Passion, Music Theatre Wales, 13 October 2018

(sung in English)

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Images: Clive Barda
Jennifer France (Her) and National Dance Company Wales

Her – Jennifer France

Him – Johnny Herford

Dancers – Cyril Durand-Gasselin, Nikita Goile, Ed Myhill, Julia Rieder, Malik Williams, Queenie Maidment-Otlet

Michael McCarthy, Caroline Finn (co-directors)

Simon Banham (designs)

Joe Fletcher (lighting)

EXAUDI

Sound Intermedia (sound design, after original concept by Thierry Cudoys)

London Sinfonietta

Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)

Ten years ago, I saw one of the first performances of Pascal Dusapin’s Passion at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. Now, Music Theatre Wales and National Dance Company Wales give the opera its first United Kingdom production – in an English translation by Amanda Holden from the original Italian: the first time, I believe, that a Dusapin opera has been performed in translation. (I shall admit to a slight disappointment that it was not in Welsh: maybe next time.) The premiere took place two nights earlier in Basingstoke; I saw this resourceful, imaginative dance staging at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Titles might not have been a bad idea, but there is always something to be said for making an audience listen, or at least encouraging it to do so. (There was, alas, some extraordinary distracting behaviour from a few bad apples on this occasion, one woman near me aggressively scratching herself like an alley-cat throughout, another apparently running a tombola from her handbag. Such highly distracting goings on did not appear to be part of a directorial Konzept; perhaps, however, I was missing the point.)

Dusapin’s Orpheus or rather Eurydice, opera, the lovers abstracted to Her and Him, Lei and Lui, with shadowing support from ‘The Others’ (Gli Altri), takes its place in perhaps the most venerable of all operatic traditions. Orpheus, son of Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry, and, according to some tellings of the legend, Apollo’s too, tamed animals, even charmed Hades itself, through performance on his lyre – here suggested, yet perhaps not merely to be identified with, the oud, Rihib Azar’s part and performance evocative, generative, and questioning towards the close. Orpheus’s purview – and that of Greek mousikē more generally – was greater than what we, in an age cursed by specialisation, might consider to be ‘music’: he was poet, enchanter and prophet; he communicated the qualities of all the Muses through his identity as a musical performer. Where, however, is Eurydice in all that? As ‘traditional’ a supportive figure, a victim, as ever? Here she is granted, or better she assumes, newfound agency. As Dusapin, quoted in the progamme, put it: ‘I sincerely wanted to do something with this myth, and yet I wasn’t really attracted to a story where a woman dies, engulfed by flames, sacrificed by the stare of an impatient man … So I thought: “What if the woman knew? And what if she suddenly decided not to go back towards the light?”’ Just as composers from Monteverdi to Birtwistle have retold, remade the myth in the light of their own concerns, the concerns of their times too, so have Dusapin and a splendidly integrated team of performers.

Johnny Herford (Him) and National Dance Company Wales

Worthy successors to the not inconsiderable team of Barbara Hannigan, Georg Nigl, Ensemble Musicatreize, Ensemble Modern, and Franck Ollu, Jennifer France, Johnny Herford, EXAUDI, the London Sinfonietta, and Geoffrey Paterson offered an outstanding musical performance, ably shadowed, incited, and criticised by a fine team of dancers. One had little doubt that the Sinfonietta and Paterson were not only presenting what one was ‘supposed’ to hear, but in the emphatic sense performing it, bringing it into life and revealing its form in the dramatic here and now. Comparisons make little sense in the case of an artist such as Hannigan; perhaps they do far more rarely than many of us would care to admit. France’s performance had us believe in this particular Eurydice, her particular concerns and ‘character’: what could be more feminist than that? Herford cheerfully yet wistfully consented to and furthered a remodelling of Orpheus’s role that leaves us all the richer. With none of Nigl’s sometimes disconcerting idiosyncrasies, he – as indeed did the rest of the team – suggested that we are all the richer for this recent chapter in the progress of the myth. A subtly raucous – yes, that is intended – duet between trombone and oboe; a recognisably celestrial yet menacing glimpse of heaven; a (false?) witness of the clavecin ‘past’; an approach to an expected final unison that proved not to be such at all: these and many more such moments attested to the fleeting quality of memory, the necessity of multiple standpoints in and of the present.

London Sinfonietta/Furrer - Furrer, FAMA, 11 November 2016

St John’s, Smith Square

Isabelle Munke (actress)

Eva Furrer (contrabass flute)

EXAUDI (chorus master: James Weeks)

Sophie Motley (staging advisor)

London Sinfonietta

Beat Furrer (conductor)

 

Premiered in 2005 at Donaueschingen – how reassuringly modernist that sounds! – Beat Furrer’s sound theatre piece has now, finally, reached London. First performed in a large ‘box’, in which about 300 audience members were seated, the musicians outside, the speaker/actress moving within and without, it must have sounded – and indeed looked – very different from its incarnation at St John’s, Smith Square. There was here, of course, no question of opening and closing the walls and celings, but instruments and choir still moved around the audience, making use of the balcony too. If a work is not to remain entirely site-specific – in any case, the box apparently no longer exists – then it will need to take on new life. That goes for Parsifal as much as for the Monteverdi Vespers, for FAMA as much as for Nono’s Promoteo.  

 

Besides, one can imagine; as Wagner, Nono, and doubtless Monteverdi would tell us, imaginary theatre is often most powerful of all, or at least differently powerful. A young woman, her roots in Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else, will adapt in the theatre of our imagination, but will and should remain a stranger to herself, looking in dramatically as well as physically. She will still find herself eventually in the house of Ovid’s Fama, ‘entirely of sounding ore, resonating ubiquitously it hurls back in imitation what it hears,’ but it will always be for us to construct that house, as well as to make it resonate, perhaps visually as well as aurally. Whether I quite managed to do so on first acquaintance, I am less than sure, but deepening acquaintance, in something worth acquainting oneself with, will always be a Beckettian case of failing better. I should certainly like the opportunity to do so again.

 

One of the most arresting, even fantastical, passages for me came with the opening Latin ensemble. The sense of fantasy – not in the debased, modern usage – was as much instrumental as it was vocal, and in any case the border, in the best music-theatre tradition, was far from clear. Highly rhythmical, colourful exuberance played intriguingly with this particular acoustic. The London Sinfonietta and EXAUDI, both on typically outstanding form, were certainly not especially large of number, the latter only eight, but the ‘scale’ of work and performance sounded much larger. At times, one might have been forgiven for hearing a full-scale orchestra rather than ensemble, even if one should accept that distinction. A sense of falling away, of dissolution, more than once put me in mind of Wozzeck; but that was perhaps just my finding my bearings.  Swimming against the tide as the instrumental music sometimes seemed to be, Isabelle Menke’s role as speaker took different routes, sometimes connecting, sometimes at odds. At any rate, and not only because it opens with ‘ich höre das Feuer,’ it proved equally incendiary, paving the way for further musico-dramatic development – if I may borrow so Classical a term – in the wordless second scene.

 

An intriguing reinvention of recitative as well as Sprechstimme was suggested in the third scene, a pulsating instrumental tapestry both backcloth and participant. Instruments came close to speech, and vice versa. A quite different sound-world and sensibility were experienced in the short fourth scene. I do not think it was just the Italian language that made me think of Nono and Sciarrino, although that doubtless did no harm. A whistling riot of sound seemed to encapsulate the concept both of scene and work. Oh! Vi doveva pur essere, sulla terra di tutti i dolori, un giardino profondo, lontano, silente… One found the silence of that garden in sound, in music, not in silence: a liminality, perhaps, one might compare to Fama’s house. That sense of the numinous could be traced, albeit in different form, into the fifth scene. It was almost pictorial, at times, but the ‘almost’ was as important as the ‘pictorial’. Post-Romantic? Doubtless; for we all are, are we not? The experience remained fresh, though.

 

In the sixth scene, interaction between actress and contrabass flute solo (the excellent Eva Furrer) stood on the boundary between an acting ‘two hander’ and a post-operatic duet. Are not such confrontations, reinventions, always at the heart of music theatre? Ominous, antiphonal trombones inevitably brought resonances from the past in the seventh, before the final, eighth scene for ensemble, in which the music, the drama seemed to subside, open-ended. It struck a note that came close to, without ever quite ‘being’, or being capable of reduction to, tragedy.

 

The performance was recorded by BBC Radio 3 for subsequent radio broadcast (date as yet unknown).

EXAUDI/Weeks - Schütz and Christopher Fox, 20 December 2015

Wigmore Hall

Schütz – Ein Kind ist uns geboren, SWV 384; Das Wort ward Fleisch, SWV 385; O lieber Herre Gott, SWV 381; Ich bin jung gewesen und bin alt worden, SWV 320; Die mit Tränen säen, SWV 378; Ich bin ein rechter Weinstock, SWV 389; Herr, auf dich treue ich, SWV 377; So fahr ich hin zu Jesu Christ, SWV 379; Ich liege und schlafe, SWV 310; Unser keener lebet ihm selber, SWV 391; Ich weiß, daß mein Erlöser lebt, SWV 393

Interspersed with: Christopher Fox – Trostlieder (in Widerwärtigkeit des Kriegs), world premiere

Juliet Fraser, Rebecca Lea (sopranos)

Tom Williams (countertenor)

Ben Alden, Jonathan Bungard (tenor)

Simon Whiteley, Jimmy Holliday (bass)

Stephen Farr (organ)

James Weeks (conductor)

 

This was a decidedly superior, somewhat yet not excessively oblique, Advent/Christmas concert. Motets from Schütz’s 1648 Geistliche Chor-Musik, supplemented by a duet and an aria from the earlier (1639) Kleine Geistliche Konzerte II, framed the four parts of Christopher Fox’s Trostlieder (in Widerwärtigkeit des Kriegs), receiving its world premiere. Fox’s work is a cappella, whereas the Schütz pieces all have organ continuo; other than that, the forces are similar, Schütz writing for slightly different forces throughout his collection. The Schütz pieces offered some ‘seasonal’ quality, in perhaps a similar measure to Handel’s Messiah doing so. The connection with Fox’s new work, a response to James Weeks’s invitation to compose a companion work to some of Schütz’s motets, began yet did not end with 1648, a date burned onto the German and indeed the European conscience and memory, as the end of the Thirty Years’ War and its attendant, almost incredible devastation. Fox had come to know Schütz’s music in the early 1980s and ‘remembered from that time that Schütz makes a brief appearance in Günter Grass’s 1979 novel, Das Treffen in Telgte’. In his novel, Grass has a number of German writers meeting in the aftermath of the war, and, as an appendix, offers an anthology from those writers, including the first part of Martin Opitz’s Trost-Gedichte in Widwärtigkeit des Kriegs (‘Poems of Comfort in the Dreadfulness of War’), written earlier during the conflict. It may, or may not, be coincidental that Opitz was also the librettist for Schütz’s Dafne, the first German opera, whose music has, alas, been lost.

At any rate, Fox has understandably felt parallels with both his own family’s history – the Red Army’s occupation of Pomerania echoing the destruction of three centuries earlier – and the plight of Syria today. They do not appear explicitly, or at least unmistakeably, in this work; we may have other, personal and/or societal, parallels to draw. The omnipresence of war, of state-sanctioned violence, and of the dislocation that refugees – from the Holy Family onwards, and indeed long before that – are unlikely, however, to leave our minds completely; they certainly did not mine. Toing and froing from 1648 (and a little earlier) to 2015 unsurprisingly shone light upon both similarity and difference; what was perhaps surprising was how much the former tended to prevail over the latter.

The nature of the Geistliche Chor-Musik as a collection has musical parallels of its own; perhaps inevitably, I thought both of Monteverdi’s Selva morale e spirituale and the later practice, in so many genres, of Bach. Thinking of Schütz as the transalpine stepping-stone – I suppose ‘Pass’ might be better, given the terrain – between the glories of Venice and the absolute summit of Western music is ingrained upon our musico-historical consciousness, and with good reason. Had he not been Gabrieli’s pupil, we might have had to invent the fact. The opening Ein Kind ist uns geboren sounded poised between madrigalian sacred piece and the prima pratica, between homophony and counterpoint: both as work and as performance from EXAUDI under Weeks. Darkness and yet luminosity were the Advent hallmarks of Das Wort ward Fleisch, the celebrated opening of St John’s Gospel made musical flesh. And even if the sense of music travelling north from Venice to the German lands might sometimes be a little too fanciful, a little too convenient, here again it sounded in the setting of Luther’s translation of an Advent collect, O Lieber Herre Gott: mediated not only by the Reformation but by the shadow of war.

The first of the four parts of Fox’s Trostlieder then followed. The composer’s own description of this lengthy section of text reads: ‘“May my tongue burn with passion; let me not stumble on this barren path.” The war-torn landscape is described: farms abandoned, the land pillaged, homes on fire. “The sickle and plough have been sharpened into swords.”’ The harmonic language is, of course, quite different from that of Schütz; so are many other things. There sounded nevertheless a strong element of kinship, not least in the sorts of writing, such as outlined above, one might hear, whether more straightforwardly echoing those distinctions in Schütz’s music or reimagining them. It also struck me – and this may simply be my own personal resonance – that the way in which particular vocal lines would sometimes take a different turn from what one might have expected, without in the least sense sounding arbitrary, offered kinship with a composer who, rightly, or wrongly, has often been seen as marking the end of that tradition inaugurated by Schütz: Arnold Schoenberg. Cries of horror – ‘Ey, ey’ – proved especially, dramatically memorable. The quasi-muttering of some of the final section and the open musical and verbal question of the final line – ‘Wer fragt, ob Kriegeskunst List, oder Tugend sey?’ left one wanting more: both of Schütz and of Fox. Excellent performances throughout were, of course, part and parcel of that; it was perhaps more than usually difficult to separate works from their performance here.

 

Schütz’s Ich bin jung gewesen und bin alt worden was sung by Simon Whiteley and Jimmy Holliday with disarming clarity and sincerity, resounding as a touching profession of faith, not least in its closing Allelujas. There followed the second part of Fox’s work: ‘A series of images of cyclical change in the natural world: the passage of sun and moon, night following day, changes in the weather. “This is the way of the world, one falls, another rises, one rises, another falls.”’ The varying textures and ‘solo’ spots somehow always sounded ‘right’, without my necessarily being able to tell you why. A case in point would be the placing of the countertenor on top in the third stanza ‘Zu Zeiten ligt die See gantz stille, glatt und eben, …’. Relative flatness – I speak not in terms of pitch, but of register: foothills, if you like, rather than peaks – in much, although not all, of this seemed to convey or at least to suggest a fatalism in the face of cyclical change, and perhaps also in the face of less natural transformations. And yet, I felt tempted to think, for ‘them’ and for ‘us’, things moved. After that, the precious sadness, interspersed with knowing, certainly not naïve, joy in what we might call salvation, sounded in Schütz’s Die mit Tränen säen. Restrained jubilation was also to be heard in Ich bin ein rechter Weinstock, that restraint partly a matter of what had gone before: historically, musically, and musico-historically.

There seemed to be a little more overt passion in Schütz’s Herr, auf dich traue ich, whilst the hymnal quality of the ensuing So fah rich hin zu Jesus Christ, its simplicity and its complexity, pointed towards the future of German music. The third part of Trostlieder sounded perhaps more overtly strange in harmonic context, at least in its opening, repeated yet transformed, invocation. To quote Fox again, ‘Two different sets of text. Groups of two, then three, then four singers gradually introduce these words, an invocation against pride: … Between these sections the singers sing together, each singing their own passage of text.’ Such was what we heard, the singers making it sound so much easier than it can possibly have been, without that musical ease obscuring the musical dialectic.

 

Holliday sang, again quite disarmingly, the solo aria, Ich liege und schlafe, reminding us once again of the more operatic elements of Schütz’s writing. Coming to the final part of Fox’s work, I reflected on what seemed to me to be the gratefulness of his vocal writing; that was certainly how EXAUDI made it sound. ‘“We are on our way again”: images of travel, the wind propelling our ship to shore. There is comfort in hope. “Life is like a house-guest, to be encouraged to stay,”, yet “life goes in only one direction”, to death.’ The interplay between cries of ‘O nein!’ and ‘Die Hoffnung,’ the hope to which Fox alludes, seems at the heart of this part to be both a verbal and a musico-structural concern. Much of the rest of the writing, leading us to death, participates in Schütz-like restraint, the homophony unmistakeable.

And then: quiet, even radiant certainty in the three final Schütz motets, Unser keener lebet ihm selber, Selig sind die Toten, and Ich weiß, daß mein Erlöser lebt. That said, there was difference here too in similarity: the quietness ,the radiance different in quality on each occasion. The final musical flowering, again for us inevitably evoking Messiah (‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’) sounded properly, softly German, whilst acknowledging the Italianate roots from which it had clearly sprung.

The EXAUDI Italian Madrigal Book – A Tenth Birthday Celebration, 21 October 2012

Wigmore Hall

Andrea Gabrieli – Vieni, vieni Himeneo

Sciarrino – Tre madrigal
Monteverdi – Sovra tenere erbette
Io mi son giovinetta
Larry Goves – Sherpa Tensing stands up from the piano, says something quiet, and walks outside (world premiere)
Christian Wolff – Ashbery Madrigals (world premiere)
Monteverdi - Vattene pur crudel
Gesualdo – ‘Mercè!’, grido piangendo
Asciugate i begli occhi
Morgan Hayes – E Vesuvio monte
Gesualdo – Ardita Zanzaretta
Languisce al fin
Evan Johnson – Three in, ad abundantiam (world premiere)
Michael Finnissy – Sesto Libro di Carlo Gesualdo I (world premiere)
Monteverdi – Rimanti in pace

EXAUDI
James Weeks (conductor)

This tenth birthday celebration for the EXAUDI consort, founded in 2002 by James Weeks and Juliet Fraser, commendably looked forward rather than back, by presenting the first performances of four new commissioned works, ‘the first tranche,’ to quote Weeks’s programme note, ‘of what we hope will become a long-term enterprise: the creation of a book of (mainly) Italian madrigals, each by a different composer. Our aim is to discover what the idea of “the madrigal” might offer the present day, either as a concrete historical phenomenon or as a set of more general principles: principles perhaps to do with the relationships between individual voices or the singers themselves, or to do with the idea of vocal expression, or simply to do with the humanist, secular impulses underlying the genre.’

 

The door is thus left pretty much open for composers to do as they will; whether something a little more prescriptive might have been in order, only time will tell. I perhaps responded more readily to those works more recognisably ‘madrigalian’, but that is doubtless a different, personal matter. (One should recall that the form had died out before and been reinvented more or less from scratch, fourteenth- and sixteenth-century madrigals possessing little in common beyond the name.) Michael Finnissy’s Sesto Libro di Carlo Gesualdo I is in a sense a transcription of Gesualdo’s Se la mia morte, dividing the six voices into two competing trios, one amplified. The dark, at times almost neo-expressionist, harmonies (or should that, in Gesualdo’s case, be palaeo-expressionist, since our terms of reference are certainly not his?) proved attractive for singers and audience alike. Evan Johnson’s Three in, ad abundantiam, sets fragments from Petrarch, apparently aiming to express difficulty or reluctance to communicate. I found it muted, fragmentary, for want of a better word, but ultimately perhaps not very interesting. Initially, I was unsure whether the intervention of a mobile telephone and ensuing conversation between one singer and the offending member of the audience, was part of the work or not; perhaps it ought to be incorporated.

 

Larry Goves’s Sherpa Tensing stands up from the piano, says something quiet, and walks outside sets a lengthy, repetitive text by Matthew Welton, to which the musical response seems deliberately sectional. Though in English, it retains another characteristic of the Italian madrigal: the privileged position of words. Christian Wolff’s Ashbery Madrigals seem concerned with quotidian experience in setting as well as text, though they are not without attractive enough harmonies; performance certainly lent them fine chiaroscuro.

 

Salvatore Sciarrino and Morgan Hayes offered examples of recently written works, which were not yet part of the EXAUDI project as such. Sciarrino’s Tre madrigal set Japanese haiku (Matsuo Bashō) in the composer’s own translation, itself apparently preparative of the Mediterranean sensibility with which the notes are imbued. Waves murmur, a cicada, bells, red sun, and winds appear. In performance – and presumably to a certain extent in score – we heard a post-Berio marriage of roughness and sophistication, intensifying the impression of Italian Renaissance roots. This for me sounded the finest or at least the most inviting of the ‘new’ works, but I am speaking from but a single hearing. Morgan Hayes’s E Vesuvio monte opts, as the title suggests, for Latin rather than Italian, setting Pliny the Younger’s description of the eruption of Vesuvius. A brace of countertenors comes to the fore, lending the narration a sense both of old and of new. The violence of antiquity is felt; whilst never sounding ‘like’ Birtwistle, that spirit, so inherent in the older composer’s work, sounded almost reimagined here – though that of course may well be a matter of me finding bearings rather than intent or indeed practice.

 

Andrea Gabrieli’s Vieni, vieni Himeneo had offered a well-chosen introduction, a welcome to performers and performance. The rest of the programme was devoted to Gesualdo and Monteverdi, avant-gardists both. Monteverdi’s Third and Fourth Books were raided, his voice unmistakeable in Sovra tenere erbette, redolent of both opera and choral music, and yet differently tender in the progress of its melodic lines and the harmonies created. Io mi son giovinetta was florid yet neither smudged nor merely ‘ornamental’, benefiting from a fine sense of harmonic direction. Vattene pur, crudel certainly marked itself out at the end of the first half as the masterpiece that it is. It seemed informed, or at least its opening did, by a more modernistic style of performance than had hitherto been heard in the Monteverdi works, though that did not preclude warmth. If here, as in the closing Rimanti in pace, I should sometimes have preferred performances a little more Italianate in spirit, the plangency of the latter arguably making it sound disconcertingly close to Couperin at times, then the chromaticism of the former remained searingly apparent, especially in those descending lines throughout the ensemble.

 

Extremity was embraced from the opening exclamation of Gesualdo’s ‘Mercè!’, grido piangendo, the sheer weirdness of the composer’s writing apparent, in no sense tonally explicable and yet sounding with necessity rather than in merely arbitrary fashion. Whereas Monteverdi in retrospect came to sound almost Mozartian, or at least classicistic, in his perfection, Gesualdo sounded more experimental, whether for better or for worse. If Ardita zanzanetta is almost skittish by his standards, the sense of split personality was still powerfully conveyed. The refusal to milk the ending of Languisce al fin was admirable.

 

Many happy returns, then, to an enterprising and highly accomplished ensemble!