Musikfest Berlin (5) - Klangforum Wien/Pomàrico: Saunders and Aperghis, 4 September 2020

Philharmonie


Rebecca Saunders: Flesh, for solo accordion with recitation (2018)
Sole, Trio in F-sharp for mobile accordion, percussion, and piano (2019)
to an utterance – study, for solo piano (2020, world premiere)
Scar, for 15 soloists and conductor (2018/19)

Georges Aperghis: Der Lauf des Lebens, for 6 voices and ensemble (2019, world premiere)

Joonas Ahonen (piano)

Krassimir Sterev (accordion)

Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart

Klangforum Wien

Emilio Pomàrico (conductor)

Two concerts from Klangforum Wien: one a world premiere, the other including a world premiere and its ‘early music’ coming from 2018. New music indeed, then, however distant 2018—Theresa May: remember her?—may seem to those of us bewildered and exhausted by the current plague. I hope I shall be forgiven for any errors I might make, confronted with such a wealth of new sounds and their organisation, without so much as a programme note, coronavirus precluding such, let alone a score. Is that not, however, an ideal way for us to approach new music, whether ‘New Music’ or not? It was certainly welcome exercise for ears starved of such experience over the preceding months.


First, we heard works by Rebecca Saunders: not only one of the most important composers of her generation, but also one of my favourites. It certainly seems another world since I flew to Munich last June to see and hear her receive the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. Indeed, some of the music we heard had then yet to be written. The opening Flesh, however, had. We hear much about embodiment nowadays, but here the physicality of Saunders’s work and Krassimir Sterev’s astounding performance as accordionist and reciter could not have been more physical: quite erasing, like Molly Bloom’s monologue itself, any thought of dualism between mind and matter. This is not ‘programme music’, certainly not in the sense of mere portrayal, but it was difficult not to think or rather to experience the piece’s progress in extremely direct as well as more indirect terms. Squeezing, shuddering, rattling, shouting, screaming: this was a musical performance of musical material.


Sole for accordion, percussion, and piano was taken attacca, its predecessor necessarily influencing our reception, yet beautifully setting the scene, the next piece stealing in to our consciousness in the after-glow or -shock of Flesh. Resonance and even ritual—perhaps closer to Stockhausen than I might have expected—enabled pitch to be heard both ‘in itself’ and as the key to transformation of other parameters, such as timbre, rhythm, and dynamics. Put another way, post-Debussy and post-Webern tendencies united, without ever remotely sounding like Boulez or any other such forerunners. There were no electronics; yet, as so often in Saunders’s work, I could have sworn I heard them.


Next, Joonas Ahonen gave the first performance of to an utterance – study, for solo piano. Its opening pitted bass resonances, later spreading across the instrument, against glissandi and similar devices: some more scampering, some more furious, again in a not entirely un-Debussyan fabric (at least to my ears). Listening, one created and dissolved new aural hierarchies; and yet again, the sheer physicality of an outstanding performance proved just as crucial to one’s experience. Ahonen’s commanding virtuosity left one in no doubt one was hearing what one should be. Chases were as furious, perhaps even more so, as or than anything in the previous night’s Rihm Jagden und Formen. Ultimately, the piece seemed to me very much to take its part in the distinguished line of (extended) piano studies, growing into something emotionally and intellectually more all-encompassing. Were ‘symphonic’ not so obviously clichéd a misnomer, I might have been tempted to use it with less caution.


The opening of Scar, with its opening soft drum tattoos, dark pitched sounds emerging therefrom, put me in mind of Berg’s Op.6 Pieces. The tricks one’s ears and such resourceful writing can play, not to mention the ensemble performance under Emilio Pomàrico, convinced me at one point I had heard a voice. Slides, dark flashes, an aural landscape in their shadows, a liminal zone between tearing and torn: this was certainly the world of scars. Flights of fancy or of flesh took wing in a process of persistent metamorphosis, leading to dazzling climax and return to the opening material, transformed by our experience of listening.


In the second concert, the ensemble and Pomàrico were joined by the six voices of Neuevocalisten Stuttgart, for the premiere of Georges Aperghis’s Der Lauf des Lebens. Words, at least my words, are still more problematic an approximation here than usual, but I sensed something of a distinction between the dramatic use to which words were put in Saunders and a more ‘purely musical’—to resurrect a choice vintage chestnut—approach to their qualities from Aperghis. Accordion at the opening (the indefatigable Sterev) made for a nice link between the two worlds, but Klangforum Wien and the (initially) female Stuttgart voices immediately took our experience in a very different direction. A riot of sound, not without resonances from jazz, raucous riffs and all, put me a little in mind of Berio at times; that, however, was just me finding my bearings, for this was exuberance very much on its own terms. Vocal parts, sung and spoken, solo and ensemble, may or may not have made ‘verbal’ sense, yet who cared? Both work and performance offered a strong sense of a greater whole over an hour-long span, despite or perhaps on account of a host of mood swings and other transformations. In such winning superfluity, the overriding, most welcome sense was of fun, even of Alice in Wonderland-like wonder. 

Musikfest Berlin (4) – Ensemble Musikfabrik, Aperghis, Lim, Schöllhorn, Baltakas, Zorn, Saunders, and Poppe, 10 September 2017

Kammermusiksaal, Philharmonie

Georges Aperghis: Damespiel, for bass clarinet (2011)

Liza Lim: The Green Lion Eats the Sun, for double bell euphonium (2014)

Johannes Schöllhorn: grisaille, for cello (2013)

Vykintas Baltakas: Pasaka – Ein Märchen, for piano (1995-97)

Liza Lim: Axis Mundi, for bassoon (2012-13)

John Zorn: Merlin, for trumpet (2016)

Rebecca Saunders: fury, for double bass (2005)

Enno Poppe: Haare, for violin (2013-14)

Saunders: shadow, for piano (2013)

Poppe: Fell, for percussion (2016)

Saunders: Bite, for flute (2016)

Carl Rosman (clarinet)

Melvyn Poore (euphonium)

Dirk Wietheger (cello)

Alban Wesly (bassoon)

Marco Blaauw (trumpet)

Florentin Ginot (double bass)

Hannah Weirich (violin)

Ulrich Löffler and Benjamin Kobler (piano)

Dirk Rothbrust (percussion)

Helen Bledsoe (flute)

Alas, I was only able to stay for two out of the three sections of this lengthy Matinée concert from soloists of Ensemble Musikfabrik. That meant that I missed out on George Lewis’s Oraculum, Toshio Hosakawa, Three Essays, and two world premieres: Tansy Davies’s Song Horn and Enno Poppe’s Filz. Eleven out of the fifteen solo works still gave me much to experience, enjoy, and reflect upon. And if, unsurprisingly, some spoke to me more from a single hearing – each one was new to me – that does not necessarily reflect upon their ‘worth’. Indeed, it is quite likely to say more about me and my state of alertness than anything else. What probably goes without saying, yet should not, are the extraordinary virtuosity, musicality, and commitment shown by all of these soloists – not least coming on the morning immediately following a not inconsiderable concert of music by Rebecca Saunders and Harrison Birtwistle.

In the first two pieces, Georges Aperghsis’s Damespiel and Liza Lim’s The Green Lion Eats the Sun, I was struck by something at least akin to a ‘traditional’ conception of unbroken line, not least in performance, even when silence formed part of that line. The former, toccata-like, often high in pitch, with considerable, often thrilling, variation in dynamic range too, nevertheless contrasted strongly, interestingly with what seemed to me two contrasted voices, in near-consequential dialogue, in the latter, that impression not least owed to the two bells of the euphonium (one muted). Johannes Schöllhorn’s grisaille was slower, stiller, its navigation through the not quite frozen waters of cello harmonics again offering contrast with the ensuing Pasaka – Ein Märchen for piano, in which Benjamin Kobler had, in addition to an unquestionably demanding piano part, also to tell the story in words (irrespective of comprehension!) It had a beguiling innocence to it, the single(ish) piano line, shared between the hands, blossoming into something more complex, again toccata-like. (That perhaps often will go with the territory of works for instrumental solo.) Another work by Lim, Axis Mundi, again showed a keen sense (to me, at least) of dialogue, in this case between the lower range of the bassoon and something else, not quite to be straightforwardly assimilated to higher pitch. If I could not quite escape the sense of notespinning in John Zorn’s Merlin, for trumpet solo, Marco Blauuw’s performance proved quite mesmerising.

The second – and, for me, final – of the concert’s three parts alternated between Saunders and Poppe. Florentin Ginot’s double bass playing had impressed me enormously the night before, even amongst such a galaxy of instrumental talent; here it did so again in fury. Almost the entire range of the instrument seemed traversed within a few seconds, and that despite the relative leisure of the pace. That done, a dark heir to the Expressionist past revealed itself, without overt, or perhaps even covert, ‘influence’, but at the level of something deeper. I thought of Anselm Kiefer, but again that may just have been me. Poppe’s Haare for solo violin opened almost as if playing with a Bachian wedge opening, although it never quite was. One was made to listen, perhaps almost so as to ascertain what was not repetition. If that sounds quasi-minimalist, I am not sure that it was, but perhaps there was some sort of relationship there. I loved the wild excess of Hannah Weirich’s vibrato (which I presume to have been written in), suggestive almost of a theremin, not least in glissando passages. I was a little more at a loss with Poppe’s Fell for percussion, although again there was no gainsaying the quality of the performance. Either side of it fell another solo piano piece, Saunders’s shadow, and her Bite for solo bass flute. The piano piece, played by Ulrich Löffler, again had something of an intangible sense of association to ‘tradition’ – Stockhausen, perhaps? – without being determined by it. There was certainly no doubting its bold, substantial quality of utterance. The shadows of the bass flute were readily apparent, yet for shadows to have meaning, there must be light, and so there was, in a vivid creation, both compositional and performative (Helen Bledsoe) of chiaroscuro.

I think that, in the case of pretty much all of these pieces, we have probably now reached a stage at which the phrase ‘extended techniques’ has become superfluous. Composers and performers alike, perhaps audiences too, have ensured that, not least through occasions such as this.