Salzburg Festival (1) - GF Haas: Koma, 24 July 2024

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Michaela – Sarah Aristidou
Jasmin – Pia Davila
Alexander, Mother – Daniel Gloger
Michael – Peter Schöne
Dr Auer – Susanne Gritschneder
Dr Schönbühl – Henriette Gödde
Nurse Jonas – Karl Huml
Nurse Nikos – Benjamin Chamandy
Nurse Zdravko – Raphael Sigling

Klangforum Wien
Bas Wiegers (conductor)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

One of Alexander Pereira’s most successful innovations at the Salzburg Festival was the introduction of an ‘Ouverture Spirituelle’ at its beginning. Pereira’s practice, long since discarded, was to open that opening, as it were, with a performance of Haydn’s Creation; if memory serves me correctly, I recall him saying that he was a descendant of an original subscriber. (I attended ten years ago, fortunate to hear Bernard Haitink as the conductor.) On first glance, the idea of a smaller, related festival of sacred music, utilising Salzburg’s array of churches, might by now seem to have been stretched to or beyond breaking point into a vague selection of ‘spiritually’ inclined works. What music, the sceptic might ask, is not in some sense ‘spiritual’? There is, I think, some force to that objection. However, if one looks to the more specific theme or motto this year adopted by Markus Hinterhäuser, ‘Et exspecto’, there is perhaps a similar drawing of order, if not out of chaos, then out of its perceived danger.

It certainly helps us to understand the inclusion of a concert performance of Georg Friedrich Haas’s one-act, two-hour-long opera, Koma, concerned, as its name suggests, with the liminal experience of a patient, possibly following a suicide attempt, in a coma, gaining and losing consciousness. The opera is told and, I think, experienced from the standpoint of Michaela, the outstanding Sarah Aristidou, placed quite separately from the rest of the cast: tellingly, unseen to us (at least to me and I assume to everyone else), somehow both inverting and yet strengthening the idea of an out-of-body experience. But the most striking element, at least initially so, both of work and performance, is that much of it – about half – takes place in the dark. Music in ‘complete’ darkness has long been a Haas preoccupation. Twenty minutes of in vain, one of the last great musical works of the twentieth century take place in darkness; so does the entirety of the composer’s Third String Quartet. 

In our world, darkness is rarely if ever ‘complete’. Here, in the Mozarteum’s Grosser Saal, there were a few signs of light, once one’s eyes adjusted, and not only from glimpses of fluorescent watches that must now be in vogue. (Recurrent sight of one would prove aggravating in another festival performance, in which lights were only dimmed. Are these the new mobile telephones?) One’s sight, like other senses, can play tricks too, which I think comes closer to the point or to one of them. The principal point, however, remains darkness: what and how one experiences things in it, and its transition to other states, be they light, something more crepuscular, or death. 

This, the second in a series of three chamber operas Haas wrote with Händl Klaus for Schwetzingen – to his delight, he found the old theatre highly appropriate for darkness – naturally also explores, and raises questions, concerning how music might be made in such conditions, and others. Haas acknowledges it must be a ‘nightmare’ for the conductor, having to wait for the light once again to come to do his thing, having to pick up from where the musicians have brought him. Yet, as with many aspects of this work, one might say that such helplessness is simply a heightened experience of what is already the case. After all, the conductor almost never makes music directly at all; he is both all powerful and entirely in the musicians’ power. I use ‘he’ here, simply because it is the appropriate pronoun for Bas Wiegers, whose accomplishment in leading the musicians of Klangforum Wien was every bit as remarkable, in a good way, as theirs—and the singers’. Doctors, nurses, members of Michaela’s family, with memories they wished and most certainly did not wish, to dredge up or have dredged up, came and went, transformed: fascinatingly, in the case of her brother-in-law Alexander metamorphosing into a countertenor Mother, given an often visceral performance from Daniel Gloger. 

That seemed to be almost a visual counterpart or instantiation (Wagner’s ‘deeds of music made visible’ even) of Haas’s musical language and method. Clearly, one cannot write music for the darkness just as one might for the light, but that is probably not as such the point, or at least my point. The post-spectralist spaces opened up, inhabited, and extended by what we may think of as microtonality but Haas, not unreasonably, prefers to consider as music beyond the twelve notes of the chromatic scale sounded as a necessary realm for this drama of states, transitions, memories, and more. I was put in mind also of Schoenberg’s Erwartung, in which a moment in perception is stretched out to thirty minutes and experienced as such. There is no suggestion that this is taking place here in any literal sense, but such heightened states perhaps hold something in common. Ultimately, though, this was a singular, yet very human experience, whose lack of staging for Haas proved an advantage rather than a compromise. We may or may not agree; in all such cases, there is gain and loss. But then such is life. Such also are death and, doubtless, a host of states in between.

London Sinfonietta/de Ridder - Haas, Xenakis, Levi, and Vivier, 27 February 2015

Purcell Room

Georg Friedrich Haas – Open Spaces (United Kingdom premiere)

Xenakis – Aroura

Mica Levi – Greezy (world premiere, London Sinfonietta commission)

Claude Vivier – Zipangu

London Sinfonietta

André de Ridder (conductor)

 

This was the first of two London Sinfonietta concerts, collectively called ‘Spectrum of Sound’. The second would take place the following evening, presenting works by Scelsi, Ligeti, Murail, and Haas; I only managed to catch the first. It was, I suppose, encouraging that it sold out – except for those who failed to secure tickets! – but I was a little surprised that it took place in the Purcell Room rather than the next-door Queen Elizabeth Hall, which would have enabled a larger audience to hear an interesting programme.

 

Georg Friedrich Haas seems popular at the moment – at least in certain new music circles. The London Sinfonietta gave a wonderful performance not so long ago of his in vain. This later, 2007 work, written in memory of James Tenney, was the only one to add to the evening’s basic string ensemble. In addition to six violins, two violas, two cellos, and two double basses (all strings ‘retuned’, that is, along microtonal lines), we heard also the excellent work of two stereophonic percussionists. The swarming sounds to be heard throughout the string ensemble at times put me in mind of Ligeti, although I am not sure whether that were ‘influence’ as such, nor whether it would matter if it were. There was revealed, as in in vain, a fine sense of instrumental drama, not least in a great, almost orchestral crescendo. Interest – dramatic in its way – also lies in the ‘shadowing’ of one half of the strings (that is, three violins, one each of viola, cello, and double bass) by the other half, each tuned a sixth of a tone lower. (The composer’s helpful note made this clear.) Open strings, not quite as one might expect them to sound, perhaps resound all the more overtly, or rather might seem to do so, in the new context.

Xenakis’s presence on concert programmes remains all too rare. This most uncompromising of composers never fails to make the strongest of impressions, at least in a remotely competent performance. Here, as throughout, the London Sinfonietta under André de Ridder certainly offered more than that, allowing one to trust in its guidance – always a crucial matter in new music (and I think we can still call a Xenakis piece from 1971 that). ‘Aroura, Homer’s earth,’ to quote the composer, ‘precedes Antikhthon, and represents the sound textures of the earth (the word is from the same root as “area” or “arena” in the Romance languages). The first impression the eyes receives of the earth is of textures, e.g., fields, words, or bare soil; similarly, the first impression the ear receives of sound is of textures.’ As ever with Xenakis, ‘elemental’ very much seemed the apt word for such impressions, however clichéd it might have become. One heard kinship in the swarming, but difference too in the variety of interplay, continuation, and imitation between instruments. Lines interlocked but also seemed to continue determinedly according to their own (would-be scientific?) necessity. There was drama too, perhaps more ‘conventionally’ framed than one might have expected – or perhaps that was a matter of the narrative coherence the conductor and ensemble imparted to their performance. Glissandi, for instance, could considered as a group be considered to generate form, necessarily heard through time – and ‘felt’, as it were, through time, too, given the undeniably visceral nature of Xenakis’s music.   

Following the interval, we heard the world premiere of Mica Levi’s Greezy, the title, according to the composer, denoting ‘a word used to describe a character who shows no remorse, who will do something bad without worrying about the consequences. It’s a kind of “hard core” description of strength through lack of compassion and fearlessness’. The work’s processional quality – Levi herself spoke of it as dirge-like – seems preoccupied with slowing, not just slowness, of time. A pair of cellos seems almost to step back in time, evoking to this listener’s ears resonances of Purcellian viols. The performance as a whole benefited from a splendidly rich string sound from the London Sinfonietta. Perhaps one of the work’s most immediately notable features is a wide oscillating vibrato, to which de Ridder drew attention, inspired, it seems, by the sound of electronic synthesisers.

Claude Vivier’s Zipangu shares with Greezy an opening concerned with what we might consider to be ‘repeated notes’, but which in context had a rather different effect, soon sonically modulating, from that which they might have had in broadly Classical repertoire. Simon Blendis’s virtuosic violin solo, superlatively played, initiated – or at least seemed to initiate, though it was not quite the first instance of such writing – responses from other instrumentalists, within what Vivier considered to be ‘the frame of a single melody’. (Zipangu, by the way, is a name given to Japan at the time of Marco Polo.) Differentiated bowing techniques contribute to the sonic tapestry, through which structure seems both to emerge and to be mediated. A ‘Spectrum of Sound’, then, was certainly what we heard.

 

This concert will be broadcast on Hear and Now, BBC Radio 3, on Saturday 11 April, 10 p.m.

London Sinfonietta/ Pomàrico - Haas, in vain, 6 December 2013

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Georg Friedrich Haas – in vain (London premiere)

London Sinfonietta

Emilio Pomàrico (conductor)

 

It has taken quite a while for Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain to receive a performance in the United Kingdom. The London Sinfonietta under Emilio Pomàrico – valiantly, brilliantly standing in for an indisposed André de Ridder – gave this country’s premiere in Huddersfield, before bringing the work to the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the final weekend of the Southbank Centre’s Rest is Noise festival. Audience numbers are far from everything. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing in front of a couple of enthusiasts, or indeed simply for its own sake in front of no one at all: for the glory of God, as any mediæval composer would have understood. Yet the claim that contemporary music is of limited interest, that what audiences want is a generic programme of overture-concerto-symphony – a perfectly reasonable formation if done for a good reason rather than out of laziness – was once again belied by a sell-out for a more than hour-long ensemble work by a sixty-year-old Austrian composer. This is not the churned-out pandering of minimalism, ‘holy’ or otherwise, but substantial, substantive, music, which both requires effort and rewards it. Such in any case was my first experience of a work whose renown has steadily grown over the past few years, not least thanks to the advocacy of figures such as Sir Simon Rattle and Alex Ross. An introduction by Rattle, given before a Berlin performance earlier this year, was reprinted in the programme. I am glad I only read it afterwards, since it enabled me to hear the performance without any preconceptions, not knowing at all what to expect, but I should recommend the enthusiasm and intelligence of Rattle’s words to anyone remotely curious.

 

One thing that struck me about a performance, whose length was not so very far off that of a Mahler symphony, was how compelling the experience was, in the sense that not only I, but seemingly 99% of the audience, had no difficulty whatsoever in concentrating throughout; the impression was of an audience gripped. In a situation such as this, one inevitably tends to make references to other works and composers, sometimes more revealingly than others: not only as a reference point, but also simply in an attempt to find verbal approximations. I do not mean, then, necessary to imply ‘influence’, let alone derivation, but simply to offer a few descriptive signposts of my own experience, itself derived only from hearing a performance rather than from having seen the score.  

 

Ligeti came to mind, not that the opening string scurryings sounded quite ‘like’ him, let alone the ‘harsher’ soundworld of, say, Xenakis, but as a starting-point, not only for my own orientation, but for appreciation of Haas’s sheer inventiveness, one could probably have done worse. (I saw afterwards that Rattle had also invoked Ligeti, so perhaps I was not being entirely fanciful.) There is theatre, of course, even if one did not know that Haas composed the work partly as an expression of dismay at the rise of the Freedom Party in Austria’s 1999 elections. (He grew up in Voralberg, later reflecting upon his experience: ‘However impressive the landscape might have been … life there in the 1950s and 1960s was largely cut off from the cultural developments in the world outside.’ This was no sentimental rural idyll, then, for him, but a disturbingly reactionary environment in need of response.) Periods of total darkness enable one to listen all the more closely: what extraordinary skill on the part of the musicians! And the dawning of light upon the stage more often than not proves – yes, in vain. Ceremonial contributes to that sense of theatre, brass perhaps recalling the great aequale of Austrian tradition: archaic almost, and yet very much of the present, just like the trombones in Don Giovanni or Beethoven’s Missa solemnis.

 

For it was the ghosts of German Romanticism that most haunted my experience of the work. Perhaps that is simply a matter of personal preoccupation, but it is not, I think, entirely so. Battle and curious confluence between ‘natural’ and modern, tempered tuning take place; again, Ligeti inevitably came to mind. (Is it that contest that makes the music 'microtonal', or is it the microtones that suggest to Haas the contest? Does it matter?) But the sense of trying to recreate a ‘natural’ world both necessary and yet, in some senses, out of our grasp, born of major triads, the arpeggios of, say, Das Rheingold, and the heart-rending horn echoes both of Wagner and of Der Freischütz, Schumann too, summons up the ‘in-vain-ness’ not only of musical works but the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. Those paintings may have been over-exposed in recent years, tarnished by base commercialism; so has Romanticism itself, many times over. The specific and the generic will nevertheless survive. Ghosts will adapt; indeed, we may doubt whether they are ghosts at all. There were indeed a good few times in which memories that great ‘farewell’ that is not really a farewell to Austro-German tradition, Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, insinuated themselves. I have heard many people express surprise that Helmut Lachenmann, that most avid, intrepid examiner and re-inventor of this tradition, should so admire Strauss’s work; that must reflect on their misunderstanding of Strauss. Lachenmann ‘gets’ Strauss; so, I suspect, does Haas.

 

The inexorable downward scalic passages of the closing ten minutes or so are as mesmerising as anything I have heard in ‘new music’ for quite some time. Tension mounting, doubtless at least as much through the Sinfonietta’s superlative performance as through the work itself, these apparently generative passages lead nowhere – but it is, of course, nowhere, nothing, something negative, in vain, that is being generated. Attempts to break free of what Rattle illuminatingly describes as ‘music … [getting] stuck on  … [an] extraordinary Escher staircase’ seem to involve both reversion, that is to scales themselves, and also neo-Lisztian innovation. My memory drew parallels with the introduction to Liszt’s B minor sonata, to the astonishing scales that most undervalued, most farsighted of nineteenth-century masters offers as material for more or less the entirety of that indisputable masterpiece. And the disconcerting, even frightening stop to which the music suddenly came: that, I thought, could only be Wozzeck. Rattle, I discovered, thought so too, adding Erwartung to the mix as well.

 

Performances, insofar as I could tell, were exemplary throughout. The London Sinfonietta are past masters at such challenges, yet we should celebrate that achievement rather than take it for granted. Pomàrico, making his London debut, clearly needs to visit these shores again soon. So does Haas. The concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 Hear and Now, on Saturday 18 January 2014.

 

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.