Queen's Hall
Beethoven - String Quartet in B-flat major, op.133, 'Grosse Fuge'
Dutilleux - Ainsi la nuit
Webern - Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, op.9
Schoenberg String Quartet no.2
Barbara Hannigan (soprano)
Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)
Ralf Ehlers (viola)
Lucas Fels (cello)
The second of the Arditti Quartet’s two Queen’s Hall series proved at least as successful as the first ; indeed, I thought the Beethoven performance, on this occasion the Grosse Fuge, surpassed that of the op.95 quartet the previous morning. It was interesting to note, in the light of my prior conversation with Irvine Arditti, the nature of the audience. He had spoken of the presence of Beethoven as a potential way to make an Arditti programme ‘a little more attractive for the non-contemporary music aficionado: people interested in hearing string quartets but who are not exactly contemporary music specialists’. This is doubtless impressionistic or downright prejudiced, but my impression of the audience was that this was in large part composed of those more likely to be interested in the chamber music repertoire. If so, such listeners could hardly have had a better opportunity to be introduced to two twentieth-century quartet masterpieces: Webern’s Bagatelles and Schoenberg’s second quartet. About Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit I felt more ambivalent but it certainly received every bit as fine a performance.
Arditti also spoke of his longstanding ‘desire to put the Grosse Fuge at the beginning of a programme and continue with contemporary music, rather as a statement to living composers, like: “This is what Beethoven did; now let’s see what you can do.”’ This was not quite the nature of the programme here, but Beethoven’s extraordinary work fulfilled a not entirely dissimilar function nevertheless; it certainly sounded here, as it should, at least as shockingly modern as anything that came thereafter. I heard an audience member during the interval lamenting that Beethoven had ‘sounded violent’; surely that is the point. From the opening, which was jagged, angular, and abrupt, such music alternated, albeit with a weighting towards the former, with a Beethoven who could be sweet, gentle, but never, repeat never, cloying. Sparks flew in what seemed almost a masterclass in the expression of Beethovenian struggle and defiance. Although the scale and nature of the forces are entirely different, I was more than once put in mind of the Missa Solemnis and, during the slow episode, the Adagio to the Ninth Symphony. The rhythmical and metrical complexity of Beethoven’s writing shone through, in a way that must have appealed to Conlon Nancarrow when he lauded this quartet’s performance of both the Grosse Fuge and his own third quartet (see the interview again). Tonality at times almost seemed to be beside the point, certainly not in the case of having ceased to function, but instead of having at times ceded its leading role to counterpoint.
Henri Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit seemed, as I said, to be performed extremely well; certainly the work’s structure was clearly delineated, as were its debts to Webern and to Bartókian night music. I also fancied that I heard a kinship – I suspect that rather than influence – to Messiaen. Prominent pizzicatos and playing sul ponticello added to the atmosphere. For whatever reason, however, I remained somewhat unreceptive, so shall move on to a very fine performance, following the interval, of Webern’s op.9 Bagatelles. Sighs, clarity, crystalline perfection, echoes (apparent or other) of the Grosse Fuge, great and minute dynamic contrasts: all of these were here. So was an aching, Schubertian beauty – how close Schubert so often stands to the Second Viennese School! – and a kinship of premonition to the Ligeti quartet heard in the previous concert, especially the sense of ethereal expiration. Above all, this Webern performance made one listen, reminding me once again why Nono so revered his predecessor.
This was the second time I had heard the Arditti Quartet perform both the Webern pieces and Schoenberg’s second quartet, the previous occasion having been a concert during the Southbank Centre’s Nono series. Claron McFadden was here replaced by the equally excellent Barbara Hannigan, whom I have previously encountered in a variety of challenging repertoire, including Nono and Berg. The density of Schoenberg’s counterpoint, so rich in expression, was conveyed from the opening of the first movement without fail. One could hear precisely what Schoenberg meant when writing, ‘In the first and second movements there are many sections in which the individual parts proceed regardless of whether or not their meeting results in codified harmonies.’ Programming and performance also revealed close parallels in this respect with the Grosse Fuge. Verklärte Nacht-like richness was revealed at times, yet sparingly, ensuring that appreciation of one’s harmonic bearings did not preclude following of neo-Brahmsian continuous motivic development. Harmonic nods to the First Chamber Symphony were unusually apparent in the scherzo. Still more prominent was a strong sense of how rhythmic and harmonic motion were as one. There was, moreover, a real charm to the celebrated quotation from ‘O du lieber Augustin,’ second violinist Ashot Sarkissjan and violist Ralf Ehrens providing just the right element of lilt and inflection, without resorting to all-too-audible inverted commas. This was poignant but clear-eyed, rather like the performance as a whole, a characteristic which in no sense precluded great intensity of musical expression – rather like Schoenberg’s œuvre as a whole.
There was a true sadness to the opening of Litanei, a passionate cello outburst from Lucas Fels preparing the way for the soprano entry: ‘Tief ist die trauer die mich umdüstert’ (‘Deep is the grief enveloping me’). Hanningan proved attentive as a Lieder-singer to the varying demands of Stefan George’s text and its implications: seductive and sultry, but also still and peaceful. The great final climax upon the word ‘liebe’ prepared the way for a peace of sorts, certainly a sense that everything had changed in the afterglow of the instrumental postlude. A very real sense of liberation could therefore characterise the instrumental opening of the final movement: hushed expectancy announcing the air of another planet. Entrückung, the movement’s title, was precisely what one felt: the ecstasy of transportation. The ‘soothing tremor of a sacred awe’ was followed by string-playing of an almost unbearable intensity, inevitably recalling Tristan und Isolde, as did the next stanza with its frankly Tristan-esque language, ‘atem wunschlos’ and all. When a ‘wild gust’ of wind gripped the verse, it felt musically as well as verbally inevitable, the product no doubt of so many years’ immersion in this endlessly fascinating score. The final stanza brought a sense of transfiguration: Wagnerian Verklärung. But there was also in the transfigured postlude ambiguity: where next? Schoenberg would soon embark upon his lonely, arduous, but necessary journey.
Showing posts with label Edinburgh Festival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Edinburgh Festival. Show all posts
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
Edinburgh International Festival (3): Skride/Vogler/BBC SSO/Runnicles - Webern, Brahms, and Strauss, 31 August 2009
Usher Hall
Webern – Im Sommerwind
Brahms – Double concerto for violin and violoncello in A minor, op.102
Strauss – Don Quixote, op.35
Baiba Skride (violin)
Jan Vogler (violoncello)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Donald Runnicles (conductor)
This concert, surprisingly sparsely attended, took place on the eve of Donald Runnicles’s accession to the chief conductorship of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. It would seem, from both this programme and a glance at plans for next season, that Runnicles is, quite rightly, keen to impart his great experience in the core German repertoire. Webern’s very early Im Sommerwind seemed, however, an odd choice with which to open. It is worth hearing occasionally, but how much more of a statement it would have been to commence with one of the composer’s many bejewelled masterpieces, than with this prolix – surely the only instance in Webern’s output – piece of ersatz Strauss. Programming complaints aside, Runnicles imparted a Wagnerian glow to the opening, coloured by would-be Straussian harmonic deviations – and, interestingly, odd hints of Debussy too. The BBC SSO’s horns sounded very Straussian, bar the odd unfortunate cracked note. The strings sometimes possessed a greater depth than at other times, but at their best were impressive, as were leader Elizabeth Layton’s solos. If the music stopped and started a bit, that reflects the work itself rather than the performance as such.
In Baiba Skride and Jan Vogler, the orchestra welcomed two fine soloists for the Brahms double concerto. The orchestral opening was measured, indeed a touch stiff, but Vogler’s passionate cello entry, matched – well, almost – by Skride’s response, seemed to rub off upon Runnicles and his players. Theirs, though not necessarily the soloists’, was a Brahms of summer brightness rather than autumnal mahogany, closer to Beethoven than one often hears. I am not sure how apt this ultimately is, but at least the BBC SSO proved impressively full of tone. The richness of the soloists’ tone was immediately apparent in the songful opening in octaves to the slow movement. It flowed as an Andante without sounding all-too-fashionably brisk. The woodwind sound for the exquisite second subject once again reminded me of Beethoven. Unfortunately there was a very noticeable slip in the movement’s final chord, although these things happen. Wisely, even if this could hardly have been the reason for doing so, the finale was taken attacca. Again, lyricism was to the fore for both Skride and Vogler: a lyricism that could encompass both wistfulness and verve. There was a nice contrast in their presentations of the principal theme: the cello more playful, the violin more serene. Vogler’s first voicing of the second theme was simply perfect, as was Skride’s response. However, if the first tutti exuded testosterone, later on there were a few signs of flagging.
Don Quixote had the second half to itself. Vogler was joined by the orchestra’s excellent principal violist, Scott Dickinson, far from outshone by his partner in crime. And indeed, there were many other well-taken opportunities for orchestral solos: for instance, oboe and clarinet during the Introduction, the leader once again showing a good rapport with Vogler during the ensuing statement of the Theme, and implacable kettledrums during the funeral march. Ensemble work was often equally fine, for instance with the pair of bassoons depicting the Benedictine monks, the archaic brass pilgrims, and the characterful, bucolic wind band and percussion during the meeting with Dulcinea. Vogler naturally remained first amongst equals, from his entry onwards, and never more so than in the dark, Romantic solo of the Knight’s Vigil. That is, never more so until his noble performance during the hero’s death, sadly disrupted by a barrage of coughing. Runnicles’s shaping of Strauss’s vast structure seemed a little listless, or at least rhapsodic, during the Introduction, but afterwards there was little problem in that respect. Technicolor was the operative word for much of the performance, but there is nothing wrong with that on occasion.
Webern – Im Sommerwind
Brahms – Double concerto for violin and violoncello in A minor, op.102
Strauss – Don Quixote, op.35
Baiba Skride (violin)
Jan Vogler (violoncello)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Donald Runnicles (conductor)
This concert, surprisingly sparsely attended, took place on the eve of Donald Runnicles’s accession to the chief conductorship of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. It would seem, from both this programme and a glance at plans for next season, that Runnicles is, quite rightly, keen to impart his great experience in the core German repertoire. Webern’s very early Im Sommerwind seemed, however, an odd choice with which to open. It is worth hearing occasionally, but how much more of a statement it would have been to commence with one of the composer’s many bejewelled masterpieces, than with this prolix – surely the only instance in Webern’s output – piece of ersatz Strauss. Programming complaints aside, Runnicles imparted a Wagnerian glow to the opening, coloured by would-be Straussian harmonic deviations – and, interestingly, odd hints of Debussy too. The BBC SSO’s horns sounded very Straussian, bar the odd unfortunate cracked note. The strings sometimes possessed a greater depth than at other times, but at their best were impressive, as were leader Elizabeth Layton’s solos. If the music stopped and started a bit, that reflects the work itself rather than the performance as such.
In Baiba Skride and Jan Vogler, the orchestra welcomed two fine soloists for the Brahms double concerto. The orchestral opening was measured, indeed a touch stiff, but Vogler’s passionate cello entry, matched – well, almost – by Skride’s response, seemed to rub off upon Runnicles and his players. Theirs, though not necessarily the soloists’, was a Brahms of summer brightness rather than autumnal mahogany, closer to Beethoven than one often hears. I am not sure how apt this ultimately is, but at least the BBC SSO proved impressively full of tone. The richness of the soloists’ tone was immediately apparent in the songful opening in octaves to the slow movement. It flowed as an Andante without sounding all-too-fashionably brisk. The woodwind sound for the exquisite second subject once again reminded me of Beethoven. Unfortunately there was a very noticeable slip in the movement’s final chord, although these things happen. Wisely, even if this could hardly have been the reason for doing so, the finale was taken attacca. Again, lyricism was to the fore for both Skride and Vogler: a lyricism that could encompass both wistfulness and verve. There was a nice contrast in their presentations of the principal theme: the cello more playful, the violin more serene. Vogler’s first voicing of the second theme was simply perfect, as was Skride’s response. However, if the first tutti exuded testosterone, later on there were a few signs of flagging.
Don Quixote had the second half to itself. Vogler was joined by the orchestra’s excellent principal violist, Scott Dickinson, far from outshone by his partner in crime. And indeed, there were many other well-taken opportunities for orchestral solos: for instance, oboe and clarinet during the Introduction, the leader once again showing a good rapport with Vogler during the ensuing statement of the Theme, and implacable kettledrums during the funeral march. Ensemble work was often equally fine, for instance with the pair of bassoons depicting the Benedictine monks, the archaic brass pilgrims, and the characterful, bucolic wind band and percussion during the meeting with Dulcinea. Vogler naturally remained first amongst equals, from his entry onwards, and never more so than in the dark, Romantic solo of the Knight’s Vigil. That is, never more so until his noble performance during the hero’s death, sadly disrupted by a barrage of coughing. Runnicles’s shaping of Strauss’s vast structure seemed a little listless, or at least rhapsodic, during the Introduction, but afterwards there was little problem in that respect. Technicolor was the operative word for much of the performance, but there is nothing wrong with that on occasion.
Edinburgh International Festival (2): Arditti Quartet - Beethoven, Berg, Nigel Osborne, and Ligeti, 31 August 2009
Queen's Hall
Beethoven - String Quartet no.11 in F minor, op. 95
Berg - String Quartet, op.3
Nigel Osborne - Tiree (world premiere, EIF commission)
Ligeti - String Quartet no.2
Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)
Ralf Ehlers (viola)
Lucas Fels (cello)
The Arditti Quartet playing Beethoven is not unprecedented, but it qualifies as ‘early music’ for these players. (For an interview in which, amongst other things, Irvine Arditti discussed with me the programming of the quartet’s two Queen’s Hall recitals, please click here.) This performance of the op.95 ‘Quartett serioso’ was though-provoking, not unlike hearing, say, Michael Gielen conduct one of the symphonies. The furious concision of the opening bars announced a fiercely modernist Beethoven: Bartók meets Webern. It was certainly not an old-world Beethoven we heard, though Irvine Arditti allowed an odd touch of portamento, for instance in the first movement’s second subject. And there was violence too in the coda, leading, quite rightly, to exhaustion rather than triumph. The second movement was songful, conversational, its counterpoint not unduly severe, though every note was made to sound as utterly necessary. There were perhaps even hints of Schubert in the sense conveyed of a melancholic onward trudge. Underpinned so often by the gentle security of Lucas Fels’s cello line, the harmonic implications were thereby permitted to flower. Also noteworthy was the varied use of vibrato, always expressively gauged, especially by Arditti himself. The transition to the scherzo was very well judged: somehow both seamless and rupture. Benefiting from a string rhythmic drive, the scherzo’s thematic profile was equally keenly observed, with only momentary relief expressed in the trio sections. There were, however, odd lapses of intonation here: surprising, given their distinct lack elsewhere, though their importance should not be exaggerated. I liked the initial sense of the finale’s introduction as the opening of the slow movement we had never had and its subsequent self-revelation not as that, but as the gateway to the Allegretto agitato. The Arditti’s reading was certainly agitato: febrile and intense, summing up the fierce concision of the work. And then: a brief glimpse of Mozart, Figaro even, in the quite delightful, joyous coda.
If I was provoked by the quartet’s Beethoven, whilst missing a little a sense of old Vienna – my problem, not the performers’ – then the performance of Berg’s op.3 quartet left me with no reservations whatsoever. The incisive delivery of the opening lines drew one in to an unmistakeably Bergian labyrinth, from which there was no escape, even had one wished to find it. Each player was indubitably an equal explorer and the whole proved so much greater than the sum of its parts. The intensity of expression and its quality – Romantic-expressionist, or expressionist-Romantic? – ensured that one listened not only to every note, but to its placing and to its implications. The ghosts of Viennese dance-forms, Mahler’s precedent still very much alive, came into focus fleetingly and just as quickly disappeared into the abyss. Indeed, the whole of the first movement came close to what Nietzsche so memorably termed Tristan und Isolde’s ‘voluptuousness of Hell’, albeit never lacking a distinct modernist edge. There was perhaps a still greater intensity to the furious opening bars of the second and final movement. Textural complexity was rejoiced in and turned to expressive ends, again an almost Wagnerian eroticism, which yet has precedent in Schoenberg and Zemlinsky. Through the cascades of passion, direction was always clear; indeed, such clarity of direction was vital to the articulation of Berg’s allegedly autobiographical outpourings.
Nigel Osborne’s Tiree received its first performance after the interval. There is no gainsaying – and why should one try? – the Arditti Quartet’s commitment to and expertise in new music, whether here or on other occasions. Tiree is so named after a ringing stone, ‘Clah a’ Choire’: in the composer’s words, ‘an erratic granite boulder carried to the island by glaciers in the ice age; it is cup-marked by many centuries of being played by percussive stones, exactly like the Neolithic rock gongs of Lake Victoria and the Serengeti (our planet is large, our human family small). The oldest known melody collected upon the island of Tiree, voiced by the two violins in response to each other, rather like an antiphon with halo-like accompaniment, is thus harmonised by these resonances, subsequently counterpointed by fragments derived from the fractal geometry of the coastline. And so, there emerges a piece that can truly be said to derive from its geographical and (pre-)historical inspiration: a sense of landscape that does not really rely upon pictorialism: not that there is necessarily anything wrong with pictorialism, but that is not Osborne’s concern. Nor, as his comparisons with Africa imply, is parochialism. The quartet makes considerable use of harmonics and non-traditional tuning, whilst remaining within a framework possessing some tonal references. Throughout the twists and turns, a sense of line – Ariadne in the labyrinth, I thought, referring back to Berg and also to Birtwistle – endures in a common thread: tribute as well of course to the skill of the performers. Inevitable reminders of Messiaen surfaced in the use of birdsong, but Osborne very much makes such material his own; it never sounded imposed upon the material, but grew out of it, likewise the stone resonances. Then, at the end, almost imperceptible but also very real, are heard the full resonances of the stone, its harmonics heard through a stone-metal plate speaker, ‘to enhance “liveness”’.
Finally, we were treated to an incendiary performance of Ligeti’s second quartet. The opening, notated silence and striking unanimity of the following pizzicato put me in mind of Horace’s ideal for the epic poet: ‘Nor does he [Homer] begin the Trojan War from the double egg, but always he hurries to the action, and snatches the listener into the middle of things.’ Thence composer and players swiftly transported us into the quasi-ether and equally swiftly into a world of neo-Bartókian violence. The intensity – that word again, I know – of this performance threatened even to surpass that of the Berg; its precision was equally astonishing and equally crucial. That calm which opens and intervenes in the second movement – Sostenuto, molto calmo – contrasted with duly ferocious outbursts, whose virtuosity was but a precondition for the still greater musical challenges set by the composer. The extraordinary ticking of the third movement, Come uno meccanismo de precisione, imparted a real sense of it not only taking place in time, but being ‘about’ time itself, before, in programme annotator Malcolm Hayes’s words, ‘retreating into the void from which it came’. Tension, violence, precision: the fourth movement embodied many of the qualities of the quartet and its performance as a whole. This was a Webern-like statement with absolutely nothing extraneous. The fifth and final movement offered intensity of a very different sort, stretching our ears in order for us fully to hear the crucial, minute variations in sound during this quiet but never still music: extreme in perhaps an even more radical way than what has gone before. Nono must surely have admired this music – and would surely have admired this outstanding performance. There was always a strong sense of dramatic flow, leading towards apotheosis – and then, this Ligeti’s masterstroke, escape.
Beethoven - String Quartet no.11 in F minor, op. 95
Berg - String Quartet, op.3
Nigel Osborne - Tiree (world premiere, EIF commission)
Ligeti - String Quartet no.2
Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)
Ralf Ehlers (viola)
Lucas Fels (cello)
The Arditti Quartet playing Beethoven is not unprecedented, but it qualifies as ‘early music’ for these players. (For an interview in which, amongst other things, Irvine Arditti discussed with me the programming of the quartet’s two Queen’s Hall recitals, please click here.) This performance of the op.95 ‘Quartett serioso’ was though-provoking, not unlike hearing, say, Michael Gielen conduct one of the symphonies. The furious concision of the opening bars announced a fiercely modernist Beethoven: Bartók meets Webern. It was certainly not an old-world Beethoven we heard, though Irvine Arditti allowed an odd touch of portamento, for instance in the first movement’s second subject. And there was violence too in the coda, leading, quite rightly, to exhaustion rather than triumph. The second movement was songful, conversational, its counterpoint not unduly severe, though every note was made to sound as utterly necessary. There were perhaps even hints of Schubert in the sense conveyed of a melancholic onward trudge. Underpinned so often by the gentle security of Lucas Fels’s cello line, the harmonic implications were thereby permitted to flower. Also noteworthy was the varied use of vibrato, always expressively gauged, especially by Arditti himself. The transition to the scherzo was very well judged: somehow both seamless and rupture. Benefiting from a string rhythmic drive, the scherzo’s thematic profile was equally keenly observed, with only momentary relief expressed in the trio sections. There were, however, odd lapses of intonation here: surprising, given their distinct lack elsewhere, though their importance should not be exaggerated. I liked the initial sense of the finale’s introduction as the opening of the slow movement we had never had and its subsequent self-revelation not as that, but as the gateway to the Allegretto agitato. The Arditti’s reading was certainly agitato: febrile and intense, summing up the fierce concision of the work. And then: a brief glimpse of Mozart, Figaro even, in the quite delightful, joyous coda.
If I was provoked by the quartet’s Beethoven, whilst missing a little a sense of old Vienna – my problem, not the performers’ – then the performance of Berg’s op.3 quartet left me with no reservations whatsoever. The incisive delivery of the opening lines drew one in to an unmistakeably Bergian labyrinth, from which there was no escape, even had one wished to find it. Each player was indubitably an equal explorer and the whole proved so much greater than the sum of its parts. The intensity of expression and its quality – Romantic-expressionist, or expressionist-Romantic? – ensured that one listened not only to every note, but to its placing and to its implications. The ghosts of Viennese dance-forms, Mahler’s precedent still very much alive, came into focus fleetingly and just as quickly disappeared into the abyss. Indeed, the whole of the first movement came close to what Nietzsche so memorably termed Tristan und Isolde’s ‘voluptuousness of Hell’, albeit never lacking a distinct modernist edge. There was perhaps a still greater intensity to the furious opening bars of the second and final movement. Textural complexity was rejoiced in and turned to expressive ends, again an almost Wagnerian eroticism, which yet has precedent in Schoenberg and Zemlinsky. Through the cascades of passion, direction was always clear; indeed, such clarity of direction was vital to the articulation of Berg’s allegedly autobiographical outpourings.
Nigel Osborne’s Tiree received its first performance after the interval. There is no gainsaying – and why should one try? – the Arditti Quartet’s commitment to and expertise in new music, whether here or on other occasions. Tiree is so named after a ringing stone, ‘Clah a’ Choire’: in the composer’s words, ‘an erratic granite boulder carried to the island by glaciers in the ice age; it is cup-marked by many centuries of being played by percussive stones, exactly like the Neolithic rock gongs of Lake Victoria and the Serengeti (our planet is large, our human family small). The oldest known melody collected upon the island of Tiree, voiced by the two violins in response to each other, rather like an antiphon with halo-like accompaniment, is thus harmonised by these resonances, subsequently counterpointed by fragments derived from the fractal geometry of the coastline. And so, there emerges a piece that can truly be said to derive from its geographical and (pre-)historical inspiration: a sense of landscape that does not really rely upon pictorialism: not that there is necessarily anything wrong with pictorialism, but that is not Osborne’s concern. Nor, as his comparisons with Africa imply, is parochialism. The quartet makes considerable use of harmonics and non-traditional tuning, whilst remaining within a framework possessing some tonal references. Throughout the twists and turns, a sense of line – Ariadne in the labyrinth, I thought, referring back to Berg and also to Birtwistle – endures in a common thread: tribute as well of course to the skill of the performers. Inevitable reminders of Messiaen surfaced in the use of birdsong, but Osborne very much makes such material his own; it never sounded imposed upon the material, but grew out of it, likewise the stone resonances. Then, at the end, almost imperceptible but also very real, are heard the full resonances of the stone, its harmonics heard through a stone-metal plate speaker, ‘to enhance “liveness”’.
Finally, we were treated to an incendiary performance of Ligeti’s second quartet. The opening, notated silence and striking unanimity of the following pizzicato put me in mind of Horace’s ideal for the epic poet: ‘Nor does he [Homer] begin the Trojan War from the double egg, but always he hurries to the action, and snatches the listener into the middle of things.’ Thence composer and players swiftly transported us into the quasi-ether and equally swiftly into a world of neo-Bartókian violence. The intensity – that word again, I know – of this performance threatened even to surpass that of the Berg; its precision was equally astonishing and equally crucial. That calm which opens and intervenes in the second movement – Sostenuto, molto calmo – contrasted with duly ferocious outbursts, whose virtuosity was but a precondition for the still greater musical challenges set by the composer. The extraordinary ticking of the third movement, Come uno meccanismo de precisione, imparted a real sense of it not only taking place in time, but being ‘about’ time itself, before, in programme annotator Malcolm Hayes’s words, ‘retreating into the void from which it came’. Tension, violence, precision: the fourth movement embodied many of the qualities of the quartet and its performance as a whole. This was a Webern-like statement with absolutely nothing extraneous. The fifth and final movement offered intensity of a very different sort, stretching our ears in order for us fully to hear the crucial, minute variations in sound during this quiet but never still music: extreme in perhaps an even more radical way than what has gone before. Nono must surely have admired this music – and would surely have admired this outstanding performance. There was always a strong sense of dramatic flow, leading towards apotheosis – and then, this Ligeti’s masterstroke, escape.
Sunday, 30 August 2009
Edinburgh International Festival (1): Ivo Pogorelich piano recital - Chopin, Liszt, Sibelius, and Ravel, 29 August 2009
Usher Hall
Chopin – Nocturne in E major, Op.62 no.2
Chopin – Piano sonata no.3 in B minor, Op.58
Liszt – Mephisto Waltz no.1
Sibelius – Valse triste, op.44
Ravel – Gaspard de la nuit
This was the strangest piano recital I have ever attended. Prefacing a transcendental account of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit were some of the most astonishingly perverse performances of other works I can recall. Perhaps the least odd element was the pianist’s incongruous dress: black tie and tails. Of course, Ivo Pogorelich has always been a controversial musician. Fame was thrust upon him by elimination after the third round from the 1980 Chopin Competition in Warsaw. Martha Argerich was so outraged that she resigned from the jury. Thereafter, performances and recordings elicited wildly divergent appraisals. Some thought Argerich’s hailing of a ‘genius’ not at all far from the mark. At least two recordings would readily find a place in my pianistic pantheon: one of Scarlatti sonatas, the other of Prokofiev’s Sixth Sonata and Gaspard de la nuit. Others were shocked by the liberties they heard. I am certainly no purist and should always welcome with open arms explorative risk-taking over dreary conformism, but I was nevertheless entirely unprepared for what was to follow.
Speaking of competition-winners – or otherwise – few composers have suffered at their hands so much as Chopin. The number of bland, technically perfect performances inflicted upon this poet of the keyboard can scarcely be guessed. Pogorelich was having none of that, instead presenting a deliberate, nay trudging, E major Nocturne, with great emphasis – to put it mildly – placed upon the melodic line. Think of an organist thumping out a fugue subject on a trumpet stop and you might approach the idea. There was greater movement, for there could hardly have been less – or so I thought – as the music became more contrapuntally involved: fair enough. There was also a wholesale transformation from deliberation to an improvisatory quality that suggested bar lines had magically melted away. This was distinctly odd but in a way refreshing. But then, we returned back to earth with a reprise of the opening style. The music pretty much ground to a halt. I suppose it made one consider the score anew, but even so…
The opening to the Allegro maestoso of the same composer’s third sonata was certainly maestoso, though decidedly grim. Hints of passion could be heard – briefly – in the build up to the second subject, but were soon banished. That theme was sung, but sung in a decidedly aggressive fashion, as if Pogorelich were determined to rid the music of any hint of degenerate Bellinian inspiration. Perhaps he was. There was a general feeling throughout of great listlessness. The scherzo brought mercurial virtuosity but its trio was distended almost beyond belief. (The first but not last intervention of a mobile telephone intensified the agony, whilst the bronchially-challenged made their presence felt unusually keenly throughout.) A strangely severe introduction to the Largo sounded as though it had come from the weird world of late Liszt. It led us into a rhythmically implacable, utterly unsmiling, positively – or negatively – glacial account of a movement drawn out to mammoth proportions. I am all for a Largo sounding as a Largo, but even so… The finale was rather more fitting: restless, but that works better here. Not only did one hear often breathtaking virtuosity; there was a certain musical sense to a strormy, vehement performance. It was too late though.
Concluding the first part was Liszt’s first Mephisto Waltz. Weirdness is less out of place here but Pogorelich nevertheless exceeded the bounds of the imaginable. This extraordinary rendition was so disjointed that it appeared to lose musical sense entirely; it resembled a peculiar laboratory experiment rather than a performance. Hammered out, it utterly lacked charm: this was neither Liszt nor Faust the seducer. The contrasting forest-music material was once again glacial in the extreme, though a certain sadness occasionally seeped through. Mephistopheles did not insinuate; he straightforwardly brutalised. One gin-and-tonic was certainly not enough for this browbeaten reviewer during the ensuing interval.
Sibelius’s Valse triste seemed an odd programming choice, but the performance proved far odder still. It was almost unbelievably slow – and I am not sure why I appended ‘almost’. This is a sad waltz, I know, and one does not expect Richard, let alone Johann, Strauss, but even so… There was considerable variation in the basic pulse, sometimes providing relief, sometimes in the opposing direction. The intensity of the climax was quite staggering, yet seemed bizarrely misplaced. However, there was something chillingly pure to the voicing of the final chords, which made one wonder, despite the barrage of coughing, about what might have been.
Finally, Gaspard de la nuit. With the very opening of Ondine, everything suddenly sounded right – and righted. Shimmering right-hand figuration provided a perfect foil to the left-hand song below and above. One could hear every note – almost all of them correct – without any sacrifice to the poetic effect. This certainly sounded more Lisztian than the Liszt piece had, both harmonically and in the well-judged application of virtuoso technique to musico-poetic ends. In Le gibet, a glacial, obstinate persistency, of an infintely more atmospheric quality than earlier on, could at last truly come into its own. Terror was in the air, though so was the noise from another electronic device. Lisztian pyrotechnics were even more to the fore in Scarbo, which received a truly diabolical reading. This sprite was dartingly elusive and unmistakeably malignant. Pogorelich’s performance was a tour de force but a musical one, fantastic in more than one sense. What happened thereafter I cannot tell, since I quickly fled the hall, lest a perverse encore tarnish the memory of what I had just heard.
Chopin – Nocturne in E major, Op.62 no.2
Chopin – Piano sonata no.3 in B minor, Op.58
Liszt – Mephisto Waltz no.1
Sibelius – Valse triste, op.44
Ravel – Gaspard de la nuit
This was the strangest piano recital I have ever attended. Prefacing a transcendental account of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit were some of the most astonishingly perverse performances of other works I can recall. Perhaps the least odd element was the pianist’s incongruous dress: black tie and tails. Of course, Ivo Pogorelich has always been a controversial musician. Fame was thrust upon him by elimination after the third round from the 1980 Chopin Competition in Warsaw. Martha Argerich was so outraged that she resigned from the jury. Thereafter, performances and recordings elicited wildly divergent appraisals. Some thought Argerich’s hailing of a ‘genius’ not at all far from the mark. At least two recordings would readily find a place in my pianistic pantheon: one of Scarlatti sonatas, the other of Prokofiev’s Sixth Sonata and Gaspard de la nuit. Others were shocked by the liberties they heard. I am certainly no purist and should always welcome with open arms explorative risk-taking over dreary conformism, but I was nevertheless entirely unprepared for what was to follow.
Speaking of competition-winners – or otherwise – few composers have suffered at their hands so much as Chopin. The number of bland, technically perfect performances inflicted upon this poet of the keyboard can scarcely be guessed. Pogorelich was having none of that, instead presenting a deliberate, nay trudging, E major Nocturne, with great emphasis – to put it mildly – placed upon the melodic line. Think of an organist thumping out a fugue subject on a trumpet stop and you might approach the idea. There was greater movement, for there could hardly have been less – or so I thought – as the music became more contrapuntally involved: fair enough. There was also a wholesale transformation from deliberation to an improvisatory quality that suggested bar lines had magically melted away. This was distinctly odd but in a way refreshing. But then, we returned back to earth with a reprise of the opening style. The music pretty much ground to a halt. I suppose it made one consider the score anew, but even so…
The opening to the Allegro maestoso of the same composer’s third sonata was certainly maestoso, though decidedly grim. Hints of passion could be heard – briefly – in the build up to the second subject, but were soon banished. That theme was sung, but sung in a decidedly aggressive fashion, as if Pogorelich were determined to rid the music of any hint of degenerate Bellinian inspiration. Perhaps he was. There was a general feeling throughout of great listlessness. The scherzo brought mercurial virtuosity but its trio was distended almost beyond belief. (The first but not last intervention of a mobile telephone intensified the agony, whilst the bronchially-challenged made their presence felt unusually keenly throughout.) A strangely severe introduction to the Largo sounded as though it had come from the weird world of late Liszt. It led us into a rhythmically implacable, utterly unsmiling, positively – or negatively – glacial account of a movement drawn out to mammoth proportions. I am all for a Largo sounding as a Largo, but even so… The finale was rather more fitting: restless, but that works better here. Not only did one hear often breathtaking virtuosity; there was a certain musical sense to a strormy, vehement performance. It was too late though.
Concluding the first part was Liszt’s first Mephisto Waltz. Weirdness is less out of place here but Pogorelich nevertheless exceeded the bounds of the imaginable. This extraordinary rendition was so disjointed that it appeared to lose musical sense entirely; it resembled a peculiar laboratory experiment rather than a performance. Hammered out, it utterly lacked charm: this was neither Liszt nor Faust the seducer. The contrasting forest-music material was once again glacial in the extreme, though a certain sadness occasionally seeped through. Mephistopheles did not insinuate; he straightforwardly brutalised. One gin-and-tonic was certainly not enough for this browbeaten reviewer during the ensuing interval.
Sibelius’s Valse triste seemed an odd programming choice, but the performance proved far odder still. It was almost unbelievably slow – and I am not sure why I appended ‘almost’. This is a sad waltz, I know, and one does not expect Richard, let alone Johann, Strauss, but even so… There was considerable variation in the basic pulse, sometimes providing relief, sometimes in the opposing direction. The intensity of the climax was quite staggering, yet seemed bizarrely misplaced. However, there was something chillingly pure to the voicing of the final chords, which made one wonder, despite the barrage of coughing, about what might have been.
Finally, Gaspard de la nuit. With the very opening of Ondine, everything suddenly sounded right – and righted. Shimmering right-hand figuration provided a perfect foil to the left-hand song below and above. One could hear every note – almost all of them correct – without any sacrifice to the poetic effect. This certainly sounded more Lisztian than the Liszt piece had, both harmonically and in the well-judged application of virtuoso technique to musico-poetic ends. In Le gibet, a glacial, obstinate persistency, of an infintely more atmospheric quality than earlier on, could at last truly come into its own. Terror was in the air, though so was the noise from another electronic device. Lisztian pyrotechnics were even more to the fore in Scarbo, which received a truly diabolical reading. This sprite was dartingly elusive and unmistakeably malignant. Pogorelich’s performance was a tour de force but a musical one, fantastic in more than one sense. What happened thereafter I cannot tell, since I quickly fled the hall, lest a perverse encore tarnish the memory of what I had just heard.
Sunday, 16 August 2009
Interview with Irvine Arditti
The Arditti Quartet will be giving two recitals at the Edinburgh Festival, both of which I shall be reviewing. I was privileged to interview Irvine Arditti, who was kind enough to take time off from his holiday in Spain, in order to discuss the programmes and the thinking behind them. The music performed will be as follows:
Beethoven - String Quartet in F minor, op. 95
Berg - String Quartet, op.3
Nigel Osborne - Tiree (world premiere, EIF commission)
Ligeti - String Quartet no.2
Beethoven - String Quartet in B-flat major, op.133, 'Grosse Fuge'
Dutilleux - String Quartet: 'Ainsi la nuit'
Webern - Six Bagatelles for string quartet, op.9
Schoenberg String Quartet no.2
MB: Thank you very much for agreeing to speak to me. I thought it would make sense first to consider the two programmes the Arditti Quartet will be performing at the Edinburgh Festival. One thing I noticed immediately was the presence of Beethoven in both. Admittedly, the works in question are late and what one might describe as ‘almost late’ Beethoven, music that often seems more shocking in its modernity than much twentieth or twenty-first repertoire. But is the presence of Beethoven in your quartet’s repertoire as unusual as it might seem?
IA: Well, I think it’s a double-edged sword really. In a way, Beethoven is there, for one reason, to make the programmes a little more attractive for the non-contemporary music aficionado: people interested in hearing string quartets but who are not exactly contemporary music specialists. This is the sort of programme we do in many places that are not venues for contemporary music festivals, and which have a chamber music series, so there is a definite desire to make the programmes attractive to people who are not going to come for the modern pieces and who will listen to them. But also late Beethoven is something that the Arditti Quartet has done – a select few pieces. It’s always been my desire to put the Grosse Fuge at the beginning of a programme and continue with contemporary music, rather as a statement to living composers, like: ‘This is what Beethoven did; now let’s see what you can do.’ This is such an extraordinary piece.
MB: Yes, I can see that makes a great deal of sense. Have you ever gone further back, say to Haydn, or even to music one might perform with a string quartet, such as Bach or Purcell? Or is Beethoven pretty much as far back as you would go?
IA: Bach’s Ricercata [from the Musical Offering] in sextet arrangement and we did a special project with members of the Alban Berg Quartet, which included Brahms sextets, but we’ve never really seriously played Classical music such as Haydn and Beethoven. We once played a Haydn quartet, but it was a very special request. But it’s not really the repertoire of the Arditti Quartet and it’s not really necessary for us to play Classical music, because we’re so busy doing other things.
MB: No, I can understand that; it’s not as if there is a shortage of other things for you to play.
IA: You wouldn’t expect a quartet like the Mosaïques to play Zemlinsky, or Schoenberg, or even more contemporary pieces, so why should we be playing Classical music when we have a wealth of repertoire from the beginning of the twentieth century until today?
MB: Yes, absolutely, so would you tend broadly to see the quartet’s repertoire as starting with Schoenberg, perhaps going a little further back, and that being the starting-point for a century or more’s further music?
IA: Yes, starting with the Second Viennese School. Our classics were the Second Viennese School and Bartók and going back to Beethoven came later, but it’s very important for us to add more classical quartets to our repertoire. We have played Ravel and Janáček quartets and I think it’s very important to communicate to audiences with these pieces. And, as I said two minutes ago, we need to communicate to audiences who don’t know so much about contemporary music, but enjoy coming to listen to the string quartet, and we try not to frighten them away, but attract them.
MB: The matter of audiences puts me in mind of something else. On the one hand, as you say, there will be audiences very interested in quartet, and perhaps more broadly chamber, music, who might be enticed to come along to hear more contemporary music. Do you find, though, that perhaps the audiences more interested in contemporary music are sometimes less interested in chamber, and indeed more specifically quartet, music? Or is that not really an issue?
IA: I think there are different sorts of audiences. A lot of the people that like contemporary music do not come from the classical music repertoire. There are a lot of people that enjoy listening to Ligeti and Xenakis, or whatever, who come from another listening point of view. Some of them come from classical music, sure, but some of them come from jazz and other alternative music. But it’s nice to appeal to lots of different sorts of people and each country, each town, has its own story. That to me is a very interesting point, having travelled now so extensively. Who is educating their audience in each venue is extremely important too, for what kind of audience will come and be prepared to listen. I’m not saying that one country is necessarily different from another but the towns could be different. One could do an interesting survey on this: who comes to listen to what? But that’s going off our point, I think.
MB: It’s an additional, very interesting point nevertheless. Going back to the programmes you are presenting, each member of the Second Viennese School is featured: Berg in the first programme, Webern and Schoenberg in the second. We have become accustomed, in reading and speaking about them, to certain broad generalisations concerning these composers and their modes of expression: Berg is portrayed as the most nostalgic, Webern the most fearsomely radical, and Schoenberg the great revolutionary traditionalist, or even traditionalist revolutionary. (Much depends on how one regards the influence of Brahms.) What I wanted to ask, however, is what similarities and differences you as string players notice between these composers, and how one might relate their quartet writing to broader conceptions of their style.
IA: That’s a very good question: it’s still very challenging. I’d say that Berg and Schoenberg were more classically friendly to traditional string techniques. The parts are written very coherently and sometimes virtuosically but always within the framework of what is possible. Webern is somehow a little more aloof. It’s difficult to know how to deal with the lines; it’s difficult to know how expressively to play Webern. We come backwards to Webern, people have always said that, whereas most people go from Classical music and late-Romantic music to the Second Viennese School. So perhaps our interpretations are affected by knowing Boulez and Ferneyhough. We certainly knew them quite well when we were learning the pieces by Webern. But I think it’s a difficult question to answer, because we would approach those composers in a very classically-oriented way, from the concept of sound and everything. Berg is very challenging, because almost everything is written down...
MB: Like Mahler and Strauss...
IA: In a sense over-marked, so you have to deal with the concept that perhaps Berg was very frustrated with the performers of the day and felt he had to over-notate everything, so perhaps there is some degree of over-notation in the phrasing, but one follows and understands what the composer wants, I think. But this is still very challenging music for us to play and never boring. This is repertoire that is constantly challenging: the two quartets of Berg, the four of Schoenberg, and the Webern pieces. I think as a core basis for our repertoire, it’s very stimulating to have that and, as in these Edinburgh programmes, to kind of bounce off that with some contemporary pieces. The idea was to have some pieces from the twentieth century, plus the Beethoven, which would be a kind of overview of the Arditti’s repertoire. In fact, the director at Edinburgh, Jonathan Mills, engaged us before at both Brisbane and Melbourne festivals in Australia. At Melbourne, we did something even more adventurous; we did six concerts. We had music from the Second Viennese School, from Bartók, from Janáček, and quite a lot of new music, plus a new commission in each concert, so we have a snippet from that in the two concerts we’re doing this year at Edinburgh
.
MB: I was thinking about Schoenberg’s preface to Webern’s Bagatelles, which has now become almost as celebrated a text as the work itself. For the benefit of our readers I shall quote it:
Consider what moderation is required to express oneself so briefly. Each glance can be extended into a poem, each sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, a joy in a single indrawn breath, such concentration is only found where self-pity is absent. These pieces, as, indeed, Webern’s music in general, will only be understood by those who believe that through sound something that can only be expressed in sound can be said.
Schoenberg there seems to be saying, amongst other things, that this is absolute music, in a Romantic sense as would have been understood by, say, Wagner or even Mendelssohn. Is that how you understand Webern?
IA: Well, I think there is that clarity in Webern; he says it all with one single stroke. I’m not sure what you were meaning about the Romantic element.
MB: Insofar as Schoenberg is saying that this is absolute music, which needs no reference to anything else, only what can be expressed in sound can be expressed here, this seems quite a Romantic view of music as an art in itself.
IA: I think Webern was able to do something quite different to Schoenberg, to reduce things to that level and to express things in that, not simple but transparent way. I think it’s not a Romantic gesture but it’s real admiration from Schoenberg and, when performing their music, you can sometimes see that Schoenberg takes a very much longer way round to get to things. He’s a different sort of composer. But it’s amazing that Berg and Webern were from this school and attached to Schoenberg. Yes, for me, Webern is the most interesting of the three composers in many respects. Of course, Webern was responsible for influencing a lot of the music that came after: the vast core repertoire from, let’s say, the ’50s onwards: the core Arditti repertoire. There is this attachment to simplicity.
MB: It’s interesting in a way that from such simplicity, for so many of the composers Webern has influenced, leads to a path of great complexity.
IA: They all do that, yes. Webern started them off and is the purest example of all. One can look back now and, historically, people like Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen: they all went in their different directions but all were very much looking back to Webern from their early pieces.
MB: Are there any potential dangers in viewing Webern in this ‘pure’ way? Pure seems to be an obvious word to describe it. Might one lose anything in doing so? Are there other ways in which one might consider this music?
IA: I think pure only in comparison to his two Viennese colleagues. I was mentioning that just a little earlier, in that other, more classical string quartets, or those who tend to play mostly classical music, would approach Webern with a little more Romanticism, a little more vibrato, shall we say, in the sound, and perhaps we come back[wards]. I remember rehearsing Boulez’s Livre and discussing the type of sound Boulez wanted for this piece and thinking that, yes, this type of sound, a very precise and not-too-involved sound, with regard to the left hand on the instruments, would be perfect for interpreting Webern. And I tend not to like a more indulgent interpretation, but that’s just the way I think. I don’t impose. In the quartet, we are a mixture of four individuals, and there is a mean, which will be the end result of any quartet sound, but of course, I influence it from my experiences.
MB: Of course. Moving to Schoenberg, in Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, we hear a progression from tonality to atonality, detest the term though Schoenberg did. Is that a particular challenge to performance? How much should we hear, or rather have in mind, the ‘air of another planet’ at the opening? Or should one milk the late, even over-ripe Romanticism for all it is worth and then find a sea-change as the work goes on?
IA: I think, with this piece, one doesn’t ever think in a non-Romantic way. Of course, the first two movements are very Classical in concept, but also, I think that, by the nature of the poem and the nature of the writing in the third and fourth movements, one would play it in the same way. You wouldn’t suddenly change your style in the middle of a piece. Of course, the quartet has to be more controlled when the singer is involved, in the latter two movements. And I think it’s a very Romantic piece: we see it as such. It’s a very Classical piece for us.
MB: With Ligeti, we find ourselves in another world again. How would you characterise Ligeti’s quartet writing? And how does it stand in relation to any of the other figures we have mentioned?
IA: Well, I think it stands out as something quite different. Ligeti is part of the avant-garde of the ’60s and ’70s. I think one has to think in a completely different way when performing this music, almost to obliterate or forget classical ways of playing. This is what he wanted.
MB: Shades of Boulez’s necessary amnesia?
IA: Yes. This is absolutely the impression I had when we played this piece early on in the Arditti Quartet and when working with the composer on numerous occasions: understanding what he wanted and the concept of sound, knowing his other music, knowing pieces like the Poem for 100 Metronomes, knowing orchestral pieces where clusters of sound were really important. And the second quartet is an extremely gestural work also, And the second quartet is an extremely gestural work also. Knowing Ligeti’s other music and other composers' music for that period helps one understand a little bit more about how to play this second quartet.
MB: Henri Dutilleux is a lone Frenchman in these programmes. How would you place him with respect to the other composers?
IA: I don’t tend to think of nationalities, more internationalities. In the quartet, we have four members who are all of different nationalities, and so on. We are an international group and Dutilleux is French, very much so. Ainsi la nuit is a very important piece, which follows a more classical tradition and represents French style in the later part of the twentieth century. It’s one of the pieces that we have played a lot and I think it fits very well into more classical programmes. How old is the piece now? It’s from the late ’70s, I think.
MB: Yes, 1976.
IA: So it’s thirty years old, but I think it’s basically a classical language we’re still playing in. It’s not at all like Ligeti, though I think it sits very well in his presence. One perhaps thinks of Ravel and Debussy when deciding how one is going to interpret the piece. There’s quite an amount of velocity and direction in the piece; it’s just a very good piece. It works in a classical way, the way the movements unfold. There’s a certain amount of energy sounded towards almost the end of the piece and then you have a return to the first movement, the slow part of the music. It’s a very well-written piece for strings; everything lies very well in the hands.
MB: I suppose we should certainly mention the new work you will be performing, by Nigel Osborne. Could you say something about what the audience should expect?
IA: They can expect a music that is very approachable, a music that is not going to frighten anybody. It’s based on some folk songs and it seems to have an obsession with the sound of a stone, which is actually projected towards the end of the piece. But the harmony and the music in the piece begins with a Gaelic folk song and Osborne introduces this pitch of the stone during the piece and I hope that, at Edinburgh, we’re actually going to have the sound of the stone projected live at the very end of the piece. It’s like a loop: I suppose we give way to the stone sound at the end of the piece. I hope I’ve been coherent: it’s a little difficult to describe.
MB: Of course.
IA: Well, it’s some sort of introduction anyway.
MB: Do you think a way into the work might be to consider it as some sort of programme music?
IA: Well, programme music in the sense that it’s using folk songs and they are literally played; there is not much transformation in them. It’s difficult. I think describing music, particularly before it’s been performed – we’ve certainly rehearsed it thoroughly – it’s difficult to say what sort of piece it is. It’s certainly a very beautiful piece and Nigel has an excellent voice. In music today, he doesn’t form part of any category of whatever; he has his own individual style. And it’s quite refreshing to work with him, and come across his music. We played a short piece of his twenty years ago but didn’t really get to know him, a very short piece in 1990, so this is the first major piece he’s written for the Arditti Quartet and it’s very nice to be in his world. We try to get into each composer’s world, and his is quite original.
MB: I came across a quotation from him, saying that music making should be ‘physically and mentally liberating ... optimistic in spirit and even capable ... of giving its strength to a weakened society.’ Do you see this conception expressed in the work that you are playing?
IA: Well, I think I do, but I also think these comments are coming as much from the man as the composer. We rehearsed with him and he’s that sort of person; he’s a giving person and it’s all part of his other activities, [such as] looking after people in less-developed countries. And he’s always going and helping in places such as Bosnia, and other places, and the whole spirit of the man: you can’t play a person’s music without being involved with the person. I think that’s a really important thing. That’s something we’ve done, tried to do, throughout the Arditti Quartet’s existence: to know the composers, to know how they want their music played. And I think that’s very relevant to Nigel Osborne, because he’s a very special character. He tries to help people; he’s a giver in the world, shall we say, he’s giving, and I think you can hear that in a way in the simplicity and coherence of his music. I think you, or we, feel that knowing him, and I hope we can convey that across to the audience. That’s our responsibility.
MB: It sounds very interesting. Going back to the broader conception of the programming, I remember hearing Pierre Boulez, quite rightly in my view, disparage programmes that appeared simply to be thrown together. ‘Like a shopping list’ was, I think, his description. How do you actually go about constructing programmes, getting the ideas and the logic behind them to come together?
IA: I think we see what pieces fit well with other pieces, over the years, when you’re programming things – and which don’t. You can be making a programme of music that is very contrasted; you can have something making a theme and perhaps that is not so well-contrasted, but complementary; textural music; you can think about relationships, how a piece works in one respect. You could say that in some ways Ligeti’s second quartet was textural and might sit very well with the Ravel quartet or you could make a stark contrast with Beethoven. There are numerous ways of doing it and I very much respect Mr Boulez’s comments, but I think sometimes it’s interesting to have very stark contrasts for the audience and not have a coherency in the way that he often makes programmes.
MB: Yes, one could often say that contrasts, almost despite themselves, lend their own coherence. You might not need a single idea; works can often react off and against each other, I’d have thought.
IA: Yes, Boulez is making programmes with Ravel, Debussy, the Second Viennese School, and his music, but I used to love bringing people like Carter and Cage together: very stark contrasts, people who didn’t see eye to eye musically. Stylistically very different, but sitting together very well by virtue of the contrast, and I think one can make programmes like that also. I don’t think there any stark problems with our Edinburgh programmes.
MB: No, far from it.
IA: What follows the Grosse Fuge? You’ll have to tell me, if you have the programme there.
MB: The Dutilleux.
IA: Well, yes, it’s always a difficult decision to follow the Grosse Fuge. Conlon Nancarrow, a composer who’s no longer with us, was very obsessed with our performance of this piece and, when we heard that we were recording the Grosse Fuge and his third string quartet, he was very happy and insisted that his piece carried on immediately after the Beethoven. The rhythmic complexities of the Beethoven really set up the rhythms in his piece and it was absolutely perfect. Of course, we choose something else, something completely different from the Beethoven, something much less rhythmically insistent and a different sort of music.
MB: Yes, quite. Having mentioned Boulez, I was wondering whether there was any chance of you being tempted to tempt him to write anything more for the string quartet. Or is that the end of a line?
IA (laughs): It’s funny you should say that, because I’ve spent about twenty or twenty-five years trying to persuade him to complete the work, Livre, which he wrote, I think, in 1948 or 1949. Livre now exists without its fourth movement, published by Heugel. The fourth movement is unfinished, it exists without marks of expression. You can see it in the Sacher Stiftung. We played for the first time the movements, of course excluding number four, and we rehearsed with him many years ago in London at my house, and at that point started to try to persuade him to complete the movement, but he felt very remote from the piece at the time. But we’ve been having discussions recently, actually in the last month. I saw him several times at concerts, and we’ve been speaking about the reality of him doing that, because I believe, next year or 2011, he’s going to have a sabbatical, so he may be able to complete that work. Of course, whether he would ever think about writing a new work for string quartet, I doubt at this stage.* I hope he will actually complete Livre.
MB: That would be enough for many of us. Are there any particular contemporary composers with whom you have never worked, whether as a quartet player or as a soloist, but with whom you would be very keen to do so?
IA: Well, that’s a very difficult question, because we’ve worked with so many. I think not. I don’t want to be rude to anyone who hasn’t worked with us. Maybe we’ve left out a few people; I can’t think. We rather hoped some years ago that Hans Werner Henze might perhaps write us a quartet. We played his five quartets many years ago, but they were not written for the Arditti Quartet. He hasn’t felt the desire to write a string quartet for many years and probably it’s too late now. There are composers who promised us pieces that never happened, but they’re people that we have close relationships with. We were discussing for many years a third quartet with Ligeti, a second quartet with Nono, and another quartet with Stockhausen, but, of course, none of those things came to fruition. And I think other composers – you never know what composers are going to do, and people that I don’t know so well might suddenly write a string quartet that’s marvellous. And I would then say, ‘Why didn’t I say to you on this Sunday morning, why didn’t I mention their name?’ Off the top of my head, there’s not really anybody that I can think of, that is not actively involved in writing us pieces or has written pieces.
MB: Thank you very much. It’s really been a pleasure to speak to you, most enlightening. I’m certainly very much looking forward to hearing the concerts when I go up to Edinburgh. I suppose that’s the most important thing.
IA: Yes, the music rather than talking about it, absolutely. Do come and say hello.
MB: Thank you. I certainly will.
* The Arditti Quartet met with Pierre Boulez in Lucerne a few days before their appearance in Edinburgh and he confirmed that he had no plans to write a new string quartet.
Beethoven - String Quartet in F minor, op. 95
Berg - String Quartet, op.3
Nigel Osborne - Tiree (world premiere, EIF commission)
Ligeti - String Quartet no.2
Beethoven - String Quartet in B-flat major, op.133, 'Grosse Fuge'
Dutilleux - String Quartet: 'Ainsi la nuit'
Webern - Six Bagatelles for string quartet, op.9
Schoenberg String Quartet no.2
MB: Thank you very much for agreeing to speak to me. I thought it would make sense first to consider the two programmes the Arditti Quartet will be performing at the Edinburgh Festival. One thing I noticed immediately was the presence of Beethoven in both. Admittedly, the works in question are late and what one might describe as ‘almost late’ Beethoven, music that often seems more shocking in its modernity than much twentieth or twenty-first repertoire. But is the presence of Beethoven in your quartet’s repertoire as unusual as it might seem?
IA: Well, I think it’s a double-edged sword really. In a way, Beethoven is there, for one reason, to make the programmes a little more attractive for the non-contemporary music aficionado: people interested in hearing string quartets but who are not exactly contemporary music specialists. This is the sort of programme we do in many places that are not venues for contemporary music festivals, and which have a chamber music series, so there is a definite desire to make the programmes attractive to people who are not going to come for the modern pieces and who will listen to them. But also late Beethoven is something that the Arditti Quartet has done – a select few pieces. It’s always been my desire to put the Grosse Fuge at the beginning of a programme and continue with contemporary music, rather as a statement to living composers, like: ‘This is what Beethoven did; now let’s see what you can do.’ This is such an extraordinary piece.
MB: Yes, I can see that makes a great deal of sense. Have you ever gone further back, say to Haydn, or even to music one might perform with a string quartet, such as Bach or Purcell? Or is Beethoven pretty much as far back as you would go?
IA: Bach’s Ricercata [from the Musical Offering] in sextet arrangement and we did a special project with members of the Alban Berg Quartet, which included Brahms sextets, but we’ve never really seriously played Classical music such as Haydn and Beethoven. We once played a Haydn quartet, but it was a very special request. But it’s not really the repertoire of the Arditti Quartet and it’s not really necessary for us to play Classical music, because we’re so busy doing other things.
MB: No, I can understand that; it’s not as if there is a shortage of other things for you to play.
IA: You wouldn’t expect a quartet like the Mosaïques to play Zemlinsky, or Schoenberg, or even more contemporary pieces, so why should we be playing Classical music when we have a wealth of repertoire from the beginning of the twentieth century until today?
MB: Yes, absolutely, so would you tend broadly to see the quartet’s repertoire as starting with Schoenberg, perhaps going a little further back, and that being the starting-point for a century or more’s further music?
IA: Yes, starting with the Second Viennese School. Our classics were the Second Viennese School and Bartók and going back to Beethoven came later, but it’s very important for us to add more classical quartets to our repertoire. We have played Ravel and Janáček quartets and I think it’s very important to communicate to audiences with these pieces. And, as I said two minutes ago, we need to communicate to audiences who don’t know so much about contemporary music, but enjoy coming to listen to the string quartet, and we try not to frighten them away, but attract them.
MB: The matter of audiences puts me in mind of something else. On the one hand, as you say, there will be audiences very interested in quartet, and perhaps more broadly chamber, music, who might be enticed to come along to hear more contemporary music. Do you find, though, that perhaps the audiences more interested in contemporary music are sometimes less interested in chamber, and indeed more specifically quartet, music? Or is that not really an issue?
IA: I think there are different sorts of audiences. A lot of the people that like contemporary music do not come from the classical music repertoire. There are a lot of people that enjoy listening to Ligeti and Xenakis, or whatever, who come from another listening point of view. Some of them come from classical music, sure, but some of them come from jazz and other alternative music. But it’s nice to appeal to lots of different sorts of people and each country, each town, has its own story. That to me is a very interesting point, having travelled now so extensively. Who is educating their audience in each venue is extremely important too, for what kind of audience will come and be prepared to listen. I’m not saying that one country is necessarily different from another but the towns could be different. One could do an interesting survey on this: who comes to listen to what? But that’s going off our point, I think.
MB: It’s an additional, very interesting point nevertheless. Going back to the programmes you are presenting, each member of the Second Viennese School is featured: Berg in the first programme, Webern and Schoenberg in the second. We have become accustomed, in reading and speaking about them, to certain broad generalisations concerning these composers and their modes of expression: Berg is portrayed as the most nostalgic, Webern the most fearsomely radical, and Schoenberg the great revolutionary traditionalist, or even traditionalist revolutionary. (Much depends on how one regards the influence of Brahms.) What I wanted to ask, however, is what similarities and differences you as string players notice between these composers, and how one might relate their quartet writing to broader conceptions of their style.
IA: That’s a very good question: it’s still very challenging. I’d say that Berg and Schoenberg were more classically friendly to traditional string techniques. The parts are written very coherently and sometimes virtuosically but always within the framework of what is possible. Webern is somehow a little more aloof. It’s difficult to know how to deal with the lines; it’s difficult to know how expressively to play Webern. We come backwards to Webern, people have always said that, whereas most people go from Classical music and late-Romantic music to the Second Viennese School. So perhaps our interpretations are affected by knowing Boulez and Ferneyhough. We certainly knew them quite well when we were learning the pieces by Webern. But I think it’s a difficult question to answer, because we would approach those composers in a very classically-oriented way, from the concept of sound and everything. Berg is very challenging, because almost everything is written down...
MB: Like Mahler and Strauss...
IA: In a sense over-marked, so you have to deal with the concept that perhaps Berg was very frustrated with the performers of the day and felt he had to over-notate everything, so perhaps there is some degree of over-notation in the phrasing, but one follows and understands what the composer wants, I think. But this is still very challenging music for us to play and never boring. This is repertoire that is constantly challenging: the two quartets of Berg, the four of Schoenberg, and the Webern pieces. I think as a core basis for our repertoire, it’s very stimulating to have that and, as in these Edinburgh programmes, to kind of bounce off that with some contemporary pieces. The idea was to have some pieces from the twentieth century, plus the Beethoven, which would be a kind of overview of the Arditti’s repertoire. In fact, the director at Edinburgh, Jonathan Mills, engaged us before at both Brisbane and Melbourne festivals in Australia. At Melbourne, we did something even more adventurous; we did six concerts. We had music from the Second Viennese School, from Bartók, from Janáček, and quite a lot of new music, plus a new commission in each concert, so we have a snippet from that in the two concerts we’re doing this year at Edinburgh
.
MB: I was thinking about Schoenberg’s preface to Webern’s Bagatelles, which has now become almost as celebrated a text as the work itself. For the benefit of our readers I shall quote it:
Consider what moderation is required to express oneself so briefly. Each glance can be extended into a poem, each sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, a joy in a single indrawn breath, such concentration is only found where self-pity is absent. These pieces, as, indeed, Webern’s music in general, will only be understood by those who believe that through sound something that can only be expressed in sound can be said.
Schoenberg there seems to be saying, amongst other things, that this is absolute music, in a Romantic sense as would have been understood by, say, Wagner or even Mendelssohn. Is that how you understand Webern?
IA: Well, I think there is that clarity in Webern; he says it all with one single stroke. I’m not sure what you were meaning about the Romantic element.
MB: Insofar as Schoenberg is saying that this is absolute music, which needs no reference to anything else, only what can be expressed in sound can be expressed here, this seems quite a Romantic view of music as an art in itself.
IA: I think Webern was able to do something quite different to Schoenberg, to reduce things to that level and to express things in that, not simple but transparent way. I think it’s not a Romantic gesture but it’s real admiration from Schoenberg and, when performing their music, you can sometimes see that Schoenberg takes a very much longer way round to get to things. He’s a different sort of composer. But it’s amazing that Berg and Webern were from this school and attached to Schoenberg. Yes, for me, Webern is the most interesting of the three composers in many respects. Of course, Webern was responsible for influencing a lot of the music that came after: the vast core repertoire from, let’s say, the ’50s onwards: the core Arditti repertoire. There is this attachment to simplicity.
MB: It’s interesting in a way that from such simplicity, for so many of the composers Webern has influenced, leads to a path of great complexity.
IA: They all do that, yes. Webern started them off and is the purest example of all. One can look back now and, historically, people like Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen: they all went in their different directions but all were very much looking back to Webern from their early pieces.
MB: Are there any potential dangers in viewing Webern in this ‘pure’ way? Pure seems to be an obvious word to describe it. Might one lose anything in doing so? Are there other ways in which one might consider this music?
IA: I think pure only in comparison to his two Viennese colleagues. I was mentioning that just a little earlier, in that other, more classical string quartets, or those who tend to play mostly classical music, would approach Webern with a little more Romanticism, a little more vibrato, shall we say, in the sound, and perhaps we come back[wards]. I remember rehearsing Boulez’s Livre and discussing the type of sound Boulez wanted for this piece and thinking that, yes, this type of sound, a very precise and not-too-involved sound, with regard to the left hand on the instruments, would be perfect for interpreting Webern. And I tend not to like a more indulgent interpretation, but that’s just the way I think. I don’t impose. In the quartet, we are a mixture of four individuals, and there is a mean, which will be the end result of any quartet sound, but of course, I influence it from my experiences.
MB: Of course. Moving to Schoenberg, in Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, we hear a progression from tonality to atonality, detest the term though Schoenberg did. Is that a particular challenge to performance? How much should we hear, or rather have in mind, the ‘air of another planet’ at the opening? Or should one milk the late, even over-ripe Romanticism for all it is worth and then find a sea-change as the work goes on?
IA: I think, with this piece, one doesn’t ever think in a non-Romantic way. Of course, the first two movements are very Classical in concept, but also, I think that, by the nature of the poem and the nature of the writing in the third and fourth movements, one would play it in the same way. You wouldn’t suddenly change your style in the middle of a piece. Of course, the quartet has to be more controlled when the singer is involved, in the latter two movements. And I think it’s a very Romantic piece: we see it as such. It’s a very Classical piece for us.
MB: With Ligeti, we find ourselves in another world again. How would you characterise Ligeti’s quartet writing? And how does it stand in relation to any of the other figures we have mentioned?
IA: Well, I think it stands out as something quite different. Ligeti is part of the avant-garde of the ’60s and ’70s. I think one has to think in a completely different way when performing this music, almost to obliterate or forget classical ways of playing. This is what he wanted.
MB: Shades of Boulez’s necessary amnesia?
IA: Yes. This is absolutely the impression I had when we played this piece early on in the Arditti Quartet and when working with the composer on numerous occasions: understanding what he wanted and the concept of sound, knowing his other music, knowing pieces like the Poem for 100 Metronomes, knowing orchestral pieces where clusters of sound were really important. And the second quartet is an extremely gestural work also, And the second quartet is an extremely gestural work also. Knowing Ligeti’s other music and other composers' music for that period helps one understand a little bit more about how to play this second quartet.
MB: Henri Dutilleux is a lone Frenchman in these programmes. How would you place him with respect to the other composers?
IA: I don’t tend to think of nationalities, more internationalities. In the quartet, we have four members who are all of different nationalities, and so on. We are an international group and Dutilleux is French, very much so. Ainsi la nuit is a very important piece, which follows a more classical tradition and represents French style in the later part of the twentieth century. It’s one of the pieces that we have played a lot and I think it fits very well into more classical programmes. How old is the piece now? It’s from the late ’70s, I think.
MB: Yes, 1976.
IA: So it’s thirty years old, but I think it’s basically a classical language we’re still playing in. It’s not at all like Ligeti, though I think it sits very well in his presence. One perhaps thinks of Ravel and Debussy when deciding how one is going to interpret the piece. There’s quite an amount of velocity and direction in the piece; it’s just a very good piece. It works in a classical way, the way the movements unfold. There’s a certain amount of energy sounded towards almost the end of the piece and then you have a return to the first movement, the slow part of the music. It’s a very well-written piece for strings; everything lies very well in the hands.
MB: I suppose we should certainly mention the new work you will be performing, by Nigel Osborne. Could you say something about what the audience should expect?
IA: They can expect a music that is very approachable, a music that is not going to frighten anybody. It’s based on some folk songs and it seems to have an obsession with the sound of a stone, which is actually projected towards the end of the piece. But the harmony and the music in the piece begins with a Gaelic folk song and Osborne introduces this pitch of the stone during the piece and I hope that, at Edinburgh, we’re actually going to have the sound of the stone projected live at the very end of the piece. It’s like a loop: I suppose we give way to the stone sound at the end of the piece. I hope I’ve been coherent: it’s a little difficult to describe.
MB: Of course.
IA: Well, it’s some sort of introduction anyway.
MB: Do you think a way into the work might be to consider it as some sort of programme music?
IA: Well, programme music in the sense that it’s using folk songs and they are literally played; there is not much transformation in them. It’s difficult. I think describing music, particularly before it’s been performed – we’ve certainly rehearsed it thoroughly – it’s difficult to say what sort of piece it is. It’s certainly a very beautiful piece and Nigel has an excellent voice. In music today, he doesn’t form part of any category of whatever; he has his own individual style. And it’s quite refreshing to work with him, and come across his music. We played a short piece of his twenty years ago but didn’t really get to know him, a very short piece in 1990, so this is the first major piece he’s written for the Arditti Quartet and it’s very nice to be in his world. We try to get into each composer’s world, and his is quite original.
MB: I came across a quotation from him, saying that music making should be ‘physically and mentally liberating ... optimistic in spirit and even capable ... of giving its strength to a weakened society.’ Do you see this conception expressed in the work that you are playing?
IA: Well, I think I do, but I also think these comments are coming as much from the man as the composer. We rehearsed with him and he’s that sort of person; he’s a giving person and it’s all part of his other activities, [such as] looking after people in less-developed countries. And he’s always going and helping in places such as Bosnia, and other places, and the whole spirit of the man: you can’t play a person’s music without being involved with the person. I think that’s a really important thing. That’s something we’ve done, tried to do, throughout the Arditti Quartet’s existence: to know the composers, to know how they want their music played. And I think that’s very relevant to Nigel Osborne, because he’s a very special character. He tries to help people; he’s a giver in the world, shall we say, he’s giving, and I think you can hear that in a way in the simplicity and coherence of his music. I think you, or we, feel that knowing him, and I hope we can convey that across to the audience. That’s our responsibility.
MB: It sounds very interesting. Going back to the broader conception of the programming, I remember hearing Pierre Boulez, quite rightly in my view, disparage programmes that appeared simply to be thrown together. ‘Like a shopping list’ was, I think, his description. How do you actually go about constructing programmes, getting the ideas and the logic behind them to come together?
IA: I think we see what pieces fit well with other pieces, over the years, when you’re programming things – and which don’t. You can be making a programme of music that is very contrasted; you can have something making a theme and perhaps that is not so well-contrasted, but complementary; textural music; you can think about relationships, how a piece works in one respect. You could say that in some ways Ligeti’s second quartet was textural and might sit very well with the Ravel quartet or you could make a stark contrast with Beethoven. There are numerous ways of doing it and I very much respect Mr Boulez’s comments, but I think sometimes it’s interesting to have very stark contrasts for the audience and not have a coherency in the way that he often makes programmes.
MB: Yes, one could often say that contrasts, almost despite themselves, lend their own coherence. You might not need a single idea; works can often react off and against each other, I’d have thought.
IA: Yes, Boulez is making programmes with Ravel, Debussy, the Second Viennese School, and his music, but I used to love bringing people like Carter and Cage together: very stark contrasts, people who didn’t see eye to eye musically. Stylistically very different, but sitting together very well by virtue of the contrast, and I think one can make programmes like that also. I don’t think there any stark problems with our Edinburgh programmes.
MB: No, far from it.
IA: What follows the Grosse Fuge? You’ll have to tell me, if you have the programme there.
MB: The Dutilleux.
IA: Well, yes, it’s always a difficult decision to follow the Grosse Fuge. Conlon Nancarrow, a composer who’s no longer with us, was very obsessed with our performance of this piece and, when we heard that we were recording the Grosse Fuge and his third string quartet, he was very happy and insisted that his piece carried on immediately after the Beethoven. The rhythmic complexities of the Beethoven really set up the rhythms in his piece and it was absolutely perfect. Of course, we choose something else, something completely different from the Beethoven, something much less rhythmically insistent and a different sort of music.
MB: Yes, quite. Having mentioned Boulez, I was wondering whether there was any chance of you being tempted to tempt him to write anything more for the string quartet. Or is that the end of a line?
IA (laughs): It’s funny you should say that, because I’ve spent about twenty or twenty-five years trying to persuade him to complete the work, Livre, which he wrote, I think, in 1948 or 1949. Livre now exists without its fourth movement, published by Heugel. The fourth movement is unfinished, it exists without marks of expression. You can see it in the Sacher Stiftung. We played for the first time the movements, of course excluding number four, and we rehearsed with him many years ago in London at my house, and at that point started to try to persuade him to complete the movement, but he felt very remote from the piece at the time. But we’ve been having discussions recently, actually in the last month. I saw him several times at concerts, and we’ve been speaking about the reality of him doing that, because I believe, next year or 2011, he’s going to have a sabbatical, so he may be able to complete that work. Of course, whether he would ever think about writing a new work for string quartet, I doubt at this stage.* I hope he will actually complete Livre.
MB: That would be enough for many of us. Are there any particular contemporary composers with whom you have never worked, whether as a quartet player or as a soloist, but with whom you would be very keen to do so?
IA: Well, that’s a very difficult question, because we’ve worked with so many. I think not. I don’t want to be rude to anyone who hasn’t worked with us. Maybe we’ve left out a few people; I can’t think. We rather hoped some years ago that Hans Werner Henze might perhaps write us a quartet. We played his five quartets many years ago, but they were not written for the Arditti Quartet. He hasn’t felt the desire to write a string quartet for many years and probably it’s too late now. There are composers who promised us pieces that never happened, but they’re people that we have close relationships with. We were discussing for many years a third quartet with Ligeti, a second quartet with Nono, and another quartet with Stockhausen, but, of course, none of those things came to fruition. And I think other composers – you never know what composers are going to do, and people that I don’t know so well might suddenly write a string quartet that’s marvellous. And I would then say, ‘Why didn’t I say to you on this Sunday morning, why didn’t I mention their name?’ Off the top of my head, there’s not really anybody that I can think of, that is not actively involved in writing us pieces or has written pieces.
MB: Thank you very much. It’s really been a pleasure to speak to you, most enlightening. I’m certainly very much looking forward to hearing the concerts when I go up to Edinburgh. I suppose that’s the most important thing.
IA: Yes, the music rather than talking about it, absolutely. Do come and say hello.
MB: Thank you. I certainly will.
* The Arditti Quartet met with Pierre Boulez in Lucerne a few days before their appearance in Edinburgh and he confirmed that he had no plans to write a new string quartet.
Saturday, 30 August 2008
Edinburgh International Festival: Wolpe! Welche Farbe hat der Vogel? 29 August 2008
The Hub
Viviane De Muynck (actress)
Johan Bossers (piano)
Gunnar Brandt-Sigurdsson (tenor/vocalist)
Caroline Petrick (coach)
Herman Sorgeloos (visual concept)
Muziektheater Transparant
Described beforehand as a ‘staged concert’, I dare say that is as close as we are likely to get; perhaps it would simply be better to file Wolpe! under ‘unclassifiable’. It should also be filed under ‘excellent’. In this show, which Antwerp-based Muziektheater Transparant has been touring since its January Brussels premiere in the Beurrschouwburg, not only are we treated to fine performances of a number of Stefan Wolpe’s songs, mostly but not exclusively from the period 1929-33, and his later, American-period Battle Piece for piano (1943-7). We are also given a greater context for and further exploration of the composer’s political ideas, their relevance for his music and for us – at a time when socialist, let alone communist hopes often seem so utterly confounded. In addition, we are treated to an extremely enjoyable hour-and-a-half in the theatre. In the words of the economist, Siegfried Moos, set by Wolpe in the second stanza of Haben Sie Kummer, the song that opened the evening’s proceedings:
Besser als Kintopp, besser als Fusel,
Gibt das Theater sel’gen Dusel.
Mit wenig Moneten verzagen Sie nie!
Die Bühnenstars begeistern auch Sie!
Gerade für Sie sind doch unsere Gaben.
Auch Bildung können Sie bei uns haben!
(Better than the pictures, better than hooch,
The theatre gives you blessed dreams.
Never despair with your few pennies!
The stars of our stage will also inspire you!
Our gifts are especially for you.
You can receive an education with us too!)
Musiektheater Transparant thus follows firmly in the tradition of Die Truppe, the late-Weimar theatre collective in which Wolpe himself served as musical director. Proscribed upon the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Die Truppe satirised contemporary political and social problems, whilst propagandising for Marxist solutions. Musiektheater Transparant was less concerned directly to proselytise but instead aimed to make the audience think, to consider possibilities beyond the depressing, suppressive current orthodoxies; that is, the company successfully attempted to accomplish what all art should do.
‘Staged concert’ is not, on reflection, at all a bad description of Wolpe! It was certainly not a play. What we had was a little staging but no characters as such, and various numbers interspersed with varied commentary from the wonderful Viviane De Muynck. This could take the form of stores concerning Wolpe’s life and work, readings from utopians Plato and Thomas More, reflections upon the nature of propaganda and activism (and the difference between the two), and observations upon matters political and social. The warmth of De Muynck’s personality and her evident commitment to Wolpe shone through. I assume that some at least of the material was provided by ‘coach’, Caroline Petrick; some of the categories in the credits did not necessarily translate directly into English stage experience, but then this was above all a collective effort. Johan Bossers proved an equally committed pianist, both in the piano parts to the songs and in the technically fearsome Battle Piece. This latter we heard in three tranches, Wolpe’s style falling somewhere between Schoenberg and Prokofiev, with a trenchant commitment that is all his own, as is the insistence upon the vertical and spatial dimensions of music in addition to traditionally linear, goal-oriented (Beethovenian) form. (Wolpe’s pupils would include Morton Feldman and David Tudor.) Gunnar Brandt-Sigurdsson’s contribution was very fine: secure of line and in style, diction impeccable, and possessed of a winning and appropriate theatricality.
An especial highpoint musically was the Dadaist An Anna Blume, ‘for piano and musical clown’, based upon an initial twelve-note theme, developed with an integrity born both of rigour and of true freedom: perhaps a useful way to consider Wolpe’s art more generally. The Brecht setting, Ballade von der Osseger Witwen, in which we learned what would be done for the mourning widows of Osseg – nothing – was genuinely moving. And in Die Herren der Welt, we were left in no doubt as to the identity of the rulers of the world, the barbarous tenacity with which they would maintain their grip, and the anger we should and did feel concerning this. However, the greatest tribute to the performers must be that the true star of the evening was Stefan Wolpe himself. Let us hope that other companies, other musicians, other institutions will take note. On the basis of this evening, they really should.
A CD, comprising much of the music from this show and some other Lieder, has been issued (NEOS 10719). I bought a copy immediately after the performance, although I have yet to hear it. Working upon the assumption that it may give some indication of this inspiring event – sadly, minus Viviane De Muynck – I shall nevertheless chance my arm and heartily recommend it.
Viviane De Muynck (actress)
Johan Bossers (piano)
Gunnar Brandt-Sigurdsson (tenor/vocalist)
Caroline Petrick (coach)
Herman Sorgeloos (visual concept)
Muziektheater Transparant
Described beforehand as a ‘staged concert’, I dare say that is as close as we are likely to get; perhaps it would simply be better to file Wolpe! under ‘unclassifiable’. It should also be filed under ‘excellent’. In this show, which Antwerp-based Muziektheater Transparant has been touring since its January Brussels premiere in the Beurrschouwburg, not only are we treated to fine performances of a number of Stefan Wolpe’s songs, mostly but not exclusively from the period 1929-33, and his later, American-period Battle Piece for piano (1943-7). We are also given a greater context for and further exploration of the composer’s political ideas, their relevance for his music and for us – at a time when socialist, let alone communist hopes often seem so utterly confounded. In addition, we are treated to an extremely enjoyable hour-and-a-half in the theatre. In the words of the economist, Siegfried Moos, set by Wolpe in the second stanza of Haben Sie Kummer, the song that opened the evening’s proceedings:
Besser als Kintopp, besser als Fusel,
Gibt das Theater sel’gen Dusel.
Mit wenig Moneten verzagen Sie nie!
Die Bühnenstars begeistern auch Sie!
Gerade für Sie sind doch unsere Gaben.
Auch Bildung können Sie bei uns haben!
(Better than the pictures, better than hooch,
The theatre gives you blessed dreams.
Never despair with your few pennies!
The stars of our stage will also inspire you!
Our gifts are especially for you.
You can receive an education with us too!)
Musiektheater Transparant thus follows firmly in the tradition of Die Truppe, the late-Weimar theatre collective in which Wolpe himself served as musical director. Proscribed upon the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Die Truppe satirised contemporary political and social problems, whilst propagandising for Marxist solutions. Musiektheater Transparant was less concerned directly to proselytise but instead aimed to make the audience think, to consider possibilities beyond the depressing, suppressive current orthodoxies; that is, the company successfully attempted to accomplish what all art should do.
‘Staged concert’ is not, on reflection, at all a bad description of Wolpe! It was certainly not a play. What we had was a little staging but no characters as such, and various numbers interspersed with varied commentary from the wonderful Viviane De Muynck. This could take the form of stores concerning Wolpe’s life and work, readings from utopians Plato and Thomas More, reflections upon the nature of propaganda and activism (and the difference between the two), and observations upon matters political and social. The warmth of De Muynck’s personality and her evident commitment to Wolpe shone through. I assume that some at least of the material was provided by ‘coach’, Caroline Petrick; some of the categories in the credits did not necessarily translate directly into English stage experience, but then this was above all a collective effort. Johan Bossers proved an equally committed pianist, both in the piano parts to the songs and in the technically fearsome Battle Piece. This latter we heard in three tranches, Wolpe’s style falling somewhere between Schoenberg and Prokofiev, with a trenchant commitment that is all his own, as is the insistence upon the vertical and spatial dimensions of music in addition to traditionally linear, goal-oriented (Beethovenian) form. (Wolpe’s pupils would include Morton Feldman and David Tudor.) Gunnar Brandt-Sigurdsson’s contribution was very fine: secure of line and in style, diction impeccable, and possessed of a winning and appropriate theatricality.
An especial highpoint musically was the Dadaist An Anna Blume, ‘for piano and musical clown’, based upon an initial twelve-note theme, developed with an integrity born both of rigour and of true freedom: perhaps a useful way to consider Wolpe’s art more generally. The Brecht setting, Ballade von der Osseger Witwen, in which we learned what would be done for the mourning widows of Osseg – nothing – was genuinely moving. And in Die Herren der Welt, we were left in no doubt as to the identity of the rulers of the world, the barbarous tenacity with which they would maintain their grip, and the anger we should and did feel concerning this. However, the greatest tribute to the performers must be that the true star of the evening was Stefan Wolpe himself. Let us hope that other companies, other musicians, other institutions will take note. On the basis of this evening, they really should.
A CD, comprising much of the music from this show and some other Lieder, has been issued (NEOS 10719). I bought a copy immediately after the performance, although I have yet to hear it. Working upon the assumption that it may give some indication of this inspiring event – sadly, minus Viviane De Muynck – I shall nevertheless chance my arm and heartily recommend it.
Friday, 29 August 2008
Edinburgh International Festival: Grimaud/Staatskapelle Dresden/Luisi, 28 August 2008
Usher Hall
Weber – Overture: Oberon
Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.4 in G major, op.58
Strauss – Ein Heldenleben
Bernhard Lang – Monadology II (British premiere)
Hélène Grimaud (piano)
Staatskapelle Dresden
Fabio Luisi (conductor)
This was a considerably different concert from that advertised. First, the programme was changed, so that Hélène Grimaud performed Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto rather than Schumann's. Then disaster struck the night before, the orchestral players arriving in Edinburgh but not their instruments, with the result that the first of their two concerts was cancelled. It was therefore decided to give the British premiere of Bernhard Lang’s Monadology II in addition to the new programme.
It is almost always a joy to hear the Staatskapelle Dresden, and this occasion was no exception. Faced with the proverbial gun to my head, I should finally opt for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra as the world’s greatest, but I have no doubt that I should put Dresden second, however nonsensical such rankings ultimately may be. No one quite possesses the sweetness of the Vienna strings, yet there is something darker, more traditionally German about the Staatskapelle Dresden, a direct line to the extraordinary tradition that has had it directed by composers such as Schütz, Weber, Wagner, and Strauss, not to mention a host of great principal conductors. That is true authenticity. I was therefore especially eager to hear Weber’s Oberon overture, as truly German Romantic a curtain-raiser as one could imagine, in spite of its composition for Covent Garden. The slow introduction was good, though not perfect; a number of minor slips made me wonder whether the prior uncertainties surrounding the concert were extracting their toll. But the main section began with a bang – and the real sound of a great orchestra. Silvery violins, a ravishing clarinet solo, a beautifully rounded sound on the kettledrums: these were some of the delights to savour, although there was also a distinctly sour tone from the oboes at one point. Perhaps the most splendid memory was that of the full complement of horns, at their fullest tone, without a trace of harshness or braying. The overture was well directed by Fabio Luisi, although without the last ounce – or perhaps even a few ounces – of individuality.
Doubts concerning Luisi resurfaced during the Beethoven concerto, although he was presented with a headstrong pianist, very much more the soloist than the chamber musician, when of course she should have been both. Interplay and even mutual sympathy were often lacking; it made me wonder quite why the programme had been changed in the first place. The orchestra sounded wonderful, never more so than in the truly ravishing pizzicato passage following the first movement cadenza, but it could have been more purposively directed. The second movement was something of an exception, with truly characterful strings proving implacable Furies to Grimaud’s pathetic – in the best sense – Orpheus and a greater sense of partnership all round. The beautifully hushed strings at the end took on a memorable, veiled sound, vibrato withdrawn momentarily for a musical reason rather than out of authenticist dogma. A winning lilt was imparted to the finale, although Grimaud once again soon became too much the star soloist. It was rare indeed for her so much as to glance at the conductor or the orchestra. There were many good things in this performance, yet I felt that it could readily have been much better.
Ein Heldenleben benefited from a splendidly vigorous opening, although once again there were quite a few slips only a little way in. The very odd cracked note apart, the Dresden horns were once again to die for, as indeed was the orchestra as a whole, especially when Strauss called for great washes of orchestral sound. Leader Kai Vogler proved a fine soloist indeed. Split violins, here as elsewhere, paid dividends, although elsewhere the account could sometimes be found wanting in terms of clarity. Bombast won out over irony, for it sounded as though the conductor was simply taking Strauss at face value. Moreover, Luisi appeared to value volume over other, more signal virtues, mistaking it for dramatic tension. His direction was once again weaker than the orchestral performance itself and here with graver consequences. Ein Heldenleben needs a great orchestra, of course, but just as important is absolute security in structural terms, lest the score begin to sprawl, to meander even. Here this happened far too often, resulting in an unduly episodic reading. And then there was an unwelcome surprise in terms of an alternative ending. Apparently Luisi and the Staatskapelle have recorded the work with this violin-focused winding down. It is not unpleasant in itself, but is not a patch upon the familiar Also sprach Zarathustra reference. Still, I suppose it might appeal either to Zarathustra-haters, although I should have thought that they would also be Heldenleben-haters in any case, or to those approaching Strauss’s symphonic poem without a sense of irony.
Then, as a bonus, came the Lang premiere. At least, I had thought it would have been a bonus. The piece sounded very interesting from the composer’s own programme note, which explained its concept of ‘musical-cellular processing’, as derived from Leibniz’s monadology. (Festival director Jonathan Mills’s stumbling over the title during his concert introduction suggested a certain unfamiliarity with Leibniz’s philosophy.) Yet the sole impression I gained from the performance was one of tedium. An opening woodwind reference to Strauss’s Don Quixote – the piece is subtitled ‘A new Don Quixote’ – never really led anywhere, and much of the music merely sounded like a textured accompaniment to something that never materialised. The introduction of a wind machine merely sounded incongruous, for there was on the whole little sense of orchestral colour. Rhythmically the piece was monotonous too. Perhaps I missed the point, but I could not help but notice an apparent lack of enthusiasm on the orchestra’s part. Whilst I cannot but applaud attempts to build upon the orchestra’s great tradition – it is hardly celebrated as a champion of the contemporary – I am not sure that this was an ideal opportunity to do so. I was, however, greatly relieved to read that this was a shorter version – of about twenty minutes, I should guess – of an original, fifty-minute-long score.
Weber – Overture: Oberon
Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.4 in G major, op.58
Strauss – Ein Heldenleben
Bernhard Lang – Monadology II (British premiere)
Hélène Grimaud (piano)
Staatskapelle Dresden
Fabio Luisi (conductor)
This was a considerably different concert from that advertised. First, the programme was changed, so that Hélène Grimaud performed Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto rather than Schumann's. Then disaster struck the night before, the orchestral players arriving in Edinburgh but not their instruments, with the result that the first of their two concerts was cancelled. It was therefore decided to give the British premiere of Bernhard Lang’s Monadology II in addition to the new programme.
It is almost always a joy to hear the Staatskapelle Dresden, and this occasion was no exception. Faced with the proverbial gun to my head, I should finally opt for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra as the world’s greatest, but I have no doubt that I should put Dresden second, however nonsensical such rankings ultimately may be. No one quite possesses the sweetness of the Vienna strings, yet there is something darker, more traditionally German about the Staatskapelle Dresden, a direct line to the extraordinary tradition that has had it directed by composers such as Schütz, Weber, Wagner, and Strauss, not to mention a host of great principal conductors. That is true authenticity. I was therefore especially eager to hear Weber’s Oberon overture, as truly German Romantic a curtain-raiser as one could imagine, in spite of its composition for Covent Garden. The slow introduction was good, though not perfect; a number of minor slips made me wonder whether the prior uncertainties surrounding the concert were extracting their toll. But the main section began with a bang – and the real sound of a great orchestra. Silvery violins, a ravishing clarinet solo, a beautifully rounded sound on the kettledrums: these were some of the delights to savour, although there was also a distinctly sour tone from the oboes at one point. Perhaps the most splendid memory was that of the full complement of horns, at their fullest tone, without a trace of harshness or braying. The overture was well directed by Fabio Luisi, although without the last ounce – or perhaps even a few ounces – of individuality.
Doubts concerning Luisi resurfaced during the Beethoven concerto, although he was presented with a headstrong pianist, very much more the soloist than the chamber musician, when of course she should have been both. Interplay and even mutual sympathy were often lacking; it made me wonder quite why the programme had been changed in the first place. The orchestra sounded wonderful, never more so than in the truly ravishing pizzicato passage following the first movement cadenza, but it could have been more purposively directed. The second movement was something of an exception, with truly characterful strings proving implacable Furies to Grimaud’s pathetic – in the best sense – Orpheus and a greater sense of partnership all round. The beautifully hushed strings at the end took on a memorable, veiled sound, vibrato withdrawn momentarily for a musical reason rather than out of authenticist dogma. A winning lilt was imparted to the finale, although Grimaud once again soon became too much the star soloist. It was rare indeed for her so much as to glance at the conductor or the orchestra. There were many good things in this performance, yet I felt that it could readily have been much better.
Ein Heldenleben benefited from a splendidly vigorous opening, although once again there were quite a few slips only a little way in. The very odd cracked note apart, the Dresden horns were once again to die for, as indeed was the orchestra as a whole, especially when Strauss called for great washes of orchestral sound. Leader Kai Vogler proved a fine soloist indeed. Split violins, here as elsewhere, paid dividends, although elsewhere the account could sometimes be found wanting in terms of clarity. Bombast won out over irony, for it sounded as though the conductor was simply taking Strauss at face value. Moreover, Luisi appeared to value volume over other, more signal virtues, mistaking it for dramatic tension. His direction was once again weaker than the orchestral performance itself and here with graver consequences. Ein Heldenleben needs a great orchestra, of course, but just as important is absolute security in structural terms, lest the score begin to sprawl, to meander even. Here this happened far too often, resulting in an unduly episodic reading. And then there was an unwelcome surprise in terms of an alternative ending. Apparently Luisi and the Staatskapelle have recorded the work with this violin-focused winding down. It is not unpleasant in itself, but is not a patch upon the familiar Also sprach Zarathustra reference. Still, I suppose it might appeal either to Zarathustra-haters, although I should have thought that they would also be Heldenleben-haters in any case, or to those approaching Strauss’s symphonic poem without a sense of irony.
Then, as a bonus, came the Lang premiere. At least, I had thought it would have been a bonus. The piece sounded very interesting from the composer’s own programme note, which explained its concept of ‘musical-cellular processing’, as derived from Leibniz’s monadology. (Festival director Jonathan Mills’s stumbling over the title during his concert introduction suggested a certain unfamiliarity with Leibniz’s philosophy.) Yet the sole impression I gained from the performance was one of tedium. An opening woodwind reference to Strauss’s Don Quixote – the piece is subtitled ‘A new Don Quixote’ – never really led anywhere, and much of the music merely sounded like a textured accompaniment to something that never materialised. The introduction of a wind machine merely sounded incongruous, for there was on the whole little sense of orchestral colour. Rhythmically the piece was monotonous too. Perhaps I missed the point, but I could not help but notice an apparent lack of enthusiasm on the orchestra’s part. Whilst I cannot but applaud attempts to build upon the orchestra’s great tradition – it is hardly celebrated as a champion of the contemporary – I am not sure that this was an ideal opportunity to do so. I was, however, greatly relieved to read that this was a shorter version – of about twenty minutes, I should guess – of an original, fifty-minute-long score.
Thursday, 28 August 2008
Edinburgh International Festival: King Roger, 27 August 2008
Edinburgh Festival Theatre
Roger – Andrzej Dobber
Roxana – Elzbieta Szmytka
Edrisi – Sergei Semishkur
Shepherd – Pavlo Tolstoy
Archbishop – Yury Vorobiev
Deaconess – Lyubov Sokolova
Mariusz Treliński (director)
Boris Kudlička (designs)
Marc Heinz (lighting)
Wojciech Dziedzic (costumes)
Tomek Wygoda (choreographer)
Mariinsky Opera Company
Valery Gergiev (conductor)
No one who heard this performance should be under any doubt that King Roger (or Król Roger, in Polish) is a masterpiece. I have seen a great deal of nonsense written about it, including the bizarre claim that there is nothing much in the way of plot. King Roger needs no excuses; what it needs is performances. Covent Garden, are you listening? Probably not, for nothing must interfere with the nth revival of Tosca or La Bohème. (Who actually goes to these things every season?!)
Having been severely disappointed, indeed disillusioned, with ‘Gergiev’s Mahler’, it was a delight to hear Valery Gergiev back on form. He proved himself just as fine a Szymanowskian as Sir Simon Rattle. And his Mariinsky forces were on superlative form too: sultry, seductive, yet precise where necessary too. Gergiev imparted an impeccable sense of forward momentum, without ever driving the music hard. We can all pick out the influences and/or parallels in Szymanowski’s music: Debussy above all here, but also Bartók, Strauss, Wagner, even early Schoenberg. Yet there is undoubtedly an individual voice too, a voice we heard clearly on this occasion. With the possible exception of Elzbieta Szmytka as Roxana, this was not a performance of truly outstanding vocal performances, but there were no weak links either and there was a real sense of a company on stage. Andrzej Dobber was a more than reliable Roger, faithfully served by Sergey Semishkur as Edrisi. After some slightly wayward intonation during the first act, Pavlo Tolstoy impressed as a charismatic Shepherd/Dionysus. Szmytka reminded us of her long pedigree in this music and acted well too.
Mariusz Treliński’s production seemed well considered on the whole. I was not entirely sure why the opera needed updating; it is not as if any of us can have been sated with ‘traditional’ productions. I was less concerned about the loss of the period than that of place, although I should not wish to exaggerate; it seemed a pity though. The sets were generally striking, although the church setting for the first act was uncompromisingly modernistic. Szymanowski’s music had to portray the exoticism all by itself. It could do that, but I did not quite see why a hint of the Byzantine would have been out of place. I was also somewhat at a loss to understand why all the clergy sported mitres. The mise en scène for the second act, however, seemed perfectly to capture the hothouse atmosphere that incites Roxana and eventually even Roger to follow the Shepherd. It is worth mentioning here the hugely beneficial role played throughout by Marc Heinz’s atmospheric and carefully targeted lighting, as well as Tomek Wygoda’s choreography in this particular scene, a fine portrayal of Dionysian erotic abandon. It seems that Treliński purposely downplayed the homoeroticism of this act, wishing the conflict within Roger’s soul ‘to be seen from a wider perspective, as a tale of self-discovery’. I am not sure that we are so overburdened with such material on the operatic stage that this was as necessary as the director seemed to think, although it did no especial harm either. I cared less for the hospital bed setting of the third act: a little bit clichéd perhaps, notwithstanding the justification of Roger’s illness? But the video projections worked well, as did the blinding light of the sun. Although I may have had doubts about some aspects of the production, they in no way detracted from the performance as a whole.
Roger – Andrzej Dobber
Roxana – Elzbieta Szmytka
Edrisi – Sergei Semishkur
Shepherd – Pavlo Tolstoy
Archbishop – Yury Vorobiev
Deaconess – Lyubov Sokolova
Mariusz Treliński (director)
Boris Kudlička (designs)
Marc Heinz (lighting)
Wojciech Dziedzic (costumes)
Tomek Wygoda (choreographer)
Mariinsky Opera Company
Valery Gergiev (conductor)
No one who heard this performance should be under any doubt that King Roger (or Król Roger, in Polish) is a masterpiece. I have seen a great deal of nonsense written about it, including the bizarre claim that there is nothing much in the way of plot. King Roger needs no excuses; what it needs is performances. Covent Garden, are you listening? Probably not, for nothing must interfere with the nth revival of Tosca or La Bohème. (Who actually goes to these things every season?!)
Having been severely disappointed, indeed disillusioned, with ‘Gergiev’s Mahler’, it was a delight to hear Valery Gergiev back on form. He proved himself just as fine a Szymanowskian as Sir Simon Rattle. And his Mariinsky forces were on superlative form too: sultry, seductive, yet precise where necessary too. Gergiev imparted an impeccable sense of forward momentum, without ever driving the music hard. We can all pick out the influences and/or parallels in Szymanowski’s music: Debussy above all here, but also Bartók, Strauss, Wagner, even early Schoenberg. Yet there is undoubtedly an individual voice too, a voice we heard clearly on this occasion. With the possible exception of Elzbieta Szmytka as Roxana, this was not a performance of truly outstanding vocal performances, but there were no weak links either and there was a real sense of a company on stage. Andrzej Dobber was a more than reliable Roger, faithfully served by Sergey Semishkur as Edrisi. After some slightly wayward intonation during the first act, Pavlo Tolstoy impressed as a charismatic Shepherd/Dionysus. Szmytka reminded us of her long pedigree in this music and acted well too.
Mariusz Treliński’s production seemed well considered on the whole. I was not entirely sure why the opera needed updating; it is not as if any of us can have been sated with ‘traditional’ productions. I was less concerned about the loss of the period than that of place, although I should not wish to exaggerate; it seemed a pity though. The sets were generally striking, although the church setting for the first act was uncompromisingly modernistic. Szymanowski’s music had to portray the exoticism all by itself. It could do that, but I did not quite see why a hint of the Byzantine would have been out of place. I was also somewhat at a loss to understand why all the clergy sported mitres. The mise en scène for the second act, however, seemed perfectly to capture the hothouse atmosphere that incites Roxana and eventually even Roger to follow the Shepherd. It is worth mentioning here the hugely beneficial role played throughout by Marc Heinz’s atmospheric and carefully targeted lighting, as well as Tomek Wygoda’s choreography in this particular scene, a fine portrayal of Dionysian erotic abandon. It seems that Treliński purposely downplayed the homoeroticism of this act, wishing the conflict within Roger’s soul ‘to be seen from a wider perspective, as a tale of self-discovery’. I am not sure that we are so overburdened with such material on the operatic stage that this was as necessary as the director seemed to think, although it did no especial harm either. I cared less for the hospital bed setting of the third act: a little bit clichéd perhaps, notwithstanding the justification of Roger’s illness? But the video projections worked well, as did the blinding light of the sun. Although I may have had doubts about some aspects of the production, they in no way detracted from the performance as a whole.
Edinburgh International Festival: Steven Osborne piano recital, 28 August 2008
The Queen’s Hall
Debussy – Children’s Corner
Beethoven – Piano sonata no.21 in C major, op.53, ‘Waldstein’
Messiaen – Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus: excerpts
Steven Osborne (piano)
This was originally to have been a recital by Ivan Moravec, with an entirely different programme. The great Czech pianist, however, was indisposed and Steven Osborne took his place at very short notice.
His Children’s Corner suite steered a middle way between modernist clarity and (post-) impressionist haze, not that there was anything of a compromise about this. The performance sounded truly as if performed an instrument ‘without hammers’, a fine touch aided by skilful, atmospheric, but never indiscriminate pedalling. Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum had an apt quality of the curtain-raiser to it, both in terms of the suite and the recital as a whole. Each piece was subtly characterised yet made to serve its place in a greater whole. Tempi were judiciously chosen, and the deployment of rubato was exemplary. Jimbo was treated to a charming lullaby; the snow truly danced, yet remained snowlike. Golliwogg’s Cakewalk was taken with a nice swing, never at the cost of rhythmic precision, and the Tristan joke was all the better for not being laboured.
I found the Waldstein sonata less successful, which is not to say wholly unsuccessful. The first movement fared best, exhibiting a strong sense of forward momentum, although it could be a little unyielding. This did not apply to statements of the second subject, whose melting chords Osborne voiced with clarity and with feeling. The modulation to E major had a sense of magic not so evident in the rest of the sonata. The Introduzione is marked molto adagio, and I am usually the last person to take a musician to task for slow tempi. However, this was not only molto adagio but also rather plodding. Phrases were not always sustained as they might be, leading to an unduly ‘broken’ impression. Part of the problem was an apparent inability or neglect to listen through the rests. The Rondo likewise sounded somewhat laboured to start with, although it improved as time went on. A greater shortcoming was the increased tendency, present to some extent in the first movement too, to treat Beethoven as if he – of all composers! – were thinking, like Debussy, of an instrument without hammers. The harmonic shifts of the changing trills were thus undersold, although the effect was beautiful in itself. One needs to guard against the prospect of harmonic monotony, given the preponderance of tonic and dominant in much of this movement. Details need to tell more than they did, both in themselves and for their structural import. Still, the coda brought matters to an exciting conclusion, although I entertained the impression that it was not so hard-won as it might have been.
When it came to the five excerpts from Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus, I had no reservations whatsoever. This was superlative pianism and, more to the point, superlative musicianship. Osborne performed no.1, Regard du Père; no.8, Regard des hauteurs; No.14, Regard des anges; No.19, Je dors, mais mon coeur veille; and no.10, Regard de l’esprit de joie. I have not heard his Hyperion recording, but I can certainly now understand why it is so highly regarded. The whole gamut of pianistic expression, from the chordal serenity of the opening regard to the post-Lisztian pyrotechnics of no.10 was covered here. Especially striking was Osborne’s response to Messiaen’s utterly characteristic harmonic language. His understanding of where the music was to lead through its harmonic implications could hardly have been bettered. Nor could his technique. In no.19, we seemed to have all the time in the world, without the slightest danger of boredom; nothing could have been more apt for the evocation of one’s heart watching during sleep. My only complaint was that we could not have heard more; a complete performance would clearly be an occasion of great note. Osborne followed this triumph with a Gershwin transcription. He savoured the idiom, although he could not convince me that this was anything more than café music. Still, this was a recital to treasure for the Messiaen.
Debussy – Children’s Corner
Beethoven – Piano sonata no.21 in C major, op.53, ‘Waldstein’
Messiaen – Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus: excerpts
Steven Osborne (piano)
This was originally to have been a recital by Ivan Moravec, with an entirely different programme. The great Czech pianist, however, was indisposed and Steven Osborne took his place at very short notice.
His Children’s Corner suite steered a middle way between modernist clarity and (post-) impressionist haze, not that there was anything of a compromise about this. The performance sounded truly as if performed an instrument ‘without hammers’, a fine touch aided by skilful, atmospheric, but never indiscriminate pedalling. Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum had an apt quality of the curtain-raiser to it, both in terms of the suite and the recital as a whole. Each piece was subtly characterised yet made to serve its place in a greater whole. Tempi were judiciously chosen, and the deployment of rubato was exemplary. Jimbo was treated to a charming lullaby; the snow truly danced, yet remained snowlike. Golliwogg’s Cakewalk was taken with a nice swing, never at the cost of rhythmic precision, and the Tristan joke was all the better for not being laboured.
I found the Waldstein sonata less successful, which is not to say wholly unsuccessful. The first movement fared best, exhibiting a strong sense of forward momentum, although it could be a little unyielding. This did not apply to statements of the second subject, whose melting chords Osborne voiced with clarity and with feeling. The modulation to E major had a sense of magic not so evident in the rest of the sonata. The Introduzione is marked molto adagio, and I am usually the last person to take a musician to task for slow tempi. However, this was not only molto adagio but also rather plodding. Phrases were not always sustained as they might be, leading to an unduly ‘broken’ impression. Part of the problem was an apparent inability or neglect to listen through the rests. The Rondo likewise sounded somewhat laboured to start with, although it improved as time went on. A greater shortcoming was the increased tendency, present to some extent in the first movement too, to treat Beethoven as if he – of all composers! – were thinking, like Debussy, of an instrument without hammers. The harmonic shifts of the changing trills were thus undersold, although the effect was beautiful in itself. One needs to guard against the prospect of harmonic monotony, given the preponderance of tonic and dominant in much of this movement. Details need to tell more than they did, both in themselves and for their structural import. Still, the coda brought matters to an exciting conclusion, although I entertained the impression that it was not so hard-won as it might have been.
When it came to the five excerpts from Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus, I had no reservations whatsoever. This was superlative pianism and, more to the point, superlative musicianship. Osborne performed no.1, Regard du Père; no.8, Regard des hauteurs; No.14, Regard des anges; No.19, Je dors, mais mon coeur veille; and no.10, Regard de l’esprit de joie. I have not heard his Hyperion recording, but I can certainly now understand why it is so highly regarded. The whole gamut of pianistic expression, from the chordal serenity of the opening regard to the post-Lisztian pyrotechnics of no.10 was covered here. Especially striking was Osborne’s response to Messiaen’s utterly characteristic harmonic language. His understanding of where the music was to lead through its harmonic implications could hardly have been bettered. Nor could his technique. In no.19, we seemed to have all the time in the world, without the slightest danger of boredom; nothing could have been more apt for the evocation of one’s heart watching during sleep. My only complaint was that we could not have heard more; a complete performance would clearly be an occasion of great note. Osborne followed this triumph with a Gershwin transcription. He savoured the idiom, although he could not convince me that this was anything more than café music. Still, this was a recital to treasure for the Messiaen.
Edinburgh International Festival: Collegium Vocale Gent/Herreweghe, 26 August 2008
Usher Hall
Stravinsky – Symphonies of wind instruments
Pousseur – Mnémosyne I
Stravinsky – Mass
Bruckner – Mass in E minor
Collegium Vocale Gent
I Solisti del Vento
Philippe Herreweghe (conductor)
This concert marked the first Edinburgh appearances of both Collegium Vocale Gent and the lesser-known but, on this evidence, very fine Belgian wind ensemble, I Solisti del Vento. Indeed, the latter performed more consistently than the former. I Solisti had the platform to themselves (plus Philippe Herreweghe) for the opening piece, Stravinsky’s Symphonies of wind instruments. It was taken at a fastish tempo, though not unduly so. The players displayed an admirably full sound, aided, it seemed, by a helpful Usher Hall acoustic. A mobile telephone’s intervention just one minute in was less helpful. This performance sounded more alert than many to the reminiscences, conscious or otherwise, of the Rite of Spring and Le rossignol, yet it never exchanged melodiousness for bite. Nor was there any contradiction between a euphonious blend and individualistic solo parts. My sole reservation concerned Herreweghe’s somewhat anti-climactic approach to the ending, although this was not nearly so much a problem as it would be later on.
There can be few more unfashionable composers today than Henri Pousseur, though once he was spoken of almost in the same breath as Stockhausen and Boulez. It was far more than a patriotic act then to perform his Mnémosyne I, composed in 1969 and dedicated to Stockhausen. (It might be a little too churlish to lament the absence of its companion piece, Mnémosyne II. Nevertheless, we should hope that some enterprising ensemble will present the opportunity to hear it before too long.) According to Paul Griffiths’s programme note, Mnémosyne I, which consist of a single unaccompanied melody, ‘may be performed by a solo singer, a unison choir, or a solo instrumentalist’. However, it was here performed by a small unison choir of six female voices, plus a solo clarinet. I am afraid that I do not know whether this practice was sanctioned by the composer; it seemed to work well enough nevertheless. Indeed, it brought the music’s inheritance from Webern all the more sharply to the fore, the clarinet and vocal combination proving reminiscent of the Austrian composer’s Dormi Jesu (Op.16 no.2). The spirit of Webern was also present, and more importantly so, in the shape of the melody, its purity, and its serenity. So, unavoidably, was the spirit of plainsong, although this was rightly not exaggerated. It was a pity that the programme did not include the text of the fragment from Hölderlin’s poem Mnemosyne, but the diction was so exemplary that anyone with basic German would have discerned the text with no difficulty. There was a real sense of something having been lost (verloren, to use an oft-repeated word from the text), yet the abiding impression nevertheless remained of beauty rather than tragic loss. Mnemosyne, the Greek personification of memory, provides consolation, amongst other things.
Stravinsky’s Mass received a good performance, although I was not without certain reservations. I liked the echoes of Œdipus Rex in the Kyrie, for which the instrumentalists must receive a great deal of credit. On the other hand, it would have benefited from a little more Stravinskian bite at times from the choir. The Gloria suffered somewhat from its two vocal soloists. The soprano’s tone was a little too white, but the real problem lay with the downright ugly tone of the contralto. Had I not seen her, I should have thought this one of those rather wild male tenorish voices sometimes associated with speculative recreations of mediæval music: a member of Marcel Pérès’s Ensemble Organum, for instance. To say that the effect jarred would be to put it far too mildly. The Credo was nicely implacable, ‘inexpressive’ in Stravinsky’s sense, which is to say nothing of the sort in reality. The a cappella ‘Amen’ made me hanker after a little vibrato, however, as I would in the solo passages of the Sanctus (especially when that contralto contributed once again). There was a good sense of motor-rhythms in the ‘Osanna’ of the Benedictus, and the wind sounded superlative on that movement’s final sustained chords. The Agnus Dei allowed Stravinsky’s harmony to tell with considerable force, but I felt that a little more warmth – this is, after all, a petition that the Lamb of God grant us peace – would not have gone amiss.
It was, however, with Bruckner’s Mass in E minor that I experienced more than just doubts. A fundamental problem lay in the size of the choir, which sometimes lacked that weight which seems so necessary to Bruckner’s conception. There were other problems, too, however, mostly related to Herreweghe’s sometimes perverse interpretive stance. The Kyrie might, at a pinch, have been termed ‘flowing’; I thought it straightforwardly rushed. It did not lack volume in the ‘Christe’, but the lack of numbers tended to be compensated for by a certain stridency. The part-writing here as elsewhere was projected with admirable clarity. Bruckner marked the brass in this movement as inessential; their interjections sounding anything but in this performance. The Gloria sounded rather as if the conductor were still in Stravinsky-mode; there was a machine-like quality quite out of place in Bruckner. The ‘Amens’ were really quite strident indeed, and too individually stressed, breaking up the greater line. Worst of all, Herreweghe brought off his musicians far too abruptly, as he would also do in subsequent movements. The Credo had a middle section that was serene, if a little on the cool side. After this, the ‘Et resurrexit...’ provided an exciting contrast but was too unyielding. Thereafter the movement staggered on with unduly sectional emphasis. This may be partly Bruckner’s fault, but he can do with a little help here. The choir beautifully captured the radiant, Palestrina-like polyphony of the Sanctus. I Solisti del Vento ably assisted the ensuing homophonic contrast, vitiated by Herreweghe’s peremptory termination of the movement. Bruckner’s harmonies sounded truly exquisite in the Benedictus, though I suspect that they would have done so all the more with larger forces. Soon, however, I wanted the music to yield more; the performance froze, to become unrelentingly metronomic, rendering the woodwind sound oddly inconsequential. When Herreweghe finally did slow down, this sounded appliqué rather than arising from the needs of the music. The Agnus Dei came across as more heartfelt, if not without a touch of shrillness at its climaxes. Sadly, this good work was undone by an almost obscenely abrupt ending. What was Herreweghe thinking of?
Stravinsky – Symphonies of wind instruments
Pousseur – Mnémosyne I
Stravinsky – Mass
Bruckner – Mass in E minor
Collegium Vocale Gent
I Solisti del Vento
Philippe Herreweghe (conductor)
This concert marked the first Edinburgh appearances of both Collegium Vocale Gent and the lesser-known but, on this evidence, very fine Belgian wind ensemble, I Solisti del Vento. Indeed, the latter performed more consistently than the former. I Solisti had the platform to themselves (plus Philippe Herreweghe) for the opening piece, Stravinsky’s Symphonies of wind instruments. It was taken at a fastish tempo, though not unduly so. The players displayed an admirably full sound, aided, it seemed, by a helpful Usher Hall acoustic. A mobile telephone’s intervention just one minute in was less helpful. This performance sounded more alert than many to the reminiscences, conscious or otherwise, of the Rite of Spring and Le rossignol, yet it never exchanged melodiousness for bite. Nor was there any contradiction between a euphonious blend and individualistic solo parts. My sole reservation concerned Herreweghe’s somewhat anti-climactic approach to the ending, although this was not nearly so much a problem as it would be later on.
There can be few more unfashionable composers today than Henri Pousseur, though once he was spoken of almost in the same breath as Stockhausen and Boulez. It was far more than a patriotic act then to perform his Mnémosyne I, composed in 1969 and dedicated to Stockhausen. (It might be a little too churlish to lament the absence of its companion piece, Mnémosyne II. Nevertheless, we should hope that some enterprising ensemble will present the opportunity to hear it before too long.) According to Paul Griffiths’s programme note, Mnémosyne I, which consist of a single unaccompanied melody, ‘may be performed by a solo singer, a unison choir, or a solo instrumentalist’. However, it was here performed by a small unison choir of six female voices, plus a solo clarinet. I am afraid that I do not know whether this practice was sanctioned by the composer; it seemed to work well enough nevertheless. Indeed, it brought the music’s inheritance from Webern all the more sharply to the fore, the clarinet and vocal combination proving reminiscent of the Austrian composer’s Dormi Jesu (Op.16 no.2). The spirit of Webern was also present, and more importantly so, in the shape of the melody, its purity, and its serenity. So, unavoidably, was the spirit of plainsong, although this was rightly not exaggerated. It was a pity that the programme did not include the text of the fragment from Hölderlin’s poem Mnemosyne, but the diction was so exemplary that anyone with basic German would have discerned the text with no difficulty. There was a real sense of something having been lost (verloren, to use an oft-repeated word from the text), yet the abiding impression nevertheless remained of beauty rather than tragic loss. Mnemosyne, the Greek personification of memory, provides consolation, amongst other things.
Stravinsky’s Mass received a good performance, although I was not without certain reservations. I liked the echoes of Œdipus Rex in the Kyrie, for which the instrumentalists must receive a great deal of credit. On the other hand, it would have benefited from a little more Stravinskian bite at times from the choir. The Gloria suffered somewhat from its two vocal soloists. The soprano’s tone was a little too white, but the real problem lay with the downright ugly tone of the contralto. Had I not seen her, I should have thought this one of those rather wild male tenorish voices sometimes associated with speculative recreations of mediæval music: a member of Marcel Pérès’s Ensemble Organum, for instance. To say that the effect jarred would be to put it far too mildly. The Credo was nicely implacable, ‘inexpressive’ in Stravinsky’s sense, which is to say nothing of the sort in reality. The a cappella ‘Amen’ made me hanker after a little vibrato, however, as I would in the solo passages of the Sanctus (especially when that contralto contributed once again). There was a good sense of motor-rhythms in the ‘Osanna’ of the Benedictus, and the wind sounded superlative on that movement’s final sustained chords. The Agnus Dei allowed Stravinsky’s harmony to tell with considerable force, but I felt that a little more warmth – this is, after all, a petition that the Lamb of God grant us peace – would not have gone amiss.
It was, however, with Bruckner’s Mass in E minor that I experienced more than just doubts. A fundamental problem lay in the size of the choir, which sometimes lacked that weight which seems so necessary to Bruckner’s conception. There were other problems, too, however, mostly related to Herreweghe’s sometimes perverse interpretive stance. The Kyrie might, at a pinch, have been termed ‘flowing’; I thought it straightforwardly rushed. It did not lack volume in the ‘Christe’, but the lack of numbers tended to be compensated for by a certain stridency. The part-writing here as elsewhere was projected with admirable clarity. Bruckner marked the brass in this movement as inessential; their interjections sounding anything but in this performance. The Gloria sounded rather as if the conductor were still in Stravinsky-mode; there was a machine-like quality quite out of place in Bruckner. The ‘Amens’ were really quite strident indeed, and too individually stressed, breaking up the greater line. Worst of all, Herreweghe brought off his musicians far too abruptly, as he would also do in subsequent movements. The Credo had a middle section that was serene, if a little on the cool side. After this, the ‘Et resurrexit...’ provided an exciting contrast but was too unyielding. Thereafter the movement staggered on with unduly sectional emphasis. This may be partly Bruckner’s fault, but he can do with a little help here. The choir beautifully captured the radiant, Palestrina-like polyphony of the Sanctus. I Solisti del Vento ably assisted the ensuing homophonic contrast, vitiated by Herreweghe’s peremptory termination of the movement. Bruckner’s harmonies sounded truly exquisite in the Benedictus, though I suspect that they would have done so all the more with larger forces. Soon, however, I wanted the music to yield more; the performance froze, to become unrelentingly metronomic, rendering the woodwind sound oddly inconsequential. When Herreweghe finally did slow down, this sounded appliqué rather than arising from the needs of the music. The Agnus Dei came across as more heartfelt, if not without a touch of shrillness at its climaxes. Sadly, this good work was undone by an almost obscenely abrupt ending. What was Herreweghe thinking of?
Friday, 31 August 2007
Edinburgh Festival: Strauss and Mahler, SFSO/Tilson Thomas, 30 August 2007
Usher Hall
Strauss: Salome - final scene
Mahler: Symphony no.7
Deborah Voigt (soprano)
San Francisco Symphony Orchestra
Michael Tilson Thomas (conductor)
Deborah Voigt's assumption of the role of Salome, albeit for a single scene, was the finest I have heard in the flesh. Hers was superlative Strauss-singing, every phrase shaped and shaded with the care that is vital to avoid this becoming a tiresome feat of vocal display. Voigt showed herself alert to every twist and turn of the text, the music, and most importantly, the marriage of text and music. Her diction was such that one could discern every word, an achievement that is not to be taken for granted from Strauss sopranos. Moreover, although this was a concert performance, she really had assumed the role, permitting the listener's directorial imagination to transport itself wherever it would. The orchestra offered impressive support under Michael Tilson Thomas, and often rather more than that, leading where required. Balances were well calculated - and projected. All that was really lacking was a sense of truly having lived this music as a seasoned opera orchestra would, or a symphony orchestra in a great performance might somehow be able to pretend that it had. The phantasmagorical display of colours and harmonic shocks could not entirely remove the sense that this was a 'showpiece' rather than the culmination of a drama. Voigt largely had to shoulder that responsibility herself. One grumble: it might be claimed that it would have been prohibitively expensive to engage singers for the lines allotted to Herod and Herodias, but one does miss them, and no one would consider omitting an important orchestral line in similar fashion. Without that chilling, gloriously melodramatic final line from Herod - 'Man töte dieses Weib! - the final bars lose some at least of their dramatic motivation. (I know that we all too often endure performances of the 'Immolation Scene' without Hagen, but that is no excuse.)
It was an ambitious programme, to say the least, which coupled the final scene from Salome with Mahler's Seventh Symphony. Once again, the orchestra was on excellent technical form, which should not be taken wholly for granted: I recall a deeply unimpressive Proms performance a few years ago from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ivan Volkov. Tilson Thomas clearly has ideas about what may well be the most problematical of Mahler's symphonies, and knows moreover how to put them into practice. His reading was certainly interventionist, though never narcissistically so. It married something of the bracing modernist coloration of Pierre Boulez with the 'house of horrors' scenario Leonard Bernstein so memorably portrayed in his Deutsche Grammphon recording with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The extraordinary surprise of Daniel Barenboim's route, assimilating the work to the great symphonic tradition, was not taken here, but Barenboim's appears so far to be a singular approach, which may not benefit from imitation. There were occasions when I thought Tilson Thomas lingered a little too much, perhaps above all during the second Nachtmusik movement, which can easily overstay its welcome. And there was something of a stop-go character to some progressions, which did not quite seem worked out as it might have done in the kind of post-Adornian, glorying-in-incoherence sensibility that Boulez brings to the work. The orchestra improved as the work went on. Brass and percussion were superb throughout, as were the violas, who shone whenever Mahler allowed them to do so. However, the other strings sometimes sounded a little thin, anonymous even, until the third movement at least. The first two movements were also somewhat marred by insensitive playing from the middle woodwind instruments - oboes and clarinets - whose phrasing was curiously unshaped, or even absent. They appeared to up their game later on, to match the most impressive flute playing from which we had benefited throughout. This was a good but not great Mahler performance. Unfortunately, the general level of Mahler performance from conductors as different as Boulez, Abbado, Haitink, and on occasion Barenboim and Rattle, is now so high that one notices more than one otherwise might, just how much apparently fine gradations can matter.
Strauss: Salome - final scene
Mahler: Symphony no.7
Deborah Voigt (soprano)
San Francisco Symphony Orchestra
Michael Tilson Thomas (conductor)
Deborah Voigt's assumption of the role of Salome, albeit for a single scene, was the finest I have heard in the flesh. Hers was superlative Strauss-singing, every phrase shaped and shaded with the care that is vital to avoid this becoming a tiresome feat of vocal display. Voigt showed herself alert to every twist and turn of the text, the music, and most importantly, the marriage of text and music. Her diction was such that one could discern every word, an achievement that is not to be taken for granted from Strauss sopranos. Moreover, although this was a concert performance, she really had assumed the role, permitting the listener's directorial imagination to transport itself wherever it would. The orchestra offered impressive support under Michael Tilson Thomas, and often rather more than that, leading where required. Balances were well calculated - and projected. All that was really lacking was a sense of truly having lived this music as a seasoned opera orchestra would, or a symphony orchestra in a great performance might somehow be able to pretend that it had. The phantasmagorical display of colours and harmonic shocks could not entirely remove the sense that this was a 'showpiece' rather than the culmination of a drama. Voigt largely had to shoulder that responsibility herself. One grumble: it might be claimed that it would have been prohibitively expensive to engage singers for the lines allotted to Herod and Herodias, but one does miss them, and no one would consider omitting an important orchestral line in similar fashion. Without that chilling, gloriously melodramatic final line from Herod - 'Man töte dieses Weib! - the final bars lose some at least of their dramatic motivation. (I know that we all too often endure performances of the 'Immolation Scene' without Hagen, but that is no excuse.)
It was an ambitious programme, to say the least, which coupled the final scene from Salome with Mahler's Seventh Symphony. Once again, the orchestra was on excellent technical form, which should not be taken wholly for granted: I recall a deeply unimpressive Proms performance a few years ago from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ivan Volkov. Tilson Thomas clearly has ideas about what may well be the most problematical of Mahler's symphonies, and knows moreover how to put them into practice. His reading was certainly interventionist, though never narcissistically so. It married something of the bracing modernist coloration of Pierre Boulez with the 'house of horrors' scenario Leonard Bernstein so memorably portrayed in his Deutsche Grammphon recording with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The extraordinary surprise of Daniel Barenboim's route, assimilating the work to the great symphonic tradition, was not taken here, but Barenboim's appears so far to be a singular approach, which may not benefit from imitation. There were occasions when I thought Tilson Thomas lingered a little too much, perhaps above all during the second Nachtmusik movement, which can easily overstay its welcome. And there was something of a stop-go character to some progressions, which did not quite seem worked out as it might have done in the kind of post-Adornian, glorying-in-incoherence sensibility that Boulez brings to the work. The orchestra improved as the work went on. Brass and percussion were superb throughout, as were the violas, who shone whenever Mahler allowed them to do so. However, the other strings sometimes sounded a little thin, anonymous even, until the third movement at least. The first two movements were also somewhat marred by insensitive playing from the middle woodwind instruments - oboes and clarinets - whose phrasing was curiously unshaped, or even absent. They appeared to up their game later on, to match the most impressive flute playing from which we had benefited throughout. This was a good but not great Mahler performance. Unfortunately, the general level of Mahler performance from conductors as different as Boulez, Abbado, Haitink, and on occasion Barenboim and Rattle, is now so high that one notices more than one otherwise might, just how much apparently fine gradations can matter.
Thursday, 30 August 2007
Edinburgh Festival: Capriccio, 28 August 2007
Edinburgh Festival Theatre
Countess - Gabriele Fontana; Count - Ashley Holland; Flamand - Hauke Möller; Olivier - Johannes Beck; La Roche - Michael Eder; Clairon - Dalia Schaechter; M. Taupe - Johannes Preissinger; Italian soprano - Katharina Leyhe; Italian tenor - Ray M. Wade, Jr; Major-Domo - Ulrich Hielscher; Dancer - Luisa Sancho Escanero
Christian von Götz (director); Cologne Opera; Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne; Markus Stenz (conductor)
Is there a more violently controversial composer than Richard Strauss? The answer would surely be yes: Wagner at the very least is, as for very different reasons is Schoenberg. However, I am not so sure that this should be the case. Strauss leads us to ask very difficult questions; or rather, we ought to ask such questions: aesthetic, political, and moral. Wagner, on the other hand, is often made to answer for questions based upon misrepresentation. Stravinsky levelled the charge that Strauss 'didn't give a damn', and one can certainly end up feeling manipulated by a composer who might just be note-spinning, who cynically appears to know which buttons to press rather than 'believing' in what he is doing. Henze has gone further, writing: 'Beethoven regarded his whole enterprise as a contribution to human progress. As with Marxism, his goal is not God but Man, whereas there are other artists who have never given a thought to the moral function of their work; for instance Richard Strauss, who is for me – perhaps I’m going too far – something like a court composer to Kaiser Wilhelm II.' The charge comes to seem even more serious when one considers Strauss's later career, and the fraught, unavoidable question of his relationship towards the Third Reich. This does not mean that it is our place to put him on trial, still less to transform him into a hero along the lines of Schoenberg or Furtwängler. It remains, however, a legitimate, indeed necessary, question to ask what it might mean to pen an apparently escapist conversation piece such as Capriccio in the darkness of 1942.
The reality, as producer Christian von Götz so ably demonstrated, is that Capriccio is intimately connected with political reality, and this heightens rather than detracts from the aesthetic disputes at its core. In one of the archetypal operas about the making of an opera, it is more than usually appropriate to add another narrative layer, in which the era of the making of Capriccio itself features. Our first sight, disturbingly set against a beautiful reading of the opening string sextet, was of the Wehrmacht marching down the Champs-Elysées. The opera therefore remained in France, somewhere outside Paris. And the bulk of the action, Capriccio's creation of an opera as opposed to the production's creation of Capriccio, took place in eighteenth-century costume: a final house party, in which the coming of the Gestapo might be put out of mind for a couple of hours. Is this what Strauss himself was doing? Perhaps, although more on that anon. There were from time to time reminders of approaching fate, which grew more numerous in the second act. (This was Joseph Keilberth's two-act adaptation.) Every aspect of the production, be it 'political' or 'aesthetic', showed the dichotomy to be false and worked inexorably towards the denouement: the Count's preparation of a cyanide capsule, the last vain attempt to answer the vexed question of words or music, and perhaps most chillingly of all, the prompter, Monsieur Taupe, replete with his yellow star, being left behind by the departure of the main party and offered his own carriage 'home'.
The final scene thus depicted the Countess saying farewell. Who knew when or indeed whether she would ever return after being escorted to the railway station? And yet, there was another, equally important side to what was going on. Radiantly sung by Gabriele Fontana, who had made an extraordinary recovery from a less than impressive first act, Strauss's music offered some sense of hope, 'utopian' in a sense Ernst Bloch might have understood, against this terrible backdrop. Whether the hope were vain or even irresponsible remained unanswered, at least explicitly. Yet just as surely as music always wins out against the words - witness the glory of the closing music as against the banality of the Major-Domo's announcement that supper is served - so here did art, the entirety of its enterprise, including music, words, and theatre, against its surrounding evil. This was not to speak of an unequivocal victory, which would be illusory and would therefore ultimately prove to be nothing more than capitulation to the horrors of fascism: monopoly capitalism's emergency strategy. Yet the music of the final scene, some of the most heartrending Strauss ever wrote - for here, as in Metamorphosen, and a few other works, the mask does seem to drop to reveal the real human being - becomes all the more moving when it confronts rather than retreats from evil.
This production understood that dialectical truth only too well - unlike a woman whom I heard leaving the theatre asking 'How was the opera supposed to be connected to National Socialism?' She exhibited either extraordinary stupidity or outrageous disingenuousness, but was not, I suspect, untypical of the largely bourgeois audience that would have wished only to be 'entertained'. Thankfully, the artists involved worked together to honour La Roche's pledge to 'serve the eternal requirements of the theatre,' to grant it 'neue Gesetze - neuen Inhalt!', in the search for the 'genialischen Werke unserer Zeit'. Michael Eder's performance of La Roche's great justification of the theatre was impressively handled, as were all of the varied contributions to the difficult second act, full of virtuoso ensemble writing. For whilst few of the vocal performances, individually taken, would sear themselves onto one's memory, there was a true, heartening sense of collective effort, of a fine company.
At the very heart of this, of course, stood the orchestra, which played finely throughout, and justly proved itself the most important 'character' of all. Markus Stenz conjured an echt-Straussian glow from the strings, nobility from the brass, and wonderfully piquant contributions from the woodwind, never more so than in the Rosenkavalier-recollections of the final scene (another layer of ironic memory). The clarity, propulsion, and overall coherence of the ensembles, not least the celebrated octet, reminded us that Così fan tutte was Strauss's favourite Mozart opera, and heightened the pervading sense of elegy. Edinburgh and Cologne served Strauss well, which is to say truthfully and without evasion.
Tuesday, 28 August 2007
Edinburgh Festival: Christine Brewer and Roger Vignoles, 28 August 2007
Queen's Hall
Strauss: Ich liebe dich, Op.37 no.2
Strauss: Breit über mein Haupt, Op.19 no.2
Strauss: Die Georgine, Op.10 no.4
Strauss: Die heiligen drei Könige aus Morgenland, Op.56 no.6
Strauss: Befreit, Op.39 no.4
Wolf: Vier Mignon Lieder
Britten: Cabaret Songs
John Carter: Cantata
Christine Brewer (soprano)
Roger Vignoles (piano)
Christine Brewer is celebrated for her Strauss, and not only in the opera house. Her recent disc with Roger Vignoles for Hyperion has gathered many plaudits. The opening group of songs gave an opportunity to consider further this growing reputation. Her apparently endless reserves of breath ensured that maintaining and shaping long phrases was never a problem and her diction was excellent. Moments of intimacy, however, were fewer than one might have expected; I rather had the impression that Brewer would have been better matched by an orchestra. Moreover, whilst Vignoles accompanied provided adept accompaniment, the piano part also lacked the sense of insights won from a seasoned partnership. This seemed to be almost the stereotypical Lieder-recital -by-an-'opera-singer', albeit one with great command over her awesome vocal reserves. Indeed, I missed the orchestra in 'Die heiligen drei Könige', in which the lengthy postlude sounded rather matter of fact on the piano. Vignoles doubtless had his reasons for not lingering, but the piano part did sound a little too much like the transcription that it is. The violin trills that depict, with such knowing naïveté, the infant Christ's crying either do not transfer very well to the piano or did not do so on this occasion.
But maybe nerves had been at play, for matters improved with Wolf's great Mignon Lieder. All four songs are so beautifully proportioned, for which we must thank both Wolf and Goethe, and these proportions were well served by readings attentive to formal as well as verbal concerns. Brewer seemed to respond more readily to the narrative context of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, enabling Vignoles to follow suit with less generalised accompaniment. Whilst the tendencies present in the Strauss songs had not disappeared completely, a greater readiness to respond to the shifts and turns in Wolf's alchemic blend of words and music exhibited itself as the group progressed, rendering the delectable 'Kennst du das Land' most moving. When Brewer asked, at the opening of the second stanza, 'Kennst du das Haus?' her hushed tone conveyed just the right sense of confiding consolation. Her full vocal strength would then be employed for a well-judged and never-strained climax at the third 'Dahin! Dahin!', before subsiding for the final line, both drawing back and urging Mignon's father on: 'Geht unser Weg! o Vater, lass uns ziehn!'
I felt nevertheless - perhaps surprisingly for a singer so steeped in the vocal works of German Romanticism - that Brewer was much more at ease in the English-language items of the second half. There was no longer any communicative barrier between singer and audience, which may partly have been a product of the audience's comprehension of the texts. She proved a witty, winning 'hostess' in the Britten-Auden Cabaret Songs, which might easily have seemed merely 'clever'. There was not only an impressive dynamic range but a quicksilver flexibility largely absent from the Strauss songs and only intermittently present in the Wolf items. Once again, this seemed also to apply to Vignoles, who must, I imagine, have been taking his cues from the singer.
John Carter's Cantata is a shaping of four Negro spirituals into the shape of a pseudo-Baroque cantata: Prelude/Rondo ('Peter go ring dem bells'), Recitative ('Sometimes I feel like a motherless child'), Air ('Let us break bread together'), and Toccata ('Ride on King Jesus'), although the designations seem somewhat arbitrary. The composer added a busy and ever-so-mildly 'wrong-note' piano part. Brewer, in her brief introduction, admitted to a longstanding devotion to these songs in their original form, having sung them so often at home as a child. She certainly seemed to sing from the heart, and once again communicated vividly, rising to a splendid climax on the held-note at the end of the final 'Toccata'. Vignoles shaped his part considerately yet with requisite vigour when required. It would be difficult to remain unmoved by the circumstances of the piece: Carter is believed dead, perhaps on account of suicide, but nobody knows where the sometime composer-in-residence of the National Symphony Orchestra may be. Nevertheless, my reaction was along the lines of: if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like.
Strauss: Ich liebe dich, Op.37 no.2
Strauss: Breit über mein Haupt, Op.19 no.2
Strauss: Die Georgine, Op.10 no.4
Strauss: Die heiligen drei Könige aus Morgenland, Op.56 no.6
Strauss: Befreit, Op.39 no.4
Wolf: Vier Mignon Lieder
Britten: Cabaret Songs
John Carter: Cantata
Christine Brewer (soprano)
Roger Vignoles (piano)
Christine Brewer is celebrated for her Strauss, and not only in the opera house. Her recent disc with Roger Vignoles for Hyperion has gathered many plaudits. The opening group of songs gave an opportunity to consider further this growing reputation. Her apparently endless reserves of breath ensured that maintaining and shaping long phrases was never a problem and her diction was excellent. Moments of intimacy, however, were fewer than one might have expected; I rather had the impression that Brewer would have been better matched by an orchestra. Moreover, whilst Vignoles accompanied provided adept accompaniment, the piano part also lacked the sense of insights won from a seasoned partnership. This seemed to be almost the stereotypical Lieder-recital -by-an-'opera-singer', albeit one with great command over her awesome vocal reserves. Indeed, I missed the orchestra in 'Die heiligen drei Könige', in which the lengthy postlude sounded rather matter of fact on the piano. Vignoles doubtless had his reasons for not lingering, but the piano part did sound a little too much like the transcription that it is. The violin trills that depict, with such knowing naïveté, the infant Christ's crying either do not transfer very well to the piano or did not do so on this occasion.
But maybe nerves had been at play, for matters improved with Wolf's great Mignon Lieder. All four songs are so beautifully proportioned, for which we must thank both Wolf and Goethe, and these proportions were well served by readings attentive to formal as well as verbal concerns. Brewer seemed to respond more readily to the narrative context of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, enabling Vignoles to follow suit with less generalised accompaniment. Whilst the tendencies present in the Strauss songs had not disappeared completely, a greater readiness to respond to the shifts and turns in Wolf's alchemic blend of words and music exhibited itself as the group progressed, rendering the delectable 'Kennst du das Land' most moving. When Brewer asked, at the opening of the second stanza, 'Kennst du das Haus?' her hushed tone conveyed just the right sense of confiding consolation. Her full vocal strength would then be employed for a well-judged and never-strained climax at the third 'Dahin! Dahin!', before subsiding for the final line, both drawing back and urging Mignon's father on: 'Geht unser Weg! o Vater, lass uns ziehn!'
I felt nevertheless - perhaps surprisingly for a singer so steeped in the vocal works of German Romanticism - that Brewer was much more at ease in the English-language items of the second half. There was no longer any communicative barrier between singer and audience, which may partly have been a product of the audience's comprehension of the texts. She proved a witty, winning 'hostess' in the Britten-Auden Cabaret Songs, which might easily have seemed merely 'clever'. There was not only an impressive dynamic range but a quicksilver flexibility largely absent from the Strauss songs and only intermittently present in the Wolf items. Once again, this seemed also to apply to Vignoles, who must, I imagine, have been taking his cues from the singer.
John Carter's Cantata is a shaping of four Negro spirituals into the shape of a pseudo-Baroque cantata: Prelude/Rondo ('Peter go ring dem bells'), Recitative ('Sometimes I feel like a motherless child'), Air ('Let us break bread together'), and Toccata ('Ride on King Jesus'), although the designations seem somewhat arbitrary. The composer added a busy and ever-so-mildly 'wrong-note' piano part. Brewer, in her brief introduction, admitted to a longstanding devotion to these songs in their original form, having sung them so often at home as a child. She certainly seemed to sing from the heart, and once again communicated vividly, rising to a splendid climax on the held-note at the end of the final 'Toccata'. Vignoles shaped his part considerately yet with requisite vigour when required. It would be difficult to remain unmoved by the circumstances of the piece: Carter is believed dead, perhaps on account of suicide, but nobody knows where the sometime composer-in-residence of the National Symphony Orchestra may be. Nevertheless, my reaction was along the lines of: if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like.
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