Salzburg Festival (4) - Stefanovich, Lečić, Widmann, SWR: Debussy, Boulez, and Stravinsky, 20 August 2025

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Debussy, arr. Bavouzet: Jeux. Poème dansé
Boulez: Dialogue de l’ombre double
Stravinsky: Concerto for two pianos
Boulez: Piano Sonata no.2

Tamara Stefanovich, Nenad Lečić (pianos)

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

SWR Experimentalstudio

Michael Acker, Maurice Oeser (sound direction)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

The most radical of Debussy’s orchestral works, perhaps the most radical of all Debussy’s works, Jeux held a special place in Boulez’s conducting repertory. He even served as Myriam Chimènes’s co-editor for this instalment in the critical edition, incorporating several of the revisions Debussy made following the 1913 premiere. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s transcription for two pianos, published in 2005 and taking up the memory of a lost version Debussy mentioned in a letter to his publisher, was given here with further modifications from the performers, Tamara Stefanovich and Nenad Lečić. One piano (Lečić), then the other, then two pianos, quickly dissolving into the sound of one, equally swift in sonic reinstatement as two: this brought different, at least equal challenges to the performers as the magically elusive orchestral score. At times, pitch seemed to gain a certain priority among parameters (as Boulez’s generation would know them) but other substitutes, complements, and contrasts vied for position too, not least the fascinating distinction between piano touch and orchestral timbre. It flickered in different ways, inevitably sounding closer to the piano works, both solo and En blanc et noir, in some ways akin to a continuous suite of études. The narrative was there too, though, both in detail and mood, often insouciant, sometimes languorous, infinitely malleable, always unhurried, yet precise and directed (if neither in a Boulezian nor a Beethovenian way). Seemingly as overflowing with melody as a work by Schoenberg, the piece and its harmonies could barely have registered more irresistibly in a performance both responsive and responsorial (to borrow from the Boulezian future). Sly, ineffable seduction led to a nonchalant closing shrug as perfectly prepared as it was delivered. 

Dialogue de l’ombre double was dedicated to Berio for his 60^th birthday, coinciding precisely with that of Boulez, in 1985, thus neatly combining this year’s two great musical centenaries. Although the most recent performance will well-nigh inevitably stand freshest in one’s mind, I think I can safely say I have never heard a better performance than that from Jörg Widmann, doubling with his recorded self, courtesy of Michael Acker and Maurice Oeser of the SWR Experimentalstudio (another important Boulez link). In some ways – it can probably only ever be some – it may also have been the most faithful to Boulez’s conception, originating in Paul Claudel’s Le Soulier de satin in which a double shadow of the central pair Rodrigue and Prouhèze is projected onto a wall, yet surely also inspired by Antonin Artaud’s idea of the glimpse of uncorrupted reality afforded by theatre’s ‘double’, and indeed to the ‘double’ variation form of the French eighteenth century, as well. as the doubling and shadowing in the relationships of work/composer and performance/performer characteristic of all notated music. All were certainly present, from the lighting that created Widmann’s silhouette on the wall to the continuation of Jeux’s responsorial two-piano elements with new means, transforming in the hall around us, more than hinting at the work’s relationship to Boulez’s own Répons. There were surprises too, such as the plunge into darkness at the beginning, the first notes we heard being the double rather than Widmann, who must have come onstage during those magical first arabesques. Perhaps one could see him, perhaps not; my mind’s eye and ear where rightly elsewhere. Unending melody, punctuated and structured in highly visible as well as audible form, created a form of music theatre that yet remained above all music. 

Stefanovich and Lečić returned to the stage after the interval for another outstanding two-piano performance, this time of Stravinsky’s Concerto for two pianos: not the most Boulez-friendly Stravinsky, and thus arguably all the more welcome in this context. Scènes de ballet might have been provocative; this, the more one listened, was thoughtful and productive, complementing as well as contrasting, whatever the two composers might have thought (or said). It would make a fascinating companion piece to Structures one day, perhaps alongside Stockhausen’s Mantra—Mozart or Schubert too. Its quietly ferocious regularity – ‘who me? igniting a debate?’ – made for an opening contrast of equal intelligence and beauty, not least in the chiaroscuro of this performance. The first movement’s surprising yet undeniable approaches to Shostakovich registered with startling clarity, and then Stravinsky pulled another rabbit out of the hat, then another… Much could be learned – in my case, was – from simple observance of the pianists’ body language and again that responsorial quality. The hollowed-out quality of Stravinsky’s tonality shone keenly, even brazenly in the second movement. At the same time, so did its undeniably ‘Russian’ roots, for instance in Petrushka. The final two movements, increasingly involved, offered ever more radical complement and development the more closely one listened. There was play too, of course, categories slyly undermined as soon as they were established. Perhaps this was not so distant from Boulez, even from his Second Piano Sonata, as we might have imagined. 

Thus to Stefanovich’s thrilling, astounding climax. I have heard fine performances of this work but none finer. Indeed, I think it may well have been the most all-encompassing, red in tooth and claw, white in heat, and both desolate and bracing in numerous aftershocks, I have heard, whether live or on record. The work’s beauty and violence were dialectically present from the opening of the first movement. How Stefanovich had the piano yield, melodically and still more harmonically, brought a surprising yet welcome touch of Brahms (perhaps via the unstable ‘model’ of Beethoven). Phrasing too was just as crucial—and revealing, every bit as much so as in Mozart or Beethoven. Artaud was more palpably, viscerally to the fore than in the Dialogue: ‘organised delirium’ (the title both for Caroline Potter’s recent study for Boydell and for Stefanovich’s still newer Pentatone CD tribute: grab both!) As Messiaen recalled his young pupil, ‘like a lion that had been flayed alive’, so not only was the work, not only was the performance, but so were we in audience response. There was a quasi-religious fervour to a fire that also signalled Beethovenian concision (the Fifth Symphony’s first movement, for instance). It was over before we knew, yet remained with us. 

If the first movement in some sense prepared us for the second – the first moment of aftershock – it also could not, given the new paths taken. Given the enormous challenges of communication, Stefanovich’s command of line proved close to incredible. It built on unerring power and a sense of ‘rightness’, that it could not be otherwise. Doubtless it could be; there are always alternatives. In the moment, though, one should (generally) feel otherwise. The third movement, unsurprisingly given its earlier origin, connected most obviously with Boulez’s earlier piano music, yet only as a starting point. Once again, the clarity and direction of what we heard, work and performance, was striking. Reconstruction and annihilation on seemingly endless, yet soon ended, repeat were the hallmark of the fourth movement, at least its beginning, all at once—and yet with Mozartian clarity. Ever transforming, ever bewitching, it stretched mind and ears, inviting them to repay the compliment. It scalded, it froze, liquid extremes imparting simultaneous life and death. The final, undeniable aftershock offered, if not peace, then a sense of human spirit in varied abundance.

 

Chaya Czernowin - Heart Chamber (world premiere), Deutsche Oper, 15 November 2019

Deutsche Oper, Berlin

HEART CHAMBER, Regie: Claus Guth, Uraufführung am 15. November 2019, Deutsche Oper Berlin, copyright: Michael Trippel

Her – Patrizia Ciofi

Her Inner Voice – Noa Frenkel

Him – Dietrich Henschel

His Inner Voice – Terry Wey

Soprano – Robyn Allegra Parton, Micaëla Oeste, Jana Miller, Rachel Fenlon

Mezzo-soprano – Verena Usemann, Anna-Louise Costello, Verena Tönjes, Jennifer Hughes

Tenor – Hans-Dieter Gillessen, Lawrence Halksworth, Wagner Moreira, Martin Fehr

Bass – Philipp Schreyer, Christoph Brunner, Simon Robinson, Andrew Munn

The Voice – Frauke Aulbert

Double Bassist – Uli Fussenegger

Claus Guth (director)

Christian Schmidt (designs)

Urs Schönebaum (lighting)

rocafilm (video)

Yvonne Gebauer, Dorothea Hartmann (dramaturgy)

Ensemble Nikel (Brian Archinal (percussion), Yaron Deutsch (electric guitar), Antoine Françoise (piano), Patrick Stadler (saxophone)), 

SWR Experimentalstudio: Joachim Haas, Lukas Nowok, Carlo Laurenzi (live electronics)

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Johannes Kalitzke (conductor)

The day prior to seeing this, the world premiere of Chaya Czernowin’s fourth opera, Heart Chamber, I had completed in draft a short introductory article on the music of Schoenberg. That was doubtless part of the reason why various works of Schoenberg came to mind both during and after the performance of this fascinating new work; but I do not think it was—at least I hope it was not—only on that account. An unnamed man and woman: one might think first of Verklärte Nacht, not least since Heart Chamber, subtitled ‘An inquiry about love’, addresses, according to the composer, a ‘transformative path’, namely ‘the elements of falling in love that expose us to our most intense beauty but also to our most intense vulnerabilities and insecurities’. It was really, however, Schoenberg’s first two operas, Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand, which provided some context or framework for my response. Czernowin’s conception, whilst far from breezily romantic, is nowhere near so dark, nor so expressionist, as either. The sound of a surrounding vocal ensemble suggested as much distance from Die gluückliche Hand as affinity; that opera nonetheless afforded a reference point of sorts. Moreover, unlike either of the Schoenberg works—though like, I suppose, his third and final one-act opera, Von heute auf morgen—both man and woman have a voice, here further amplified, in addition to actual electronic amplification, by further solo parts for their inner voices.

It was less in subject matter than in overall conception that Erwartung helped frame my response. In letter to Busoni, written just before beginning work on that score, Schoenberg presented a physiological understanding of what he was about to portray: ‘For a human being, it is impossible to feel but one sensation at a time. One has thousands at once. … And this variegation, this multifariousness, this illogicality which our senses demonstrate, this illogicality presented by their interactions, set forth by a soaring wave of blood, by some sense- or nerve-reaction, this I should like to have in my music.’ In Heart Chamber, Czernowin—and I felt this with considerable, sometimes well-nigh overwhelming force before reading a word about it—attempts ‘to create a true multisensory experience, an experience of music in its sensual fabric, where music becomes smell, touch, cutting pain, extreme vulnerability, pure joy, or euphoria. The transitions and shifts between these states are uncontrolled and unpredictable.’ Reinventing the operatic wheel, then? Perhaps, but is that not what any opera composer worth his or her salt will be engaged in at some level? There is certainly here a strong, even unusually strong, sense of aural and visual, compositional and performative elements coming together dynamically yet also structurally—this is perhaps more knowingly sectional, if undoubtedly interconnected, a work than a post-Romantic piece such as Erwartung—to create something we might yet know, if we must, as a Gesamtkunstwerk.

An double bass solo (Uli Fussenegger), nervous and wide ranging, eventually settling on a narrower bad of pitch oscillation – a minor second, if I remember correctly – is the way in, an overture of sorts. Is this the heart or the physical and metaphysical chambers within which it is confined? There seems no reason to choose. Listening and watching, one registers different speeds, sometimes successive, sometime simultaneous, of experience; a bowing as much as an electronic modification, the spatial relationship between the excellent Ensemble Nikel to the side of the auditorium and the orchestra in the pit as much as that between conductor Johannes Kalitzke and electronics, or voices on and offstage. Nevertheless, at the structuring, animating heart, if one may put it that way, of this opera there stand voice and voices, singular and plural, generic and particular. One may say that such is the case for any opera—and yes, in many ways of course it is. However, I think it is probably fair to say that it is still more so the case for some operas, and some types of opera, than others, at least vis-à-vis the orchestra, or whatever stands in its place. For me, Heart Chamber took one back, with an effect not entirely unlike—whatever the differences in means—a work such as Pascal Dusapin’s Passion, to the earliest, Monteverdian days of opera: not in the sense of pastiche, nor even, as with Dusapin, of reference, but, to quote Czernowin, of ‘being about the voice, about using the voice, about communicating with the voice.’ That is, I know, what some, more responsive to its charms than I, say of bel canto opera too; I shall leave it to them to comment on any such affinity. Vocal colour, both through singing, prior recording (sometimes set against the present), and complex yet meaningful sound design, multiplies, not least in its potentiality for meaning.

Doubling or more, whether of ‘real’ or electronic voices, invites reflection, just as will any number of retellings of, for instance, the Orpheus legend. Vocal externalisation of inner voices, often more the affair of instruments, of harmony—and it is certainly not the case that there is none of that here—adds further layers not just of meaning, sometimes of a daily contradiction we all know, yet do not always acknowledge, but of experience both highly immediate and mediated. Such conflicts take place, related and unrelated, between song and speech, stage and film too. Incomprehension and frustration play roles as important as understanding and satisfaction. This is often, then, the realm of the unconscious, as further suggested by a number of dream sections, not always so readily distinguished, but which both for Schoenberg (again to Busoni)—music as ‘an expression of feeling, as our feeling really is, which connects us with our unconscious, not a changeling born of feelings and “conscious logic”—and for Czernowin, more vocally, less orchestrally—‘an additional singer (an internal voice) who reveals the protagonists’ deep subconscious … The internal and external voices do not always agree’—are perhaps the ultimate source of drama, even of ‘reality’, whatever that may be. In neither is narrative straightforwardly the point, probably still less so for Czernowin than Schoenberg. How one reacts to countertenor (Terry Wey) mirroring and contradicting baritone (Dietrich Henschel) and contralto (Noa Frenkel) doing likewise, yet never in anything so banal as mirror image, for soprano (Patrizia Ciofi) is part of the way one structures and indeed creates one’s own response.

This landscape, however, is no forest, enchanted or disenchanted. It is unrepentantly urban, quotidian, even in contrast with such settings. It could be anywhere; it might even be one of the roads outside, just off Bismarckstrasse. Video work (roca-film) treads with excellence that thin line between specificity and non-specificity, just as it does differently, elsewhere, in nightmarish, invasion of ants, as psychological as it is physiological; for what is ‘reality’ here? So too, more broadly, do Claus Guth’s direction and Christian Schmidt’s designs, indeed the production as a whole. A highly resourceful revolving stage creates and delimits spaces, urban and physiological, perhaps even metaphysical too. That is more a question for us, I think, than for the work and production as such. My first reaction was that I should need to see and hear the opera again to be able to say anything about it; sadly, that was not immediately an option and, in retrospect, time for reflection was undoubtedly a good thing too. The experience, conscious and unconscious, would doubtless be very different—just as it would with Cosi fan tutte or Tristan, and their treatments of a not entirely dissimilar theme. I should nevertheless be keen to see and hear it again, especially given such committed performances, and have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone for whom opera is both what it was for Monteverdi, Mozart, Wagner, or Schoenberg and something necessarily different.

Musikfest Berlin (5) – SWR SO/Rundel - Schumann, Andre, Marenzio, Vicentino, and Nono, 11 September 2017

Philharmonie, Berlin

 

Images: Kai Bienert

Schumann – Manfred, op.115: Overture

Mark Andre – über, for clarinet, orchestra, and live electronics
Luca Marenzio – Ninth Book of Madrigals: ‘Crudele, acerba, inesorabil morte’
Nicola Vicentino – Fifth Book of Madrigals: ‘L’aura che’l verde lauro et l’aureo crine’
Nono – Il canto sospeso

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

Laura Aikin (soprano)

Jenny Carlstedt (mezzo-soprano)

Robin Tritschler (tenor)

SWR Experimentalstudio

Michael Acker, Joachim Haas, and Sven Kestel (sound design)

SWR Vocal Ensemble (chorus master: Michael Alber)

SWR Symphony Orchestra

Peter Rundel (conductor)

A programme that promised much and, ultimately, ‘delivered’ – as they now say. The main attraction was Nono’s Il canto sospeso: one of the undisputed masterpieces of what I am still old-fashioned enough to call the post-war avant garde. I have been waiting twenty years or so to hear it ‘live’, since I first listened, astonished and terrified, to Claudio Abbado’s live Berlin recording: made, according to a declaration in the booklet note from Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic, ‘when ‘Germany … three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is once again in the grip of an increasing hatred of “foreigners”,’ when, across Europe, ‘nationalism, xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism are once more on the increase’. The recording was ‘intended as a message on the part of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Claudio Abbado that we condemn all brutality and resurgent violence against people who think differently and that we do so from the very bottom of our hearts,’ Il canto sospeso being ‘music born of deep dismay, painful and accusing’. Plus ça change… Except that, without wishing to minimise the poison from the German far Right – recently addressed by and cheering Nigel Farage – much of the rest of Europe (and the United States) now stands in a far more parlous state. Angela Merkel and Luigi Nono: strange bedfellows, to put it mildly, but they are or were both adults, willing to speak out.

 

Every work of Nono’s, he said, required a provocation: ‘The genesis of any of my works is always to be found in a human “provocation”: an event, an experience, a test in our lives, which provokes my instinct and my consciousness, as man and musician, to bear witness.’ Each of the texts we hear – here in the standard German translation of the original Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza europea – is testimony to and from a resistance fighter shortly to be killed by the Nazis. It is the eloquence of this music, which ‘speaks’ or ‘sings’, almost irrespective of whether it be actually vocal or otherwise, which bears witness here – and so it did. Peter Rundel and the SWR SO (the first time I have heard the orchestra since its despicable forced merger) gave a performance that seemed to me to lie very much in the line of Nono’s Second Viennese School inheritance: not just Webern, although he was certainly there, but his (posthumous) father-in-law Schoenberg too. (As Nono declared, in a lecture on A Survivor from Warsaw, it stood as ‘the musical-æsthetic manifesto of our era. What Jean-Paul Sartre says in his essay, What is Literature?, about the problem ‘why write?’, is witnessed in utterly authentic fashion in Schoenberg’s creative necessity.’) This was glowing post-Romanticism: painful, even agonising, in its beauty, as it should be, nowhere more so than in the sixth movement, when, after what I think of as a choral Dies irae without (metaphysical) end – the testimony of Esther Srul – orchestral music so horrendously beguiles us. Words, witness, their horror – for which many thanks must also go to the soloists and choir – continue to resist their aestheticisation, however ravishing, say, the melismata of Laura Aikin or the Webern aria-with-ensemble of Robin Tritschker’s preceding number (Chaim, a fourteen-year-old Jew from Galicia). We await, wish for, reconciliation, even benediction, but know, with Nono and Adorno, that it can never happen. The final silence truly terrified. It would, perhaps, have been better if we had had no applause, although I understand why we did.

 

The rest of the programming was intelligent: a model of its kind, to set the Nono in relief. I had a few qualms about it in practice, though. The Schumann Manfred Overture – an important work for Nono, not least in his use of the ‘Manfred chord’ in Prometeo – was played with a great deal of nervous energy, but somewhat at the expense of what else makes this very difficult piece work. Rundel drove very hard and Schumann’s music lost much of its humanity – and, I think, its sense. The two Venetian madrigals suffered in a different way. I am certainly no fundamentalist on such matters, and was intrigued to hear them sung by a chamber choirs, as opposed to by soloists. There was a smoothness, however, especially to Marenzio’s Crudele, acerba, inesorabil morte, which seemed to me both somewhat to fail the piece and to fail as preparation for Nono. Beauty, yes, but not blandness, is required here.

 

As for Mark Andre’s 2015 über, for clarinet, orchestra, and live electronics, I am afraid I found myself rather at a loss. I liked the idea, insofar as I understood it, and Jörg Widmann certainly offered compelling showmanship as the soloist. But it seemed to me a very drawn out, often featureless, counterpart to an extended (!) Bruckner slow movement. The aural waves I heard promised much – and seemed to allude to Nono and Venice, above all to Prometeo (or at least, in this context, could be understood in that way). There were beautiful sounds to be heard; the blurring of boundaries between clarinet, electronics, and other instruments and their electronic transformation, allured. Had I not known there was no glass harmonica present, I should have sworn at one point that there was. Shadow worlds posed intriguing questions as to what was shadowing what. What did it all add up to, though? Perhaps I needed to hear it again; however, much as I should have liked to be convinced, I was not on this occasion. And it is the Nono work, which I had waited so long to hear, that now I need to hear again. So does the world in which we live, alas.

 

Grau-Schumacher Piano Duo - Bach-Kurtág, Busoni, and Manoury, 12 October 2015

Wigmore Hall

Bach, arr. Kurtág – Cantata: Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106: Sonatina

Chorale Prelude: Alle Menschen mussen sterben, BWV 643
Chorale Prelude: Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV 687
Busoni – Fantasia contrappuntisca, BV 256b
Manoury – Le Temps, mode d’emploi (UK premiere)

Andreas Grau, Götz Schumacher (pianos),

Experimental Studio des SWR (José Miguel Fernandez (sound direction), Dominik Kleinknecht (technician))

 

We do not get to hear music for piano duet or for two pianos nearly so often as we should (although yours truly is already looking forward to a date in March with Daniel Barenboim and Martha Argerich). There are many excellent works, and if the duet repertoire is often in some respect ‘players’ music’, it loses little when transferring to the realm of public performance; much the same might, after all, be said about the string quartet, or at least Hans Keller claimed so. It was especially welcome to hear a concert in which a major new work, new to these shores at any rate, was performed – and it could certainly not be considered a work for the private sphere.

 

In the first half, though, we heard two very different sides to the existing repertoire. First, for piano duet, were three of Kurtág’s Bach transcriptions. (I have yet to attend one of his and his wife’s recitals, always having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.) They were well chosen and well played by the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo, treated as piano music, yet retaining their essential – if you will forgive me, just this once, such an ontological assumption – modesty. The Sonatina from the Actus Tragicus might perhaps have been imbued with a greater sense of mourning, but such is of course hardly the fashion today, when we are fortunate to hear Bach played with any manner of gravity at all. The pair of alto recorders sang out beautifully – I am tempted to say rather more beautifully than in ‘real life’ – against a rock-solid ‘continuo’. Two Chorale Preludes once again provoked sadness that this music is so little known outside organ circles; there really is no excuse for any who consider themselves music lovers not to explore its riches. What one can learn from studying the Orgelbüchlein, and what Kurtág undoubtedly must have, his transcription of ‘Alle Menschen müssen sterben’ simple, straightforward, and perhaps all the better for it; that, at least is how it sounded here. The left-hand (in the original) thirds and sixths sounded smooth but not too smooth, as if attempting, and if so successfully, a sense of legato organ-style. The somewhat backward-looking style of ‘Aus Tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir’ showed what nonsense ‘backward’ and ‘forward’ are in Bach’s case, and how irrelevant ‘style’ alone is in any case. Its rhythmic complication, or perhaps better enhancement, of counterpoint shone through clearly and without mannerism.

 

Busoni was thus well prepared. His Fantasia contrappuntistica was here heard, for my first time, I think, in its version for two pianos. Like, on a much smaller scale, the Fifth Sonatina – as close as I shall get to this extraordinary work as a performer in concert – it marries Bach and Busoni in fascinating and unexpected ways. One can tell the difference, then one cannot; one cares, and then one does not. And yet it coheres with more than a hint of Mephistophelian necromancy; indeed, Doktor Faust came to mind on more than one occasion. So did the still surprising harmonic world of the Sonatina seconda, ‘senza tonalità’, so un-Schoenbergian, a tantalising glimpse of worlds that perhaps have yet to be discovered. There were times when I found the players a little stiff, a little short on magic, but there were others in which neo-Lisztian virtuosity swept all before it. Perhaps it is difficult to know how to approach Busoni’s music; it is certainly some of the most scandalously neglected of the twentieth century. Any niggles I might have had were firmly put in their place by gratitude at the opportunity to hear the workings of this grossly-misunderstood compositional – and musicological – mind.

 

I did not consult my watch, but I suspect that Philippe Manoury’s Le Temps, mode d’emploi exceeded three-quarters of an hour, and perhaps did not come so very far from an hour. I say that not as a complaint, nor indeed as praise, Webern turning in his grave, but simply to give an indication of its scale. It was written for Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher, who with the ever-wonderful Experimentalstudio des SWR, gave what seemed to me a hugely compelling performance, its commitment and, insofar as I could tell, understanding palpable throughout. That this is piano music is never in doubt; there is a joy in exploration of the piano, its capabilities, and its sonorities, often old, and occasionally newer (for instance, by placing a finger on strings inside), which speaks just as it does in the music of Liszt or Busoni. The live electronics are just as important; as Manoury puts it, ‘The two pianos are surrounded by four virtual pianos,’ via ‘a very complex system of sound synthesis, signal processing and spatialisation’. The spatial element cannot help but be felt, of course, and how interesting it is to hear that in the Wigmore Hall, but equally, immediately apparent was its musical quality. Some sort of kinship with what I have thought of as the magic squares of instrumental placing in Boulez’s sur Incises suggested itself, although whether that be simply a sign of my own personal preoccupations I cannot say. Across the span of the work, transformations apparently accomplished, according to Paul Griffiths’s note, by means of Markov chains (‘a process in which movements from one state to another are determined by probabilities’), a dialectic was dramatised, in performance as well as work, between relatively simple, irreducible material (perhaps an arpeggio, bringing Répons, unsurprisingly, to my mind, or a scalic figure) and what sounded to me, trying to make sense of what I heard, as complex yet ‘inevitable’ procedures with respect to tempo, texture, structure, and much else. I half expected the players to begin signalling their decisions to one another, as in the second book of Structures.

 

Indeed, the drama of Manoury’s work possessed a sheer excitement not dissimilar, although – and I do not intend this as a cavil, merely description – it is probably somewhat less concentrated. The possibilities of expansion still inherent in Boulez’s work struck me as, if not entirely, then at least to a greater extent already explored here. The language also sounds more ready to incorporate elements of tonality, perhaps a little after Messiaen, although that I say simply to ‘place’ it, rather than to impute influence. I hope that I shall have opportunity to hear the work, whether from these performers or others, soon, to further an exploration which, for me at least, has only just begun.

Prom 55: SWR SO Baden-Baden and Freiburg/Roth - Boulez, Ligeti, and Bartók, 26 August 2015

Royal Albert Hall

Boulez – …explosante-fixe…

Ligeti – Lontano
Bartók – Concerto for Orchestra

Sophie Cherrier (flute)

SWR Experimental Studio (live electronics)

SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg

François-Xavier Roth (conductor) 

 

First, …explosante-fixe…, one of the Boulez works I had yet to hear this anniversary year, although I have heard its Originel seed more than once, and shall do again this weekend at a Proms Matinée. Sophie Cherrier, whom I had most recently heard in stunning Salzburg Festival performances of Répons, joined SWR forces, including flautists Dagmar Becker and Anne Romeis, under François-Xavier Roth. Cherrier proved as commanding and as malleable a soloist as one would have expected, her flautist supporters just as impressive. It is an exquisite work(-in-progress) and received an exquisite performance from all concerned, certainly not forgetting the SWR Experimental Studio. If I felt slightly dissatisfied, it was that my seat – too far to one side? – did not really permit the electronics to resound, to incite as they might have done. Rather to my surprise, the Royal Albert Hall seemed to work less well than the Queen Elizabeth Hall had in 2011 for a mesmerising performance from John Cox, the London Sinfonietta, and Péter Eötvös. Still, the ‘exquisite labyrinth’, to borrow from the title given to that South Bank series, of Boulez’s music retained its fascination, its post-Debussyan seduction, and the intangible yet surely present ‘modern classicism’ Arnold Whittall has identified as a key component of Boulez’s later style. Form created itself just as sonorities seemed to do so; if only the setting had been a little more ideal.

 

Ligeti’s Lontano was given its first performance by this orchestra at Donaueschingen in 1967. A beautifully judged performance from an orchestra of at least Mahlerian forces was notable for its subtle transformations; more than once, the word Klangfarbenmelodie came to mind, without Ligeti’s procedures being reducible to the practice of either Schoenberg or Webern. Indeed, as something equating to a tone poem, the work – and performance – offered sepulchral brass with more than a hint of Wagner and Strauss. Harmonics suggested electronic means that were not present, even perhaps an organ (such as might also have been suggested in …explosante-fixe…). Swarming violins reminded us of the Ligeti of the previous decade, whilst also making clear the development in his style. That (almost) imperceptible polyphony to which Ligeti himself drew attention did its wondrous work: ‘its harmonic effect represents the intrinsic musical action: what is on the page is polyphony, but what is heard is harmony.’ Hell, however, is too good for the person who took a telephone call as the piece drew to its close, music shading into silence.

 

Roth’s way – and the orchestra’s – with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra gave one of the most intriguing performances I have heard of the work, perhaps the most intriguing, at least since I last heard Boulez conduct it. The opening of the first movement stated its affinity with Bluebeard’s Castle as strongly and yet, quite properly, as ambiguously as I can recall. Both the bass line and those shivering, trembling lines above made that connection and also reminded us of Lontano. Throughout, this was a performance one might file under ‘modernist’, but that description raises more questions than it asks. It was more mysterious than Boulez, more internationalist than the stereotypical ‘Hungarian’ performances one often hears. Above all, it told its own story with its own means. Subtle inflections, be they of instrumental colour, texture, or rhythm, were to the fore. One was drawn in rather than the victim of a Solti scream. Even at the louder end of the dynamic spectrum, employed relatively sparingly, gradations were subtle, meaningful. Bartók’s startling formal ingenuity spoke for itself; or such was the illusion, as art concealed art.

 

The second movement delighted in its ‘pair play’, woodwind duetting – and other ensemble work – colourful and ever ambiguous. This was detailed, without a hint of pedantry: delightful indeed! The grave opening of the ‘Elegia’ was ‘elegiac’ indeed. Woodwind reminded us of the opening of the work and thus again of Bluebeard’s Castle, but the path taken was to be very different. This was a world of defiant passion. And how those massed strings dug in! For the anguish was undeniably musical, not something cheaply applied. One was beguiled – and unsettled. The fourth movement began very much as a counterpart to the scherzando second movement, yet just as important, announced and celebrated its own character and concerns. A brief Mahlerian moment underscored Bartók’s seriousness, providing retrospective bite to his unanswerable despatch of the banalities of Lehár and Shostakovich alike. Excitement was certainly a crucial quality to the performance of the finale, but again this was an eminently musical excitement: one was compelled to listen, to delight in an invention that is almost Haydnesque, and to admire a not entirely dissimilar humanism. The players sounded well-nigh phantasmagorical in their transformation of material and process; Roth ensured there was no breaking of musical line.

 

How sad, then, that this, the orchestra’s first performance at the Proms, a veritable triumph, will also be its last. Following reprieves in which we had foolishly placed our trust, the unforgivable forced merger with its Stuttgart sister-orchestra is to go ahead after all. Roth spoke at just the right time, many in the audience clearly unaware, but it was a forlorn announcement. Schubert, in Rosamunde guise, sounded all the more poignant as an encore.




 

Kairos Quartet/Experimental Studio des SWR: Haas, Stroppa, and Rusconi, 7 April 2013

Hall Two, Kings Place

Georg Friedrich Haas – String Quartet no.4 (2003)

Marco Stroppa – Spirali per quartetto d’archi ‘proiettato’ nello spazio (1987-88)
Roberto David Rusconi – String Quartet no.4, De imago (Materia) Sonora (2012, world premiere)

 

Wolfgang Bender, Stefan Haussler (violins)
Simone Heiligendorff (viola)
Claudius von Wrochem (cello)
Thomas Hummel, Simon Spillner (sound projection)

 

I wanted to enjoy this concert, but ultimately found that expectations exceeded reality. It is perfectly likely, of course, that I simply did not properly understand or even appreciate the works performed, all of which I was encountering for the first time. It is even possible that they may have been left down in performance, though I doubt it; insofar as I could ascertain, the players of the Kairos Quartet and the Südwestfunk Experimental Studio offered committed advocacy. Yet, on a first hearing, I cannot say that I was entirely convinced by two out of the three pieces for string quartet and electronics.

 

Georg Friedrich Haas’s Fourth String Quartet was, according to the programme, his first work to employ electronics; I had a slight sense that it might have been out of duty rather than powerful inclination; indeed, there seemed to be something rather dated about the practice, which though ‘live’, had an air of early, 1950s tape experiments rather than the first decade of the twenty-first century. Much of the first half of the work was a story of gradual transformation, though the pace of that transformation picked up somewhat with time. A surprisingly lyrical section, initiated by viola, offered some respite from what was beginning to sound merely grey. (Try to imagine electronic, microtonal Hindemith Gebrauchsmusik.) Sections were clearly demarcated and, at least in retrospect, the work’s architecture was readily discernible, but drama tended to come from the ‘effect’ of the electronics rather than anything more intrinsic to the material. Or perhaps I was just missing the point.

 

Marco Stroppa’s Spirali plays, as its title suggests, with spirals in spatial form, as realised by electronics. It seemed to me a far more interesting work. Electronics sounded more integral to the experience, and from the very outset; the material itself, apparently derived from a latent chorale, also seemed to be of greater interest. There was certainly a greater sense of drama and of the material being in flux. One could even experience intensity simply from watching the sound engineers, let alone from hearing. The ‘involved’ quality of the music at some points, even if only coincidentally, might have been glancing back to Schoenberg’s quartet writing. There were, then, complexity, expressiveness, and complexity in and of expression, aided and furthered by ‘voices’ emanating from electronics. The magical conclusion might almost have been said to have possessed an air of spectralism.

 

Roberto David Rusconi’s De imago (Materia) Sonora also made fuller use of electronics, indeed arguably more so still, and again from the outset. Rusconi’s work, receiving its first performance, gave a strong sense of ‘landscape’, not necessarily as opposed to a journey through time, though not necessarily unopposed to it either. As with Haas’s work, however, the quartet as a whole sounded very sectional. Though full of incident, it was unclear to me quite how it all added up. Perhaps, however, I was again merely missing the point.