in the mode of expression of the second, though Schubert and indeed Brahms, as well as a more general (typically for the composer) relationship to German musical Romanticism were present. There were here and throughout so many ghosts that I cannot remember them all, and am not sure it would be helpful to list them even if I could. A charming waltz began, only to be partially obscured, yet soon returned to go a little haywire, pianist’s whistle and all. Kozhukhin offered a fine lilt, always idiomatic without sentimentality. There were starker passages. And surely that was Schubert’s final piano sonata I heard in the last movement, just before the close. But so what? Reference, allusion, or kinship were apparent, ‘meaning’ more allusive—and doubtless rightly so. 

Schubert’s own G major Sonata, D 894, followed. The first movement, Molto moderato e cantabile, was taken at no Richter tempo; how – why – would one imitate the inimitable? But it certainly took its lead from Schubert’s marking, as indeed did all four movements, in character as well as mere speed. A sense of sleepwalking, as in Thomas May’s programme note quotation from Alfred Brendel, was apparent, Schubert striding ‘across harmonic abysses as though by compulsion, and we cannot help remembering that sleepwalkers never lose their step’. Kozhukhin’s command of line certainly suggested this. One might, at any one moment, have been forgiven for thinking Schubert was not really in the business of development, but he was, through a stasis that was only apparent yet no less ‘felt’ for that. And he proved just as adept as summoning ghosts, albeit without any compulsion to name them. Form grew out of what we heard rather than being imposed upon it; that said, there was no doubting the moment of tonal return, nor the transformed nature of material thereafter. What a pity, then, that someone’s telephone went off at the first movement’s close, visibly disconcerting pianist and audience alike. The Andante received a similarly ‘interior’ reading, passages turning outwards where called for and not without violence. It made sense, again as if from deep sleep. This music can certainly be understood dialectically, yet it was less clear than with Beethoven that that would be the point. It came from a damaged world, a damaged psyche, Adorno’s Minima moralia coming to my mind, but showed great strength from within. The minuet asked and responded, the difference between question and response meaning all—both to pianist and composer. Its trio offered a vision of something beyond, perhaps heavenly, whilst unable or unwilling to let go of remaining, unbridgeable distance, as if a Bach musette found itself in the world of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, neither party knowing quite what to do. The final movement brought us back to earth, perhaps, whilst remembering what had just passed (and in truth, we had never really left). This was the wayward progress of music that wishes to approach Mozart, yet actually ends up further away. Might Kozhukhin have confronted the abyss more starkly? Perhaps, but his long, unbroken line told its own story. 

The thirteenth and longest of Ligeti’s Etudes, ‘L’Escalier du diable’, offered a strong pictorial sense of its titular inspiration without being bound by it, nor indeed by anything else other than a precision the composer would surely have admired. The craziness of its technical demands and their fulfilment were all part of the challenge—and the fun. Dynamic levels were as rock-solid as rhythm, a big, post-Romantic sound as present where required as interior unwinding. It was probably just my imagination, but I could have sworn a chord emerged, perfectly in keeping, as if from the world of Messiaen. In any case, the final resonance was surely one to rival Stockhausen. 

It made for an ideal curtain raiser to the Liszt B minor Sonata, which began with an almost modest precision that was actually more a case of knowing where the music must lead. That precision remained, as did tautness of conception, again with fine command of line to recall Schubert. There was no haze here, though, in a performance that was bright even when dark, and ever immediate. If there were sleepwalking here, it was of a more nightmarish quality. Kozhukhin did not shy away from rhetoric as such, the first statement of the second subject, for instance, highly declamatory, but form and, even on occasion, a certain formalism were more to the fore. Perhaps the performance, then, sprang from Ligeti in that sense too. Again, it was certainly not that Kozkuhkin could not spin a compelling, even spell-binding cantabile line; he could and did. Integration nonetheless always seemed his ultimate concern. Clarity of texture and purpose was admirable, even if I occasionally missed a little Romantic mystery. (Was that just me trying to have it all? Probably.) There were surprises, though, in the sense that new points of departure, the fugato a case in point, truly sounded as such, even when one ‘knew’. The true recapitulation sounded, again, with all the inevitability one could wish for. It was, perhaps, a more modernistic story than often, but that is inherent to Liszt. And on the very few occasions when the music threatened to escape even the most iron self-control, that is surely part of Liszt and Lisztian performance too. This sonata will never sound ‘perfect’; it is not Mozart and is not trying to be. It was something different from that and all the better for it. 

A moan: must audience members really tell each other loudly what an encore is when a musician begins to play it, or just as bad, give a stage-sigh of satisfaction? Well done: you have recognised Schumann’s Träumerei, one of the most celebrated and likely encores in the piano literature. Fortunately, Kozhukhin gave an honest account, beautifully voiced. To be fair, no one made such noises for the first encore, perhaps because – like me – they did not know what it was. Hymnal and, if I remember correctly, slightly modal, it had melodic and harmonic characteristics I might have guessed to be Russian. I wondered whether it might have ‘meant’ something beyond its notes; at any rate, Kozhukhin clearly believed in and winningly communicated those notes.

Careddu/Kozhukhin/Deyneka/Boulez Ensemble/Roth - Boulez, 29 February 2020

Images: Peter Adamik

Pierre Boulez Saal

Boulez: Sonatine for flute and piano

Messagesquisse for solo cello and six cellos, arr. for violas by Christophe Desjardins

Éclat/Multiples

Silvia Careddu (flute)

Denis Kozhukhin (piano)

Yulia Deyneka (viola)

Boulez Ensemble

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

An excellent afternoon concert of works by Pierre Boulez opened with what may well be the best – certainly among the best – performance, live or recorded, of the flute and piano Sonatine I have heard, from Silvia Careddu and Denis Kozhukhin. Self-trans-form-ation, free yet determined, proved the ultimate answer to questions of form and per-form-ance alike. From the opening piano bars, harmonically a characteristic mix of Debussy and Schoenberg, yet never quite to be pinned down to them, through waves of sound, rising and vanishing into nothingness, and frenetic treading over hot toccata-coals, to a theatre of cruelty suggestive of highly irregular clockwork – until one listened and realised irregularity ran far deeper – here was a performance whose precision and depth truly astonished. Here was the white heat of inspiration, in work and performance alike. Kozhukhin showed that this was just as much music for the Steinway as Rachmaninov. Careddu’s endlessly divisible tonal variegation proved an object lesson in expressive range for an instrument sometimes, however unjustly, accused of its lack. The melodic salience of, say, a flute trill, thereafter taken up by the piano offered aural preparation for much of what was to come, an entry point to the Boulezian labyrinth; again, so long as one listened.

I confess to having been previously unaware of Christophe Dejardins’s viola version of Messagesquisse, its performance here dedicated by François-Xavier Roth and the Boulez Ensemble to the violist’s memory. It may seem a statement of the blindingly obvious to say how different it sounded, but it was the invitation to hear the same material differently that mattered. The viola shadow surrounding solo violist Yulia Deyneka seemed, at higher pitch, not only lighter but capable of further refraction – or at least that refraction was capable of further aural enquiry. Arnold Whittall’s characterisation of Boulez’s ‘modern classicism’ has rarely seemed more apt, albeit in friendly competition with a frenzied complexity and mysterious echoes that endured and, yes, further transformed themselves.

Éclat it says; and that is certainly how it opened with Joseph Houston on piano, and continued to open up further in fevered anticipation, even before the onset of its Multiples. There was visual and aural theatrical beauty in Roth’s numerical cues; likewise in the incitement of pitch, one by one, in Webern-like nouvelle Klangfarbenmelodie across the ensemble, aural acrostics already anticipating the late summation of sur Incises. Multiples brought veritable multiplication of new realities, no longer mere serial potentialities. Endlessly surprising, gateways to new soundworlds opened before our eyes and ears. That applied to the familiar as well as the unfamiliar: somehow a clarinet or a muted transport was heard – played too? – as if for the first time. The languor of suspended time, the perpetuation of a Messiaenesque cell, the wondrously variegated sound and procession of a viola consort at the work’s heart: those and so much more beguiled and transformed. ‘Music for the thinking ear’, to quote the motto of the hall to which Boulez gave his name.

Boulez Ensemble/Barenboim: Beethoven, Bartók, and Boulez, 9 September 2019

Pierre Boulez Saal

Beethoven: Sonata for horn and piano in F major, op.17

Bartók: Sonata for two pianos and percussion, Sz 100

Boulez: sur Incises

Radek Baborák (French horn)

Karim Said, Denis Kozhukhin, Michael Wendeberg (piano)

Aline Khouri, Susanne Kabalan, Stephen Fitzpatrick (harp)

Lev Loftus, Dominic Oelze, Pedro Torrejón Gonzáles (percussion)

Daniel Barenboim (piano, conductor)

Two-and-a-half years after the opening of Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, in a programme climaxing in Pierre Boulez’s sur Incises, the hall’s resident Boulez Ensemble, drawn from members of the Staatskapelle Berlin and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, returned, neither for the first time, nor, I suspect, for the last, to a work that seems almost to define not only the performing space, not only its memories, but just as much its potentialities. In that, it takes its leave from Boulez’s own method of proliferation, his own pattern of works-in-progress, his own incomparable, endlessly proliferating legacy for all musicians and music-lovers, and indeed for all those interested in reimagination of performing spaces in the line of Boulez’s cherished concept of the salle modulable.

First, however, came two other Bs: Beethoven and Bartok; and a third, that other presiding musical presence of the Boulez Saal: Barenboim. What a joy it was not only to hear Beethoven’s Horn Sonata, op.17, but to hear it in such an enlightened performance, from Radek Baborák and Daniel Barenboim. A horn call as forthright as it was perfectly judged of tone seemed the perfect way to open a new season: rooted not only in the Austro-German musical past, but in Beethoven, a prelude to next year’s anniversary. (And if people do not like that prospect, they should, quite frankly, stop their childish posturing and grow up.) Barenboim’s melting, post-Mozartian response reminded us why he stands as one of the very few great Beethovenians alive (indeed the only one, as conductor). A few first movement exposition smudges, of interest only to carpers, were banished upon the repeat. What mattered was Beethoven’s spirit, revealed in a performance of perfect balance and tempo, the latter flexible, yet never drawing attention to itself in the subtlety of that flexibility. It was, above all, a performance grounded in harmonic understanding, without which all else will be in vain (and more than often is, in contemporary Beethoven performance). The recapitulation brought a fine sense of return, and some magically soft playing, Baborák’s phrasing, here and elsewhere, to die for. A gravely beautiful, properly vocal Poco adagio quasi andante led to a finale that proved, again, quite perfectly judged in its post-Mozartian spirit. Darker passages told, albeit without exaggeration, in an account both poignant and ebullient.

It was a welcome occasion indeed to hear Bartók’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion: not only as precursor to sur Incises, but also in relation to Peter Eötvös’s Sonata per sei, heard the previous day at the Berlin Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal. The first movement’s opening, imbued with suspense, erupted in well-nigh Boulezian éclat; and again, although quite rightly, differently. This was to be a performance that surprised, even when one ‘knew’: that is to say, it was to be a performance in the emphatic sense, pianists, Michael Wendeberg and Denis Kozhukhin, and percussionists, Dominic Oelze and Lev Loftus, alike revelling in the potentialities of live thinking and communication. Bartók’s music was made strange in the best sense, these fine musicians riding a defiantly untamed tiger and (more than) living to tell the tale. How inevitably. The score unfolded, grew, developed, taking in predecessors such as Beethoven and Bach in a sense extending far beyond the relative banality of ‘influence’. Its spatial element, prophetic for Boulez among others, felt especially immediate in this space. Inevitability – not in the sense of dullness, but a ‘rightness’ that, in retrospect, could not have been other – characterised the slow movement too, percussion processional joined by Wendeberg, then by Kozhukhin, in playing of almost Mozartian perfection (not only the pianists!) Form dramatically revealed itself; so too did the wildest, most compelling of night music. As in the Beethoven sonata, the final movement proved in every sense a finale, almost as fascinating to watch – for instance, how the percussionists, sometimes unexpectedly, shared their load – as to hear. Counterpoint lived and thrilled in a performance that was not remotely safe, and was all the better for that, culminating in a splendidly witty and beguiling close.

sur Incises has many roots: most obviously in the solo piano piece, Incises (written originally for the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition, with which Maurizio Pollini had a strong association). Boulez’s first intention, as he explained in a 1998 interview, was to ‘transform this piece into a longer one for Pollini and a group of instrumentalists, a kind of piano concerto although without reference to the traditional form.’ Other ghosts reared their head, though, such as Bartók’s Sonata and Stravinsky’s Les Noces. In this context, unsuprisingly, Bartók offered a strong point of departure – opening similarly, yet differently, de profundis – yet, as with so much of Boulez’s music, it was his conception of serialism as open-ended, ever-expanding, that dazzled. The spatial element is, of course, crucial. Here, again, it was greatly assisted by the hall and its acoustic, enabling us not only to hear but truly to feel the interplay between the ensemble as a whole (a giant reinvention of the piano, one might say), solo lines, and differently constituted groups within: three groups, considered vertically, each of percussion, harp, and piano, and, horizontally, the three percussionists, the three harpists, and the three pianists. Here, in the line of Boulez’s – and Barenboim’s – beloved Parsifal, not only did space become time, both became music. The way a trill passed across all three piano keyboards, Wendeberg and Kozhukhin joined by the equally excellent Karim Said, would offer but one case in point. Magic squares sensual, musical, conceptual, above all thrilling played themselves out and reinvented themselves before our eyes and ears (the ‘thinking ear’, as the hall’s motto has it). Whatever the antecendents, it was vividly clear that Boulez’s own proliferating method of generation actually had little in common with either Beethoven or Bartók; likewise his, and Barenboim’s, control of liminal suspense and propulsive release. The work, like the two that had preceded it, passed as if in no time, whetting the appetite for more, much more, in the weeks, months, years to come. This hall and the events within, then, continue as a work-in-progress, very much in Boulez’s sense.

Vadim Repin and friends: Brahms and Dvořák, 23 June 2019

Mozart-Saal, Konzerthaus, Vienna

Brahms: Piano Quintet in F minor, op.34

Dvořák: Piano Quintet in A major, op.34

Some might have expected a clash of solo egos with an instrumental line-up such as this. Not a bit of it: the billing ‘Vadim Repin and friends’ seemed very much borne out by what we saw and heard in this Vienna Konzerthaus performance of piano quintets by Brahms and Dvořák.

There are doubtless many ways to sound Brahmsian; we should not be prescriptive. This, from the outset of Brahms’s F minor Quintet, was undoubtedly one of them. Overall line and its ebb and flow were likewise immediately impressive: more often said than done, perhaps particularly in the first two movements. Similarly balance: what, one might have asked, is often held to be the problem? What struck me particularly about the opening ‘Allegro non troppo’ was both the sense of proximity to and distance from the sound and conversational quality of a Classical chamber ensemble, and the character of themes when announced: the latter something for which, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Schoenberg consistently lauded Mozart, many of whose techniques he also claimed to have learned more consciously via Brahms. ‘I found, Schoenberg once told a pupil, ‘that if he [Mozart] has a scene in which there are several characters or moods, then he would construct a theme in the beginning of this scene which contains at once as many elements as necessary to contain the later coming moods.’ Such was what we heard here. Another distance relished was that of the development from home – until, that is, we were (tonally) home for a recapitulation that proved a true second development.

The opening piano quartet music to the second movement (minus Nikita Boriso-Glebsy’s second violin) left us in no doubt concerning this music’s complexity. Somehow Boriso-Glebsy’s first entry, however brief, seemed to ground music that had threatened already to veer off towards Schoenberg. Perhaps that was a conscious straining towards full ensemble; it certainly felt like that. Not that that precluded further complexity, far from it. The Scherzo was taken swiftly indeed – and it worked. Transformation from ghostly to vehement is key to this music. That was very much how it sounded here. Rhythm was rightly grounded in harmony, as opposed to being some thing-in-itself; it was all the stronger for that. There was, quite rightly, no attempt to beautify the Trio, which made the Scherzo’s reprise all the more different. The finale’s opening, reminiscent of late Beethoven in its rarity, fragility, and humanity, offered fertile ground for a veritable explosion of material. Not that its profusion was arbitrary; again it put me in mind of Schoenberg on Mozart.

Dvořak’s A major Piano Quintet opens very differently. Mellow, duetting lyricism between Alexandre Kniazev on cello Denis Kozhukhin on piano was nonetheless emphatically, unanimously brought to an end by the whole ensemble, setting up a polarity that would run through the performance as a whole. I was especially struck by the limpidity of Kozhukhin’s playing and golden yet variegated playing from Maxim Rysanov on viola; but truth be told, every musician’s playing was outstanding. Perhaps the overall tone was richer than in Brahms: a reflection, I suspect, of the greater, or more overt, lyricism on display. Affinities also made themselves apparent, but the expansiveness on offer seemed to owe little to Brahms and more than a little to Schubert. There was a great deal of art concealing art to the ‘Dumka’ (Andante con moto) that followed, properly grounded in harmony as the force through which this music could truly sing. It was Schubert who again came to mind in the high spirits of the Scherzo/Furiant, poles apart from its Brahmsian counterpart. Kozhukhin’s way of reminding us of that material throughout the Trio proved wonderfully compelling. And there was no doubt that the Finale was indeed a finale, relished and communicated as such. It lent a fine sense of coherence to a work that can sometimes seem to meander. A fitting conclusion to a fine concert.

Widmanns/Kozhuhkin - Schoenberg, Weber, and Bartók, 5 May 2017

Pierre Boulez Saal

Schoenberg – Fantasie, for violin with piano accompaniment, op.47

Weber – Grand Duo concertant, in E-flat major, op.48
Weber – Piano Sonata no.3 in D minor, op.49
Bartók – Contrasts, Sz.111

Carolin Widmann (violin)

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

Denis Kozhukhin (piano)

One ends up saying that almost every Schoenberg work is ‘extraordinary’ – or at least I do. Such enthusiasm is perhaps not entirely a bad thing for one at work writing not just one but two books concerning the composer and his music, but it needs to be kept in check, lest one end up sounding a bit too much like a contemporary Radio 3 presenter. Nevertheless, the Fantasie for ‘violin with piano accompaniment’ – Schoenberg actually wrote the violin part in its entirety before the piano part – continues at the very least to surprise, on those few occasions when musicians bother to perform it. For that alone, thanks would be due to Carolin Widmann and Denis Kozhukhin, but these were scrupulous performances indeed, taking on board both Schoenberg’s somewhat strange description and the work’s nature as a fantasia, not least its inspiration in Mozart’s essays in the genre, tonal and formal implications there to be heard without pedantic exaggeration. At first, I wondered whether Kozhukhin was proving a little reticent, but it was who I was in the wrong; his ‘accompanying’ role, neither over- nor understated, brought Schoenberg’s constructivism to the fore, Widmann’s greater fantasy very much the other side to the coin. One heard, moreover, the passing of motifs between instruments, without that suggesting a misleading equivalence: a very difficult balance, or rather ordering, to maintain, especially in music so febrile, so ever-transformative as this. (Whatever I might say about it will over-simplify.) Echoes of the old and their transformation sounded very much at the heart of the music and its progress. So too as an overflowing lyricism such as one often hears in Schoenberg: the problem for many, it seems, is not so much a lack of ‘tunes’ as far too many, a twentieth-century reinstatement of Mozart’s own ‘problem’ (with apologies to an apocryphal Joseph II). The ending surprised as much as ever, whether one ‘knew’ or not.

I try with Weber’s instrumental music; I really do. Alas, odd points of contact notwithstanding, I find it difficult to credit that a piece such as the Grand Duo concertant for clarinet and piano is by the composer of Euryanthe. Yes, it is earlier, yes I know we are fashionably supposed to take an interest in virtuosity for its own sake (or have we now gone beyond that in ‘nineteenth-century studies’?); but really… Carolin Widmann was replaced by her brother, Jörg. There was no doubting his virtuosity, nor indeed that of Kozhukhin. This, however, is a piece in which a very different form of inequality between instruments makes for much less satisfying, much less interesting listening. Ironically, or perhaps not, the occasional sighing phrases in the first movement’s piano part registered far more sympathetically than all the passagework in the world, whichever part it were in. (The piano part often sounds oddly as if it were an orchestral reduction.) There are lovely moments, but nothing more than that, and a degree of note-spinning, above all in the finale, which makes the likes of Hummel sound profound. That the slow movement was a little darker offered some relief.

Weber’s Third Piano Sonata followed the interval, offering Koshukhin, at least in the first and second movements, something more to get his musical teeth into. Allegro feroce is the marking for the first movement, and feroce the first group certainly was, the advent of the second as melting as anyone could hope for. There was perhaps even the odd hint of a soprano aria from one of the operas, with in a general ‘early Romantic’, non-Beethovenian framework. If there is a bit too much ‘more of the same’, Kozhukhin did what he could. He charmed, moreover, in the Andante con moto second movement, even in its more turbulent passages – which is probably as it should be. The range of colours drawn from the instrument in the finale was quite something, even if its musical substance were more dubious. I was soon longing for Beethoven. An oddity I noted only at the end: was the ordering of an op.47, an op.48, and an op.49 a coincidence?

With Bartók’s Contrasts, involving all three musicians, we turned to a masterpiece of the highest order. The first movement’s performance caught to perfection its fantastical gawkiness (perhaps a hint of Schoenberg’s opening piece, perhaps not) and equally its slinky eroticism. Not for nothing was this written for Benny Goodman. Contours were well traced, with equally keen projection of metre. Kozshukhin’s (at times) almost Schubertian way with the piano part of the first movement intrigued; it made me wonder what he might do with the piano concertos. Jörg Widmann’s virtuosity was put to still more startling and certainly much better use. The second movement was very much the heart of the performance, rich clarity offering a truly tripartite partnership. Line was just as clear, as goal-directed, as in Beethoven. The opening to the third movement suggested the Devil himself (or herself, in this case) tuning up, proving contagious both to clarinet and piano in turn. Once again, virtuosity was attuned throughout to properly musical ends, in performances as impressive for their flexibility as for their respect once again for metre. There was longing too, perhaps suggestive of the beginning of American exile for the composer – although is that to sentimentalise? At any rate, this was an awe-inspiring performance, as exciting as it was thoughtful: perhaps the best I have ever heard. A movement from The Soldier’s Tale made for an encore as enjoyable and, again, as exciting as it was apt.

‘Music for the thinking ear’: the opening concert of the Pierre Boulez Saal, 5 March 2017

© Volker Kreidler

 

Boulez – Initiale

Schubert – Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, D 965
Mozart – Piano Quartet in E-flat major, KV 493
Berg – Chamber Concerto
Widmann – Fantasie, for solo clarinet
Boulez – sur Incises

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Michael Barenboim (violin)

Yulia Deyneka (viola)

Kian Soltani (cello)

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

Karim Said (piano)

Boulez Ensemble

Daniel Barenboim (piano, conductor)

‘Musik für das denkende Ohr’ is the slogan for Berlin’s new Pierre Boulez Saal, which opened its doors to the public on Saturday 4 March. Why a new hall? The city’s Philharmonie (‘Karajan’s Circus’, or ‘Zirkus Karajani’, as West Berliners dubbed it) remains a monument to architectural, acoustic, and indeed performative modernism. There are no bad seats, whether visually or acoustically; the surrounding of the orchestra, or other performers, by the audience offers quite a different, ‘in the round’ experience from many more ‘traditional’ halls, even the most blessed acoustically, such as Vienna’s Musikverein and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, let alone the miserable examples with which London has been cursed.  Nevertheless, although Hans Scharoun’s Berlin hall has a smaller, chamber music hall attached, Berlin has had nothing like this. Frank Gehry’s oval design – no stage, merely a centre, again ‘in the round’ – genuinely seems to open up, in the spirit of Boulez’s long-held desire for a flexible ‘salle modulable’, the possibility of the ‘thinking ear’: to engage, to reflect, to make itself part of the performance. The greatest distance there can be between the conductor and the most distant member of the audience (682 seats in total) is but fourteen metres. There is intimacy, then, but the intimacy, it is hoped of collaborative endeavour.

The conceptual collaboration between Gehry, Daniel Barenboim, and acoustician, Yasuhisa Toyota stands very much in the spirit of the artistic collaboration, spanning more than half a century, between Barenboim and Boulez. They performed together for the first time in Berlin, with the Philharmonic, in Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto, and Barenboim has long proved one of the most ardent champions of his friend’s music. Whilst Boulez’s death continues to be lamented, the conscience of New Music seems almost to be reborn here. In programming philosophy, we see echt-Boulezian selections, connections made. Barenboim’s new ‘Boulez Ensemble’, at least as modulable as the hall, made up of musicians from his Staatskapelle Berlin and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, both of which Boulez conducted, will present concerts with combinations of contemporary music, Classical music, and classically modernist music – just as Boulez would insist that musicians auditioning for his Ensemble Intercontemporain play one Classical piece, not just contemporary music. The hall will also, most important of all, offer a home to the young musician-students of the Barenboim-Said Akademie, whose first cohort, thirty-seven of them, enrolled last autumn.

 

© Volker Kreidler

There will be much more to say about the hall itself; much will already have been said by others. I should like to concentrate now on the opening concert itself. It was given twice, the Saturday evening concert in the presence of a host of dignitaries, the German President included; I went the following morning. It may have been a lengthy occasion by the standards of the typical, one might say formulaic, concert; it did not feel as if it were. There is no reason why every concert should last for about two hours with an interval; every opera does not. If a performance of, say, the Diabelli Variations or the Missa solemnis is enough in itself, then there is no reason to add to it. Nor is there any reason to fret about a concert as rich, in very Boulezian terms, in programming possibility as this. Split into three parts, with two intervals, repertoire stretching from Mozart to Jörg Widmann, this encouraged, even did its part to create, that very ‘thinking ear’ of which we had previously been informed: to think and to listen.  

A new hall needs a fanfare. This one had Boulez’s 1987 Initiale, for seven brass instruments (two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, and tuba). The musicians encircled us, or rather played to us, Gabrieli-like, from the balcony, conducted (although I could not see him from where I was seated) by Barenboim. Clarity and warmth combined in near-ideal proportions, both in work and in performance. The experience of Répons seemed to offer musical as well as spatial inspiration – albeit now somewhat miniaturised. Five minutes of music offered an extraordinary expressive range, almost as if a symphonic poem and its narrative, wordless or otherwise, were being distilled – which, in a sense, is just what was happening.  It is not for nothing that ‘form’, understood as something more dynamic than ‘structure’, is contained within the word ‘performance’.

Schubert is to feature strongly in the Boulez Saal’s programming. A Winterreise with Christian Gerhaher, Barenboim at the piano, will launch a cycle of the complete Lieder over several years; Barenboim will also play the complete piano sonatas and conduct the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in the complete the symphonies. Here, we heard Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, with Anna Prohaska and Jörg Widmann, neatly also offering connections both to Widmann’s own clarinet Fantasie in the third section of the concert and to subsequent Widmann contributions to the season. This was true chamber music, perhaps especially between the two ‘soloists’, Barenboim not exactly reticent but far from dominant. The song opens: ‘When I stand on the highest rock, look down into the deep valley, and sing,’ that final ‘und singe’, quietly ecstatic here, enthusiastically echoed, as if across the valley, by the clarinet. The clarity of both lines – this was certainly not just a matter of the acoustic – did much to aid the Alpine impression: ‘atmosphere’, as Boulez would have been the first to point out, does not necessarily entail a blur. There was real sadness to be heard in the fourth and fifth stanzas, ‘In tiefem Gram verhehr ich mich…,’ until the ‘wunderbarer Macht’ (wondrous power) of song itself won through: a triumph as unmistakeable as it was unexaggerated. Playing to the gallery, figuratively or literally, is not a requirement for the hall of the thinking ear. And what post-Mozartian delight there was to be had in the concluding stanza, Spring arrived, receiving a fitting celebration in Prohaska’s coloratura.

Barenboim has been associated with the music of Mozart for as long as he has been a performing musician. For many of us, his piano concertos (whether with the English Chamber Orchestra or the Berlin Philharmonic) can hardly be bettered. It was fitting, then, to round off this first part of the concert with Mozart’s E-flat major Piano Quartet, with Michael Barenboim (violin), Yulia Deyneka (viola), and Kian Soltani (cello). I am yet to be entirely convinced by Barenboim senior’s new piano, much as I applaud the initiative; this was not the occasion on which I was to be won over. At times, although I do not wish to exaggerate, his uncontested leading role passed over into heavy-handedness. Nevertheless, at its best the first movement offered a fine balance between ebullience and tenderness, muscularity excluding neither relaxation nor, most importantly, dialogue. A typical Barenboim strength was to be heard in the dynamism of form I remarked upon in Initiale; Mozart’s music developed, motivically and harmonically, the one engendering the other. The balance between simplicity and complexity was well achieved in the slow movement, harmonic surprised registering with a delight that comes of knowing them well. The quiet dignity of the score, supported by extraordinary musical richness as soon as one exercised that ‘thinking ear’, was affirmed. Perhaps the finale was taken a little hastily: more Allegro than Allegretto? Such matters are, however, tricky in Mozart. It had, at any rate, the character of a finale, even if Barenboim sometimes proved a little too dominant again. The extroversion of the close was nothing less than delightful.

 

© Peter Adamik

The second section was given over to Berg’s Chamber Concerto. Barenboim conducted, his son played the violin solo, with Karim Said as solo pianist. (It was difficult not to think of this as a reinvention of the classic recording with Boulez, Barenboim, and Pinchas Zukerman.) Even with the intervention of an interval, one could hardly resist, even if one wished to do so, hearing Berg with Mozartian ears: protean, teeming with invention and expression. Boulez’s late recording with Mitusko Uchida and Christian Tetzlaff, cunningly, revealingly coupled with Mozart’s own Gran Partita, KV 361, came to mind. Thirteen instruments: how very un-Schoenbergian! The two soloists only combine in the final movement, the first being the pianist’s territory. Said offered clarity and sweep – just as Boulez, or Berg, might have wanted, or so one could fancy. Conductor, ensemble, and hall seemed to combine to afford a relationship between such clarity and complexity that came to the very heart of the work and its ever-shifting balances. Barenboim had its measure as few conductors, Boulez excepted, can ever have done, more than once playing up, or so it seemed, anticipations of Lulu.  

Musical process was audibly at work throughout, just as much in the central Adagio as in that opening theme and variations. Michael Barenboim’s playing gave us tenderness and fury, sometimes well-nigh spontaneous. Still more so did that of the Boulez Ensemble, its climaxes fearsome, de profundis. Berg’s music emerged as it should: labyrinthine yet purposeful. The thread was never lost, not even for a split second. Furious, again, and still more febrile, the finale, piano and violin now combined, proved endless generative in its working through of musical material. Constructivism was shown to be in itself expressive, not somehow, sentimentally, opposed to expression. (Again, Boulez would surely have approved.) The re-entry of the orchestral ensemble seemed truly to set in motion the idea of a finale, endlessly developmental and yet unquestionable in its conclusion.

Widmann returned to give a spell-binding account of his early (1993) Fantasie for solo clarinet. Like the brass players for Initiale, he played down to us from the balcony, in a performance that incited, might even be thought of as incantatory.  Musical line was as clear, as direct, as anything we had heard before, extended techniques very much at its service rather than heard for the first time. The performance seemed almost to exemplify the wishes expressed both by Boulez and by Barenboim that new music (newish, in this case) be performed as if it were classical (and vice versa).

Meanwhile, three pianos, three sets of percussion instruments, and three harps awaited their respective performers (Karim Said, Denis Koshukhin, Michael Wendeberg; Lev Loftus, Pedro Torrejón González, Dominic Oelze; Aline Khouri, Susanne Kabaln, Stephen Fitzpatrick) for Boulez’s sur Incises. Like many of Boulez’s works, sur Incises has its seeds in an earlier work. Incises is a piano piece written (1994, revised 2001) for the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition (with which Maurizio Pollini, long an advocate of Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata, had a strong association). Boulez’s initial intention, as he explained in an interview of 1998, was to:

 

… transform this piece into a longer one for Pollini and a group of instrumentalists, a kind of piano concerto although without reference to the traditional form. … Therefore, I produced a piece for three pianos, assuming that there already exists enough interesting literature for two pianos and ensembles, especially in the modern age – take for example Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. (In my opinion, everybody would have been reminded of this world if I had also written a piece for two pianos.) I have also considered the possibility of four pianos as this constellation is very attractive and provides a good balance.

 

Then, however, the siren call of Stravinsky and especially Les Noces suggested another path. As Boulez would remark more recently, in 2010, ‘This is the reason why I ended up with three pianos - incidentally three pianists are part of our ensemble [Intercontemporain].’ There were likewise three percussionists in the ensemble, and subsequently, the idea of adding three harps occurred to him, an idea rendered more attractive by his use of the instrument in Répons.

Boulez’s conception of serialism as ever-expanding, open-ended, was the overriding experience of this performance, conducted by Barenboim. The spatial element sounded more crucial than ever: we hear solo lines but also different groups: three groups, considered vertically, each of percussion, harp, and piano, and, considered horizontally, the three percussionists, the three harpists, and the three pianists. A startling aspect of those latter formations, all the more so in this telling acoustic, was to hear passages transferring spatially across, say, the three pianos, whilst remaining in a sense part of the one giant piano: played, as it were, by Barenboim, the pianist-conductor. I have long thought here of Boulez playing with something akin to a musical magical square, three rows and columns constantly shifting, and yet always adding up to the required total, even if we do not know what that should be: a magical extension of Webern, one might say.

Then there were the beguiling sonorities: the sumptuous quality of Boulez’s harmonies, fully captured here, harks back to and yet surely extends those of Debuusy. Kinetic, rhythmic energy brought every more strongly to mind Stravinsky and Bartók; indeed, that distancing from the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion notwithstanding, Bartók’s ghost seemed present in some of the piano writing, contagious, as it were, for the other instrumentalists. Barenboim seemed especially adept at signalling moments of transformation; one might think of Boulez’s own conception, adumbrated in his lectures to the Collège de France, of the musical ‘signal’. Rising clamour, typically Boulezian frenzy, would subside, at least partially, dialectically: confounding, yet making unanswerable sense. Form, we were again reminded, lives, acquires meaning, in performance, especially one so outstanding in quality as this. (What collaborative virtuosity was on show, and yet never for its own sake!) Nevertheless, however much we might have wished this universe to continue expanding forever, its material in perpetual proliferation, the conclusion once again proved decisive – at least until the next time. The ear had thought; the mind had listened.

(An edited version of this article appeared first in VAN Magazine, focusing less on the performances, more on the idea and reality of the hall and its programming. Please click here to read that. Apologies for the inconsistencies of formatting in this case: I seemed unable to get it to work, however much I tried...)

Berlin Festtage (5) - Kremer/Kozhukhin: Weinberg, Brahms, and Franck, 1 April 2015

Philharmonie, Berlin

Weinberg – Sonata no.2 for solo violin, op.95

Brahms – Fantasies, op.116

Weinberg – Sonata no.3 for solo violin, op.126

Franck – Sonata in A major, for violin and piano

Gidon Kremer (violin)

Denis Kozhukhin (piano)

 

1 April: I suppose the date should have given it away. Perhaps I am being unduly cynical, but this was the fifth time I had booked to hear Martha Argerich, and the fifth time she had cancelled. At any rate, a ‘feverish flu’ led to her replacement with Denis Kozhukhin and consequent rearrangement of the programme. Out went a Beethoven sonata (op.30 no.3) and one of Mieczysław Weinberg’s sonatas for violin and piano; in came Brahms’s op.116 Fantasien and a second of Weinberg’s sonatas for solo violin.

Frankly, one would have been more than enough, not least given the sometimes shocking performance offered by Gidon Kremer of Weinberg’s op.95. It took until the sixth of its seven movements for the performance to sound like a performance at all; a friend commented that Kremer had often sounded as if he were someone practising in his bedroom, and it was difficult to dissent. Maybe he had been as irritated by the rearrangement of the programme as many others. The poverty of Weinberg’s invention nevertheless came through, the first movement, ‘Monody’, made of the sort of banal figuration with occasional wrong notes Shostakovich would offer with (in a generous reading) irony. With this piece, however, irony was difficult to discern. Likewise, the third movement seemed characterised by sub-Shostakovich impotent anger. Kremer’s somewhat fuller tone – before, only thinness had been striking – was welcome in the final two movements, but that did not, most likely could not, disguise the sense of straining and failing to achieve profundity.

The one-movement Third Sonata, with which the second half started, was much more of a performance, certainly more urgent. Indeed, it was in this that Kremer sounded at his best. Weinberg, perhaps, shows at times a slightly less reactionary language and, more to the point, a stronger sense of development. At best, at least at the beginning, there are some mildly attractive ideas, whose development was over-extended. That, I am afraid, is the greatest enthusiasm I can muster. I think it is time to say that, as with some of the Entartete Musik composers and, more often than not, Shostakovich that an undeniably moving personal story and political persecution do not guarantee convincing, let alone compelling, music.

Denis Kozhukhin’s contributions proved to be stronger than Kremer’s. Kozhukhin’s Brahms is not for me the most appealing; I simply – or perhaps not simply – hear and understand the music differently. However, on its own, Romantic, ‘grand manner’ terms, it worked very well. It is perhaps too easy to describe it as ‘Russian’ Brahms, but there was more than a hint of that. The opening Capriccio showed a great dynamic range: ‘big’ tone, which can certainly be scaled down. If the following Intermezzo might have been intimate in conception, especially to begin with, it was admirably flexible; this remained, however, very ‘public’ Brahms. (One might well argue that a large hall such as the Philharmonie invites such a conception.) A stormy third movement had little sense of Brahms as progenitor of Webern, but certainly held the attention. The succeeding Intermezzo was slower than is perhaps fashionable, but none the worse for that. It was played beautifully, if at times the sound edged a little close to Rachmaninov. Moreover, the central section achieved a beautiful sense of half-lighting. The next Intermezzo, the fifth movement, was meaningfully voiced, though not in a modernist fashion. Its successor was bracingly fast, at least according to pianistic ‘tradition’, but arguably – just about – an ‘Andantino’ nevertheless. Such a reading is preferable to a sentimental one, but was the piece’s heart perhaps lost? The final movement needs to be fast, and it was; it was certainly ‘agitato’ too. Voicing again was a particular strength. And how the poverty of Weinberg’s inspiration was shown up!

As for the Franck Sonata, the only piece in which violinist and pianist appeared together, it was Kozhukhin’s playing that proved by far the more compelling. Even relative understatement, as at the beginning of the first movement, drew one in. Kremer’s wiry tone was disappointing, his poor intonation rather more than that. The performance did not conceal the truth of Debussy’s jibe about Franck as a ‘modulating machine’; the best can. In the second movement, Kozhukhin’s tone, recognisable from his Brahms, offered much to admire, Kremer’s only rarely. Much the same could be said of the very different third movement. Kozhukhin’s legato was pleasing, but in itself could not paper over the cracks of the composer’s vaunted cyclic method. More of the same in the finale – with some breathtaking pianism from Kozhukhin. In replacing Argerich, he saved the day in more than one sense.

 

Kozhukhin/Philharmonia/Temirkanov - Tchaikovsky and Dvořák, 31 May 2014

Royal Festival Hall

Tchaikovsky – Piano Concerto no.1 in B-flat minor, op.23

Dvořák – Symphony no.9 in E minor, op.95

Denis Kozhukhin (piano)

Philharmonia Orchestra

Yuri Temirkanov (conductor)

I keep trying with Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, and a Richter performance can just about momentarily dispel my doubts, but less than that simply confirms me in my belief that Nikolai Rubinstein’s initial dismissal of the work was not so far off the mark. It is certainly difficult to imagine on what conceivable musical grounds it is performed so frequently, the greatest problem being that apparently tacked-on introduction. Yes, it can be argued from looking at the score that there is a connection with subsequent material, but does it ever sound like it? Perhaps it does, and I have yet to hear the right performance; at any rate, this was not it.

 

Yuri Temirkanov’s conducting of the Philharmonia was impressive; he can probably conduct this concerto in his sleep, but it certainly did not sound as if he were. The introduction was somewhat on the swift side, no great loss. Thereafter, the first movement was characterful and agile – at least from the orchestra, which, when having the spotlight to itself, might have been performing one of the symphonies. Denis Kozhukhin, alas, rarely showed any sign of listening to the other players; it was as if it were his show and his show alone, the orchestra treated as if it were a mere ‘accompaniment’, certainly no way to salvage so problematical a work. It was a pity, since Kozhukhin was perfectly capable of exhibiting dark, weighty tone, at times melting away into nothingness. The slow movement was, on the surface, well played, but it was difficult to detect anything much beneath the surface, at least when it came to the pianist. The orchestra, alive with dance tunes and rhythms was another matter. A typically alert orchestral opening promised well for the finale, dispelling a predictable bronchial outburst. There was a sense of urgency throughout, though at times, Temirkanov perhaps drove a little too hard. Indeed, at times, the performance felt on the verge of falling apart. Meanwhile, Kozhukhin apparently remained in a world of his own, his playing increasingly brutalising. Thank goodness it was not Mozart.

The second half offered an estimable account of Dvořak’s ‘New World’ Symphony. The opening intrigued, sounding more as if were plunged into action that had been going for some time than I can recall. The first movement’s exposition proper clearly derived from material we had heard: not only analytically, but dramatically (as if there were such an opposition!) Temirkanov drove the performance urgently, but not too much, and relaxed significantly for the second group, which benefited from lilting rubato. Here, as in Tchaikovsky, the Philharmonia’s strings sounded splendidly full of one. The concision of the movement registered very well indeed. Its successor benefited from an unsentimental approach. Jill Crowther’s beautifully-played English horn solo was first among equals in an excellent woodwind section. This was a songful account, with due understanding of harmonic development. The third movement bore definite kinship to the contrasting sections in the slow movement; rhythmic detail was very well pointed. In that respect, one might even have called it ‘balletic’, so long as that were not understood to detract from its symphonism. If the work bears its ‘cyclic’ features too obviously on its sleeve, then that is not the performers’ fault; at least they were duly suggestive here. The same might be said of the finale, given an impassioned, perhaps more overtly Romantic performance: full of dramatic tension, without a hint of the routine.