Salzburg Festival (2) - Motus Percussion/Sietzen: Grisey 24 July 2024

Kollegienkirche

Le Noir de l’Étoile

Christoph Sietzen, Leonhard Schmidinger, Nico Gerstmayer, Akisato Takeo, Miguel Llorente Gil, Lorenzo Manquillet (percussion)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

Having emerged from Georg Friedrich Haas’s Koma at the Mozarteum, the chance for a breath of fresh air and a quick beer in the shadow of Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s Kollegienkirche was a happy one, prior to entering the church for further musical liminality, in the form of Gérard Grisey’s Le Noir de l’Étoile from Motus Percussion, led by Christoph Sietzen. Although the two performances were not formally connected, save as part of the Festival’s Ouverture Spirituelle, it is difficult to believe there was not some intent in the scheduling; at any rate, it made for an illuminating journey to travel from the absolute darkness of Haas’s coma opera to the starry sky of Grisey’s work for six percussionists, tape, and electronics.

The skies have of course fascinating and inspired composers and other artists from the dawn of time, but there is something very much of its time to Grisey’s idea and realisation, resting as it does on the 1967 discovery of signals emitted by pulsars, a class of neutron star, residue of supernova explosions, whose spin is with regular rapidity picked up with every rotation. (For this, I am indebted to helpful programme notes by Jean-Pierre Liminet, whose introductory text is sometimes read out prior to performance, and Tim Rutherford-Johnson.) The science is fascinating, insofar as I understand it, and played a crucial, indeed determining role in the conception, born of Grisey’s friendship whilst teaching at Berkeley with the astrophysicist Joseph Silk. But ultimately, it is the musical work and its performance that we experience, albeit with the intervention of a pulsar recording that seems both to confirm and to correct the dizzying array of untuned percussion we have previously heard. 

Tempi and time interacted on an extraordinary musical journey – Stockhausen, who inevitably comes to mind, eat our heart out – they formed and were framed by, from now to the Vela pulsar (12,000 years old) to that of 0329 + 54 in the constellation Camelopardalis (5 million). The relationship between something so much larger than humanity and the human virtuosity that realises and discovers lay at the heart of an experience that was nonetheless experienced as mesmerising, all-encompassing ritual. Pulse and pulsars came and went. Sounds shifted as if in a reinvention of old Klangfarbenmelodie. Time, as in, say, Wagner or Messiaen, seemed to be felt, even to move differently: ironically, perhaps, for something founded conceptually and as work and performance upon precise measurement. The coup de théâtre, visual as well as musical, of the striking and spinning of the central musical disc, the work’s only note with pitch, seemed in itself both a visualisation and auralisation in microcosm of idea and instantiation.

Motus proved estimable successors to Les Percussions de Strasbourg, who gave the first performance in 1991 directed by the composer (as in their recording). Then, as now – as per Grisey’s instructions – the six percussionists were placed around the audience, as if in orbit around us, or at least their sounds were. The intensity of musical understanding and listening between them was just as impressive as the overt virtuosity heard aplenty This was the first concert for which I have been handed earplugs on arrival at the venue, but they were quite unnecessary for me, anyway, though perhaps matters were slightly different for those seated closer to one of the performers. I did not notice anyone using them, but then nor was I looking. For this music of the spheres, both nothing and everything was new under the sun(s).

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.

BPO/Petrenko and Wood: Stravinsky, Zimmermann, Rachmaninov, and Grisey, 15 February 2020

Philharmonie

Stravinsky: Symphony in Three Movements

Zimmermann: Alagoana: Caprichos Brasilieiros

Rachmaninov: Symphonic Dances, op.45

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

Grisey: Le Noir de l’Étoile

Raphael Haeger, Simon Rössler, Jan Schlichte, Wieland Welzel, Matthias Kessler, Laura Melero Beviá (percussionists)

James Wood (conductor)

Reviewing the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony last month, I referred to the ‘monstrously metronomic’ quality of its opening march, ‘by design: of course’. I might almost have used the same phrase for the opening of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements from the same forces, save for the implication of life in ‘monstrous[ly]’. ‘Brutal’ would perhaps be better here, for whatever humans were perpetrating the wartime images said to have inspired the composer’s musical gestures, they seemed to have become practically disembodied, automated in their robotic quality. Not only in this first movement, but certainly here, it was rhythm above all that had become dramatically generative, music thereby projecting its own motion picture. There was as much darkness, moreover, in the cracks between the music’s chamber dialogue and in its self-automated retransformation into fuller orchestral music. In what sense, however, is this a symphony, is this a symphonic movement? That, probably rightly, remained as unclear as ever. Balletic? Perhaps; it certainly had an iron structure that it does not always. The second movement was possessed of an uneasy yet – in its way – delightful interiority: another form of balletic self-automatic, Marie-Pierre Langlamet’s harp here as crucial as Majella Stockhausen’s piano in the first movement. A mechanistic brutalism that cannot fail to voice historical and political resonances once more characterised the finale, the goose-stepping soldiers of whom Stravinsky spoke coming vividly to death, all the more so for the music’s infernal catchiness. Desiccated woodwind clucking showed how an allegedly Haydnesque gesture could be transformed into something so dramatically lifeless. Repetition and even transformation, yet without development; the mysterious fugal combination, at last, of solo piano and harp: such were the Stravinskian riddles brought so vividly to our attention, yet rightly never solved.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s ‘ballet suite’ – actually a ballet in its own right, for there is no further material – Alagoanoa: Caprichos Brasilieros followed. The first of its five movements, the Overture, benefited from similar rhythmic precision, albeit precision which could now be bent, indeed swung – and its was. Delightfully grotesque yet ultimately seductive instrumental combinations shone through, Hendrik Heilmann’s harpsichord instructively, even wittily, quizzical. The following ‘Sertanejo’ likewise caught a fine balance between observation and involvement, all the while dancing – or being danced. More ‘human’ than Stravinsky, yet not necessarily less inscrutable, there was something undeniably chilling to its weird climax. Foreboding in the ‘Saubade’ was founded on, yet not restricted to, cello and double bass pizzicato. Repeated guitar figures; strange woodwind solos; percussion machinations, tuned or untuned: all contributed to an unease both general and specific. The ‘Cabachio’ was jazzier and relished as such, bass pizzicato once more put to excellent use, Wenzel Fuchs’s clarinet solo; yet compositional and performative control necessarily also emphasised distance, even alienation. A hallucinatory interlude seemed to foretell the suspense prior to brutal climax in the finale. Its fallout – this was, after all, music for the nuclear age – spoke both humanly and enigmatically. Die Soldaten lay just around the corner.

It was welcome to hear a performance of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances that did not sentimentalise the score, though whether the music might sometimes have yielded a little more will remain mostly a matter of taste. Certain exaggerations will have overstepped the mark for some. At any rate, Petrenko seemed to understand rhythmic precision rather than harmony as the ultimate key, not only in the first movement but throughout. Even the string sound spoke with poignant alienation of a composer long in hopeless exile: familiar sounds, yet uprooted. The opening of the second movement had more than a hint of Debussy both to its brass fanfares and waltzing response. Some will perhaps have found the orchestral solos a little distant, but I rather liked the continuing sense of exile. Far better this, certainly, than the sort of muddy chaos one might hear from the likes of Valery Gergiev. Petrenko declined to coerce the finale into answering questions, thereby permitting it to ask a few more of its own. Materials, even the composer’s life and career, were once again revisited from a different standpoint: enigmatic and, like Stravinsky and Zimmermann, not without reference to a brutal external world.

There followed a bonus downstairs in the Philharmonie’s foyer. Six percussionists, four from the Berlin Philharmonic, two from the orchestra’s Karajan-Akademie, and James Wood performing Gérard Grisey’s Le Noir de l’Étoile. Inspired, as we heard from an introductory recorded text (Andreas Sparberg) by the 1967 discovery by a young astronomer of, to quote the composer ‘a rapidly varying radio signal, in the form of periodic impulses 1.3 seconds apart’, this performance, aided by simple yet powerful lighting and projection, seemed to tread a line between the initial suspicion that the irregularity betokened signals from an extra-terrestrial civilisation and the subsequent discovery of ‘a truth … just as surprising: the signals were being emitted by a pulsar, the fantastic compact residue created by the supernova explosions that long ago disintegrated the massive stars.’ We listened intent, following the signals, trying to make sense of them, making connections that may or may not have been there – not so very unlike what we had done in the evening’s earlier performances. Just as a pattern, be it rhythmic, timbral, spatial, emerged, it transformed itself so as to confound lazy and even informed expectations. There was an undeniably powerful sense of forces beyond our comprehension at play: like the gods of old, yet unlike them too. This was a vision, an experience, not so much without hope as beyond it. Our world would do well to remind itself more often of such concerns; that is, if it is not too late already.

Musikfest Berlin (11) - Karajan Academy/Mälkki: Neuwirth and Grisey, 18 September 2019

Kammermusiksaal

Image © Monika Karczmarczyk

Neuwirth: Aello: ballet mécanomorphe (2016-17)

Grisey: Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (1998)

Emmanuel Pahud (flute)

Juliet Fraser (soprano)

Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

All good things must come to an end. This year’s Musikfest Berlin has been a very good thing indeed. I had hoped to go to Rusalka in concert performance to round things off, but alas that was not to be. This concert of works by Olga Neuwirth and Gérard Grisey, however, proved if anything a more fitting way to conclude, in performances from the young players of the Berlin Philharmonic’s Karajan Academy, under the wise leadership of Susanna Mälkki, to rival those of many a new music ensemble.

I first heard Neuwirth’s Aello as part of the Swedish Chamber Orchestra’s Brandenburg Project’, in which new works were commissioned to accompany Bach’s six concerti grossi. Then I wrote that it was ‘to my ears, by far the strongest of the new works’. Two years later, my ears found at least as much to fascinate and to enjoy. Having Emmanuel Pahud on flute (later bass flute) is unlikely ever to be a bad thing; it certainly was not here, in a performance of expressive virtuosity. As soloist, or first among equals, he was joined by two muted trumpets (piccolo in B-flat and in C), and three first violins, all at the flute pitch of 443 Hz; three second violins (431 Hz); two violas (443); two cellos (450); synthesiser (433, with guest artist, Majella Stockhausen); mechanical typewriter (Olivetti Lettera 22); hotel reception bell; wine-glass, with unknown (to me) liquid content, at pitch e’’; and small triangle with milk-frother. The machine element, then, is – and, in performance, was – important, acknowledgement no doubt of recent, to my mind highly regrettable, tendencies in Bach performance, from 1950s ‘sewing machine Baroque’ onwards. There was nothing, however, puritanical to what we heard, quite the contrary. Not only were there ghosts aplenty in the machine; they were having fun. Rhythms were tight, in a good way, facilitating metrical, melodic, and harmonic turns. Memories of Bach, often in the foreground, offered a framework for listening, in a fashion that perhaps might recall Berio, albeit without straightforward, evident ‘influence’. One listened, was aided to listen, on several levels at once. A closing climax both mechanistic and thrilling still left space for a fine surprise, whose secret I shall not spoil here, on the final note.

Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, for which the players were joined by the ever-excellent Juliet Fraser, made for an intriguing contrast, evolution perhaps replacing mechanism. (Does that implicit contrast not already, however, beg several questions?) A pattern of almost, yet never quite, imperceptible openings – the first, in the Prélude, surely most so, and not only because one’s ears have yet to adjust – sets up such expectation; though expectations are there to be, if not confounded, then at least developed and questioned. Fraser’s emphatic intonation of her opening pitches received ‘backing’ that might almost have seemed ambient, until one listened. Process was clear: settling and unsettling, almost yet not quite according to one’s strategy of listening. How a voice’s, or rather this particular voice’s, timbre might be echoed, continued, by a trumpet or a clarinet was not the least of the mysteries to be savoured rather than resolved. Tuning, for instance in the Interlude between the first and second songs, continued to unsettle, somehow being both right and wrong simultaneously, the harmonic spectrum working its wonders, yet working them against an occasionally nagging backdrop of what we, or at least I, otherwise ‘knew’. By the time we had reached the fourth song, ‘La mort de l’humanité’, from the Epic of Gilgamesh, I began to wonder whether the change effected on my listening might have negative consequences for returning to the music I love, and perhaps know, so well. A brief, pointless fantasy, no doubt, yet testament to the transformational qualities of work and performance, whose form seemed to have something both natural and magical to them. We had observed, heard, perhaps experienced the deaths of an angel, of civilisation, of the voice, and now of humanity, but that did not necessarily seem to have been a bad thing. There will always, after all, remain ghosts in the machine; or will there?

Salzburg Festival (6) - Gheorghiu/ORF SO/Pascal - Grisey, 16 August 2017

Kollegienkirche

© Salzburger Festspiele / Marco Borrelli

Les Espaces acoustiques

Maria Gheorghiu (viola)

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Maxime Pascal (conductor)

Rarely have I been so inundated with messages of envy than when I let friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter know that I was attending this performance of Gérard Grisey’s cycle of six pieces, Les Espaces acoustiques. Unlike many of them, I am very much a Grisey novice. For some reason, I was unable to attend a (relatively) recent performance of this work in London; likewise, other Grisey performances have not fallen at good, or even possible, times for me. I was therefore especially keen to begin to discover what all the fuss was about, and am most grateful to the Salzburg Festival for offering such an opportunity, not least in Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s glorious Kollegienkirche, which underlined the quasi-liturgical nature of the work – or at least one way in which it might be received.

Mario Gheorghiu’s performance of the first piece, a ‘Prologue’ for solo viola, captured, even instigated, that sense of visual and aural theatre very well, preaching to us, as it were, from the spotlit pulpit. The simplicity of Grisey’s opening material, phrases undergoing only very gradual transformation, certainly had something of an ancient, though not only an ancient, ritual to it. Coming to the work blind – or perhaps ‘deaf’ – I thought also of a slowly evolving fractal display. Whatever the truth or nonsense of that, Gheorghiu and Grisey imparted a true sense of the exploratory, albeit on an almost defiantly unhurried timescale. At some point, I realised that what I was hearing had undergone an almost complete transformation from what I had begun hearing, but I could not put my finger on when I might have begun to realise such a thing.

Gheorghiu wandered down within the wall, still audible, no longer seen, in order to join the orchestra for the second piece, ‘Périodes’, for seven musicians. Other string players joined gradually: double bass first, if I remember correctly. Again, transformation was slow, yet unmistakeable. There were here, though, I think, definite milestones, or perhaps it was more that my ears were becoming more accustomed to style, method, even idea. A duet between violin and viola, both apparently ‘tuning’, seemed a little obvious, but I suspect that was deliberate, prompting one to ask questions about expectation. Or was that just my own, almost metatheatrical, preoccupation being brought to the table? The ritualist element seemed to intensify in ‘Partiels’, for eighteen musicians. Many sonorities and harmonies were familiar in one sense, and yet, in contrast, not necessarily so. Spectralist technique seemed almost to reinvent a Straussian waterfall or Messiaenesque birdsong. Perhaps, again, that was just me; for context, again, was quite different, similarity seeming incidental if unmistakeable. I was certainly fascinated once again by the realisations that material had been transformed out of all recognition, or so it seemed. The non-cymbal-clash at the close again seemed all too predictable, but perhaps that is the point. Is it intended humourously? Or is that how we deal with unknown ritual, as in Stockhausen, with nervous laughter?

Following the interval, the fourth piece, ‘Modulations’, for thirty-three musicians, sounded perhaps still closer – but still only –er – to Messiaen. There was perhaps even a sense of éclat suggesting (to me) that pupil of Messiaen who will not be mentioned here. Any such (idle?) thoughts, though, were soon more or less banished, or at least subdued, by the spectralist framework within which this particular celestial banquet unfolded. ‘Transitoires’, for large orchestra seemed to develop from that movement with an expectation that was not entirely (at least for me) un-Wagnerian. Earlier onomatopoeia without an object – a forest perhaps? – was now set against and combined with a darker, deeper menace. There is clearly an extraordinary simplicity to what one hears at one level, but it is equally clear that that is not the only level at which one can, perhaps should, listen to this music. Around it, a fractal halo of sound both heightens and questions ‘familiarity’.

With the ‘Epilogue’ for four solo horns and large orchestra we return also to solo viola. That phantasmagorical ‘waterfall’ sounded here both exultant and an agent of disintegration, perhaps even tragedy. If descending the mountain is not a mirror image of the ascent, then it hardly would be; ask Strauss. Was the final drumming arbitrary or tragic? Why should it be either/or? The lady seated next to me probably came closer than any of my musings, when she turned and exclaimed: ‘Die ganze Kirche klingt!’ The church did itself resound, but it would not have done so without outstanding performances from all concerned. Maxime Pascal’s conducting of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra gave the impression, which I have no reason to doubt, of having mastered not only the detail of the score, but of its connections, and of the challenge of communicating all that and more. The players’ commitment was similarly beyond doubt. This is just what festival music-making should be: something quite out of the ‘ordinary’.

My immediate reaction was that I should now like to hear another performance, having just begun to establish what might be going on. I hope that my review will be taken in that spirit. I doubt, at this point, that I am about to become a devotee of Grisey’s music, but who knows? There are many instances of composers whose music it has taken several hearings for me to even to begin to respond to it; on the face of it, there is no reason why Grisey should not join their company. We shall see – or rather, we shall hear.