JACK Quartet - Carter, Aguilar, Lachenmann, Boulez, Houben, Webern, Cage, Wulliman, and Cheung, 22 March 2025

Wigmore Hall

Carter: String Quartet no.5
Eduardo Aguilar: HYPER
Lachenmann: String Quartet no.3, ‘Grido’

Boulez: Livre pour quatuor: 1b
Eva-Maria Houben: Nothing More
Boulez: Livre pour quatuor: 3c
Webern: Six Bagatelles, op.9
Cage: String Quartet in Four Parts
Boulez: Livre pour quatuor: 1a
Austin Wulliman: Escape Rites
Anthony Cheung: Twice Removed
Boulez: Livre pour quatuor: 2

Christopher Otto, Austin Wulliman (violins)

John Pickford Richards (viola)

Jay Campbell (cello)

From a full day – three concerts – of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music for string quartet, I was able to attend the last two of the JACK Quartet’s Wigmore Hall appearances. Alas, I had to miss most of two pieces in the third, both from 2024, by Austin Wulliman and Anthony Cheung. It would be unfair to comment further, other than to say I should be keen to put that right, should the opportunity present itself. Otherwise, the JACK Quartet showed itself once again to be an outstanding ensemble of broad musical sympathies, encompassing works at what we might consider the modernist end of the spectrum, but also others, which have points of contact with the likes of Boulez and Lachenmann, as well as Cage, yet also have quite different concerns. 

Carter’s Fifth (and final) Quartet opened proceedings for me, as finely crafted in the JACK’s performance as this masterpiece is on the page. From the outset, one was left in no doubt that every note counted. Patterns, progressions, and contours in sound were communicated as readily as in an outstanding performance of a Haydn quartet. One felt as well as heard – as throughout the day – emotional breadth and depth, as well as energy, rhetorical eloquence, and intellect. Carter’s metric modulation provided the turning points, the moments of decision, in transitional material. His indications underlay not only tempi in the narrower sense, but in a fuller understanding of character: for instance, ‘Lento espressivo’, ‘Presto scorrevole’ (the latter word a favourite of Carter’s), or ‘Adagio sereno’. In high-lying violin harmonics, in a magical reinvention of viola pizzicato, in a conversation between two or three of the instruments (and players), or in the four coming together in time-honoured fusion of harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, and attack, this was the keenest, most captivating of quartet music. 

Eduardo Aguilar’s ten-minute HYPER (2021) followed, beginning almost inaudible on the first violin, yet fast becoming not only audible, but vividly present across the quartet, pitch gradually discernible in the gathering of a whirlwind. Then came another—in another direction. (I was going to say the opposite direction, but that would, I think, present a false binary.) Tempi shifted and transformed, not ‘like’ Carter, but holding a potential point in common. So did other parameters and other, less definable concerns: intriguingly including a sense of ease or effort, speaking perhaps to some, indefinable sense of subjectivity and/or objectivity. At the close, the players gave up their instruments, though continued to play with their bows, two walking into the audience and making music with and into the air. 

Lachenmann’s ‘Grido’ Quartet immediately showed the players once more fully inside the idiom: language, yes, but also a broader sensibility and strategy. There was at the opening something of a ‘story so far’ impression: both to Lachenmann’s previous quartet writing and even to the history of the genre more broadly. It invited and, if one accepted, compelled us to listen in a performance with a strong sense of discovery. Dynamic and other fluctuations – pitch, for instance, through what one might have thought vibrato, yet only rarely was – grabbed and led us on our journey as much as more overt musical gesture, in a neat-half-hour of enormous intensity of musical expression. This was, without question, a German heart and mind at work: ever-becoming, on multiple levels. At the close, one felt, as one might with Webern or Nono, that one was hearing differently, more clearly. 

In the second concert, movements from Boulez’s Livre pour quatuor framed a wider exploration, involving not only those works I was unable to hear but also Eva-Maria Houben, Webern, and Cage. Webern stood behind the other three: ironically, perhaps, for one the brevity of whose music is so celebrated (if never really the point). Here, his op.9 Six Bagatelles sounded, far from inappropriately, as much as backward glance to German Romanticism as Boulez’s ‘threshold’ for modernity. Each of his six movements said everything, and yet each said something different. This was not compression, but rather a paradoxical (or dialectical) superfluity in which not a note, not a sigh, not a Viennese dance inflection, was anything but necessary. Mahler sounded more present than ever. 

Houben’s Nothing More (2019) took what one might, in the broad rather than the US American sense, call a minimalist route from Webern (from Cage too, I think). There was nowhere to hide, not that anyone should have wished to. Precision was all in work and performance. Much playing was, if not at the limits of audibility, not so far away from them. This, one felt, not entirely unlike Lachenmann, was a way into listening ‘itself’. 

The glassy non-vibrato of Cage’s 1949-50 Quartet suggested, similarly, both a fiddling and a viol consort past, complemented by the music’s melodies and harmony. (It was a little surprising to find myself thinking of harmony in Cage, but that doubtless points to my preconceptions, not to his reality.) The apparent simplicity of its four movements is real enough, but again seems as much an invitation to listen and to listen differently, as a quality in itself. Its related chastity – rarely, if ever, does Cage (for me) sound erotic – sounded, like that of the Five Melodies I heard earlier this month, closer than one might expect to the folksiness of ‘populist’ Copland. In both cases, though, that probably conceals more than it reveals. The closing Quodlibet came as relief in every sense.   

Boulez’s more-or-less contemporary Livre pour quatuor (1948-9), long more or less unheard, seems to be regaining popularity again. It seemed to me a pity not to hear all of it, with or without the reconstructed completion of the fourth movement, but a fragmentary approach has always been part of its performance tradition—and some would say also speaks in some way to essence. Hearing parts of it interspersed with other music heightened its contrasting qualities and perhaps aided reflection on its particularities within Boulez’s œuvre too. At the outset, it may have been the relative austerity – classicism perhaps, though that raises at least as many questions as it answers – that spoke, especially if one had in mind from preceding works the explosive qualities of the Second Piano Sonata, or indeed the eroticism of Les Soleil des Eaux. And yet, even in movement 1b, a veiled sense of kinship with late Beethoven as allegedly annihilated in the Sonata came through in (smaller) fragmentary manifestation of its dialectical contrasts. 3c brought greater emotional, Webernesque intensity, aptly preceding the Bagatelles, whilst 1a at the beginning of the second half sounded more variegated, partly in reaction to the different, arguably more essential austerity of the Cage. The second movement, with which the concert closed, engaged itself – and us – in a process of seemingly infinite, centrifugal transformation, perhaps not only a quartet but a world in itself.

LSO/Volkov - Lachenmann and Beethoven, 28 November 2024

Barbican Hall

Lachenmann: My Melodies (Music for Eight Horns and Orchestra)
Beethoven: Symphony no.7 in A major, op.92

LSO Horns
London Symphony Orchestra
Ilan Volkov (conductor)

Images: Mark Allan

This concert was the latest casualty of François-Xavier Roth’s absence from the concert platform. Whilst Ilan Volkov, another conductor with considerable experience in both new and older music, made good sense as replacement, it was difficult not to feel losses of connection in programming concept and, to a lesser extent, between conductor and orchestra (if only through Roth’s long association with the LSO). 

First up was My Melodies by Helmut Lachenmann, who had celebrated his eighty-ninth birthday the day before. Eight horn players (Diego Incertis Sanchez, Timothy Jones, Angela Barnes, Jonathan Moloney, Katu Woolley, Annemarie Federle, Richard Watkins, and Ben Goldscheider) were seated at the front, encircling the conductor, in front of the strings. Volkov offered a brief introduction, with musical examples: welcome as far as it went, though it did not go beyond identification of a few musical figures. What we used to call extended techniques, which have long since passed into common instrumental practice, elicited baffling, uproarious laughter from sections of the audience, some of whom proceeded to leave, both then and throughout the actual performance. It is certainly not the case that Lachenmann and his music lack humour, but it is not really to be found there, at least not intrinsically. Perhaps that was why Volkov forewent further analysis, understandably if so. 

The LSO sounded in its element for the opening éclat, razor sharp, full of colourful, and ably guided by Volkov, if perhaps without quite the sense of what was going on beneath the surface Roth might have conveyed. (I wonder whether it may in part also have been the difficult Barbican acoustic, to which Roth would have been more accustomed.) Even when the horns played together, as often they did, forming a single ‘macro horn’, parts as well as sum were apparent through the necessary workings of sound. Passages of stillness in motion were equally given their due. I loved the interplay with the orchestra, seemingly incited and infected, and vice versa, ‘conventional’ sounds coming across all the more freshly: dialectically rendered anew, even in a single piano note or chord, or harp arpeggios. The impression of wandering in pitch, even when objectively it was not, fascinated and further incited. Sometimes, a horn echo sounded, miraculously, as if it from the distance, though again clearly it did not. This was a performance that could be heard and felt viscerally and spatially, lines darting across the orchestra, not unlike, say, Webern or Boulez, albeit less geometrically. It was exhilarating, confounding, and yes, inspiring; but equally, there was an unmistakeable quality of Romantic solitude, even loneliness. Through the horns in particular, Lachenmann showed himself once again an heir to Schumann and Caspar David Friedrich, as well as to Nono and the postwar avant garde.

To follow My Melodies with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony made excellent sense then. Volkov’s reading had its moments, yet, save for an excellent Allegretto, did not quite seem to have settled. The first movement was a case in point, as indeed was its introduction: expectant, yet lacking a sense really of heading anywhere. Some of the LSO’s playing was strangely abrasive: by ‘period’ design, I imagine, far closer at any rate to the world of John Eliot Gardiner than that of Colin Davis. The exposition blazed rather than blared and had a stronger sense of form, as did the rest of the movement, though it still lacked that necessary goal orientation. The second movement, by contrast, was given as if in a single breath, with a keen sense of expanding from a chamber ensemble, and darkly developmental throughout. The scherzo and trio seemed to have exchanged characteristics: the former at times, again seemingly by design, turning strangely inward, save for on its more convincing second reprise; the latter possessed of considerable strength. The finale went where it needed to, yet never quite took flight, dogged from beginning to end. I have certainly heard worse, but I have also heard better.

Quatuor Diotima - Ligeti, Lachenmann, and Brahms, 19 October 2023

Pierre Boulez Saal

Ligeti: String Quartet no.1, ‘Métamorphoses nocturnes’
Lachenmann: String Quartet no.3, ‘Grido’
Brahms: String Quartet no.2 in A minor, op.51 no.2

Yun-Peng Zhao, Léo Marillier (violins)

Franck Chevalier (viola)

Alexis Descharmes (cello)

Another splendid string quartet recital in Berlin, to rival or better to complement that I heard last week in a different venue, the Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal, from the Quatuor Ébène. One of the mysteries of the musical world is the seeming inability of French symphony orchestras to match those who might be their peers in German- and English-speaking countries. (In some ways, French opera orchestras seem to fare better.) One explanation I have often heard lies in French conservatoire training, where orchestral performance plays little or no role, neglected in favour of a more or less exclusive focus on solo and chamber playing. That may or may not be the case; certainly no one has ever claimed France lacked excellent solo and chamber musicians. These two quartets, the Ébène and Diotima are a case in point, unquestionably among the finest ensembles in the world, with approaches to music-making that are anything but off-the-shelf, very much their own, and with programming to match. 

Ligeti is being heard a little more than usual during his centenary, but a work such as his First Quartet, ‘Métamorphoses nocturnes’, would in any case always be central to this ensemble’s repertoire; indeed, a recording was released on Pentatone earlier this year (with the Second Quartet and the earlier Andante and Allegretto). The players immediately conveyed the mood as well as notes of the opening upward slithering, melodies above sounding with Romantic intensity. Bartók’s ghost – Kurtág once called this Bartók’s Seventh Quartet – was often apparent, not least rhythmically—and crucially, in that rhythms were never merely rhythms but rather inseparable from melody. Quicksilver changes of mood, sometimes in transition, sometimes in abrupt cut-off, were vividly characterised: ask someone to guess the marking for the section marked ‘Adagio, mesto’ and that might be just what (s)he would come up with. Silences told in an almost Beckettian fashion, hinting at the necessity yet something at least approaching the impossibility of speaking, singing, or playing freely. Machines came to life. Notes flew off the page with undeniable physical impact. The waltz movement or section emerged with a sardonicism worthy of Prokofiev and, as throughout, such ears for contrasting textures that at times one might almost have fancied a larger ensemble to be playing. The last few minutes brought the piece together and concluded, in an almost ‘traditional’ way, with not only a nod to Bartók but, in their riot of invention, perhaps also to Haydn. 

For all its radicalism, indeed in many ways on account of it, Lachenmann’s Third Quartet could also be heard as taking its place in such a tradition. The Diotima had clearly studied the composer’s notes carefully – without doing so, the piece would surely be unplayable, or at least incomprehensible – whilst also bringing their own imagination and insights. On the one hand, the array of new sounds might give arise to all manner of strange, unworldly associations – extra-terrestrial chatter, perhaps even a game of cosmic table-tennis – or one might, using one’s eyes, less fancifully but with equal incompletion, speak more technically, say of ‘legno flautando whilst moving the bow between the bridge and the left-hand figure’. ‘Gasping’, Lachenmann’s own term, ‘a very strong, almost explosive crescendo up-bow cut off so abruptly by the suddenly intervening application of a left-hand finger to the respective string, lifting the bow at the same time … comparable to a tongue ram on a flute, or a recording of a pizzicato played backwards,’ could not have sounded more like human breath if it had been. Yet not for one moment did this sound as a string of ‘effects’; rather, at-times Stockhausen-like whimsy was projected with Schoenbergian concentration (in more than one sense). And the near silences inevitably brought to mind, without thoughts of imitation, Lachenmann’s own teacher, Nono. Its various sections may not be movements as such, but their structural function was communicated and felt. For if this were almost a textbook case of musique concrète instrumentale, in which one might swear electronics or other means were employed unless one knew they were not, it was highly theatrical too, albeit in the almost classical theatre of the musical imagination. 

With Brahms, so much began; and/or with Beethoven, or Bach, or Monteverdi, or… At any rate, Schoenberg’s now slightly hackneyed yet still necessary ‘Brahms the Progressive’ was represented in an equally gripping account of his Second String Quartet, its first movement febrile and lyrical not only by turn but often simultaneously. Counterpoint, developing variation, and darkly Romantic vehemence when it came gave rise to a not entirely dissimilar sense of metamorphosis such as we had heard in both Ligeti and Lachenmann. A post-Schubertian second movement (the ‘post-’ as important as the Schubert) was no more comfortable than the Ébène’s Schubert had been; the shock of sudden outbursts, themselves owing something to Schubert’s example, was second only to an overarching sense of discovery, tonal areas all possessed of their own character and colour, albeit interconnected. The players captured expertly the unusual character of the third movement, here taking after Mendelssohn as well as Schubert, though with half-lights (perhaps ‘half-darknesses’ would be better?) that could only be Brahms. The central ‘Allegretto vivace’, if close to anyone, would perhaps approach late Beethoven, and so it sounded here. It is tempting to call the sense of purpose in the final movement Beethovenian; certainly, it abounds in dialectical relationships that ultimately strengthen. Equally impressive was the communication of demands both horizontal and vertical, not in some ‘theoretical’ sense, whatever that may mean, but as a temporal drama that foreshadows Schoenberg, Webern, and many others: Brahms the progressive indeed. 

For a refreshing and spirited encore, we returned to Ligeti, to an arrangement for string quartet of the first of his Six Bagatelles for wind quintet.

Aimard/ Gürzenich Orchestra/Roth:.‘Alleyn Freyheit: Eine Beethoven-Séance’ – Mundry, Beethoven, Lachenmann, Filidei, and Zimmermann, 10 February 2020

Philharmonie, Cologne

Images: Holger Talinski

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

All music once was new: uncontroversial statement, one might have thought, however much one sometimes imagines having heard its particular strains before. ‘Es klang so alt und war doch so neu!’ as Hans Sachs muses to Walther of the latter’s melody. New music needs, after all, to be performed if not as if it were old music, then with at least as much commitment and understanding, both ‘in itself’ and of whence it has come. A celebrated concert, entirely Beethoven’s music, with no fewer than four world premieres, took place on 22 December 1808 at the Theater an der Wien, Beethoven both playing and conducting. How might we have heard it? We can never know – and probably should not want to, not least on account of what seems, given but a single rehearsal, to have been an unsurprisingly poor orchestral performance. We faint-hearted would-be-modernists can only marvel, however, at a programme that ran: Symphony no.6 (premiere); Ah, perfido; Mass in C major, ‘Gloria’; Piano Concerto no.4 (premiere); Symphony no.5 (premiere); Mass in C major, ‘Sanctus and Benedictus’; solo piano improvisation; Choral Fantasia (premiere).

There have been occasional repetitions of the programme of this particular ‘academy concert’, which experience will of course be entirely different from that of its first audience. Cologne, however, has presented something quite different for the composer’s anniversary year, a ‘new Beethoven Academy’, entitled ‘Alleyn Freyheit: Eine Beethoven-Séance’. The city’s Gürzenich Orchestra, Pierre-Laurent-Aimard, and François-Xavier Roth, invited us to this séance of freedom with what, through the offices of infidelity, may actually have proved in some senses a more faithful or at least imaginative recreation of its spirit. We were told nothing of the music to be performed other than its composers – and that pieces by Isabel Mundry and Francesco Filidel would receive their first performances. What we had heard would be revealed to us only at the end, on a programme insert to be collected as we left the hall. With that in mind, I have uniquely placed details at the close rather than the opening of this review, following not only that chronology but also that of Debussy in naming his piano Préludes. The impatient or merely curious are of course free to skip the following paragraphs, but I thought it might be more valuable to record my impressions as they came to me rather than to edit with inevitable hindsight. I thus took notes during the performance and shall make do with as little editing as possible, doing little more than turn them into full sentences (usually). The reader will have to take my word for it that I correctly identified Beethoven’s scores and matched composers to music. works by Helmut Lachenmann’s and Bernd Alois Zimmermann I knew; the others I could not possibly. However, after a little metaphorical head-scratching, I worked out that Isabel Mundry’s music – orchestral fragments, as I learned later on – was interspersed with Beethoven and Lachenmann. For what it is worth, I have also refrained from reading interviews and notes in the actual programme, although I shall certainly take a look after posting this.

A large orchestra, soloist, and conductor having assembled onstage, it was perhaps surprising – although what here would qualify as unsurprising – for the concert to open to the strains of the Moonlight Sonata, yet from afar. It made sense, though, if this were to be a retrospective appreciation of the composer, for this was not only from afar. A second pianist and Aimard began to collaborate with what we had heard – recorded, or was it? and for the soloist as such to assume his proper role. Immediately memories, ears, the imagination started to play tricks – as did orchestral percussion. Musicians turning, bowing their heads, and so on acknowledged the billing of choreographer Jörg Weinöhl. The orchestra grew, though it took longer for relatively conventional – non-extended? – techniques to be employed. There was no doubting, however, the éclat of Lachenmann’s contribution, nor of the orchestra’s performance, gradation of attacks and resonance both precise and visceral, waves of sound passing across the orchestra so as to send shivers down the spine.

A change in lighting (Bernd Purkrabek) heralded something different: a new piece, so it seemed, although not for long. [This, to avoid confusion, was the second of Mundry’s Fragments, Lachenmann having followed Beethoven.] It used both pianos and orchestra, calling on six horns and two oboes to stand; at least the choreography did. Then suddenly, without warning came something familiar yet strange: the introduction to the first movement of Beethoven’s First Symphony. Or was it? So disoriented had my expectations become that I found myself asked the occasional question about Beethoven’s scoring. (‘Did he really write that phrase for the flute?’ is one I recall, and afterwards recall Beethoven having been criticised for supposedly excessive use of wind in this work.) I think I was wrong to have done so, but to be enabled to listen critically in that way concerning music I allegedly know so well was a fascinating experience in itself. It was an unfashionably large orchestra we heard for this symphony, or however much of it we were going to hear – and all the better for it: it had bite and heft, colour and…

… then the light changed, downward orchestral glissandi were heard, and Aimard and his page-turner solemnly left the stage. So too did a number of other musicians from the orchestra, those six horns and two oboes included. This mysterious Mundry (?) interlude – was it a continuation of what we had heard previously? – led us to another Beethoven introduction, that of the Fourth Symphony, darkly expectant. This time, it was my sense of pitch that I did not quite trust. Was it at modern pitch? A nagging doubt remained. After all, I told myself as the exposition progressed, context is all: this means something different here and now, if indeed it ‘means’ anything at all. Departed wind players reappeared on the balcony above to signal to us friends nicht dieser Töne, but something again unexpected: the transition to the finale of the Fifth; and then the opening of the portals of heaven itself. Those trombones! The rest of the orchestra too, of course, not least the excellent Cologne timpanist, but those trombones: what a thrilling Beethovenian moment it was once more, ‘authentic’ in the best sense. I could after all be excited by this music again when conducted by someone other than Furtwängler, Klemperer, or Barenboim. (There are others, I admit, but a list would be beside the point right here.) Moreover, I could do so without the tonal preparation of the rest of the symphony, which I should otherwise have insisted was necessary. How long, I wondered, would it go on? When would it be transformed into something else? The scherzo reprise came and went; heaven reopened. Wind were again especially prominent, hinting perhaps at the contemporary music – to Beethoven – of French Revolutionary processionals. Was I merely romanticising? If I were, why should I not, given a tradition dating back at least so far as ETA Hoffmann? On this occasion, at least, we reached the end, thus signalling the interval.

Upon returning to the hall, it was clear that some audience members had left. My initial reaction was to wonder why, but perhaps just as valid a question would be ‘why not?’ It is difficult, for whatever this may be worth, to imagine that some did not in 1808 – and their departure did no harm to anyone. It was not the full orchestra that was back on stage, although Aimard was back. The opening piece [the fifth and final of Mundry’s Fragments] played with piano and orchestral response. Cellists, percussionists, others shone in ways traditional and not. [Alas my memory deserts me here with regard to precisely what.]  We were invited, even compelled, to listen and indeed to watch. Was that Aimard playing a ‘light’ version of Beethoven? It took me a few seconds to realise that such lightness, as ever with the Bagatelles, was largely deceptive; hearing them at the same time as other music, seeing them at the same time as other actions was undeniably strange. The orchestra, intriguingly, seemed at times almost asleep and needed to be roused.

‘Warmer’ lighting signalled an impending change; as if by magic, we were part way through the first movement of the Emperor Concerto, somewhere in the development, leading us to the recapitulation. Aimard offered some delightful leaning into phrases, blinding clarity too, not least in trills reminiscent of Pollini in his prime. Once the movement had come to a close, a further dialogue between piano and orchestra began, piano seemingly querying the chordal responses it received, responses that nevertheless led it – and us – away from Beethoven, whether we liked it or not, initial memories disintegrating. This different voice fashioned music to metamorphose into a new concertante work: hectic, rhythmically insistent, playing on the ruins of tonality with a fine sense of the sardonic that occasionally brought Prokofiev to mind. Childhood and even childish memories, clockwork machinations, other, darker remembrances of things past or imagined fascinated in a veritable riot of invention, after which Aimard left the stage. The second movement of the Seventh Symphony followed, as compelling a processional as ever, after which Aimard and missing orchestral players returned. The orchestra stood and the lights went down. There was, notably, no applause, although it seemed like a moment when there might have been. What was Aimard, seated, about to play?

It was the final movement [ultimately only part of it] of the final piano sonata, op.111, exalted yet also strangely exultant. Oddly, given the elements of choreography throughout, I started to wonder about the silhouetted organist’s head, sometimes still, sometimes moving, I saw to the side of the stage. Was it, too, part of the performance? It was difficult to see how, yet once seen, I could never quite forget my wondering. The music led without a break into something new – and yet perhaps not quite so new. By this stage, I had forgotten that Zimmermann was on the programme, and it took me again a little while to realise that this music, with its unnervingly oscillating opening, an oscillation seemingly retained yet transformed into a dialectic between precision and vagueness, was indeed what it was. So this was why an organist had appeared: for the horrific fragments of musical remembrance – how apt! – of Photoptosis. Yet there was no ‘O Freunde…’ moment; the finale to the Ninth had been revoked, as in Mann’s Doctor Faustus, or at least averted. Truly this was a nightmare from which we might never awake. Parsifal, The Nutcracker, and, for some reason the most unsettling, Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy took their bows, but for what? Did they, did the Bach and plainchant, ‘mean’ anything any more? Do we not hear them all now in the shadow of Beethoven, which is to say of our construction(s) of ‘Beethoven’? Does not all music, old and new, Beethoven’s included, stand in that shadow? As if it had not been with us all along, darkness fell.

Isabel Mundry: Orchestral Fragments to Beethoven I-V (2020, world premiere), interspersed with (and on occasion played simultaneously with):

          Beethoven: Piano Sonata no.14 in C-sharp minor, op.27 no.2, 1^st movement (1801)

          Lachenmann: Tableau (1988/9)

          Beethoven: Symphony no.1 in C major, op.21, 1^st movement to bar 109 (1800); Symphony no.4 in B-flat major, op.60, 1^st movement to bar 333 (1806); Symphony no.5 in C minor, op.67, 3^rd movement from bar 324 and 4^th movement (1804-8); Bagatelles, op.119: nos 7,9, 10, and 11 (1820-22); Piano Concerto no.5 in E-flat major, op.73, 1^st movement from bar 258 (1809-10)

Francesco Filidei: Quasi una bagatella, for piano and orchestra (2019, world premiere)

Beethoven: Symphony no.7 in A major, op.92, 2^nd movement (1811-12); Piano Sonata no.32 in C minor, op.111, 2^nd movement to Variation IV (1821-2)

Zimmermann: Photoptosis (1968)

Musikfest Berlin (10) - Zimmermann/Les Siècles/Roth: Rameau, Lachenmann, and Berlioz, 15 September 2019

Philharmonie

Rameau: Les Indes Galantes: Suite

Lachenmann: Mouvement (– vor der Erstarrung)

Berlioz: Harold en Italie, op.16

Tabea Zimmermann (viola)

Les Siècles

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

Images: © Monika Karczmarczyk

Charles Ives’s father famously insisted that his son stretch his ears. It was partly in that spirit that I went to this concert from the French period-instrument orchestra, Les Siècles, and its founder, François-Xavier Roth. Hand on heart, I remain a sceptic, though certainly not an opponent, when it comes to period instruments. I reacted very strongly against them, or rather against the underlying ideologies of those preaching their use, when coming of musical age. No one was successfully going to tell this teenager that he could not play Bach – or Handel, or Rameau, or Byrd… – on the piano; no one likewise was going to create anything other than an enemy by telling him the Bach of Klemperer or Furtwängler or, God help us, even Karl Richter was ‘incorrect’, or as Gustav Leonhardt put it in the case of Furtwängler, ‘disgusting’. (To be fair, ‘disgusting’ at least shows some emotional engagement; the idea of a performance being ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ is considerably worse.) However, not everyone is like that, especially today; many ‘period’ musicians indeed never were. Partly through curiosity, partly through friendship with many musicians with varying degrees of commitment to such music-making, and partly through re-examination of my own prejudices and that imperative to stretch my ears, I have latterly shown greater interest and sympathy.

When it comes, say, to seventeenth-century music, I frankly have little choice, if I ever want to hear that music performed live. With the eighteenth-century, opportunities to hear its music on modern instruments vary according to repertoire and instrument: pianists are clearly never going to give up Bach, yet how often do we hear a symphony or even chamber orchestra perform a Handel oratorio that is not Messiah, let alone a Rameau opera? The nineteenth century is another matter again; I have never felt any particular need here, but curiosity led me here to give Berlioz on instruments of the period. So too did the ethos of the orchestra in question: that is, playing each piece, as close as possible, on the instruments of its time, thus affording a contrast between instruments of the mid-eighteenth, mid-nineteenth, and the late twentieth centuries. So too did the programme – how often, if ever, have Rameau, Lachenmann, and Berlioz appeared together like this? – and the conductor, whose work I have long admired. Why mention all of this? I hope that is not simply self-absorption, but also to try to explain what will perhaps be an unusually personal response. My aim is certainly not to dissuade musicians from performing and listeners from listening to Berlioz on period instruments – why on earth should I wish to do that? – but to describe and also to reflect a little on my experience. By all means call me an antediluvian, if it helps – whilst also acknowledging the ‘historicist’ irony that may entail.

First, however, Rameau, and a suite from Les Indes galantes (instruments of 1750, A=415 Hz). As it happens, I had actually heard another suite from the same opera on modern instruments (LSO/Rattle) earlier this year. I had also, once before, heard Roth conduct Rameau dances, albeit from Dardanus, with a modern orchestra (the BBC NOW), at the Proms. If my prejudices may lie in that direction, I am not at all sure that this was not the best performance of the three. It certainly left me in no doubt that I was happy to listen to this music on instruments of any period, which would doubtless have surprised my younger self. Roth and his players, mostly standing with obvious exceptions, offered an introduction, the ‘Entrée de la suite d’Hébée’, as enticing and in its way as fantastical as anything in Berlioz: an array of percussion, responded to by light, lithe, yet far from inexpressive or indeed vibrato-less playing. It set an infectious precedent, to which subsequent dances fully lived up. Two rigaudons (‘pour les Matelots provençaux et Matelotes provençales’) both offered expressive lilt and meaningful contrast, both with what had come and with each other. Here and in the pair of tambourins (also for those Provencal sailors) one could pretty much see the dancers in one’s mind’s eyes, fully alert to the dramatic possibilities of the dance’s intensification on repetition (and dynamic variation). Two numbers in common with Rattle’s selection, music for the ‘savages’ and the great chaconne, brought the suite to a memorable conclusion, the latter’s sequential sense of drama firmly founded in rhythm and harmony. Indeed, it was Raymond Leppard, rather than any period-instrument conductor, who came to mind for me. Not that these instruments lacked their own character and colour, in many respects delightful, but those were not ends in themselves.

Lachenmann’s Mouvement ( – vor der Erstarrung) for ensemble dates from almost two-and-a-half centuries after Rameau’s opera (1982-4, as opposed to 1735). It was played on modern instruments, or, as the programme had it, ‘instruments from the year 1980’, tuning at A=442. This was at least as committed a performance, not only revealing something akin to a sonic palimpsest, but also revelling in the drama of effort in music-making, as well as its reward, by players truly in sovereign command of their instruments. Webern and Nono, as in the Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied heard that morning, were present guests at the feast, yet in no sense could any of the music have been said to sound like theirs; rather, their methods, or memories thereof, helped us – or at least me – find a way in. Extreme ‘expressivity’ – I am not sure that that is quite the right word – of twin precision and intensity bade, even insisted, that one listen, and listen with ears both old and new: an idea not without implications for such an orchestra and such a programme. I could even have sworn I heard a Rameau rhythm echoed at one point: a coincidence at best, yet a pleasing one. Lachenmann’s music was played with all the skill and understanding of a dedicated new music ensemble, but does this music, the best of forty years all, still qualify as ‘new music’? Does it matter? Eruptions as powerful as those in Mahler (or Webern), whispered confidences as hyper-expressive as those of Nono, riots of wind and percussion to rival Messiaen’s: those and many other aspects, moments, of death, yet also surely in some sense of life, offered a world-kaleidoscope different from Rameau’s, yet one which could surely be heard with profit in succession to it. A performance exhilarating in its aggression had me ask whether my ears would ever be quite the same again, and why on earth I should wish them to be.

Finally, then, Berlioz, and Harold en Italie (instruments from 1850, A=438), for which the orchestra was joined by Tabea Zimmermann. I learned much from the performance, yet emerged from it less convinced. That may simply, or principally, be more a matter of my resistance; perhaps I was hearing it not dissimilarly from the way some notably dissatisfied members of the audience appeared to have heard Lachenmann. Perhaps that was no bad thing at all. Certainly the darker, less resonant string tone with which the first movement opened, had its own potentialities. It was woodwind blend, or lack thereof, both within the section and with the strings, that troubled me more. That will doubtless have been part of the attraction for many, but I found it had me listen more to the instruments, less to what they played. On her entry, Zimmermann proved unfussy yet expressive; so too was the harpist with whom she duetted. (The idea of placing the harp at the front of the stage, almost as a second soloist, offered a definite advantage here.) As time went on, though, Zimmermann proved surprisingly wayward, not just of mood, but of tuning, a problem far from restricted to this movement. Roth’s basic tempo was faster than usual, but it worked well, and was far from inflexible. If a relative thinness of orchestral tone contrasted greatly with Roméo et Juliette from the Berlin Philharmonic just two nights previously, stretching my ears was always intended as part of the exercise.

For the second movement, I was gain struck by the difference in balance and blend. The mood was very different, too, from any performance I could recall: less solemn, more a motley crew of pilgrims. Why not? Again, it made me listen, and there was something quite Catholic, even if renegade Catholic, to the conception, which fitted well. The mountaineer serenading his beloved in the third movement benefited from splendidly rustic sound, period woodwind here coming into its own (for me, at any rate), in what proved another swift account. There was plenty of nervous energy to the finale, whose darker colours and moods came off best, Roth handling its many twists and turns with typical skill and conviction. There were some pretty wild sounds, all in all: many will have found them exciting; alas, they soon became rather wearing for me. I suspect they would have done so still more on repetition. As an encore, the ‘Marche hongroise’ from La Damnation de Faust proved infinitely more colourful and involving than it had during a dreary trudge on modern instruments through the entire work at Glyndebourne this summer with Robin Ticciati. Swings and roundabouts, then; I had at any rate stretched my ears and been made to think.

Musikfest Berlin (9) – JACK Quartet/Junge Deutsche Philharmonie/Nott: Lachenmann and Strauss, 15 September 2019

Philharmonie

Lachenmann: Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied

Strauss: Ein Heldenleben

Christopher Otto, Austin Wulliman (violins)

John Pickford Richards (viola)

Jay Campbell (cello)

Junge Deutsche Philharmonie

Jonathan Nott (conductor)

It is extraordinary to think that Helmut Lachenmann’s Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied, written in 1979 and 1980, is now almost forty years old; or perhaps, on reflection, it is not. When one considers how much Lachenmann, still considered dangerously outré by many fifteen or twenty years ago, is now not only accepted but welcomed and even loved as a grand old man of German music, and indeed the world’s, it makes a good deal of sense. (It happens to them all.) The play between familiar material – a brief spoken and musical introduction involving the composer will have rendered it so to all – and what we, in the midst of its disintegration and reintegreation, might consider its pasts and futures is not, Lachenmann advised, comical (komisch) but rather cheerful (heiter). The distinction can be a fine one, most likely lost in my attempt at translation. It was not, however, lost in this excellent performance from the JACK Quartet, the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, and Jonathan Nott. Nor was Lachenmann’s opening, Stravinskian acknowledgement: ‘Wir Komponisten sind Parasiten’ (‘We composers are parasites’), referring not only to his use of Deutschlandlieder (Haydn, Bach, and others) but his remodelling of Morton Feldman’s The Viola in My Life into a version of his own ‘the music in my [German, bourgeois] life’. Indeed, he proceeded to acknowledge the Christmas Oratorio’s ‘Pastoral Symphony’ as a song not only of his Existenz but his Heimat. (Think Edgar Reitz and Hermann Simon, if you will…)

A classic, then, of musique concrète instrumentale and of German music’s self-reckoning received a performance worthy of such classical status, without losing any of its immediacy and excitement. The quartet’s opening play with material from Haydn’s imperial hymn left open the question of deconstruction or reconstruction: why not have both, and more? It also, crucially, bade us listen intently, as if pre-empting the late music of Lachenmann’s teacher, Luigi Nono. So too did the full orchestra, when employed, its make-up at any one time constantly changing, yet never quite rejection the concerto grosso-ish line-up. Webern’s example was surely heard in the expert (both in work and performance) passing of lines between instruments, although the outcome rightly felt very different. Metrical transformations and restatements proved just as important as those of melody or harmony; this is, after all, a dance suite. Indeed, one had the impression almost of melodic lines rushing to grasp hold of metres, being carried forward upon them, transformed and yet also restated by them. When music from the gigues of two Bach French Suites is given the Lachenmann treatment, is it the gigue (an acknowledged dance in the ninth of the work’s seventeenth parts) or Bach’s notes that will endure? Does that question even make any sense? Even if it does, should one be asking it at that time? It was quite a ride, both immediate and mediated.

Lachenmann’s enthusiasm for Strauss’s Alpine Symphony is well known. I do not know what he thinks of Ein Heldenleben, but it made for a fascinating companion-piece: a self-reckoning of its own, of course, often bizarrely misunderstood as mere egotism. Nott seemed especially keen to emphasis the piece’s symphonic qualities, the opening section ‘Der Held’, perhaps slightly slower, even sturdier, than often one hears, insistent in its grounding of the E-flat major to which it will, to which it must, return. Like Lachenmann in its way, it bade me listen. Not that there was any want of colour from the excellent young players, but this was clearly not intended as an orchestral showpiece. The opening of ‘Des Helden Widersacher’ was in turn quicker than is typically heard, affording greater contrast that yet had clearly evolved, even if one could not quite say how, from preceding material.  ‘Wir Komponisten sind Parasiten’; wir Kritiker auch… An organised chaos of carping woodwind melodies seemed almost to prefigure the birdsong of Messiaen, albeit with considerably more negative intent. Throughout these and other contrasts, Nott ensured continuity of line and sound, which is not to say unexciting, communication of fundamental harmonic rhythm, which far too often can be lost in performances of this music.

The concertmaster’s solo in ‘Des Helden Gefährtin’ showed both dramatic flair and eminently musical phrasing: in a sense, emblematic of the performance as a whole. So too was the depth of orchestral string tone, which yet never overwhelmed nor came close to doing so. That was not the point – and the musicians, Nott certainly included, knew it. For there was similar depth to his conception of the piece overall: not necessarily without irony, but understanding that irony will better be expressed through underlying seriousness of purpose. The closing sections brought both a symphonic sense of arrival and, very much in Beethoven’s Eroica footsteps, further development. Indeed, Strauss’s invention here registered with uncommon skill; too often, this music finds itself unwittingly belittled as mere winding down or tailpiece. A dignified, close, nothing exaggerated, furthered poignancy that arose from the notes and the connections between them, affording apt comparison and contrast with the thinking, writing, and performance of Lachenmann.

Musikfest Berlin (7): Aimard/Kakuta: Schubert and Lachenmann, 12 September 2019

Kammermusiksaal

Schubert: Piano Sonata no.18 in G major, D 894

Lachenmann: GOT LOST (2007-8)

Yuko Kakuta (soprano)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

A fascinating pairing of Schubert and Lachenmann from Pierre-Laurent Aimard and, in the latter, Yuko Kakuta. In some ways, roles, at least roles as might popularly be assumed, were reversed. What we heard was plain-spoken, even austere, day I say modernist, Schubert, followed by vividly dramatic, accessible, perhaps even Romantic Lachenmann. Such labels doubtless beg more questions than they answer, but then so, quite properly, do such performances. At any rate, Aimard provoked us in the best way: not out of some desire to épater les bourgeois, but to make us listen, to think, and most likely to reconsider our lazy assumptions, bourgeois or otherwise.

Basic pulse and metre were established right from the start of the G major Piano Sonata, D 894. You might think that obvious, yet it is far from a given. Aimard’s account of the first movement flowed, and was flexible, but never lost sight (or hearing) of that fundamental pulse. Thematic groups remained distinct but also emerged from one another, in a performance anything but maudlin, imbued with a fine sense of fresh discovery, indispensable in such (over-)familiar repertoire. Aimard captured both the deception and the simplicity in its deceptive simplicity, not least in a vigorous, determined development section. The Andante was similarly direct and without predetermined framework, performance seemingly arising from the notes rather than vice versa. Every note likewise told in the minuet, sometimes as gruffly as in Beethoven, though never sounding remotely like him. There were no easy answers – or even easy questions. A slower tempo for the trio came across less as relaxation than as strange intensification, whose mysteries seemed to foreshadow the Chopin of the mazurkas. The finale, likewise, was rendered strange in a way that compelled one to listen. Modulations, almost always key to Schubert’s music, surprised, even shocked. Modernist Schubert? I suppose so, but ultimately this seemed less a matter of such a broad aesthetic, still less such an aesthetic applied, than of Aimard’s Schubert.

Lachenmann’s GOT LOST takes its name from one of its three verbal sources, a note in the lift of a Grunewald apartment block used by Fellows of the Wissenschaftkolleg zu Berlin: ‘Today my laundry basket got lost. It was last since standing in front of the dryer. Since it is pretty difficult to carry the laundry without it I’d be most happy to get it back.’ The other two texts employed are an extract from Nietzsche’s Gay Science, its Wanderer message full of association for anyone vaguely acquainted with German Romanticism, and a poem by Fernando Pesso (under the pseudonym, Álvaro de Campos),’ ‘Todas as cartas de amor são ridículas’ (‘All love-letters are ridiculous’). According to the composer, these are ‘three only seemingly incompatible texts’. ‘Stripped of their pathos-laden, poetic and profane diction,’ they are despatched by:

… the same sound-source – a soprano voice singing ‘in whatever way’  – into a intervallically ever-changing field of sound, reverberation and movement. Calling out, playfully, ‘warbling’ and lamenting arioso: they interrupt and pervade one another, thus marking out a space that ultimately remains foreign to them, and in which – as in all my compositions – music reflects upon itself with ‘expression’ -less joviality, thus showing its awareness of the transcendent, god-less message of ‘ridicolas’  that unifies these three texts.

Un-Romantic, even anti-Romantic, then? Yes and no. The idea of music in itself, shorn of ‘expression’ has all manner of associations, many of them at least heirs to the Romanticism Lachenmann has long deconstructed and perhaps, just perhaps, even reconstructed. A post-Nietzschean revaluation of values, if we like, does not perhaps change those values, whether in work or performance, as much as we might suspect. Transcendence, after all, remains – and what could be more Romantic, even Wagnerian, than that?

For performance will always play its part, even when, sometimes especially when, that outcome is guarded against. So it did here, in superlative performances from Aimard and Kakuta, performances I find it impossible to imagine bettered. (And what would be the point of such imagination?) Every note, every articulation, every connection between notes, articulations, and so much more, to the whole, remains crucial; or, at least, so the illusion holds. Romantic ghosts? Perhaps. But are not those ghosts actually more performances of earlier music, such as Schubert’s? Monteverdi, perhaps the ultimate source, known or unknown, acknowledged or acknowledged, for all ‘modern’ music in the Western tradition, seemed once again reborn in this scena for the twenty-first century (2007-8). Music theatre? Again, perhaps, but like so many such concepts, it seemed more an historical reference than anything else. Perhaps Joycean music would be more to the point, at least for me, even the Mahlerian conception of the symphony as a world. In reality, we shall act differently, although surely all with the joviality of which Lachenmann spoke. Kakuta sang into the piano, only for the piano’s resonances to sing back to her, to us; Aimard responded in all manner of ways, instrumental and extra-instrumental. The term ‘extended techniques’, whether for voice or piano, seemed so beside the point as to suggest that, at long last, it should be dropped. These are surely ‘just’ techniques, ‘just’ music. The final climax, when it came, might even have seemed conventional, yet no less extraordinary for that. Whatever we may wish to label, to say, to think, this was a performance no one there would likely ever forget. Outstanding.

Musikfest Berlin (4) – Ensemble Musikfabrik: Lachenmann, Hosokawa, and Eötvös, 8 September 2019

Kammermusiksaal

Helmut Lachenmann: Marche fatale (2016-17); Berliner Kirschblüten (2016-17)

Toshio Hosokawa: Birds Fragments II (1989)

Peter Eötvös: Secret Kiss (2018, German premiere)

Hosokowa: Birds Fragments III (1955)

Eötvös: Sonata per sei (2006, German premiere)

Ryoko Aoki (Noh-performer)

Mayumi Miyata (shō)

Ulrich Löffler (piano)

Helen Bledsoe (flute)

Dirk Rothbrust (percussion)

Ensemble Musikfabrik

Peter Eötvös (conductor)

Images: © Adam Janisch 

The metaphor of the journey has been so overworked, so debased, that it will often now elicit little more than a groan. Perhaps, though, there was something to be retained, lightly, even playfully, from the idea of composers and their music – and its performance – travelling in different directions here, in a splendid concert from Cologne’s Ensemble Musikfabrik.

Helmut Lachenmann might seem initially here to have travelled quite some distance indeed from the composer we know and, in many cases, love. However, as Schoenberg once remarked, ‘a Chinese poet is certainly not only someone who sounds Chinese. Rather, he says something else as well!’ Lachenmann’s Marche fatale acquired a cult following – I account myself a member – last year, when, in its new orchestral version, it heralded Stuttgart’s New Year. It was originally composed for piano, though, which is how we heard it on this occasion, from Ensemble Musikfabrik’s Ulrich Löffler. That in itself made me listen, re-listen, to material with which I had perhaps become over-familiar. (Is that not what Lachenmann bids us do all the time with the debris of German Romanticism?) Oddly, and perhaps only because I knew the orchestral version first, the piano piece sounded more akin to a piano reduction: again, an interesting challenge for my ears. But then, I started to wonder: was not the grit in the oyster here clearer; were not the dissonances harsher; was the music not more evidently fractured? Was this not, in a strong sense, the ‘original’, and what did that mean? Subversion of Liszt’s most celebrated Liebestraum seemed more pronounced. The close certainly had more of the abyss to it. And if I had my doubts about Löffler’s rubato at times, it made me listen – and rendered those fractures more pronounced. Again, surely the point.

Berliner Kirschblüten came as all the more of a surprise, since I neither knew it nor its antecedents (for instance, the 2000 Sakura-Variations on a Japanese folk song, and its 2008 expansion, Sakura mit Berliner Luft). An opening that can sound sentimental immediately has one question one’s own orientalism. Is there anything one can do about it? Perhaps not, but at least it alerted me to the problem in time for the works by Toshio Hosokawa. Then the song from Paul Lincke’s operetta, whose jazzy deconstruction was more than welcome. As with Marche fatale, this was unmistakeably Lachenmann’s mind at work. He was taking a walk on another side, perhaps, but was that not all the more Adornian? Yes, most likely, but it was enjoyable too. Here, the cavernous abyss at the close drew comparison with that of Marche fatale, but was longer and, most likely, deeper, resonance and dissolution two sides of the same coin.

Next came the second of Hosokawa’s Birds Fragments, for shō – used, most likely not coincidentally, in Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern – and percussion. An opening invocation, with strokes on bass drum and piercing cries from crotale, provided in its continuation ritualistic (I think, but am I orientalising?) backdrop for sh­ō chords that drew one in, had one listen to every pitch, to the movement of lines: not entirely unlike Marche fatale, in fact. Its form and duration seemed to me perfectly judged; nor could there be any doubting the distinction of performances from Mayumi Miyata and Dirk Rothbrust. After the interval, in the third, for shō and flute (Helen Bledsoe), the same could certainly be said of performances and form. The flute part, first alto flute, then piccolo, sounded here more akin to commentary upon shō processional, that commentary then susceptible to transformative influence; or so it seemed in terms of a drama that perhaps approached our notions of music-theatre.

Music-theatre in a more emphatic sense had been heard in between, in Peter Eötvös’s Secret Kiss, for reciter (the splendid Ryoko Aoki) and ensemble, here receiving its German premiere. An opening percussion invocation forged a connection with Hosokawa – as well as readying the audience for the world of Noh. Aoki’s recitation of the text (from Alessandro Baricco’s novel, Seta, in Oriza Hirata’s Japanese translation) moved between speech and song, the ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and percussion) inviting further, more or less inevitable, comparison with Pierrot lunaire. And indeed, it was just as much in the instrumental lines that narrative weight and content seemed to lie, all exquisitely crafted yet dramatically involving. Ominous, unsettling, beguiling, radiant: this distilled tale of a nineteenth-century Frenchman travelling to Japan to learn secrets of silk manufacture, of subsequent orientalist enchantment, and of something we might call death, duly enchanted and, moreover, duly invited us to question its and our journey.

The programme closed with Eötvös’s Sonata per sei, only now, thirteen years late, receiving its German premiere, again conducted by the composer. Written for two pianos, three percussionists, and sampler keyboard, it inevitably invites comparison with Bartók’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion, as well, perhaps, as with the wondrous spatial acrostics of Boulez’s sur Incises. Bartók certainly seemed to be echoes in the entry of the first percussionist, as well as in the pianists’ first entry. That did not, however, ultimately seem to be the point, the sampler reminding us that, certain formal correspondences notwithstanding – was that at some point a Bartók-like arch? – Eötvös’s procedures were quite different. Groups – that is, the keyboard players and percussionists – sometimes functioned more or less as one, sometimes very much as individuals. Overall form strongly echoed, without quite replicating, movements of a classical sonata and their ‘character’. As with the rest of the programme, I was left wanting more: a sign, then, of a journey well travelled.