Musikfest Berlin (8) - Tetzlaff/RSB/Jurowski - Yun, Schoenberg, Nono, and Beethoven-Mahler, 17 September 2017

Philharmonie

 

Images: Kai Bienert

Isang Yun: Dimensionen, for large orchestra with organ

Schoenberg: Violin Concerto, op.36
Nono: Julius Fučik
Beethoven, retouched by Mahler: Symphony no.5 in C minor, op.67

Christian Tetzlaff (violin)

Max Hopp (speaker: Fučik)

Sven Philipp (speaker: Officer)

Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra

Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

 

My final – although not quite the final – concert of this year’s Musikfest Berlin fell on the hundred birthday of Isang Yun. Having heard some of his chamber music that afternoon, it was an interesting prospect to hear a work for full, indeed large, orchestra, with organ. (Alas, I was unable to find the name of the organist anywhere in the programme.) Dimensionen, or Dimensions, was commissioned by the city of Nuremberg, as part of the 1971 celebrations for the five-hundredth anniversary of Albrecht Durer. I wish I had been able to respond more than I had, but found myself a little nonplussed; perhaps I needed to give it another hearing or two, or indeed to do a little homework rather than coming to it cold. The idea seemed to encompass three different planes of sound: the organ and high, often very high, strings; deep percussion and brass; and woodwind in between, less static than either. I was certainly struck by the passages in which woodwind really took on the ‘persona’ of highly tremulant organ stops. One section, in which loud organ was offset by vigorous percussion sounded oddly like avant-gardist Poulenc, but I doubt that was the intention! There was a good bit of (considerably earlier) Ligeti- or Xenakis-like violin swarming too. It all, however, seemed to me a great deal of trouble to have gone to for relatively little reward. And then, it stopped.

With Schoenberg, though, I found myself back very much on home territory, and should have no hesitation in saying that this was the finest performance of the Violin Concerto I have heard in the concert hall. Indeed, I am not sure that I have heard a better one on record, either. Opportunities are rare to hear the work; even I have only heard it ‘live’ twice before. The last time had been in 2009, in which Nikolaj Znaider had – sadly, if all too predictably – been let down by a clearly unprepared Valery Gergiev. There was no such question of that being the case here. Vladimir Jurowski and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (RSB) were just as much party to the success of this performance as the outstanding Christian Tetzlaff. The first movement very much set the tone for what was to come: precise, yet dancing idiomatically. Textures were almost incredibly clear, so much so as to have one wonder whatever the ‘problem’ might ever have been with this work. More than once, there seemed to be a strong orchestral affinity with the more or less contemporary world of Berg, albeit more Lulu than the Violin Concerto. (Schoenberg was anxious to make clear, in a 1936 letter to Webern, that he had conceived of the idea of his work at the same time as Berg had his.) Tetzlaff’s tone could hardly have been more centred; one might readily have taken dictation, however dazzling the virtuosity. The Andante grazioso brought a winning match of doggedness and sublimity to the long violin line, dance again never far away. Developing variation was here so much more than a mere description; it was something one could hardly fail to experience. The mood of defiance to the finale was brilliantly captured too. Perhaps there was just a little ‘formalism to Jurowski’s conducting, but to be able to hear so much of this wondrous score was more than ample compensation. Mahler seemed almost resurrected in its militarism, and yet to very different purposes. Tetzlaff’s despatch of the cadenza seemed almost calculated to echo Schoenberg’s workds: ‘Yes, yes. That will be fine. The concerto is extremely difficult, just as much for the head as for the hands. I am delighted to add another unplayable work to the repertoire. I want the concerto to be difficult and I want the little finger to become longer. I can wait.’ And the soloist’s choice of Bach’s D minor Sarabande as an encore was perfect. Not only could one read back Bach’s line into Schoenberg’s, and vice versa; the choice of D minor picked up on and responded to Schoenberg’s hints at that key – always a ‘special’ one for him – in the concerto.

 

I had heard Jurowski conduct the British premiere of Nono’s unfinished Julius Fučik in London in 2011. ‘Pointillism’ was what had immediately come to mind in the opening then; so it did now; far more so, say, than in the later Il canto sospeso, heard earlier in this festival. Its melodramatic quality inevitably puts one in mind of Schoenberg: for instance, A Survivor from Warsaw. There was certainly no doubting the violence and the human ‘provocation’, such as Nono said he always needed: ‘an event, an experience, a test in our lives, which provokes my instinct and my consciousness, as man and musician, to bear witness’. In this case, the witness borne is to a Czech communist and literary critic, hanged by the Nazis in 1943. (Fučik’s words would also be used in Intolleranza 1960.) Drums and trumpets again suggested Mahler (and Schoenberg), as the music led us to one of those typical Nono passages of agonising beauty. The German ‘Schönheit’, spoken shortly after, made the point clearly. And then, to hear the phrase ‘ein Motif von Beethoven’ alerted us, with savage irony, to where we were heading.

 

Jurowski had followed that London performance too with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The great difference here was that it was performed with Mahler’s retouchings to the score – and with a much larger orchestra. Interestingly, Jurowski now seemed liberated, no longer hidebound by self-imposed ‘authenticke’ restrictions. It was, of course, a splendid experience in itself to hear Beethoven via Mahler, but it was not just that; we heard more, I think, of Beethoven ‘as Beethoven’ too. Moreover, simply to hear a full-sized orchestra, still more one on such splendid form as the RSB, let loose on this music – sixteen first violins down to eight double basses – is an opportunity all too today too. Doubling of wind made perfect sense in such a hall and on such an occasion too. Yes, of course it is not strictly ‘necessary’, but what is? If we go down that route, we might as well all stay at home and listen to recordings – or indeed to nothing at all. To hear, for instance, the oboe solo in the first movement not as a solo at all was fascinating, especially when played as well as it was here. We doubtless will not hear it like that next time, but we might have the memory in some sense with us, offering a different, reflective standpoint on what we hear. Moreover, the first movement as a whole burst forth with all the radicalism of Beethoven’s almost incredible gift for concision. Perhaps Jurowski might have yielded a little on occasion, but one might say the same about Klemperer.

 

It was glorious to hear the lower strings, so full and rich, so songful and soulful, at the opening of the second movement. Even the slightly static approach Jurowski brought to the music seemed to work, although I could not quite tell you how or why. I was less convinced that this was really a ‘Mahlerian’ approach, but so what? To attempt to imitate, whether something imaginary or otherwise, is an approach for pedants, not for artists. The performance, moreover, benefited from all the clarity we had heard in the Schoenberg. I very much like the stateliness, the strength – I dare not invoke ‘stability’ here! – of the Scherzo, transmuted into something similar yet different in the Trio. The reprise of the scherzo material sounded as ghostly as ever; alas, the transition to the finale remained somewhat foursquare, lacking in mystery. If there were times in that final movement when Jurowski seemed to hold back – rather oddly, and overtly, in forced ritardandi – many earlier virtues remained, showing clarity, strength of purpose, and numbers to be anything but antithetical. (It is extraordinary that one has to make such a point, but given the current fashionable climate, alas one must.) And this time, the surprise would be that the oboe solo was – yes, an oboe solo. Two piccolos, four flutes, four oboes, four clarinets (including bass and E-flat clarinets), four bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones: I have no doubt whatsoever that Beethoven would have been overjoyed to hear his music relished by and through so many. If, ultimately, I was perhaps more impressed than moved by the performance, it gave me much to be impressed by – and to think about.

Musikfest Berlin (7) – Isang Yun 100 Chamber Concert, 17 September 2017

Kammermusiksaal, Philharmonie

Quartet, for four flutes (1986)

Glissées, four pieces for solo cello (1970)

Gasa, for violin and piano (1963)

Trio, for violin, cello and piano (1972/75)

Images, for flute, oboe, violin, and cello (1968)  

Martin Glück, Fang-Yu Chung, Laura Schreyer, Ziangchen Ji, Roswitha Staega (flutes)

Birgit Schmieder (oboe)

Clemens Linder, Sunyung Hwang (violin)

Adele Bitter (cello)

Holger Groschapp (piano)

The Korean-German composer, Isang Yun, was born on 17 September 1917, one hundred years to the day before this commemorative concert. His was, by any standards, a dramatic life: a figure in the resistance to Japanese occupation, a participant in the Darmstadt summer schools and other important aspects of European musical life, kidnapped from West Berlin in 1967 by the South Korean military regime and charged with communist subversion, released two years later following an international outcry, and settling once again in Berlin, where he would live until his death in 1995. He aimed to combine, even integrate, elements of European and Asian – not just Korean – music. This concert, part of the Musikfest Berlin, offered an opportunity to hear various chamber music pieces, very much, it would seem, at the heart of his output, especially later in his career. They were all new to me; my remarks should be taken very much in the spirit of a first hearing. Insofar as I was able to tell, the performances all gave committed accounts.

I hope that flautist friends will forgive me when I say that the prospect of a piece for four flutes did not exactly fill me with joyous anticipation. As it turned out, I rather enjoyed this 1986 Quartet, both as work and performance. In four sections, it broadly seemed to encompass a journey if not from darkness to light then from deeper tones to something almost seraphic. The interval of a minor third seemingly in some sense fundamental, the work moves upwards in various combinations from two bass flutes and two alto flutes, through four standard sized flutes, two of them then swapped for piccolos, and finally to one of each variety; the turning of the four seasons also came to my mind. Perhaps it was simply because the example of Boulez comes to the fore in my memory, but the arabesque quality of the writing did have me think of his music at times, although Yun’s music seemed far more inclined to repeat, even if not exactly. The return of the bass flute in the final section heralded a change of mood, of pace, figuration above notwithstanding; something akin to the full range of this family of instruments offered a sense of culmination.  

The twelve-note organisation of Glissées, for solo cello, did not preclude a similar sense of something close to, if not to be identified with, tonality. It had, in Adele Bitter’s exciting, rich-toned performance, a strong sense of line, albeit with greater disruption than the preceding work. As time went on, I began to hear – or at least believe I did – more dodecaphonic process. The functional and expressive qualities – not that I intend a distinction between the two, quite the contrary – of glissandi fascinated, as the piece moved towards what I thought of, in homage to Nono, as a canto sospeso.

Gasa, from 1963, seven years earlier, perhaps had a greater proximity of some elements of ‘avant garde’ language, although, less, I think, of its temperament. If I knew a little more about East Asian music, perhaps I should find an answer there, perhaps not. Again, twelve-note method seemed not merely an element of organisation, but something, if far from the only thing, to be heard. There was also, in work and performance, a strong sense of drama, of whatever variety. The title means ‘Song Words’ in Korean: interesting, since I had thought of it more as a wordless scena than a song as such. I later discovered the following characterisation by the composer: ‘Gasa exists in space. It takes no heed of time – each moment exists in space and that space is unending. Within this (space) however there exists a dramatic development.’ Again, that was not necessarily how I had naïvely heard it, but it made me keen to hear it again with those words in mind.

The two movements of the Trio (that is, piano trio) were written in 1972 and 1975, on either side of the death of one of Yun’s teachers, Boris Blacher. Intervals, as in the piece for flutes, immediately announced their importance: both, I think, in their recurring use and in their transformation. At a certain point, though, I am afraid I began to found the music all sounding a little same-y, if you will forgive the colloquialism. Perhaps I was just tiring a little. The second movement, faster, at least to start with, certainly offered relief, seemingly more in the line of Glissées and Gasa. I loved the ricocheting of lines between instruments, never quite predictable. Then the music froze, seemingly, but only seemingly, to return us to the opening mood. I thought a little of the music of Giacinto Scelsi here, but perhaps that was just me finding my own bearings.

Images, for flute, oboe, violin, and cello sounded to me a little long for its material, despite the apparent distinction of performance. It seemed curiously static, somehow, but perhaps that was the point. I only learned afterwards – I should have worked it out, given the date! – that it had been written during Yun’s imprisonment, inspired by the frescoes at the Great Tomb of Kangso. Yun’s visit to North Korea, in which he had seen those frescoes, had raised the suspicions of the paranoid Southern authorities, partly leading to his abduction. Whether I should find this musical journey – perhaps not dissimilar to that in the opening work – more interesting armed with that information, or indeed simply on account of a second hearing, I do not yet know. On the basis of much of what I had heard, though, I should not mind finding out. Three cheers, then, to the festival for affording us this opportunity.