Musikfest Berlin (3) – Michel-Dansac/Ensemble Musikfabrik/Poppe - Saunders, Birtwistle, and Dowland, 9 September 2017

Kammermusiksaal, Philharmonie

Rebecca Saunders: Yes (2016-17, world premiere)

Birtwistle: Cortege (2007)

Birtwistle: 26 Orpheus Elegies (2003-4) interspersed with:

Dowland, arr. Birtwistle: Lachrimae: seaven tears figured in seven passionate pavanes (1604/2009)

Doniatenne Michel-Dansac (soprano)

Andrew Watts (countertenor)

Peter Veale (oboe)

Mirjam Schröder (harp)

Paul Jeukendrup (sound design)

Ensemble Musikfabrik

Enno Poppe and Harrison Birtwistle (conductors) 

Other soloists:

Helen Bledsoe (flute, bass flute)

Carl Rosman (clarinet, bass clarinet)

Alban Wesly (bassoon)

Christine Chapman (horn)

Marco Blaauw, Nathan Plante (trumpet)

Jan Roskilly (trombone, bass trumpet)

Melvyn Poore (tuba)

Dirk Rothbrust, Rie Watanabe (percussion)

Ulrich Löffler, Benjamin Kobler (piano)

Krassimir Sterev (accordion)

Hannah Weirich, Yoonhee Lee (violin)

Axel Porath, Kirstin Maria Pientka, Tim-Erik Winzer (viola)

Dirk Wietheger, Andreas Müller (cello)

Florentin Ginot (double bass)

Images: Kai Bienert

Whilst London once again endured that ghastly annual farrago at the Royal Albert Hall – if, as apologists claim, it is ‘just a party’, then kindly choose a ‘theme’ other than imperialism – Berlin showed what British music, European music, or better still, just ‘music’, can and should be: bold, forward-looking, outward-facing, and above all, nourishing as well for the body as for the soul. It was almost certainly more than a mere programming coincidence that the three composers featured here were all English, but there was certainly nothing nationalistic concerning the choice, any more than there would have been had this been an all-German programme – or, for that matter, an all-nineteenth-century programme. We make connections when and where we and the material will. The crucial thing is quality; that was not lacking here.

The first part of the concert was devoted to the premiere of Rebecca Saunders’s Yes, a spatial performance for soprano (Doniatenne Michel-Dansac), nineteen soloists (Ensemble Musikfabrik), and conductor (Enno Poppe), after the final chapter of Ulysses (in particular, Molly Bloom’s monologue). Joyce famously said he wanted his book to end on the most positive word in the English language – and so it did. So too does this work of vocal and instrumental theatre, in some ways standing in the tradition of Birtwistle’s music theatre and other musical dramatic works, although certainly not merely to be assimilated to them. Beat Furrer’s FAMA also came to my mind, if only because it is not so long ago that I heard its London premiere. But the previous weekend’s Monteverdi could not also help but hover in my contextual consciousness, not least since this evening we also heard from both Ulysses and Orpheus. This, then, proved in many ways – I have only hinted at a few – ideal programming both in itself and in the context of the broader themes of this year’s Musikfest Berlin.

We hear first the voice, then double bass. And so, a new Odyssean journey is underway – albeit from Molly Bloom’s standpoint, if we care to think about it that way (and why would we not?) The Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal proved as much instrument as mere location: Monteverdian echoes again, or perhaps better, pre-echoes, hinting at the Vespers next weekend. There was arguably more ‘Mediterranean’ spirit – not in some narrow geographical way, but open as the sea itself, open as Angela Merkel’s Germany itself (at its best) – than there had been in the strangely insular world of John Eliot Gardiner’s ‘English’ Monteverdi. New members of the ensemble joined, all over the hall: a microcosm perhaps of a world outside, but also, perhaps more importantly, a created world, like that of Joyce. Art does not merely reproduce ‘reality’; if it did, we should have no need of it.

Trumpets called, duetted, almost as if this were St Mark’s. Wind surrounded us from the balconies above. This was a theatre of instruments and of instrumentalists, whether or no Michel-Dansac were singing, her contributions and those of everyone else equally impressive in virtuosity and the humanity that incited and enabled. Rarely were positions static for long; our ears and our minds moved, even if we physically stayed put. (Again, the precedent may be found in Joyce, Monteverdi, wherever one wishes…) Nothing was to be taken for granted, certainly not the sound of the soprano voice, which often might have been taken for a contralto. Indeed, that is precisely how Michel-Dansac had been listed when, earlier this year, I heard her in Le Marteau sans maître! It was not only the ‘range’ of her voice, but of all ‘voices’, that expanded. Hierarchies, spatial and musical dissolved as, say, the (wonderful) accordionist had his ‘spot’ and then moved on: or were there indeed no such hierarchies in the first place? Was that simply my need to think of them that way, and if so, what does that say about me? This was, then, in many respects, an ‘open’ world: Berio (Sinfonia) suggested itself more than once, perhaps even in the odd musical figure, although that may well just have been my imagination playing tricks. This was, I think, more drama than ritual, insofar as the distinction makes sense (on which one might perhaps consider Parsifal), not that there is anything wrong with ritual – as Birtwistle would triumphantly show. Michel-Dansac’s final stream of consciousness muttering, or more than that, proved unusually ‘audible’. Once again, what might that mean? And why might we ask that? Scale is not everything; indeed, as the Orpheus Elegies to come would show, it is perhaps nothing at all. This was nevertheless the largest-scale work by Saunders I had yet heard, and it confirmed, even enhanced, the view I have of her as one of the finest composers of her generation.

The second half opened with Birtwistle’s Cortege, a ‘ceremony’ written in memory of Michael Vyner, itself a reworking of the much older ceremony, Ritual Fragment. It is, perhaps, more familiar territory to me – although how ‘familiar’ can the strange antiquity of Birtwistle ever be? The musicians certainly played it with all the confidence, yet none of the taking for granted, of a ‘classic’ work, which it is. Different soloists again took their ‘turn’: this is an ensemble piece in all manner of ways. There remains, I think – or did in this performance – something of a post-Stravinskian ‘attitude’ to the music, The Soldier’s Tale still somehow present in the background, as it is for so much music theatre, actual or related. Perhaps even The Rite there somewhere too, in the odd instrumental line? I do not think it is anything so obvious as ‘influence’ by now, but as I said above, one makes connections when and where one will. This ritual teemed with drama, at any rate, at least as much as any work with words might have done. Whatever distinction I might have made in the first half had already been called into question, indeed dissolved.

So too was it with the interweaving of Birtwistle’s Dowland arrangements with his own Orpheus Elegies. That antique, indeed archaic (in the proper sense), ‘authenticity’ of which, in which, the elegies speak, with or without words, was immediately apparent in the very first. (Many of them have no vocal part at all, simply or not so simply alluding to the Rilke sonnets from which the work takes its name and, in part, inspiration.) The refracted sound of the old viol consort in Dowland-Birtwistle offered its own counterpart, challenge, emotional intensification, all the more so perhaps when, in the second piece, strings were joined by wind: never quite as one expects, yet never seeking attention either. Veiled rather than violent, one might say, but is that again all too easy a formulation? The world of the Orpheus Elegies: rhythms as much as melodies, and above all their clashes (occasionally in stark relief through the use of metronomes). Occasionally, I thought of Elliott Carter’s polyrhythms, although again I am not quite sure why: perhaps, again, that was just my own fancy, but why not? Webern’s celebrated Bach arrangement hovered also in the (non-electronic) penumbra of my consciousness: father, or mother, to so much in this tradition, just like his ‘own’ work. And were not Dowland’s ‘passionate pavanes’ themselves also speaking of a ‘passion’ one might conceivably associate with Bach? The dissonances were certainly as moving, likewise the grace with which they were presented, a grace that in no way precluded depth. That the final Dowland arrangement seemed truly to emerge from within the 16^th Elegy (they were not performed ‘in order’, I should add) seemed to make both more present and yet more distant. After that, after those ‘true tears’, the final (19^th) Elegy offered an instrumental conclusion unadorned in every respect.

Michel-Donsac/Boulez Ensemble/Roth - Mozart, Boulez, and Schoenberg:, 17 March 2017

Pierre Boulez Saal

Mozart – Oboe Quartet in F major, KV 370/368b

Boulez – Le Marteau sans maître
Schoenberg – Chamber Symphony no.1 in E major, op.9

Donatienne Michel-Dansac (contralto)

Boulez Ensemble

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

At last: a hall that programmes the concerts I should love to programme – or, perhaps more to the point, not so distant from the concerts Boulez might have programmed. The Pierre Boulez Saal is not Boulez’s hall in name only. His vision of a ‘salle modulable’ extended beyond its dimensions, its physical adaptability. Take a look at Boulez’s orchestral programmes for any given year, any given month, and you will be swept away by their mouthwatering promise. For instance, in June 1974, six concerts on six consecutive evenings (!) in New York with its notoriously reactionary Philharmonic Orchestra: (1) Brahms: Symphony no.4; Debussy, Ibéria; Bartok, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta; (2) Handel, Music for the Royal Fireworks; Mozart, Flute Concerto in G major, KV 313/285c; Webern, Concerto, op.24; Varèse, Octandre; Ligeti, Aventures, Nouvelles aventures; (3) Schumann, Symphony no.2 in C major, op.61; Berg, Three Movements from the ‘Lyric Suite; Ravel, Daphnis et Chlioé, Suites 1 and 2; (4) Bach, Brandenburg Concerto no.3; Schubert, Symphony no.2 in B-flat major, D 125; Webern, Symphony, op.21; Boulez, Improvisations sur Mallarmé 1 and 2; Stravinsky, L’Histoire du Soldat: Suite; (5) Schoenberg, Serenade, op.24; Ode to Napoleon, op.41; Pierrot lunaire, op.21; (6) Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht, op.4; Berg, Three Fragments from ‘Wozzeck’; Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring. Bliss it must have been in that dawn to have been alive.

 

Such, however, is increasingly the case here too. Moreover, with the ‘thinking ear’ that is the hallmark of this new hall, each and every audience member can and should draw his or her own connections and contrasts, continuities and dialectics, essentially becoming a programmer in his or her own right: ‘in real time’, as the performance progresses. The doldrums of subscription concerts and their bored subscribers – why would one attend a two-hour performance, irrespective of what was being performed and who was performing it, simply because it was ‘on’? – have long deserved to be banished. More than once, they frustrated Boulez, not least in his desire to perform Busoni’s Doktor Faust in New York. Perhaps now, at long last, we are beginning to make another start.

 

That will not happen, of course, without excellent performances; indeed, Boulez would recall that one of the banes of his earlier musical life had been well-meaning, yet technically insufficient, performances of new(ish) music, above all that of the Second Viennese School, which did more harm than good. It was one of the reasons he set up the Domaine musical, a forerunner, we might think, of the Ensemble Intercontemporain (on this same evening celebrating its fortieth anniversary in Paris), and of Daniel Barenboim’s own Boulez Ensemble, drawn from both the Staatskapelle Berlin and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, as well as from those teaching at the Barenboim-Said Akademie and guest artists.

 

Here, this flexible ensemble, under the direction of François-Xavier Roth for the latter two items in the programme, and playing ‘simply’ as a chamber group for the first, justified the hopes placed in it as an ambassador for this musical mission. In Mozart’s Oboe Quartet, the players (Cristina Gómez Godoy (oboe), Yuki Manuela Janke (violin), Volker Sprenger (viola), and Kian Soltani (cello)) drew one in, made one listen, even seduced one into doing so. The acoustic, with its near-ideal blend of clarity and warmth helped, but again, that will come to naught if the performance is not also up to scratch. The difficult path between chamber and concertante work was carefully, or better confidently, trodden, so that the ear’s natural inclination to treat the oboe as separate from the strings was neither entirely denied nor indulged. Indeed, subtly shifting balances, always musically justified, were a hallmark of the performance – looking forward, perhaps, to the worlds of Schoenberg and Boulez. Phrasing was always impeccable, but never ‘in itself’; one always had a keen sense of response and its necessity, generating form rather than being moulded by a prior formula. The difference between an aria-like slow movement and an actual aria was clear; we heard the oboe (and not just the oboe) as soloist, but we heard what only it could do, rather than an imitation of a singer, however close the kinship. The warmth and, on occasion, involved quality of the so-called ‘accompaniment’ again looked forward to works later in the programme. Above all, perhaps, each movement, whilst contributing to the whole, had its own ‘character’, the Rondeau finale – a favourite gambit for Mozart – an especial joy in that respect, just so long as one listened.

 

Donatienne Michel-Dansac joined Roth and his players (Yulia Deyneka (viola), Claudia Stein (alto flute), Lev Loftus (percussion), Pedro Torrejón González (vibraphone), Adrian Salloum (xylorimba), and Seth Josel (guitar)) for that landmark in post-war modernism: Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître. Roth and Michel-Dansac have performed the work together before; their close partnership showed. But first, of course, the ensemble had its say, the ‘soloist’ not entering until the third of the nine movements. There was nowhere for the players to hide – just like in Mozart – but they had no need of anywhere to hide, their performances duly confident, even commanding. The occasional minor slip or insecurity will trouble almost any ensemble in this fearsomely difficult work, and will in no sense detract from the overall performance. What struck me here was the kinship to Boulez’s earlier performances: not so much those ‘pointillistic’ 1950s readings, although there was perhaps an element of that too, as those of the 1960s and ’70s. There was less of a tendency towards what we might broadly, perhaps too broadly, call Romanticism, and more of an emphasis upon the cellular. (It will always, I think, be a matter of degree, but degree matters.) Sometimes one needed to listen especially carefully to make the connections between lines, especially those of different instruments; it was not that the connection was not ‘there’, or that the listener had to do all the work, but that (s)he was, perhaps by way of contrast rather than connection with Mozart, less of an object of seduction. There was, indeed, a good deal of the shock of the new, or at least the classically new. ‘Period’ Boulez? I am not sure, but, as the composer’s grip over his works recedes into history, the possibility and likelihood of alternative performative strategies seems likely to grow – even, to use an appropriately Boulezian idea, to expand. Silences, intriguingly, seemed to tell as strongly as they might in Bruckner.

 

Michel-Dansac’s performance earlier on, for instance in ‘L’artisanat furieux’ seemed – and I do not mean this as a value judgement – almost conventionally vocal, as if she were the soloist in a Baroque cantata whose language might be French, but whose inventiveness was that of Bach. If anything, intriguingly, her line seemed simpler, more ‘vocal’, than one of Bach’s might have been, perhaps suggestive of another French tradition: an updated Ramellian, or Ravelian, air? Art conceals art, though, and the complexity of her part revealed itself over time: development of a sort, if not quite how Mozart would have understood it. By the time of the closing double to ‘Bel edifice et les pressentiments’, she and her part were fully-fledged members of the ensemble. Hierarchy had been questioned and transformed with the means of that time-honoured mode of vocal experimentation: ‘tempo libre de récit’. Percussion seemed almost to acquire a voice, just as the voice shed its words. And yet, there was finality too, to a performance well-shaped.

 

Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony was long a favourite work of Boulez’s. Listen to him performing it with his Domaine musical musicians and you will find a bracing reading indeed, almost spoiling for a fight. I heard him conduct the Scharoun Ensemble (drawn from members of the Berlin Philharmonic) in 2008 in as close to an all-encompassing performance as one could imagine, far more at ease with itself, yet never wanting excitement. Roth likewise seemed to approach the work as a classic – which surely by now it has long been. That is not to imply lazy familiarity, but rather an appreciation of its formal and expressive (the two are inextricably intertwined) greatness, which no longer needed to plead a cause. Every member of the ensemble contributed an incalculable amount; each part proved as crucial as any other. Balance was never an issue – or rather, when it was, it was musically an issue, part of the performance, rather than something detracting from an ‘ideal’ version thereof. For, just as in Mozart’s Oboe Quartet, balances shifted; we looked, or listened, into a future of Klangfarbenmelodie, even of Boulez. It was, though, above all the inventiveness of Schoenberg’s post-Lisztian transformation of sonata form that provided the drama. Straussian, Wagnerian, Brahmsian harmonies might come and go, refracted by the new uses to which they were put, but the formal propulsion of work and performance were, quite rightly, the principal narrative. This might, to return to that first cited New York performance from Boulez in 1974, have been a Brahms symphony in itself – and in many ways, that is just what it was. Shorn of the accoutrements of the symphony orchestra, work and performance reminded us what the real point of that orchestra and its continuing great tradition might yet be.