Rossi/Kubota/BCMG/Paterson: Saunders, Anderson, Eötvös, Illean, and Birtwistle, 26 November 2024

Wigmore Hall

Rebecca Saunders: Stirrings
Julian Anderson: Mitternachtslied
Peter Eötvös: Secret Kiss (English version, world premiere)
Lisa Illean: Cantor
Harrison Birtwistle: The Woman and the Hare; …when falling asleep (London premiere)

Alice Rossi (soprano)

Meg Kubota (reciter)

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group

Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)

London visits from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group are rarer than we might hope, though doubtless many would object, quite reasonably, that visits to the capital need not be its priority. At any rate, a city seemingly ever more starved of new music was here blessed by fine Wigmore Hall performances of six works from the last twenty-five years. 

‘The strokes now faint now clear as if carried by the wind but not a breath and the cries now faint now clear,’ is one of two quotations from Samuel Beckett Rebecca Saunders selected to accompany her 2011 ensemble piece, Stirrings: in this case from Beckett’s late Stirrings Still. Although the only vocal work on the programme, it seemed to set up much of what was to come, its title and perhaps not only that coming to life in the opening double bass solo and what it provoked. Nine players, most onstage, some behind us, took us on a captivating journey of extraordinary sounds that were never mere sounds, always music, ever evolving, as if this were a geological process. As before in Saunders’s work, I could have sworn I was hearing electronics, but I was not: simply nine musicians and their instruments who seemed  before our eyes and ears to have, in Gurnemanz’s vision – and Wagner’s – time become space. A sense of musical landscape already hinted at the music of Birtwistle to come, as did that of inherent musical drama. It is probably better to leave Beckett the last words, again as selected by Saunders, this time from Company: ‘Light infinitely faint it is true since now no more than a mere murmur.... In dark and silence to close as if to light the eyes and hear a sound. Some object moving from its place to its last place. Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more. To darkness visible to close the eyes and hear if only that. Some soft thing stirring soon to stir no more.... By the voice a faint light is shed. Dark lightens while it sounds. Deepens when it ebbs. Lightens with flow back to faint full. Is whole again when it ceases.’

A recent (2023) setting by Julian Anderson of Zarathustra’s roundelay followed. Undaunted by Mahlerian precedent, composer and performers (here the Pierrot ensemble, joined by soprano Alice Rossi and conductor Geoffrey Paterson) made something new yet old, in that sense at least like Saunders and Birtwistle. It is tribute to their success that not once did I think of Mahler, save for the occasional resonance, perhaps via Schoenberg. Stravinskian inheritance seemed at least as strongly in play, not least in rhythm. It opened de profundis – how could it not? – yet soon moved on, even before Rossi’s entrance. If the pace was slow – again, how could it not be? – it seemed over too soon, like midnight or a Nietzschean aphorism. Much caught the ear. vocal and instrumental melismata seemingly inciting one another, building to a midnight climax both dark and refulgent, touching and perhaps ironic in the brevity of its evocation of eternity. 

To complete the first half, we heard the premiere of the English version of the late Peter Eötvös’s Secret Kiss (2018). Another arresting opening, this time from percussion, set the scene for a typical yet typically individual melodrama, words selected by Mari Mezel from Alessandro Baricco’s novel Silk. Five players, on flutes, clarinets, percussion, violin, and cello, were joined by reciter Meg Kubota and Paterson, seemingly bringing a silken world into existence before our ears. It was an instrumental as much as a verbal drama we heard, processes recognisably rooted in central European tradition – Webern, Bartók, et al. – yet reinvented in magically pictorial terms that were entirely Eötvös’s own, Bluebeard notwithstanding. My sole reservation related to what sounded like overmiking. I wondered whether it were simply a feature, if an odd one, of the piece, yet its persistence in the two Birtwistle pieces suggested otherwise. Maybe it was nonetheless an artistic decision; if so, at least to my ears, it proved a pity, detracting not insignificantly here and later from the ultimate coherence of otherwise spellbinding performances. 

Lisa Illean’s Cantor (2017) opened the second half, verse by Willa Cather separated by entirely different, yet no less exquisite, instrumental movements for somewhat augmented ensemble, more string-focused than anything heard previously (or afterwards). Whether it were simply Schoenberg on my mind, I am not sure, but I sensed his presence at a distance in noticeably un-Schoenbergian, postspectralist (?) music: a pattern from Pierrot here, a floating vocal line there. As with all pieces on the programme, rates of change, be they melodic, harmonic, or timbral, seemed just right in work and performance alike. 

The Woman and the Hare (1999) brought singer, reciter, ensemble, and conductor together in exploration of a post-Gawain landscape both alluring and threatening, unmistakeably English in its melancholy and in its vocal and instrumental reinvention of Morgan Le Fay. The two voices contrasted and complemented, embellished and elucidated, music not necessarily ‘autonomous’, yet unquestionably ‘itself’. Stravinsky was an abiding, yet intangible presence, as sure as in Punch and Judy, all the way down to Birtwistle’s musical bedrock. And like Stravinsky’s Pierrot, it was above all an instrumental masterpiece—and yet… 

To hear …when falling asleep immediately after (twice, the second time as an encore) was instructive and, it seemed, inevitable. The 2019 commission sounded less a homage to the earlier work, despite the return to responsorial combination of singer and reciter, than its distillation in a new yet related world. Rilke in English translation (Jochen Voigt) and words drawn from Swinburne’s elegy for Baudelaire here sounded more strongly in opposition, until they were not. Instrumentalists played on as as ever-changing voice of continuity, in this world and the evening’s music as a whole.

London Sinfonietta/Piero, Paterson, et al. - Vivaldi and Grisey, 21 May 2023

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, op.8
Grisey: Vortex temporum

Michael Morpurgo (narrator)

Clio Gould, Oliver Wilson (violins)

Oliver Wilson (viola)

Clare O’Connell (cello)

Jonas Nordberg (archlute)

David Gordon (harpsichord)

Katherine Tinker (chamber organ)
Karen Jones (flutes)

Mark van de Wiel (clarinets)
Paul Silverthorne (viola)
Tim Gill (cello)

Daniel Piero (violin, director)
Andrew Zolinsky (piano)

Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)
 

All music unfolds in time. Here, two musical works, separated by the greater part of three centuries, in turn explored time’s unfolding. It has become such a cliché to moan about the ubiquity of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons that perhaps now it is time, as it were, to welcome it back to the fold. (In any case, apart from telephonic descents into hell punctuated by reminders of the value of our call and eagerness of Corporation X to answer us, we can readily avoid it. I have for years.) It is certainly time to do so if treated to so engaging a performance as this from Daniel Pioro and friends. Comparisons between Baroque music – a well-nigh meaningless term, but anyway – and jazz are overdone, yet here there really was something akin to that spirit of listening and responsiveness on show, Pioro often at most first among equals, sometimes even ready to cede that position, as well as stepping up – and around the stage, as if it visit his colleagues – to the solo spot when the moment seized him. Introduced and punctuated by similarly engaging readings on the four seasons by Michael Morpurgo, this was no ordinary Vivaldi, which is surely the best plan for rescue of these concertos. 

‘Spring’ showed us many things, reminded us of a good few more. The greater prominence assumed by the continuo players, both on account of chamber scale but also their conception both of work and role, marked it from the start, as did Pioro’s camaraderie with his fellow string players. Duetting, trios, jamming: it was all there in the first movement, yet also beyond. If he were more a conventional soloist in the slow movement, such is the material. The third took a folk-like route, Pioro as head fiddler in foot-stomping mood, rock-solid continuo providing rhythmic underpinning. 

Bird-calls of ‘Summer’ came not only from the violin, but also from organist Katherine Tinker’s moonlighting, also prefiguring the world of Grisey. Stormy rumblings and other aspects of the natural world eventually erupted, leaving us with something old and new, known and unknown: perhaps a metaphor for Vivaldi’s cycle as a whole, as well as its modern reception. Jonas Nordberg’s animating presence on archlute for the first movement of ‘Autumn’ again dissolved expectations of genre, writing, and performance. What was Vivaldi here, and what was extemporisation? Why should one care? After the vivid contrasts of the two succeeding movements, ‘Winter’ concluded in vivid pictorial and extra-pictorial fashion. It was still full of surprises, not least an unexpected pedal, above which various solo lines prepared for the final fireworks. 

For Gérard Grisey’s Vortex temporum, Pioro joined the ranks of the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Geoffrey Paterson. If any player were first among equals here, it was pianist Andrew Zolinsky. There from the opening éclat, along with flautist Karen Jones and clarinettist Mark van de Wiel, those instruments’ pulsating sound serving, among other things, to introduce the strings, the piano would close the first movement with a fearsome, ferocious solo. In between, one experienced much of that strange hyper-clarity of sound that seems to come with the best of spectralism. (Like others with serialism, I prefer results to aesthetic.) Out of that, sound itself seemed to re-emerge, transformed and even recreated in the second movement, as we passed from ‘normal’, human time to the ‘expanded’ time of whales. A hypnotic quality to the piano’s descending figure, varied in repetition – dare one say ‘development’? – as enveloped by ensemble penumbra, did indeed suggest Grisey’s titular vortex. 

There and in the third movement, strings elevated us to the world of birdsong and its ‘compressed’ time. They seemed indeed to breathe as naturally as us humans, perhaps more so. Balances, roles, techniques were reinvented before our ears; proliferation remained, unlike that of, say, Boulez, centripetal rather than centrifugal. A universe was not being created, but rather turning in on itself, ‘compressed’. Piero and others had solo moments, but this was even more an ensemble piece, a collaborative effort, than Vivaldi. Or was it? Perhaps it was simply a different way to do something similar, to make music, as indeed we should find in Boulez too. Not only to make music, of course, but to make it interestingly, both as work and performance—and, one hopes, in listening too.

Southbank Centre - Xenakis at 100, 8 October 2022

Queen Elizabeth Hall

O-Mega; Palimpsest; Echange; Thalleïn for ensemble

Concret PH; Kottos; Rebonds A, Rebonds B

Psappha; Ikhoor; Tetras; Mikka and Mikka ‘S’; Pléïades

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

Philip Howard (piano)

Tim Gill (cello)

Oliver Lowe, Colin Currie (percussion)

London Sinfonietta

Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)

JACK Quartet

Colin Currie Group

Iannis Xenakis’s music does not age. It is an ahistorical cliché to say so, likewise to say how stark, elemental, uncompromising, visceral, mysterious, unique, and so on it is. Those descriptions retain their force, whilst remaining open to exception and to broader questioning. But they came to many listeners’ mind, judging by the general conversation at the Queen Elizabeth Hall throughout this Xenakis Day, seeming to lodge themselves in a sort of collective consciousness through which works and performances could be heard. I did not, alas, hear all of the day’s events, but I attended the two principal concerts in the hall itself, hearing also three of the works on offer in the foyer in between. It was, I think, enough—although the way the closing Pléïades left one aurally bludgeoned was less on account of the astounding performances from the Colin Corrie Group of six percussionists than the unsuitability of the hall: a pity, one necessarily felt, whilst recognising that the Southbank Centre had done what it could.

The first works I heard were four from the London Sinfonietta and Geoffrey Paterson, in performances like everything here that seemed quite beyond reproach. (If you are going to play Xenakis, you tend to do it well.) O-Mega, for percussion and ensemble, made for a splendid opener; after that, his final work, we could only go back, at least temporally. Oliver Lowe’s opening bongo tattoo, a call to something, it seemed, met with implacable wind response, a hieratic ritual initiated in a theatre of music that might always have been, except it had not. Moving from 1997 to 1979, Palimpsest, for eleven instruments, offered piano (and other) scales reinvented before our ears, its lines unmistakeably architectural, even engineered—to borrow a little too readily from the composer’s other callings. Sawmill strings, wind fractals in which one could see as well as hear the geometry, virtuoso drumming and so much more: this was not easy listening, nor was it supposed to be. It was quite a journey to final, mesmerising piano-and-drum-led climax.

Échange, for bass clarinet (Mark van de Wiel) and ensemble, was similarly yet entirely differently primal. Again, it sounded unmistakeably that ‘this was how it must be’, in a world of violence (like our own) quite unconcealed. How can we continue so blithely, it seemed to ask, in a world imperilled by nuclear attack? Xenakis must have asked the same thing, or so we fancied. And yet, life in all its physicality, all its mental wonder, continued. The bass clarinet, somewhere between priest and Pierrot, bade new sounds emerge at will, though that will was again sometimes no mean effort. The ensemble could, though, and did respond. The startling weirdness of an E-flat major chord could hardly have sounded more alien: a signal, it seemed, from yet another planet.

Thalleïn, the Sinfonietta’s first commission (1984) from Xenakis, was as implacable as anything yet heard, perhaps still more so. Siren-like—ambulance, not temptress—its opening had us browbeaten, and thereby strangely receptive to proliferating subtleties to come, even to the point of finding them inviting. Masses of sound continued to confront us to exhilarating effect. Ascending and descending scales led both ways, so it seemed, to hell, their mockery a deeply serious business. Piccolo pierced our consciousness, at times painfully, like a moment of alarm on an intensive care unit screen. There was blood-letting aplenty, the final string swarms, punctuated by percussion, as far as ever from consolation. 

Concret PH, like most, possibly all, musique concrete actually did seem to have aged—though even that is dependent on our knowing the unknowable Rankean ‘how it really was’, and how can we? Even if we had been there, in the 1958 Expo Philips Pavilion Xenakis as Le Corbusier’s assistant designed, memory would play its tricks. There is no ‘authenticity’; there never was; and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool or a charlatan. How admirably full of integrity Xenakis and his fellow avant-gardists seem contrasted with those snake-oil-salesmen to come. No, you cannot hear the St Matthew Passion as if you had never heard Xenakis; more to the point, why would you wish to? Or is that just to invest my own fantasy of postwar ‘inauthenticity’ as super- or supra-authenticity? There was, at any rate, room for fantasy here, if one closed one’s eyes and listened. Here was another world: inaccessible, perhaps, like that of Bach’s Leipzig, yet an idea not without its own seduction. 

Tim Gill’s performance of Kottos for cello really deserved the main hall, as did Lowe’s Rebonds A and Rebonds B. They were mightily fine accounts, though, wherever one heard them, the first’s evocation of the horrible hundred-armed creature, progeny of Uranus and Gaia, a song both fragile and stark: deeply rooted, if hardly in the conventional harmonic sense. Or perhaps it was, for I felt the implication at least of a harmonic language, even if I could never know it, even if it were in fact unknowable. There was whimsy in the asides, even as the ‘creature’ gained strength. And the music reached something akin to ecstasy, doubtless more effortful than that of Messiaen, yet no less genuine for that. The state of frenzy reached was a liberation of sorts, not least amidst the hell of our current existence. Both Rebonds pieces, A in particular, invoked—even if we knew not what (that inscrutability again). One was drawn in, less hypnotised than converted, in powerfully cumulative, remarkably different experiences of control and abandon. 

In the evening, Colin Currie’s Psappha seemed almost designed to cement our growing sense of structure as fundamental in an emphatic, again quasi-engineered sense to Xenakis’s work. The extraordinary musicianship on show never threatened to take on a life of its own; structure remained paramount. There seemed no other way. And the silences: they might almost have been from Bruckner. Here, again, was a summoning both archaic and not. Pléïades, here ordered ‘Metaux’, ‘Claviers’, ‘Peaux’, ‘Mélanges’, suffered, as I said, from an ear-splitting quality that made it, for me at least, too difficult to take, the sixxens too rarely emerging, to quote Xenakis, as ‘clouds, nebulas, and galaxies of the fragmented dust of beats’. Even here, though, ‘the idea of periodicity, repetition, duplication, faithful, pseudo-faithful,’ and above all ‘unfaithful copy’ shone through. ‘Claviers’ came closer to polyphony, its ripples even a little Boulezian, though I am not sure either composer would have approved of the comparison. Its patterns emerged as if on multiple screens before our ears. Drummed hypnosis in ‘Peaux’ prepared the way for less a synthesis or recapitulation than a gigantic rehearing, even rewriting when all instruments united in ‘Mélanges’. It was ear-splitting, again, at times, but in quite an aural landscape, at times almost dreamed.

Rhythm, its problems and opportunities, had haunted much of the string music in between, especially Ikhoor for string trio and Tetras for string quartet, both given by the JACK Quartet. Vivid, fiercely directed narratives marked out both, as did superhuman unanimity of purpose. Tetras seemed somehow both stranger and familiar, the strangeness heightened by sounds I might have sworn had emerged from electronics, did I not know otherwise. Voices, of whatever sort, bore witness, as if from Luigi Nono’s long-estranged cousin. Two works for violin solo, Mikka and Mikka ‘S’, were given by the quartet member absent for the trio, Austin Wulliman. Measured swarming, control in dilemma, line tracked as if in a real-time graph: throughout one ‘felt’ the mathematics, or imagined one did. As in every performance here, there was a rightness that left one knowing, like this music or not, it deserved as well as demanded to be heard.

Passion, Music Theatre Wales, 13 October 2018

(sung in English)

Queen Elizabeth Hall

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

Her – Jennifer France

Him – Johnny Herford

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

Michael McCarthy, Caroline Finn (co-directors)

Simon Banham (designs)

Joe Fletcher (lighting)

EXAUDI

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

London Sinfonietta

Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)

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

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

Johnny Herford (Him) and National Dance Company Wales

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

Birtwistle: The Corridor/The Cure, Royal Opera, 18 June 2015

 Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House

Woman (Eurydice)/Medea – Elizabeth Atherton

Man (Orpheus)/Jason, Aeson – Mark Padmore

Martin Duncan (director)

Alison Chitty (designs)
Paul Pyant (lighting)
Michael Popper (choreography)

London Sinfonietta

Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)

 

Outstanding in pretty much every way – just what an opera house should be doing, in this case in collaboration with Aldeburgh and the London Sinfonietta. Although The Corridor was premiered in 2009, with the same cast, this was my first encounter; and The Cure had been given its first performance but a few days earlier, again in Aldeburgh. The two chamber operas could clearly work separately, and I hope that they will, in conjunction with any number of other works; in tandem, however, there are all manner of connections one may make, whether as performer, director, or audience. Agency, not least female agency, is but the most obvious, although that is not to minimise its importance. Identical instrumentation (violin, viola, cello, harp, flute, clarinet) and, in this case, an identical cast, served to strengthen unity, but also to allow us to consider what is different.

The Corridor takes us, once again, to that foundational musical myth so beloved of Birtwistle, that of Orpheus. But a moment – his turning back, wondering why Eurydice is not by his side – and then a lifetime’s reaction. David Harsent and his composer have us ask whether Eurydice in fact ever really wanted to leave Hades. She was lagging behind and Orpheus wonders where she has gone, turning around involuntarily. Love and tragedy are expressed in their laments following the event, but did they ever have a chance, second time around? She interacts with the players in Martin Duncan’s straightforward, powerful staging, not unlike one of those increasingly popular stagings of Bach’s Passions. Birtwistle’s score steers a fascinating path between tight rhythmic cellular writing and something more capable of subdivision, even perhaps rubato (or at least homage to Monteverdian freedom?) Stravinsky versus Schoenberg, we still might say. Or rather, Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

Birtwistle’s love of antique wildness exhibits itself once again: a reinvented antique wildness, not born from our paltry knowledge of ancient music, but something far more powerful. But there is no sense that we have heard this all before, for we have not. Fourths and fifths seem to speak to us from the age of organum – and beyond. The harp – what writing he has always offered for that instrument! – is no stranger to calamity, to catastrophic caesura. Vocal lines, in impassioned performances by Mark Padmore and Elizabeth Atherton, speak again of the invention that comes with longstanding assurance. Everything draws in – and makes us rethink what we thought we knew.

 

The Cure was conceived explicitly as a companion piece. Here, in the words of the excellent conductor, Geoffrey Paterson, the six solo instrumentalists of a work that had come close to ‘secular oratorio, for much of its duration’ coalesce ‘into a mini orchestra whose endlessly varied colouristic possibilities are at the service of a viscerally operatic scenario’. As ostinato builds up climactically, but never predictably, we reach the (again surprising) climax of a tale adapted by Harsent from John Gower, who in turn had adapted it from Ovid. Medea and Jason having returned to Colchis with the Golden Fleece, Jason offers to give ten of his years, that his father, Aeson, might regain some youth. Medea uses her magic instead, but did Aeson, partially transformed, actually want to be rejuvenated?

Again, then, we are made to think, and rethink. Birtwistle’s ritualistic response to Harsent’s ritual spells screws up tension – both conventionally and unconventionally. Duncan’s staging, with Alison Chitty’s typically primæval yet modern designs, again draws us in to a work that seems to take its cue perhaps more from the Birtwistle of The Minotaur than the composer of The Mask of Orpheus. Circles, numbers, and their properties: verbally, musically, scenically, they have us recall Gawain, yet also remind us that this is a different myth, a different response. The performances from all concerned seemed to me beyond reproach. Padmore and Atherton had us forget they had even appeared on stage before; Padmore even had me wonder whether it was indeed he singing both Jason and Aeson, so differentiated were his responses. Atherton's wild dignity struck just the right note. in every respect. 

 

 

My immediate reaction was to want to hear both works again. Then, doubtless, like the works themselves with respect to earlier tellings of their myths, my responses would both deepen and change. These are both chamber operas we shall need to hear again and again.

 

Glare, Royal Opera, 18 November 2014

Alex (Amar Muchhala) and Lea (Sky Ingram)

Images: ROH/Stephen Cummiskey

Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House

Alex – Amar Muchhala

Lea – Sky Ingram

Christina – Clare Presland

Michael – Ashley Riches

Thaddeus Strassberger (director)

Madeleine Boyd (designs)

Matt Haskins (lighting)

CHROMA

Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)

 

 

 

Offerings at the Linbury have looked up greatly since Kasper Holten ditched the previous regime’s ROH2 experiment and reintegrated the studio theatre’s programming. That has not precluded visiting ensembles, such as Music Theatre Wales and English Touring Opera, from giving their shows there – and giving them very well indeed, when one thinks of, for instance, Greek and King Priam. But there has been a distinct improvement in the profile of the Royal Opera’s own stagings, last season’s brilliant Francesconi Quartett a case in point, and a newly commissioned work is always – well, almost always – to be welcomed in principle.

 

What, then, of Glare, a new opera by Søren Nils Eichberg and his librettist, Hannah Dübgen? It certainly does not reach such heights; nor does it seem really to aspire to them. But an enterprise with a commitment to contemporary music, indeed a commitment to broadening the repertoire and the terms of its presentation, needs to offer space to fail. Glare does not do that; this is no Miss Fortune, to recall an unfortunate new work from the ‘main’ stage, let alone ENO’s nadir of Two Boys. What is offered in about an hour and a quarter might seem like a superior version – it would not be difficult! – of the latter work’s genre, coming across more like a sung version of a television drama than an opera as we generally understand it. And frankly, it is difficult imagining many wanting to grant it repeated listenings, or viewings, the plot-driven nature of the piece seemingly being more the thing than we tend to expect. Yet, on those terms, should we accept them, it passes the time and even has one think a little.

 

Michael (Ashley Riches) and Lea

Glare, then, is clearly driven, or so it seems, by Dübgen’s libretto. It is not always brilliantly written and, frankly, shouts of ‘fuck!’ are not in the slightest bit ‘edgy’ in themselves. Put another way, this is no angry Steven Berkoff shout, thinking again of Greek; but then, nor is it trying to be. However, despite the banalities, whether of language or indeed of a story in which a man, Alex, meets a ‘perfect’ woman, only to discover, or so he thinks, that his supposed friend, the scientist Michael, has designed her as an android, one is prompted to think, if a little too obviously, of what it might mean to be human, of how we exist in relationship to one another. There are finer libretti, of course, but for every Hofmannsthal or Da Ponte, there are many – well, fill in the gaps at your leisure.

 

Where, for me, the opera is weaker is in the score. Again, I am sure that part of the claim will be that it is not trying to be desperately original or searching. Its derivative rather than positive eclecticism, its drum-kit-heavy orchestration – this is an urban tale, is, I assume the point – and above all its unremarkable vocal writing and lack of musical characterisation conspire to ensure that the opera never really takes off as it might. Just when the android – or is she? – Lea seems to hint at an Olympian (Tales of Hoffmann) sound-world or at least vocal line, she is cut short and normal service resumes; I am not convinced that that is a deliberate musico-dramatic strategy. Eichberg’s writing is, to be sure, competently written on its own terms, but it trails rather than mirrors, questions, or transcends the ‘thriller’ story – which again makes one unlikely to wish to hear the work again. Perhaps that is the point: a ‘disposable’ opera for disposable times; perhaps I am too wedded to the idea of a ‘repertoire’ to be expanded. Perhaps, but I shall need more convincing than this.

 

Opera is also of course about performance. And here the Royal Opera scored very highly. Geoffrey Paterson and the ever-excellent musicians of CHROMA seemed very much on top of the score: precise, colourful, rhythmically taut. One was left in little doubt that this was what we were supposed to be hearing. A cast of young, attractive – vocally and physically – singers invested their roles with much of the character that was lacking in the music. Amar Muchhala proved nicely equivocal as Alex: always a difficult thing, strongly to portray (relative) weakness. (Ask any Don Ottavio!) Sky Ingram engaged considerable sympathy as Lea, despite having tediously to observe that the noise-level was so many decibels and so on. (That is an indication of her robotic nature, in case you were wondering.) Ashley Riches convincingly moved from Mephistopheles to sadistic rapist as Michael, his rich bass voice dramatically as well as musically convincing. He also proved a dab hand at pool, not least whilst singing. Clare Presland as Christina, Alex’s former girlfriend, appeared, again vocally as much as visually, properly bewitched by Lea, hinting at a greater humanity on both their parts.

 

Lea and Christina (Clare Presland)

Thaddeus Strassberger’s staging provides an effective enough frame for the opera to play itself out. It is difficult, indeed impossible, in such situations to know how much is his doing and how much the librettist’s; wherever the responsibility lies, Alex’s falling down upon his bed is perhaps overdone, especially when he masturbates during his sleep. The realism of the æsthetic seemingly militates against a reading that he is imagining Lea and Christina becoming better acquainted with each other, though perhaps that is the point. Perhaps, though, the lack of ambition, the ordinariness of a science-fiction conceit, is again part of the point.

London Sinfonietta/RAM Manson Ensemble/Brabbins, Brönnimann, Paterson: Stockhausen and Nono, 6 October 2013

Royal Festival Hall

 

Stockhausen – Gruppen
Nono – Canti per 13
Nono – Polifonica-monodia-ritmica
Stockhausen – Gruppen

London Sinfonietta

Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble

Martyn Brabbins, Baldur Brönnimann, and Geoffrey Paterson (conductors)

 

Stockhausen and Nono provided the music for the second of my 'Rest is Noise' weekend concerts. As seems to have become common practice, Stockhausen’s Gruppen was performed twice: not only sensible in terms of utilising the forces assembled, but also a wonderful opportunity to listen again with the experience both of the first performance and of other works fresh in the mind. Augmented by players from the Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble, the London Sinfonietta under Baldur Brönnimann, Martyn Brabbins, and Geoffrey Paterson offered perhaps the finest ‘live’ performances I have yet heard, especially the second time around, when there was almost the sense of an encore – and, as we all know, encores often offer the best performances of all. Stockhausen’s music beguiled and viscerally excited; space really seemed to become time, and vice versa. On the first performance in particular, I seemed, for whatever reason, to be particular attuned to the ghosts of German Romanticism, post-war claims for a ‘Stunde Null’ notwithstanding. Horns from the Weberian past, Mahlerian vistas, a clarinet from Pierrot (or indeed the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, for this is not entirely as German matter), a sweet, Berg-like violin line: all seemed to announce and to lose themselves in a world inconceivable without Schoenberg’s op.16 Orchestral Pieces, ‘Farben’ in particular. Solo piano pre-empted Stravinsky’s Movements. Messiaen-like ‘spirituality’ – an abused word, yet here apt – suffused the performances. There were ‘moments’, both in the general sense and in Stockhausen’s more particular sense, of great beauty, but equally there were connections, both intellectual, and perhaps most extraordinary of all, spatial. I do not think I have experienced a more completely successful sense of the three orchestras coming together, and yet, at the same time, the sound passing through them. Insofar as a ‘conventional’ concert hall can convey Stockhausen’s spatial vision, the Royal Festival Hall did an excellent job: one orchestra on stage, the other two surrounding the side stalls. Antiphonal harps worked their magic. Brass conversations inevitably brought to mind Gabrieli and the Venetian past, also preparing the way for Nono.

 

It was a little odd to read in the programme that Nono was a ‘late bloomer’, given that we were to hear performances of works from 1955 and 1951, respectively, the composer having been born in 1924. At any rate, those performances proved that he was nothing of the sort; we may or may not prefer his exquisite, late existentialist explorations, but here were crucial contributions to the musical world of ‘Darmstadt’, thirty years earlier. Canti per 13, first performed by the Domaine musical under the batonless hands of its dedicatee, Boulez, brought Webern still closer than he had sounded with Stockhausen, though there was equally to be heard a lyricism that was far from identical with that of the Austrian composer. Those lapping waves of Venice that seem to envelop the late Prometeo were already more than hinted at. So were the cries of ‘provocation’, something Nono said that he always required in order to conceive of a new piece. Notes, shards, and connections, as in Webern, were equally to the fore, for which of course the performers must receive a great deal of credit. A single note, an interval, a Klangfarbenmelodie: we experienced these as emotional utterances, even truths, not just compositional material.

 

The earlier Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica is both starker and, if anything, still more songful. So it certainly sounded here, showing that greater pointillism and melody are not in any sense antithetical; indeed, the melodic impulse was always palpable. Nono’s hushed atmosphere again seemed already to breathe, at least in part, the air of a world we more readily associate with his late works. There was undeniable strength too, the work’s cumulative power increasingly conveying the sense of a processional, not unlike Boulez’s considerably later Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna (the latter, of course, for much larger forces than this ensemble piece). What a spirit of adventure remains in this music, as vigorous and as sensuous as ever!

 

 

Theseus Ensemble/Paterson - Goehr and Carter, 30 April 2012

Linbury Studio Theatre

Goehr – Lyric Pieces (1974)
Carter – Triple Duo (1982)

Jenny Doyne (flute/piccolo)
Kate Andrews (oboe/English horn)
Sarah Thurlow (clarinet/bass clarinet)
Rosie Burton (bassoon)
Adrian Uren (horn)
Chris Evans (trumpet)
Matthew Knight (trombone)
Stephen Burke (percussion)
Chris White (piano)
Florence Cooke (violin)
Jonathan Rees (cello)
Anthony Williams (double bass)

Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)


The Theseus Ensemble and Geoffrey Paterson continue to further their commitment both to perform challenging new music and to provide new ways for audiences to approach it, first and foremost amongst which are Paterson’s excellent spoken introductions with musical examples. Alexander Goehr’s Lyric Pieces were therefore introduced with brief comparisons between two of Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze and two passages from Goehr’s work, which is to a certain extent built upon structures and gestures to be found in its predecessor: nothing laboured, nor indeed forbiddingly technical, but a way in for listeners who may conceivably have fretted about what to expect. Derivation and transformation, in these particular cases from the eighth and ninth Schumann pieces (both Florestan), were presented with admirable clarity, as indeed was the performance as a whole, which benefited equally from purposive command of line. Particularly striking was the echt-Romantic horn melody of the second of the six pieces, ‘Sostenuto, ma non troppo lento’, which, when joined by muted trumpet proved suggestive both in sonority and progress of Webern’s transcription from the Musical Offering (Bach’s masterpiece another Goehr favourite, perhaps far from incidentally). Trombone added an almost chorale-like impression, again furthering the sense not only of refracted Bach but Bach refracted via a refraction of German Romanticism. Stravinskian coolness from the ensemble’s woodwind offered a welcome counterpoint, in more than one sense. A sense of processional was doubtless furthered by timbral similarities with Varèse’s Octandre (the scoring is identical) and, inescapably, Symphonies of Wind Instruments. By contrast but also by connection, the liveliness of the third piece, both as work and performance, put me in mind of a more Germanic Pulcinella. The near-hypnotic repetitions of the fifth piece – already contextualised by that piano excerpt from the sixth Schumann piece – were heightened by intensification, again both in work and performance; this is no mere repetition, as Paterson’s keen rhythmic sense made clear. Indeed, there was a true spirit of the dance, both delightful and threatening. Echoes of the boisterous good spirits of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, surely a contender for the most life-affirming work of the twentieth century, were to be heard in the closing ‘Scherzando’, also possessed of an eloquent, wonderfully grainy bassoon soliloquy from Rosie Burton.

Paterson’s introduction to Elliott Carter’s Triple Duo presented the arresting image of a cocktail party, at which conversations between three pairs of people, more or less independent of each other and yet with some knowledge of and some reaction to the other conversations, finally closing with a conversation involving all six. Spatial separation between the three pairs heightened that way in for the listener; Carter may or may not approve, but there will always be other performances that do not adopt the experiment. It certainly offered clarity as well as visualisation for the first-time listener, so that the different varieties of ‘conversation’ – in rhythmic terms, triplets for flute and clarinet, twos and fours for violin and cello, slightly more elliptical groups of five for piano and percussion – might be more readily identified than would otherwise necessarily be the case. That in turn enabled one’s ear to devote a little more attention to the crucial intervallic characteristics of the different ‘conversations’ and eventually to the nature and implications of their combination. Again rhythmic exactitude proved fundamental to the success of the performance, permitting one to delight in the almost Haydnesque sense of invention Carter typically brings to his material. Perhaps surprising is the frankly lyrical quality of some of his writing, heightened again in performance.

It was excellent to observe so good-sized an audience for this Linbury lunchtime recital. Alas, it was considerably less than excellent to have to endure a number of persistently distracting noises-off – moaning, groaning, sometimes even shouting – from someone above. Whatever the reasons, and it may well have been that someone was ill, action should have been taken earlier by someone responsible. It was a pity, but ultimately music and performance won through.


 

 

Theseus Ensemble concert: Goehr and Carter

The Theseus Ensemble will be performing Alexander Goehr's Lyric Pieces and Elliott Carter's Triple Duo at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Theatre on 30 April, at 1 p.m. Geoffrey Paterson will once again conduct, as he did in two extremely fine previous concerts (for previous reviews, click here and here). Anyone in the vicinity or potentially in the vicinity is warmly encouraged to come along: this is a splendid group of young professional musicians, strongly committed to the cause of contemporary music. Admission is free; a certain number of tickets may be reserved online from the Royal Opera House website nine days beforehand; others will be available on the day.

Collett/Theseus Ensemble/Paterson - Benjamin and Boulez, 14 February 2011

Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House

Benjamin – Upon Silence
Boulez – Le marteau sans maître

Louise Collett (mezzo-soprano)
Theseus Ensemble
Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)


Whilst posters around town regaled us with the uninviting promise of ‘Valentine’s Day Romantic Classics’ and the like – who actually goes to these concerts? – the Theseus Ensemble and its founder Geoffrey Paterson presented something far more interesting. If that sounds like faint praise, it was certainly not meant as such, for any ensemble, let alone one that has been in existence for less than a year, which performs Le marteau sans maître deserves praise most fulsome, especially when presented as well as it was here.

First on the menu, however, was George Benjamin’s Upon Silence. Written for the viol consort, Fretwork, in 1990, Benjamin arranged it for seven strings (two violas, three cellos, and two double basses) the following year. As Paterson pointed out in his programme note, ‘with astonishing imagination and skill, Benjamin managed to retain the distinctive qualities of the original’. Vibrato is forbidden, save for certain instances, when it really tells; moreover, the players perform throughout with wooden mutes. The febrile, glassy string tone with which the performance opened contrasted with and yet complemented the more muted – in more than one sense – general timbre. Mezzo-soprano Louise Collett delivered Yeats’s words (from Long-legged fly) with great clarity of line and diction. One might characterise the vocal writing as restrainedly melismatic, recognisably that of the composer of Into the Little Hill. The refrain, ‘Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His/Her mind moves upon silence’, seemed both to impart and to transform the work’s form. The second stanza, dealing with Helen of Troy, ends in ‘silence’ accompanied and succeeded by a plaintive cello line, which one could well have imagined actually was a viol. By contrast, the end of the third and final stanza, that of Michelangelo, presented rich cello vibrato, truly striking and liberating, likewise the ensuing string harmonics, building to an ecstatic climax, subsiding, then preparing the way for the final, questing and questioning vocal crescendo upon the final ‘silence’.

As in November’s Theseus Ensemble concert, Paterson also provided an illustrated introduction, on this occasion only to Le marteau sans maître. It was succinct but telling, providing an excellent ‘way in’ for audience members who might have been daunted by Boulez’s 1953-5 masterpiece and, even for those of us who fancy we know the work a little better, providing an important key not only to the work but also to the performance. The ensemble’s stated mission is, ‘with thoughtful programming and approachable presentation, … to illuminate the sometimes forbiddingly labyrinthine complexities’ of ‘challenging works of the later 20th and 21st centuries’. It certainly scored upon programming and presentation here. Paterson described and the players performed three types of music, corresponding to the three poems, L’artisanat furieux, Bourreaux de solitude, and Bel édifice et les pressentiments. The first was characterised as ‘making’, the craftsmanship of the poem’s title, not ‘furious’ until the performance, since we heard it slowed down; the second had a ticking, clock-like pulse; finally, the third, corresponding to the more human imagery of the verse, was more temperamental, rhetorical, gestural, and passionate. (Far more passionate, one might say, than the greetings card culture awaiting us outside.) The tale of the piece was to be how the three types of material interacted, preparing the way for final disintegration.

That, I think, was very much what we heard, amongst other things of course. What also struck me was the dialectic between similarity and dissimilarity concerning a work that equally defined so much of the first half of the twentieth century, Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. The ensemble is not identical, of course, though a number of works would take as their cue that fabled Pierrot ensemble, but there are points of reference – flute, albeit alto flute, and viola – as well as the percussion instruments very much of Boulez’s own time and presaging what was to come. The singer: well, she sings rather than speaks, but recall Boulez’s notorious, beautifully ‘sung’ recording with Yvonne Minton. There were times when, not unreasonably, Collett seemed a little uncomfortable, but she was clearly suffering from a cough; if her pronunciation was not always perfect, once again, one could hear every word, and her intonation was generally excellent too. Paterson ensured early contrast between the different types of material; the contrast between the first two movements was admirably clear, that of the first commentary on Bourreaux de solitude sounding almost like an exoticised, Webernised, Ravel (Stravinsky’s ‘Swiss watchmaker’), or to put it another way, sounding precisely like what it was, namely Boulez. If tension flagged slightly part way through this movement, it was a minor blemish, for all players evidently gave their best throughout, and it showed. Invidious though it may be to single out any one member of the ensemble, I feel I must mention Matthew Kettle’s valiant and successful struggle with Boulez’s well-nigh impossible viola part. (Click here for an interview in which the conductor and I discussed the work beforehand).

The second commentary showed how even when one might fancy the music to be pointillistic, it is connections that count: this is not Stockhausen. I especially liked the way the closing triangle note was left to resonate: a nice touch of detail and expression. When it came to Bourreaux de solitude itself – two of the three commentaries precede the verse itself – one could still hear the ticking, albeit slower and perhaps more luxuriant, if one can conceive of luxuriant ticking. (The phrase almost sounds as though it might have come from René Char!) Its interaction with the other varieties of material became increasingly marked, so that, during the third commentary, we could readily hear, well primed as we were, its subversion of craftsmanship and rhetoric, and the other way(s) around too. Breakdown under the strain of such intricate interrelationship thus came as an expressive and intellectual necessity during the ninth and final movement, the double of Bel édifice et les pressentiments. Was Pierrot perhaps our uninvited guest to the disintegrating feast? Gongs and alto flute opened up a void at the end, both ominous and inviting.

Preparing to conduct Le marteau sans maître: Interview with Geoffrey Paterson

This morning, I visited the Royal Opera House to interview Geoffrey Paterson, at present working there as conductor on the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme. We spoke before rehearsals for The Barber of Seville, on which he is assisting Rory Macdonald. Geoffrey is also hard at work with preparations for the forthcoming Linbury Studio Theatre concert of Boulez (Le marteau sans maître) and Benjamin (Upon Silence) from the Theseus Ensemble, which he founded and whose second concert I reviewed here.

I started by asking whether there was any significance in the programming of Le marteau sans maître for that most nauseating celebration in the calendar, St Valentine’s Day. ‘None whatsoever; it was simply the date in the Linbury we were given, though I think it can serve as a sort of anti-Valentine’s Day concert.’ Some of the imagery in Le marteau sans maître is highly erotic, though. ‘I’m not an expert on poetry at all, but the funny thing with the poetry here is that Boulez only really uses a few words.’ And of course, René Char’s verse isn’t exactly the most readily understood. ‘So you really have something like just an adjective and a noun, with a few verbs thrown in. But whatever you make of the poetry, it’s striking when you think that the whole idea of serialism for many people was the withdrawal of the composer and yet here is something so violent and unpredictable. I didn’t really know what to make of that when I first heard the piece. I can’t really believe that Boulez wanted to shoot himself in the foot or engage in self-critique like that.’ Though in many ways so-called Darmstadt composers were very keen on just that, especially with regard to each other’s works. It does come as a surprise though, after the total serialism of works like the first book of Structures. What perhaps most struck me when I first heard Le marteau was how beautiful, indeed ravishing, it sounds. ‘Yes, I think the first time I heard any of it was on an old interval feature from the BBC, a little black-and-white film. It was done in a very arty way, with the camera cutting. It was one of those rare things; very rarely does one hear anything that is completely unlike anything one has heard before. I didn’t understand it but I was utterly intrigued. That’s what I was so excited about.’

I recalled having had a similar experience with what, I think, was the first Boulez piece I ever heard, the Second Piano Sonata. I listened to Pollini’s recording and really did not understand what was going on, but could tell immediately that something was going on, which I wanted to understand. Odd bits I could discern, the Beethoven connection for example… ‘I actually heard the Boulez sonata before the Hammerklavier sonata. And I had assumed that it was at least hyperbole when people spoke about it being modelled on the Hammerklavier. And then it was really thrilling to discover that that was actually the case, and how it was the case.’ Maurizio Pollini, I remarked, will be playing the Boulez sonata in London in April: the date, it turns out, of the Royal Wedding. ‘It can be another anti-celebration…’

We then discussed the issue of rehearsing the Boulez and the stage that had now reached. ‘I’ve been rehearsing individually with some of the players. You really need to do that first. The players, even those who have performed a lot of contemporary music, are now having to play, in the pieces I am choosing, music that is even more difficult. The best thing, when you are dealing with music of such difficulties, even with the notation, is to go through it individually first, to work out what it all means. Some of it is so horrible to read; the notation is almost fetishistic. That is perhaps the greatest difficulty, though when it come to the viola part – I used to play the viola myself – that is the one verging on the unplayable, particularly when it comes to all of the double-stopping.’ The vocal soloist will be Louise Collett, singing the part for the first time. ‘I’ve known her for quite some time from working in Scotland. She’ll be singing Maddalena in Rigoletto for Scottish Opera this year. She is not a contemporary music specialist by any means, although she sang the Berio Folk Songs very well, but the vocal quality is so important here. We’ve been working through the score together and I’m delighted to be working with her.’

I then asked about the George Benjamin piece, Upon Silence, knowing it only by reputation. Geoffrey reminded me that it had originally been written for Fretwork, and then reworked by the composer for modern instruments, though very much with the intention that the original austerity, indeed a good part of the viol sonority, should be maintained; ‘the way he dulls the sound is very much part of the effect. It’s really an incredibly beautiful piece.’ Clearly this piece by a fellow Messiaen pupil will prove an intriguing companion to the main course of Boulez.

The conversation turned for a while to Boulez as conductor, since Paterson studied with him at the Lucerne Academy. It was interesting to note how eminently practical Boulez’s advice would be on matters of how to get tricky groups of seven or eleven right, always born of experience, sitting down and talking through how they might be heard, understood, and then fitted back into context. The ear helps of course too. ‘Of course, he seems to have pitch as absolute as possible. Mine has got much better and my relative pitch, which is probably more important, has improved a great deal. But Boulez can simply hear every pitch in a great orchestral chord and tell that the second horn is slightly out of tune, hearing the notes as pitches, where others might hear a chord and then try to work out which part of is simply out.’ I was put in mind of a similar situation when I heard Boulez rehearse Mahler’s Eighth Symphony in Berlin, when, at a climactic point in the first movement, he was somehow able to correct, ever so courteously, a slight infelicity of tuning from one of the clarinets.

Another experience was working with Péter Eötvös on Stockhausen’s Gruppen. Not just a matter then of being able to beat time at sixty-seven and a half beats per minute, or whatever it might be? ‘No, he would suggest that you sang it. I looked at him, wondering however you might do that. He suggested then singing the harp part. Because the point is that, in these pieces, you are not just there to beat time. If you can’t conceive of the different lines musically, you aren’t going to be able to communicate that to the players.’

It was a delight to learn that our conductor was also a great devotee of Strauss. Operatically, he has not yet had much opportunity, though he had played for an extract from Der Rosenkavalier, which we agreed was a much darker work than many recognise. The moment of the Marschallin’s return in the Third Act, and the straightforward but wonderfully apt cadential means with which it is announced was a particular favourite moment. With regard to the work as a whole, ‘just because it is placed in inverted commas doesn’t mean that there is a lot of what is there in Salome and Elektra’. And of course, those works have their inverted commas too. It was even better to discover an ardent fan of the Alpine Symphony, ‘Strauss at his most serious,’ and in some ways sparer, the ‘Ausklang’ less awash with notes than the earlier tone poems. The extraordinary historical accident of late Strauss being composed at the same time as Boulez’s First Piano Sonata, Webern and Bartók already having died, was not without its irony for those who admire those composers so greatly.

Alexander Goehr, from whose analyses I learned a great deal at Cambridge, was a formative influence for Paterson when an undergraduate there too. He took private compositions lessons with him for quite some time. One of the things he most admired, a word I have heard time and time again with respect to Goehr, is ‘integrity’, another ‘the refusal to play to the gallery, which is very important to me too’. Goehr said that he did not mind at all the style in which something was written, but taste, by which it seems that he meant that ‘integrity’ was crucial; he was critical of composers who had not thought through what they were doing or why, or who were playing for effect. ‘I’m immensely grateful for him making me think much more closely about my composition, though it slowed me down a lot. I don’t mean that in an ungrateful way at all; it was a very good thing. Now, like many people who start off composing, I have found myself doing less of that and more conducting.’

More generally we discussed the difficulties of a great deal of expression within ‘modernist’ works, the adjective being one of which Paterson is wary, since it can often put people off and should perhaps now be considered more historically. He is, he said, very attracted to complexity that is expressively necessary, to works that often need more than one hearing to reveal their secrets, ‘like my first experience with Le marteau sans maître’; after all, if one has heard everything in a work on a first hearing, there is nowhere left to go. (I thought immediately of a great deal of Shostakovich, but kept my thoughts to myself.) Schoenberg, I suggested, was another case of so much expressivity, more than many audiences still seem able to take, though they often reject his music claiming quite the opposite. Paterson’s criticism of some of Schoenberg’s music was tellingly similar to that of Boulez, namely that the new, serial language sometimes falls back upon old forms.

Returning to more contemporary music, we agreed upon a parallel problem to that of the term ‘modernist,’ namely the habit of more conservative listeners to refer to some new music as ‘tonal’, when that seems truly to miss the point of tonality. ‘Just to hear a chord that might appear in tonal music does not make the music tonal, since it does not have the same role at all. For instance, some of the chords in George Benjamin’s piece, though not of course in Le marteau sans maître and other pieces where composers avoid them, might sound like that in isolation, but this isn’t tonal music.’ Nor, of course, is complexity somehow something that appeared in the twentieth century, a favourite case of his being the complexity of the Eroica Symphony. For, in Paterson’s view – and mine – what matters here is what is done with and to the material. One might listen superficially and just hear a tune, but it is the processes that remain crucial, processes which, as he pointed out, are also so apparent in Haydn’s playing with form. Classical composers were not placing consonant chords around to be heard in themselves. The case of Debussy, I suggested, showed the difference: he would sometimes do just that, using chords to be heard, because of their sound; Mozart and Beethoven were certainly not in the business of doing that. With Schoenberg, however, and another Paterson favourite, Elliott Carter, listening in that way is simply not an option. ‘Carter’s Concerto for Orchestra is a wonderful, wonderful work, but you need to concentrate, to keep a sense of what is happening all the time. You can’t listen to it half-heartedly.’

The Theseus Ensemble’s next performance, of Boulez and Benjamin, will take place at 1 p.m., 14 February, in the Linbury Studio Theatre of the Royal Opera House (click here). Further details concerning the ensemble may be found here, and concerning Geoffrey Paterson here.

Theseus Ensemble/Paterson - 'Out of the Labyrinth', 5 November 2010

Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall, Royal College of Music

Brian Elias – Geranos
Sir Harrison Birtwistle – Verses for Ensembles

Theseus Ensemble
Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)


Launched in April, with a concert programming Ligeti’s Piano Concerto and Boulez’s Dérive 2, the Theseus Ensemble, ‘dedicated to the exploration of the labyrinths of modern music, and to sharing our discoveries with our audiences,’ now turned its attention to two English composers: Brian Elias and Sir Harrison Birtwistle. Skilful programming on founder and conductor Geoffrey Paterson’s part revealed a certain post-Stravinskian kinship in these two ensemble pieces, without prejudice to the composer’s individual voices. Paterson’s spoken introductions to both works, along with brief musical excerpts from the players, were clear, engaging guides to what one might profitably listen out for, but such was the high standard of performance that one could hardly have failed to sit up and listen.

Elias’s 1985 Geranos was written for the Fires of London. Like so much of Birtwistle’s music, there is an audible inspiration of archaic Greece. Here, Elias’s interest in ancient metrical feet – dactylic, anapæstic, bacchic, and so on – provides a basis for the work’s generative rhythmical cells; such was made clear both by Paterson’s introduction and by the performance itself. The word ‘geranos,’ Paterson’s programme note explained, has two meanings: when the stress falls upon the final syllable, it connotes a dance imitating the flight of cranes in line; when falling upon the first, it refers to Theseus’s dance to celebrate the rescue of seven youths and seven maidens from the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Elias scores this piece of three interconnected movements for six players: piano, piccolo/flute/alto flute, violin/viola, E-flat clarinet/bass clarinet, and percussion. Each of these players had a chance, well taken, to shine in solo and ensemble.

Following a slow introduction, in which Christopher White span a pregnant single line – a labyrinthine thread, perhaps? – which led us into an almost impressionistic haze of instrumental response, the rhythmically driven character of the first movement fully revealed itself. Jonathan Rees’s early ecstatic cello solo incited others, Elias’s post-Stravinskian soundworld soon fully established. Flights of fantasy from piccolo and percussion proved orientally suggestive. The slow, second movement put one in mind of a processional, its growth in intensity owed as much to percussion as to the leading figure of the E-flat clarinet (Sarah Thurlow), evocative of the mournful antique aulos gingras. The transition to the final movement seemed especially well handled, resulting in the alternation of various ‘feet’ in a generative, almost Dionysian frenzy. There were, however, more phantasmagorical sections too, in which the players created a sense of slowed, but not quite suspended animation. Throughout the ritual, twists and turns clearly unfolded, until the concluding near-stasis – written before such things became wearisomely popular – of tuned percussion.

As a prelude to performance of Birtwistle’s classic Verses for Ensembles (1986-9), Paterson and his players took us through the seven types of music present in the work: audible signposts, though as Paterson admitted, the delineation is so clear in Birtwistle’s writing, that it would be well-nigh impossible not to register their character. The visual-dramatic aid of players moving around the stage assists in that respect too, of course. Material was throughout clearly but meaningfully delineated, whether in introduction or performance.

Immediately, we were thrust into a violent soundworld, pulsating with drama both visceral and perspectival: unmistakeably Birtwistle. Hard-edged – have glockenspiels ever sounded more so? – and yet with moments of true tenderness, for instance from Alec Frank-Gemmill’s fine French horn, the character of this world was finely judged. Trumpet fanfares from Huw Morgan and Dimitrios Gkogkas harked back to Monteverdi and beyond, the spatial dimension contributing to the impression of Gabrielian ghosts at the modernistic feast – and how greatly so much music of this period is influenced by the Venetian example: think, for instance, of Stockhausen. The controlled riot of percussion (three players here: Stephen Burke, Oliver Lowe, and Scott Wilson) suggested an archaic threefold – or more – intensification of Messiaen’s rhythmic explorations, whilst all the time the hieratic example of Symphonies of Wind Instruments and, of course, The Rite of Spring incited. Rhythmic precision and definition are crucial in such respects; the Theseus Ensemble succeeded triumphantly in imparting them. At least as impressive, however, was the true sense the performance instilled of geography to the work’s ‘location’. As so often with Birtwistle, we are engaged in audition of differing perspectives upon different ‘places’, their characters sometimes variant – as in the three-line woodwind stanzas – and sometimes invariant. Secret Theatre seemed to beckon, inescapably: a privilege afforded by this fine performance.

The Theseus Ensemble’s next performance will be at the Linbury Studio Theatre of the Royal Opera House on 14 February 2011, at 1 p.m. George Benjamin’s Upon Silence will preface Boulez’s iconic Le marteau sans maître. Further information concerning the ensemble may be found at http://www.theseusensemble.com/.