ASMF/Wigglesworth - Sibelius, Nielsen, Wagner, and Mozart, 5 December 2020

St Martin-in-the-Fields

Sibelius: Belshazzar’s Feast: ‘Nocturne’
Nielsen, arr. Hans Abrahamsen: Three Piano Pieces, op.59, recomposed for ten instruments
Wagner: Siegfried-Idyll
Mozart: Symphony no.34 in C major, KV 338

Academy of St Martin in the Fields

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

‘Awakening’, aptly enough, was the theme of this post-lockdown concert from the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in the church where, for this orchestra, it all began. I only noticed that after the event and confess to having been thinking in different, if far from opposed, terms, related to the theatre. Music means many things at different times, to different people—and surely all the more so in times such as these. At any rate, a sign of musical light in London at the close of the first week of Advent was welcome indeed, not least given the typical accomplishment of the Academy’s playing, this time under Ryan Wigglesworth.


As a heretic who has always preferred Sibelius’s smaller pieces to his symphonies—perhaps one day they will ‘click’ with me—I was delighted to hear the ‘Nocturne’ from his incidental music to Belshazzar’s Feast in a spacious performance well judged for the church acoustic. One heard from the outset coolness and warmth in the Academy’s sound, both in timbre and harmony. Such balance was typical of the performance as a whole, Tchaikovskian inheritance apparent, yet neither overwhelming nor overwhelmed by Sibelian distinctiveness of voice. Scalar orientalism may have charmed, yet sounded rightly incidental (in the other sense). Here was a Nordic heart beating through out.


Hans Abrahamsen’s ‘recomposition’ of Carl Nielsen’s Three Piano Pieces had no intrinsic connection with the stage, yet sounded here very much as if it had. The first piece set the scene for quite a journey within only a few minutes. Quirky, colourful, yet with enough disorientation to retain a welcome enigmatic quality, it proved neither one thing (Nielsen) nor the other (Abrahamsen), albeit in a positive, alchemic sense: if not quite the magic of theatre, then certainly of performance, the latter here one of sensitivity and verve. The second proved similar yet different, a second act in miniature. Here a sense of kinship with Maskarade seemed stronger, but likewise tendencies in another, re-composer’s direction. Likewise, still more, in the third: whether that were a matter of work, performance, or my listening, I am not entirely sure. And does it matter? Some wind sounds, perhaps inevitably for such an ensemble, echoed Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony; by the same token, some emphatically did not. Music guards its mysteries.


Wagner’s Siegfried-Idyll is music with a complex relationship to the stage: it precedes the composition of the section of Siegfried from which it seems to ‘come’, written for a domestic stage—and a domestically staged event. To accord it its full title: ‘Tribschen Idyll with Fidi-Birdsong and Orange Sunrise as Symphonic Birthday Greeting Offered to his Cosima by her Richard, 1870.’ This lullaby of peace, joy, and world-inheritance, to employ the conventional leitmotif references from the opera yet ‘awakens’. It certainly did here, in a reading brisk and unsentimental which, at start, sounded a little as if Wigglesworth were trying to force Wagner’s melos into pre-conceived moulds. In truth, the opening is very difficult indeed to bring off; it takes the most experienced of Wagnerians, whether a Furtwängler or a Boulez, to do so with the ease it seems to demand. There was no denying, though, the excellence of the ASMF’s instrumental playing, nor later on of Wigglesworth’s shaping of Wagner’s climaxes, always more economical than one expects and all the more telling for that. There was, moreover, an almost Straussian after-glow to the final minutes; it would always have been welcome, but was all the more so set against the cold frigidity of the pandemical world outside.


Finally came Mozart: ever poised between concert hall, theatre, and indeed church. His Symphony no.34 opened with festal swagger that did not preclude relaxation. If anything, I felt Wigglesworth offered too much of the latter later in the first-movement exposition, somewhat losing momentum. It remained a joy, however, simply to hear this music once again. There was throughout a keenness to the woodwind that spoke, or better sang, of the opera house, leading to a coda to lift the darkest of spirits. Sometimes—often, with Mozart—C major can prove just the tonic. The Academy’s small forces reinforced the slow movement’s lineage in Salzburg serenades. Wweetness of string tone was especially welcome given the perversities we often suffer nowadays in this music. Polish and fire marked the finale: a Catherine wheel in the Salzburg night sky I missed so much this summer. There was, thank goodness, no fussiness to Wigglesworth’s direction, nor to the playing. And what playing it was!

Musikfest Berlin (6) – Hannigan/LSO/Rattle: Abrahamsen and Messiaen, 11 September 2019

Philharmonie

Hans Abrahamsen: let me tell you (2013)

Messiaen: Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà (1987-91)

Images: © Monika Karczmarczyk

Written for Barbara Hannigan and the Berlin Philharmonic, Hans Abrahamsen’s song-cycle, let me tell you, has garnered plentiful plaudits, including the 2016 Grawemeyer Prize. On a first hearing, it was not difficult to understand why, even if – a matter of taste, no more than that – its neoromanticism became for me at times a little wearing. For underlying a musical foreground whose somewhat saccharine language verges on the reactionary, structure and finely honed compositional craft are present and meaningful. The verbal text, drawn by the composer from a novella by Paul Griffiths whose vocabulary is restricted to the words spoken by Hamlet’s Ophelia, serves its purpose well as a springboard for song, though I cannot say that makes me eager to read the novella itself. There is, moreover, no doubting the work’s vocal qualities, ranging from intriguing reinvention of the Monteverdian genere concitato to a genuinely extraordinary relationship between soprano and instruments of similar or still higher range, in which colours echo, pierce, and fuse. Hannigan’s response was predictably outstanding, likewise the interplay between her voice and the LSO players, especially woodwind, tuned percussion, and violins, wisely guided by Simon Rattle. If I found a slight tentativeness to some of the playing in the very first song, that was soon forgotten – and may have been more a matter of adjustment to an acoustic very different from and far superior to the orchestra’s Barbican home. This was a performance, as it was a work, amounting to considerably more than the sum of its parts. And whilst I had my doubts during the performance, evidently not shared by an enthusiastic audience, on reflection I think the audience may well have been right.

It was Messiaen’s Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà that had been the real attraction for me, though, and a fine performance indeed it turned out to be. Even if I sometimes found myself missing the particular colours a French orchestra might have brought to this music – the Paris Opéra orchestra on Myung Whun Chung’s recording, for instance – there was again no doubting the all-round excellence of the LSO here. If the work has ever been treated to superior playing from massed flutes and percussion, I should be astonished; I doubt even that any performance will have matched those players here. Certainly the LSO wind brooked no dissent in the implacable, mystical opening ‘Apparition du Christ glorieux’. One could imagine the music transcribed for organ, yet never did the instruments imitate Messiaen’s beloved instrument; composer and performers alike were far too skilled for that. Rattle handled the twin imperatives of continuity and contrast in the ensuing ‘La constellation du Sagittaire’ with palpable understanding, paving the way surely for the surprises, even when one ‘knew’, of flute birdsong, superlatively despatched; mysterious violin harmonics; and Indian rhythms. If I found ‘L’Oiseau-Lyre et la Ville-Fiancée’ a little hard-driven – pretty much my sole cavil – it was rhythmically tight and vivid throughout, percussion of all varieties typically incisive. The apocalyptic cacophony of ‘Les élus marqués du sceau’ proved as mysterious, as inscrutable, as anything in Stockhausen.

Inscrutable in a very different way was the fifth movement, ‘Demeurer dans l’Amour’, the sweet ecstasy of its violins, Turangalîla and indeed Tristan reimagined, an object lesson in communication of sentiment without sentimentality. I was, moreover, fascinated to hear so clear an invitation from Messiaen, harmony notwithstanding, to listen intervallically: just as keen, just as meaningful as in the music of some forty years earlier. There was no doubting that this was the true heart, in more than one sense, of the work, balanced as it was by apocalyptic fervour on its other side, in ‘Les sept Anges aus sept trompettes’. Gareth Davies’s flute solo in ‘Et Dieu essuiera toute larme de leurs yeux’ was, to put it simply, perfectly judged.

Then came ‘Les étoiles et la Gloire’: the apocalypse once again, terrifying in that this might have been truly be the work of God or the Devil – and how could we know? Three sets of tubular bells (and three players), xylophone, glockenspiel, marimba, and so much else: a second heart, perhaps, to the work, even a heart of darkness. This listener emerged from it awestruck, as, in quite a different way, he did from the veritable dawn chorus of ‘Plusieus oiseaux des arbres de Vie’, woodwind onstage and beyond (au-delà?) There was no need for visibility in ‘Le chemin d I’Invisible’ when music rendered whoever He was so palpably present. The sense of completion, not just of this work, but (almost) of Messiaen’s musical life was keen in ‘Le Christ, lumière du Paradis’. Its kinship, from the opening chord, with the final movement of the early L’Ascension, ‘Prière du Christ montant vers son Père’, was clear, as was the reality that this was a different, if related, path to be taken. There was surely much theology as well as music in that thought – and prayer – alone. This was unquestionably – Messiaen tends no more to questioning than does Bach – a blessed, luminous, and in every sense sweet assurance.

Arditti Quartet - Clarke, Abrahmsen, Saunders, and Rihm, 31 October 2012

Wigmore Hall

 

James Clarke – String Quartet no.1 (2002-3)

Hans Abrahmsen – Quartet no.4 (2012, United Kingdom premiere)
Rebecca Saunders – Fletch (2012, United Kingdom premiere)
Wolfgang Rihm – String Quartet no.13 (2011)

Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)
Ralf Ehlers (viola)
Lucas Fels (cello)

 

Hurricane Sandy necessitated alterations to the programme of this concert. The New York-based JACK Quartet’s absence entailed postponement of the British premieres of James Clarke’s 2012-S for two string quartets and Mauro Lanza’s Der Kampf zwischen Karneval und Fasten for octet. In their place came Clarke’s first string quartet and Wolfgang Rihm’s thirteenth. Two British premieres, then, rather than four, but all the works were new to me, and Clarke’s work was the outlier in being almost a decade old.

Its arresting opening proved typically uncompromising in its violence. Considerable use is made of glissandi, post-Xenakis buzzing, glassy harmonics: but this is no mere catalogue of effects. Themes, if I may call them that, or motifs are flung between the four parts with visceral abandon – as they were in the Arditti Quartet’s commanding performance. Dogged insistence and something akin to variation were revealed as two sides of the same coin, a ‘duet’ between two violins almost beguiling, likewise its successor for viola and cello. And yes, this ultimately proved conversational in a quartet tradition one might trace back to its founder, Haydn.

 

Hans Abrahamsen’s fourth string quartet was commissioned in 2010 but took twenty years to write. I wish I could say I thought it worth the wait. Again, there is an arresting opening: high solo first violin harmonics intoning a chorale-like tune. Joined by the second violin, then the viola, and then very briefly the cello, all using harmonics, the process is repeated. A second hearing, then, though of course in knowledge of what has passed before. I was intrigued by dim echoes of Bartók and perhaps even the viol consort in the opening of the second movement, before it settled down into a quasi-minimalist mode of expression whose mild motor rhythms and tonal harmony sounded more suited to a television film score than a stand-alone concert piece. The third movement consciously echoes the first, or rather mirrors it, opening with a cello pizzicato solo passage, joined by viola (again pizzicato), and so on upwards, rounded off, again very briefly, with an utterance sul ponticello by the first violin. The process, again, is repeated. Likewise the fourth movement echoed the second, apparently ‘planned,’ according to the composer, ‘as a dark and heavy counterpart but it turned out to be like “babbling” music of a child’. Though I clearly was not on Abrahamsen’s wavelength, there could be no faulting the response of the Arditti players, as committed here as elsewhere.

 

Rebecca Saunders’s Fletch concluded the first half in what sounded to me far more typical Arditti territory. In the composer’s words:

Fletch, n. (archery); the feather placed on the arrow, providing it with the capacity of flight; the feathered vane towards the back of the arrow, used to stabilise during flight. Fletch is a furious ongoing exploration of a specific physical gesture and fragment of sound.

The physical quality of tone was vividly, viscerally communicated in work and performance. Glissandi, rapid crescendo, trills, and more combined to far more than the sum of their parts, betokening a fascinating exploration of the instruments and their capabilities as much as performing techniques. There was on a first hearing a satisfying formal arc, or perhaps better progression, which put me in mind – how or why, I cannot quite explain – of a neo-Lisztian symphonic poem. It was an instinctive reaction, doubtless, but perhaps that was in keeping with the physical immediacy of the piece.

 

Rihm’s thirteenth quartet had the second half to itself. It sounded as if from another world, or planet, its post-Bergian harmonic language and motivic development more ‘traditional’, though none the worse for that. Formal propulsion clearly grew out of the material with a rhythmic insistency that perhaps owed something to Stravinsky, even to Henze. The one-movement formal compression inevitably evoked echoes of Schoenberg, though the concentration rarely seemed as extreme as his. A chorale-like passage – again! – was played with neo-Romantic abandon, revelling in the richness of its harmonisation. Developing variation, its roots in Schoenberg and Brahms, still has a great deal to impart.