Musikfest Berlin (5) - Aimard/BPO/Nott - Mazzoli, Eötvös, and Ives, 8 September 2024

Philharmonie

Missy Mazzoli: Orpheus undone
Peter Eötvös: Cziffra Psodia (German premiere)
Ives: Symphony no.4

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

Ernst Senff Choir (chorus master: Steffen Schubert)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Gregor A. Mayrhofer (co-conductor)

Jonathan Nott (conductor)

Images: Stephan Rabold

This was, by any standards, a varied programme, though I am not quite sure what connected the three works on offer. That all received excellent performances from the Berlin Philharmonic and Jonathan Nott – Pierre-Laurent Aimard joining not only for Peter Eötvös’s Cziffra Psodia for piano and orchestra, but also as one of the pianists for Ives’s Fourth Symphony – will doubtless not surprise, but is nonetheless worth celebrating. The concert, dedicated by orchestra, soloist, and conductor to Eötvös’s memory, displayed an open-mindedness he would surely have approved. 

First up was Missy Mazzoli’s 2019 two-part suite, Orpheus undone, from her ballet Orpheus Alive. With American minimalism, I try, genuinely. Yet, having some sense of the aesthetic behind it in its admittedly varied manifestations has yet to help me respond as many others do. The piece began, like much of its school, in obviously post-Stravinskian mode rhythmically; here, there were also Stravinskian tendencies in something approaching melody. It offered compelling writing for trombones and playing from them; a strong sense of musical narrative; and, I think, an equally strong sense of personal warmth. I can imagine it working well for dancers, as of course does much Stravinsky. Otherwise, I regret that, for now, I shall simply have to keep on trying. 

Cziffra Psodia was first performed in 2021, by János Balázs, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and Mikko Franck, and has garnered a few performances since. This, I imagine, will have gained Eötvös, like Mazzoli, some new admirers, not least for its frank engagement with the piano and orchestral tradition of Bartók. It is neither pastiche nor epigonal, but the affinities, as with the hypervirtuosity of György Cziffra, are surely no coincidence. There were other affinities, naturally: some almost Debussyan chord sequences from piano and cimbalom, but the greater sense was of an organicism one could hardly fail to think of as post-Romantic, despite or perhaps in some ways even on account of the rhapsodic qualities suggested in Eötvös’s punning title. Incisive, substantial, and involving, this was music founded on harmonic progression as much as on melody and rhythm: again, not unlike Bartók. Its four movements and half-hour span offered vivid, helter-skelter writing, married to a keen sense of fun; solo sections that suggested a string of black pearls; a fascinating relationship between piano and orchestra in which the former often seemed to ignite the latter; pealing tubular bells; and more, both to thrill and delight. Rhythms propelled yet also, intriguingly, on occasion found themselves bent. In the enigmatic closing violin solo, was that a conscious echo of both Bach and Berg, or just another instance of the composer writing with unfailingly idiomatic command? 

Ives’s Fourth Symphony received its first Berlin Philharmonic performance nearly fifty years ago, in 1975, under Seiji Ozawa; it was last heard from them thirty years later, in 2005, conducted by Sakari Oramo. The Philharmonie will have added an important spatial dimension then too; Ives’s ‘extra’ solo strings were here placed up by the organ. But that is not really the point of a work that famously, according to Henry Bellamann’s 1927 programme note (in which Ives probably had a hand), seeks to ask ‘the searching questions of What? and Why? which the spirit of man asks of life’. This was ‘particularly the sense’ of the first movement Prelude then and now, given to us with warmth, depth, and astonishing translucency of tone. Yes, it sounded like a prelude, and yes, it sounded ‘Maestoso’. The combination of orchestra and choir, Nott joined by co-conductor Gregor A. Mayrhofer, matched apparent ease in performance with unease of harmonic and other undercurrents.   

The second movement ‘Comedy’ seemed to extend such characteristics in its mysterious introduction. Its stretching of pitches, even of pitch itself, sounded wonderfully fresh—almost as much as it must have done when written and first performed (these first two movements alone) in the 1920s. It rumbled, and continued to rumble, its frustration of unambiguous eruption deeply telling. The whirling vortex briefly put me in mind of Ravel’s La Valse and, more spiritually, of Mahler. Ives’s extraordinary multimetrics, though, were entirely his own, shockingly so. As in Aimard’s Concord Sonata of a few nights earlier, it was the vision, if not the finish, of a James Joyce that came closer as a comparison. Ives, unruly, untamed, and untameable, never took anything for granted. Nor did his interpreters here or in the rich, cultivated string playing of the Fugue, whose corners as well as its counterpart, its emotional import as well as its aesthetic ambition, again suggested kinship with Mahler. 

The fourth movement’s strangeness and conviction – doubtless, for many of us, also strange conviction – built and built, infecting and inspiring the whole. First, I thought it nightmarish, but its quality of apotheosis was not in the slightest negative, nor was it even really dreamlike. It stretched our ears, as Ives’s father told his son music must do. It stretched them, moreover, in multiple directions, more than might even be counted. If the build-up – though to what? – was masterly, so was the winding down, though words are beginning more than usually to fail me. This is music whose categories may not be mine, may not be ours; we probably do not even know what its categories are. At the close, I had no doubt that, whatever its imperfections and its impossibilities, or rather through and on account of them, this was a masterpiece we had just heard and in which, in some sense, we had participated.

Musikfest Berlin (4) - Prohaska/MCO/Manacorda - Ives, Kloke, Mahler, and Dvořák, 5 September 2024

Philharmonie

Ives, arr. Eberhard Kloke: Seven Songs from the collection ‘114 Songs’ (world premiere)
Kloke: The Answered Question, op.131 (world premiere)
Mahler, arr. Kloke: Seven Early Songs
Dvořák: Symphony no.9 in E minor, op.95, B.178, ‘From the New World’

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

Antonello Manacorda (conductor)

Images copyright: Berliner Festspiele / Fabian Schellhorn

Musikfest Berlin’s focus on the Ives sesquicentenary continued with two commissions from Eberhard Kloke, one an arrangement of seven Ives songs for soprano and chamber orchestra, the other ‘an alternative experimental arrangement’ of Ives’s The Unanswered Question, ‘in which a differently posed question from Ives’s work is answered anew’. Kloke’s compositional activity, long focused on existing music by other composers – as conductor and composer alike, he considers himself above all an ‘interpreter’ – here also took in his arrangements of seven early songs by Mahler, dedicated, like those of Ives, to Anna Prohaska. 

In all three cases, ‘originals’ drifted in and out of consciousness: sometimes straightforwardly present, sometimes changed (whether by arrangement or otherwise), sometimes as underlay, and sometimes as a starting-point for other music by either composer. Ives’s own mysterious piano opening to ‘Thoreau’ prefaced, as in the original song, the spoken voice, ultimately leading to our first hearing of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra’s wind, directed by Antonello Manacorda, melodrama turning into song. Here, as elsewhere, Kloke’s orchestration proved sympathetic for voice and original material, musical and verbal. ‘Élegie’ offered a taste of Ives in French, both composers seemingly responding in kind, Kloke’s use of cello pizzicato almost more harp-like than the also present harp. His chamber writing permitted Prohaska to scale down her voice in singing of great subtlety that could also soar to climax—and did. Sharper-edged sonorities and harmonies in ‘His Exaltation’; a keen sense of the waters in ‘Grantchester’; and a jaunty, unmistakeably Americanism – accent to match, spoken and sung, with and without microphone – in ‘Charlie Rutlage’ were among other highlights, leading us to the closing question, already familiar from the encore to a song recital a few nights earlier: ‘Is life anything like that?’ 

Other questions, actually posed and might-have-beens, emerged in The Answered Question, partly submerged by a barrage of audience coughs. The MCO’s performance drew one in to listen, as did the spatial arrangement: two trumpets above, winds below, a further group (flute, oboe, clarinet, piano) at the back of the latter, as if in limbo. Questioning was questioned, as indeed was that questioning of question, in what came across as a post-transcendentalist refusal to accept easy answers, and accompanying unease as a result. Manacorda’s balancing and reconciliation of the instrumental parts proceeded with an ease belying the difficulty of his task, patient direction amply rewarded.  

For the Sieben frühe Lieder, title echoing Berg and perhaps Berio too, cowbells appeared: a temptation doubtless too difficult to resist. Here, Kloke offered quotation, allusion (thematic and timbral), and perhaps also illusion from Mahler’s Wunderhorn symphonies, already closely related to his song output, to produce a work I should guess extended to about twice the length of the songs alone. As the work progressed, memory, accurate and faulty, increasingly played a role of its own. A ‘Bruder Martin’ introduction to ‘Nicht wiedersehen!’ albeit with celesta and harp alongside double bass (first solo then duo) set the scene, the klezmer music of the First Symphony’s third movement joining later, surfacing in a way not dissimilar to that of the Mahler material in Berio’s Sinfonia. Saxophone was but one of the other instruments to be heard, all beautifully, expertly played by the musicians of the MCO; just as welcome, Prohaska treated the songs throughout as songs, not as would-be arias. The posthorn solo from the Third Symphony unsettled ‘Es ritten drei Reiter’. A purely vocal, folksong-like opening to ‘Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald’, elicited a sly instrumental response again evoking the First Symphony. Sleighbells from the Fourth framed ‘Das Mägdlein trat aus dem Fischerhaus’. The idea of resurrection, capitalised and otherwise, helped shape ‘Selbstgefühl’. It made for an unexpected, fascinating journey, and a surprisingly apt bridge between Ives and Dvořák.

 

Hearing the ‘New World’ Symphony from a chamber orchestra is different; it would be idle to pretend otherwise. In a well-conceived performance such as this, hard-driven at times but with undeniable drama, losses were surprisingly few. There was, moreover, unquestionable advantage in the Abbado-like sense of an orchestra of soloists coming together. Contrasts, as in the first movement introduction, were in some ways greater; nothing was prettified; and there was no doubting the symphonic integrity of the whole, whether as work or performance, a welcome change from an incoherent Mahler Sixth two nights earlier. Manacorda’s single-minded determination made for a concise, not un-Beethovenian experience, the first movement seemingly over almost before it had begun. In the slow movement, that solo and others were magically taken: as if heard for the first time, nothing taken for granted. (An extended cadenza for mobile telephone was less welcome.) Songful, soulful, yet never sentimental, the music spoke more of Bohemian words than an imagined ‘America’, and was all the better for it. Bubbly and boisterous, the scherzo teemed with life and not a little fury. I was less sure about the solo-string transition to the trio, though whether it was a strangeness too far is more a matter of taste than anything else. It had me listen, though. The finale sometimes had me miss a greater complement of strings, but the better course of action was to value what one did hear here, vehement, direct, and gripping. There was heart-rending exhilaration to the second group too, born of the material rather than imposed upon it. The struggle, once more, was unquestionably symphonic.

Musikfest Berlin (2) - Schoenberg and Ives, 2 September 2024

Kammermusiksaal

Schoenberg: Three Piano Pieces, op.11; Six Little Piano Pieces, op.19; Five Piano Pieces, op.23; Piano Pieces, op.33a and op.33b; Suite for Piano, op.25
Ives: Piano Sonata no.2, ‘Concord, Mass., 1840-1860’ (1947 version)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)  

For most pianists, to present the complete (non-posthumous) piano œuvre of Schoenberg or to perform Ives’s Concord Sonata would be enough for a tough yet rewarding recital. To offer both, in twin homage to composers whose 150^th birthday is being celebrated this year, is by any standards a feat, let alone to do so in such searching and comprehending performances. But thenm Pierre-Laurent Aimard has never been ‘most pianists’. Apparently, he had performed the complete Schoenberg in a single recital only once before, as a teenager, followed by the Hammerklavier Sonata . 

Schoenberg’s piano music is not exactly absent from the recital hall, though the number of pianists who perform it is not great, and they tend to concentrate on the op.11 Three Piano Pieces and the op.19 Six Little Piano Pieces. One might have thought works that unquestionably changed the history of music – the op.23 Five Piano Pieces including the first published twelve-note piece, and the op.25 Suite both including Schoenberg’s first twelve-note composition and forming his first entirely twelve-note work – might be heard a little more often, but no. Once, one might have said they were more written about and read than heard; now, it is difficult even to make that claim. As for the two op.33 pieces, this was, I think, the first time even I, as a Schoenbergian of reasonable enthusiasm and commitment, had heard them in concert. Given that Aimard also performed the Piano Concerto earlier this year, might we hope for a recording of that with the solo œuvre? We are still far from spoiled for choice in either. 

The first of the op.11 Pieces registered with radical, far from arbitrary, freedom, indicative of many years’ internalisation. Here was a fantastical Schoenberg, affinities lying as much with Schumann as with Brahms, though never to be pinned down to one particular ‘flavour’. Indeed, kaleidoscopic range, whether in dynamics or such reference, was not the least of this recital’s virtues. If this is ‘freely atonal’ music – one can register doubts concerning the label, whilst conceding it is unlikely either to be replaced or bettered – then perhaps this was also ‘freely atonal performance’. The opening of the second struck me as insisting less on remnants of D minor than often; that is, until it did. Somehow, that all-important figure insisted on its ostinato procedure as if all depended upon it, and in a way it did. Again, all seemed to be in motion, according to a distinctly Romantic sensibility that immediately extended beyond ‘mere’ Romanticism. The third piece was as furious and as capricious, and so much more in between, as anyone could hope for. 

In the op.19 Six Little Piano Pieces, thinner textures were immediately apparent; they could hardly fail to be. Likewise Schoenberg at his most aphoristic. It was, though, his sheer single-mindedness that shone through the exquisite spinning of a near-single line, however much shadowed on either side (pitch) and other sides (other parameters). The sheer magical quality to the final chord of the second, the almost vocal eloquence of the third, and the darting will-o’-the-wisp movement of the fourth: none of it, for once, required great virtuosity, but it required the fiercest of musical intelligence, which is what we heard. A distinctly unsentimental reading of the sixth piece sounded recollections of the Mahlerian funeral bells; above all, here as elsewhere, it sounded as music, programme or no programme. 

The op.23 Pieces gained greatly from being heard in this context. One immediately sensed an impulse to constructivism, even – perhaps particularly – on such elusive foundations. Kinship to other Schoenberg music of a similar time, as well as to more ‘freely’ atonal predecessors – the still-more-seldom heard Four Orchestral Songs, op.22, a case in point – was immediately apparent; so too were the reinvention and reintegration of polyphony. With Schoenberg, as with Bach, it is never either/or. Each piece sounded as a response to its predecessor, the second for instance as vehement as it was protean. Aimard less argued than demonstrated beyond doubt that this music mattered. The third was characterised by a splendidly Schoenbergian combination of obstinacy and whimsy; the fourth’s eloquence of utterance evoked Beethoven; and the fifth, of course, marked another bridge, to the twelve-note music to come, reminding us as much of its dancing, its smiling, and its open-heartedness, as its rigour. 

If I was brought up sharply by the beginning of op.33a, it was because I had been expecting the Suite. It was a nice jolt, as it was to return to the Suite for the conclusion of the first half: an invitation to listen differently. Schoenberg’s very particular mixture of expressionism and the Bauhaus glowered and glistened. In its successor, op.33b, from two years later (1931), we seemed to hear an attempt to create a new centre, its abandonment, and a new freedom that resulted from both. In performance, as in work, music never went quite where one expected. One needed to listen—and that was good. 

The Suite, op.25, emerged as quite a reckoning with Bach: harmonic as much as in ‘style’. We all know, after all, that Schoenberg had little patience with ‘style’ as a would-be substitute for Idea; it was certainly Idea we heard – and felt – here. The white intensity of the ‘Präludium’ and its Bachian ambition set out a new world before us, enabling one to hear this music as never before and, again, above all as music. Schoenberg’s need to communicate and the sheer abundance of that communication came to the fore in the Gavotte’ and Musette that followed; so too did a sense of delight, even of fun, as well as that trademark, ever-productive obstinacy. The Intermezzo, here the work’s beating heart, attained a well-nigh Mahlerian intensity of utterance, without forsaking an equally characteristic sense of childlike delight. All the while, through the Menuett and Trio, to the Gigue, line and development were pursued as one, the latter signing off with an éclat to foreshadow and even to rival Boulez. 

If one naturally heard passing resemblances, especially harmonic, with Schoenberg in Ives’s Sonata – there are, after all, only twelve notes in the chromatic scale – it was more the composer’s particular belief and integrity in his own inimitable utterance that characterised what we heard. Aimard’s eloquence and understanding as guide in turn enabled us as listeners to place greater confidence in our own listening—and thus to reap rewards in response. The beginning of the first movement, ‘Emerson’, had a proper sense of mapping out of space to come, even if it could only offer a foretaste at most. Familiar melodies came through, though here that did not really seem to be the point as perhaps it sometimes may have been later on. The multiplicity and obduracy already familiar from Schoenberg took on new guise of expression and form. Line is perhaps more difficult to trace here than in Schoenberg; it may again not even be the point. Being able to place such confidence in our guide to this most singular of divine comedies was nonetheless at least part of the battle. Moreover, for all the craggy masculinity of utterance, there was tenderness too, nowhere more so than at the close of this movement. 

‘Hawthorn’ was possessed of a very different character, heard with an unmistakeable sense of release and propulsion. Clusters were magical, even Debussy-like, to be savoured almost in themselves, yet rigour and struggle ultimately remained the thing. The plain-spokenness of ‘The Alcotts’, building Romantic momentum in work and performance, and the newly enigmatic quality to ‘Thoreaux’, however different its material and implications would soon prove, seemed to speak of an almost Joycean musical universe, albeit one rooted in particular, unmistakeably American transcendentalism. Summation seems reductive; perhaps summa comes a little closer, if a little ‘foreign’. Then, inevitably, all turned again more wayward. Like Schoenberg, Ives can never be pinned down. Why, indeed, would anyone try?

Musikfest Berlin (1) - Prohaska/Aimard: Ives, Stravinsky, and Debussy, 1 September 2024

Kammermusiksaal

Ives: 25 songs from the collections 114 Songs and Eleven Songs
Stravinsky: Four Russian Songs; Three Songs from William Shakespeare: ‘Full Fadom Five’
Debussy: Prose lyriques

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

Image copyright: Berliner Festspiele, Foto/photo Fabian Schellhorn

My visit to this year’s Musikfest Berlin began with a fascinating, brilliant recital from Anna Prohaska and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, weaving five selections of songs by Charles Ives, like Arnold Schoenberg 150 this year, amongst a set apiece from Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy. There may be about 400 Ives songs to choose from, but the selections were anything but random, whether in themselves or in combination with the other works. I doubt many in the audience will have been familiar with more than a few, but they will surely have won a good few converts: just what an anniversary celebration is for. 

The first Ives set, running into Stravinsky, offered songs of remembrance and autumn, the latter often being a time when minds turn to the former. Yet, just as memories are not always what one might expect, nor was the opening ‘Memories’, written when Ives was still a student at Yale. In two sections – what appear to all intents and purposes to be two separate songs – the first offered a seamless transition from pre-concert hubbub into recital, Aimard arriving on stage to put his music on the piano, declining applause, suddenly joined on the piano stool in a little coup de théâtre by Prohaska. The two then launched into ‘We’re sitting in the opera house, the opera house, the opera house…’. Aimard’s own delivery of the line ‘Curtain!’ brought proceedings, as beautifully acted as sung by Prohaska, to a close, swiftly to be followed by a distinctly New England languor for the second section, ‘Rather Sad’. Just when one thinks one might have begun to get to grips with Ives, if hardly to pin him down, he throws everything up in the air again, whether through the absorbing piano writing – very much Aimard’s thing – of ‘A Farewell to Land’, one line seemingly multiplying in a radical alternative to Schoenberg; the bracing, disquieting liberty of the night in ‘The “Incantation”’; or the tricky, jaunty, yet unerringly ‘true’ speech rhythm, captured by Prohaska to a tee, of ‘September’. Indeed, that sense of ‘truth’, ponderous, even portentous though it might sound, seemed to ring, well, true throughout, in Ives’s harmonies, the obstinacies of his rhythms, and much else. 

It is perhaps more usual to hear Stravinsky’s Four Russian Songs for voice and instrumental ensemble, although frankly one is lucky ever to hear them in any form. I am not sure I have had the opportunity before in concert, likewise with ‘Full Fadom Five’ from the Three Songs from William Shakespeare. In the former, the voice in particular captured once more to a tee this world of Les Noces in miniature. The ease with which Prohaska summoned up the right ‘voice’ for each section of the recital made it all seem so easy, art concealing art, Aimard’s command of metre and its transformation equally fundamental to the performance’s success. A whole new world was brought into life with great personality, alongside and indeed dependent on accuracy and musicality. The late, serial Stravinsky, time-travelling as widely and wildly as ever, was represented by the Shakespeare song: another jewel combining Webern-like process with ghosts of another past, in this case that of English music. Intervallic and harmonic flashes of that world beguiled yet also warned, prior to the celebrated Tempest tolling: ‘Ding dong bell’. 

That song was followed by Ives’s Shakespeare setting of the same text, ‘A Sea Dirge’ richly post-Romantic, for want of a better word, yet still admirably concise. Prohaska’s ‘Hark now’ haunted like a siren, recording an earlier recital and album of hers. Not for the first time, traces of Schoenberg also haunted proceedings, but it was Ives and no one else who set us truly along the path of contrasts between town and nature. ‘The Swimmers’ evoked worlds physical and metaphysical, culminating in a strikingly declamatory declaration that the protagonist was the sea’s master, not its slave. ‘Soliloquy’ proved increasingly expressionist, continuing that at least intermittent Schoenbergian thread. Modern life and its contrasts – alienation is more Mahler’s world – was the stuff in performance as well as text for ‘the New River’, followed by a poignant account of the Matthew Arnold setting, ‘West London’, unusually expansive in this company. The wry ‘Ann Street’ and ‘In the Alley’, the latter’s musical and verbal twist nicely – or naughtily – relished led us to a circus band full of surprises in the song of that name, seemingly aching to be staged and responding well to the soprano’s natural scenic gifts. 

Following the interval, a more impressionist or at least Debussyan Ives evoked ‘Evening’, ‘Mists’ and, in between, the ‘Evidence’ of his own words, preparing the way for spellbinding performances of Debussy’s Proses lyriques. The post-Wagnerian harmonies of ‘De rêve’ breathed a different air, leading us by the hand into a kaleiodoscopic dream world that emerged all the better for its clear-sightedness. The crepuscular tumult of ‘De grève’ and the Yniold-like shift (apparently without Pelléas’s catch) in the final ‘De soir’ offered further instances, as did ‘De fleurs’ in between, of subtle, imperceptible shaping, songs growing out of words and harmony, which in turn seemed to grow out of the shifting light they had themselves engendered. 

Ives’s ‘Berceuse’ made for a nice bridge to the final set, its lack of perfume and striking straightforwardness – which is certainly not to say simplicity – announcing a different voice and path, one leading perhaps from childhood, through battle, and ultimately to the strange heaven of General Booth. ‘Tom Sails Away’ suggested a world somewhere, aptly, between the whimsical and the visionary, that sense of liminality carried through into the next-but-one ‘Slow March’, its quotation of the ‘Dead March’ from Handel’s Saul both comforting and jarring. The closing ‘General Booth Enters into Heaven’ one might call a scena in itself, were such Italianate ways not so alien to Ives. It seemed to capture the composer’s brazen individuality and individualism: complex and straightforward, familiar and strange, old and new. Like a Mahler symphony, it seemed to embrace everything, to be like as well as of the world. Aimard gave the last of his own vocal interjections here, ‘Hallelujah!’ Yet it was Prohaska’s question that lingered, unsettlingly: ‘Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?’ It was quite a climax, to be followed only by a taste of the soprano’s upcoming Musikfest concert with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, in which she will sing more Ives songs, this time orchestrated by Eberhard Kloke. ‘The Cage’ left us asking, quite properly: ‘Is life anything like that?’ If only it were.

’20 Sonatas’ – Stefanovich: Bach, Soler, Scarlatti, CPE Bach, Ives, Bartók, Eisler, Hindemith, Scriabin, Roslavets, Janáček, and Ustvolskaya, 27 February 2022

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Bach: Sonata in A minor, BWV 965, after Reincken
Soler: Sonata in C minor, R.100
Busoni: Sonatina seconda
Scarlatti: Sonata in C minor, Kk.158; Sonata in G major, Kk.13
CPE Bach: Sonata in G minor, Wq.65/17
Ives: Three-Page Sonata

Scarlatti: Sonata in C major, Kk.406
Bartók: Sonata, Sz.80
Scarlatti: Sonata in G minor, Kk.450
Eisler: Sonata no.1, op.1
Soler: Sonata in D-flat major, R.110
Hindemith: Sonata no.3 in B-flat major

Soler: Sonata in G minor
Scriabin: Sonata no.9 in F major, op.68, ‘Black Mass’
Scarlatti: Sonata in G minor, Kk.8
Roslavets: Sonata no.2
Scarlatti: Sonata in B minor, Kk.87
Janáček: Sonata in E-flat minor, 1.X.1905, ‘From the Street’
Ustvolskaya: Sonata no.6

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)

Twenty piano sonatas over three fifty-minute-long recitals; avoiding the ‘core’ Classical and Romantic (broadly speaking) repertoire, from Haydn to Liszt; asking why composers might time and time again have returned to this genre, if indeed it can be considered the same genre at all. What would you choose? Why? There are no answers, of course, or rather no definitive answers, only an almost infinite host of opportunities. Such is the embarrassment of riches, usually a blessing but just occasionally a curse, of the piano/keyboard repertoire more generally. Tamara Stefanovich’s selection proved typically imaginative, committed, and both spiritually and intellectually nourishing, as well as an outstanding feat of musicianship and pianism.

The first selection began with Bach. (Does not everything?) Here we heard him in the sonata ‘after’ Johann Adam Reincken’s Hortus Musicus trio sonatas: some distance, perhaps, from what we generally think a sonata to be, but perhaps that was part of the point. No one would deny the glories of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, et al., but they can sometimes obscure other paths, especially earlier ones. Stefanovich left us in no doubt that this was a performance for the piano. (If you want to give a harpsichord performance, surely you should do that on the harpsichord.) Voicing gave the sense of a small orchestra at her disposal, a flute answering an oboe, a cello a viola. ‘Ornamentation’ was shown to be melody. There was declamatory joy, a strong sense of harmonic motion, and throughout a vivid, directed performance, culminating in a splendidly ‘present’ Gigue. Antonio Soler offered a very different voice, with both greater pathos and lightness. Stefanovich’s performance drew one in to listen. Busoni’s Sonatina seconda grew out of its close. Restless, diabolical, or better Faustian, it took us to the edge of atonality in a performance of virtuosity entirely at the service of the music, recalling what we know of Busoni's own pianism. Long-range coherence and incident of the moment were two sides of the same coin. 

Domenico Scarlatti made the first of several appearances, with a finely contrasted pair of sonatas (as we often hear his music). The first notes of the C minor Sonata, Kk.158, sounded truly disorienting, emerging as they did from Busoni. Where were we? In a liminal zone, so it seemed, in which eighteenth-century tonality reassembled itself. Both performances seemed thought out from first principles, from individual materials. What joy there was to be had in hearing the second’s repeated notes (more difficult on the piano than they sound). A sonata by CPE Bach, in G minor, followed. Its opening benefited from the grandest, most magnificent opening to a work of his I can recall, rhetoric harnessed as if to the rise of a velvet curtain. The first movement’s fantasia-like swings of mood and material were disciplined, just about, into a whole, yet never too much. This justly lived on the edge. The central Adagio sarabande, still duly involved, nonetheless offered some sense of relief, its arioso quality finely captured. The sheer strangeness (Sturm und Drang, one might call it, I suppose) of the third movement was again relished, never tamed. From one avant-gardist to another, we moved to Charles Ives’s Three-Page Sonata. Strikingly Schoenbergian language—close, not identical, and only for a moment or two—unleashed a parade of restless, radical, and wry freedom, whose chimes were almost the least surprising feature. The vehemence of disciplined chaos to its close made it almost impossible, had I not seen it for myself, to credit that there were only two hands at work here. 

The second recital was announced by Scarlatti: full of incident and pictorial character and contrast. ‘Percussive’ is a word we often hear used to describe Bartók’s piano-writing. One can understand why, but in reality it begs still more questions. (No bad thing.) For here, in his strangely neglected Piano Sonata, there were such profusion of melody, such variegation in the entirely unfussy weighting of each chord, propelled by rhythm and harmony alike, it seemed more than usually inadequate. A relentless first movement paved the way for a second of equal (at least) emotional intensity. The finale was every inch a finale in its substantive release. Rightly, for the first and only time within a recital, the pianist paused for applause. Returning to Scarlatti, it was fascinating to hear his repetitions and other, lighter obstinacies through the shadow cast by Bartók. 

Hanns Eisler’s opus one brought us fascinatingly close in its first movement to the language of the serial Schoenberg, yet held its distance too: more skittish, Scarlatti an excellent preface. Structure on paper became living form in liquid performance. Prokofiev seemed close at times too, perhaps particularly in the second of the three movements, its line unerringly traced and projected. The care and abandon with which not un-Schoenbergian idiosyncrasies were integrated in the finale typified the performance as a whole. Following an unexpectedly fragrant ornamental flowering from Soler, its harmonies taking a while to get used to after Eisler, we moved to Hindemith’s Third Piano Sonata. In its first movement, siciliano rhythms immediately standing out, they sounded as if formed by their surrounding harmonies. A scampering scherzo and two deliberate yet purposeful movements to follow led us to a sense of hard-won victory. 

Soler opened the third and final instalment: courtly yet capricious, ornamentation speaking of a freedom of which we stand in greater need than ever. Scriabin’s ‘Black Mass’ Sonata suggested dissolution as another, more dangerous form of emancipation, even through the burning fire of Bakunin-like anarchism (very different from Ives’s). There was wayward alchemy, though, and direction to be appreciated looking backwards from where we had come, even if we were uncertain at the time where we were heading. Command of detail was crucial to that greater sweep, just as it was in the dignified pathos of the Scarlatti sonata that followed. The post-Romantic constructivism of Ukrainian Nikolai Roslavets took a different path from Eisler (or Schoenberg) yet could nonetheless be felt as something of an antidote to Scriabin. There were moments of languor, yes, but motivic construction and transformation won out. Once more, the strangeness in context of Scarlatti’s harmonies was to be relished as a pendant.

Janáček’s Sonata, 1.X.1905 could hardly fail to have particular resonance given the state of the world around us. It went beyond that, though, in a moving performance of proud dignity and deeply communicative humanism, fusing the subtle and the direct. Its second movement was more songful, yet no less impassioned, through rather than despite its fragile nerve endings. For the final work of the day, Stefanovich donned black gloves to tackle the immediate yet reflective violence of Galina Ustvolskaya’s 1988 Sonata no.6. More unremitting than Bartók, blacker than anything we had yet heard or wished to hear, it duly bludgeoned, yet spoke of and with an integrity that refused to offer easy answers. Was there, perhaps, a glimmer of hope in there somewhere? It was probably something more equivocal than that. And then it was gone.

BBC Proms (3) - BBC NOW/Bancroft - Thomas, Ives, and Dvořák, 8 August 2021

Royal Albert Hall

Augusta Read Thomas: Dance Foldings (world premiere)
Ives: Orchestral Set no.1: Three Places in New England
Dvořák: Symphony no.9 in E minor, op.95, ‘From the New World’

BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Ryan Bancroft (conductor)

An excellent American-themed concert from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and its Californian Principal Conductor, Ryan Bancroft. It began, as is right, with a new work: Augusta Read Thomas’s Dance Foldings. For the 150^th anniversary of the Royal Albert Hall, founded to promote the arts and sciences alike, the BBC has commissioned four new works to reflect the arts and sciences in our world. Dance Foldings is the first, Thomas taking as the starting point for her material ‘the metaphors, pairings, counterpoints, foldings, forms and images inspired by the biological “ballet” of proteins as they are being assembled and folded in or bodies’. As she observes, the animations one can view online of proteins folding can resemble assembly lines or ballets, both types strongly suggesting ‘musical possibilities’. The sense of ballet music, even without dancers, was strong from the opening: hard-edged, sharply rhythmic, ‘alive-from-the-inside’. The orchestra, including piano, suggested a post-Agon world, perhaps even some commonality with Henze, though it was Stravinsky who more frequently came to mind. There were rhythmic, melodic cells, but there was also, increasingly, mirroring, chain-like progression, and transformation, leading us through a musical maze that suggested something both spontaneous and yet, once done, set in stone (or, perhaps, an amino acid chain). Urgent, unquestionably forward-looking, and highly colourful, t were a work and performance both raucous and controlled, as if evoking a life-force more scientific than often one encounters in the concert hall.

Charles Ives’s First Orchestral Set, Three Places in New England, followed, an all too rare opportunity to hear Ives’s orchestral music in the concert hall. I would not say the misty opening of ‘“The St Gaudens” in Boston Common’ sounded more ‘modern’, but rather differently modern, its known/found melodies notwithstanding. In highly atmospheric, expertly shaped performance, it sounded like music of the clouds and/or music emerging from the clouds. Ligeti was not far beyond—or should that be behind? At any rate, Ives’s pioneering spirit was unquestionably, poetically present. ‘Putnam’s Camp’ was admirably clear, the riot of tunes heard against each other and gaining from that experience without losing their own identity. There was a fine sense of what I thought of as the programmatically spatial: this was music in some sense ‘about’ space, temporal space included, irrespective of the space in which it was performed, or at least not confined by that latter space. Still more mysterious at its heart, the movement seemed to explore the age-old dramatic dichotomy of private and public, as well as old and new, in ways that never ceased to surprise and to enliven. Enigmatic, liminal, ‘The Housatonic at Stockbridge’ proved in its breadth as complex as its predecessor—so long as one listened. There was something ineffably human at its base or its far-away, aurally glimpsed hymn-book source, but there were no easy questions, let alone answers.

The New World Symphony opened similarly broadly, as if in keeping with social distancing on stage, yet with no lack of tension. Bancroft’s principal tempo for the ‘Allegro molto’ was, if anything, on the swift side, but not unreasonably so. He was flexible too, permitting keen woodwind plenty of opportunity to sing. There were some strikingly Wagnerian moments to this first movement: harmonically, but also in the way the cellos ‘spoke’. Grave brass and soft strings prepared the way for that melody in the ‘Largo’. It moved, without being harried; in short, again it sang. As did much else: not in one voice, but in many, more than the sum of their parts, not entirely unlike Ives’s music. Bancroft shaped the movement unobtrusively, comprehendingly, another nice touch being the nod to Mendelssohnian processional (the second movement of the Italian Symphony, as in the First Night’s Sibelius Second). Indeed, there was a strong sense of narrative: not necessarily programmatic, but not necessarily not either. A properly urgent scherzo, to which harmony was as crucial as rhythm (or melody) gave way, through somewhat disorienting transition, to a polished, lyrical, rhythmic trio. As for the finale, this may sound facile—perhaps it is—but it combined and culminated. Lyricism was just as crucial here as elsewhere. What a tremendous symphony this is, in quite a different league from any other by Dvořak; and so it sounded here.

 

Samling 20th Anniversary Concert, 8 November 2016

Wigmore Hall

Britten – A Charm of Lullabies, op.41: ‘A Cradle Song’; ‘The Nurse’s Song’

Warlock – My Sweet Little Darling
Schubert – Wiegenlied, D 498
Ives – The Children’s Hour
Schumann – Lieder-Album für die Jugend, op.79: ‘Marienwürmchen’
Poulenc – La Courte Paille; nos.4-7
Schubert – Licht und Liebe, D 352
Liszt – Tre sonetti di Petrarca, S 270/1: Sonnets nos 104, 47
Quilter – Five Shakespeare Songs (set 2): ‘It was a lover and his lass’
Britten – The Foggy, Foggy Dew; Soldier, won’t you marry me?
Schubert – Schwanengesang, D 957: ‘Kriegers Ahnung’
Schumann – Der Soldat, op.40 no.3
Wolf – Der Soldat I and II
Fauré – Les Berceaux, op.23 no.1
Poulenc – Bleuet
Barber – I hear an army, op.10 no.3
Liza Lehmann – Nonsense Songs from ‘Alice in Wonderland’: ‘Fury said to a Mouse’
Bolcom – Twelve Cabaret Songs: ‘Amor’
Brahms – O wüsst ich doch den Weg zurück, op.63 no.8; Alte Liebe, op.72 no.1
Barber – The Secrets of the Old, op.13 no.2
Copland – Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson: ‘Going to Heaven!’
Schubert – Nachstück, D 672; Der Tages Weihe, D 763

 

Kiandra Howarth (soprano)

Kathryn Rudge (mezzo-soprano)

David Butt Philip (tenor)

Benjamin Appl (baritone)

Andrew Foster-Williams (baritone)

James Baillieu (piano)

Ian Tindale (piano)

Malcolm Martineau (piano)

James Garnon (actor)

The Samling Artist Programme has nurtured the careers of many a young artist, both singers and pianists (or, if you will, accompanists), gathering them together (apparently, gathering, collective, even assembly are possible translations of the Norse ‘Samling’) with an array of senior artists. Part of that programme is an annual showcase at the Wigmore Hall. For its twentieth anniversary, Samling Artists from 2000 (Andrew Foster-Williams) to 2016 (Kiandra Howarth) took the stage, joined by Malcolm Martineau (one of those senior artists or ‘Leaders’) and the actor, James Garnon. Thomas Allen, Samling’s Patron was to have joined the assembled company, but flu put paid to that, and thus to an ensemble from Sullivan’s Trial by Jury. I cannot comment on every single song, but hope to give a flavour of what was on offer in this particular showcase.

The programme traced the ‘seven ages of man’, prefaced by Garnon’s engaging reading from As you like it’s ‘strange eventful history’. Two songs from Britten’s A Charm of Lullabies (Kathryn Rudge and James Baillieu) opened ‘Infancy’, Baillieu’s piano making much of the harmonic affinity of the Blake ‘Cradle Song’ with the world of The Rape of Lucretia, Rudge captivating in the a cappella opening of ‘The Nurse’s Song’. Her mezzo-soprano voice here and elsewhere proved both rich and variegated of tone. The post-Mozartian simplicity of Schubert’s Wiegenlied was well captured by Kiandra Howarth and Malcolm Martineau, paving the way for ‘Childhood’. Benjamin Appl seemed not to come truly into his own until later in the recital. Although Ives’s The Children’s Hour was beautifully sung, he missed a certain lightness of touch. Four songs from Poulenc’s La Courte paille were more successful. They were shared between Howarth and Rudge, the former seemingly relishing a more absurdist side, the latter more seductive.

 

When we reached the stage of ‘The Lover’, David Butt Philip joined Howarth and Ian Tindale for Schubert’s Licht und Liebe. Tindale proved equally alert rhythmically and harmonically. The ardent quality of Butt Philip’s singing carried into an unapologetically Italianate rendition of Liszt’s first Petrarch Sonnet. Vocal passion was matched in Baillieu’s piano playing of that and the second, for which Howarth returned, to give a similarly dramatic performance. I cannot claim to care much for the music of Roger Quilter, but Rudge and Appl gave a charming performance.

 

A welcome change of mood – Britten folksongs are really not for me – came after the interval with ‘The Soldier’. Following a reading from Henry IV, Part I, Andrew Foster-Williams was heard for the first time, with Baillieu, in Kriegers Ahnung. A greater depth was immediately announced, carried into an especially commanding performance (now with Tindale) of Schumann’s Der Soldat, sadness and anger in compelling balance. Appl seemed much more at home in two soldier songs from Wolf’s Eichendorff-Lieder, using the words to excellent effect. Another highlight, not just of this section, but of the concert as a whole, came with the Rudge-Martineau performance of Fauré’s Les Berceaux, its sadness deeply felt. Honesty and integrity of feeling were equally apparent in Butt Philip’s Poulenc Bieuet. Stylish, never mawkish, he impressed just as much as he had in the very different music of Liszt. Much the same might be said of Foster-Williams, in Samuel Barber’s Joyce setting, I hear an army.

 

‘The Justice’ was missing the aforementioned Sullivan number, so was confined to a charmingly despatched Liza Lehmann song (Butt Philip/Tindale) and a cabaret song by William Bolcom: not my thing, I am afraid, although Howarth was very much in her element. Lugubrious Teutonophile that I am, I responded more warmly to ‘Old Age’ and Brahms. Foster-Williams and Bailliue gave an unexaggerated, deceptively straightforward performance of O wüßt ich doch den Weg zurück, Rudge and Martineau displaying depth to match that of the Fauré song in Alte Liebe. Rudge’s Barber song, The Secrets of the Old, captured the idiom perfectly: an equally fine performance, again well supported by Martineau. Much the same might be said of Howarth and Tindale’s sincere, aware Going to Heaven!  

 

Our revels now were ended, as the final Shakespeare reading reminded us. ‘Oblivion/Second Infancy’ opened with a fine performance of Schubert’s Nachtstück from Appl and Martineau. With beautiful vocal shading, Appl offered ample consolation for the misery of dotage. A heartfelt consecration of the day (Des Tages Weihes) concluded proceedings, with a well-matched performance form Howarth, Rudge, Butt Philip, Foster-Williams, and Baillieu. It seemed fitting to leave to the echoing strains of a Schubertiade.

Stefanovich - Copland, Carter, and Ives, 26 February 2016

St John’s, Smith Square

Copland – Piano Variations

Carter –Tri-Tribute
Carter – Two Thoughts about the Piano
Ives – Piano Sonata no.1

Tamara Stefanovich (piano) 

 

This will prove, I think, to be a recital long echoing in the memories of those present. The music of three very different composers were here heard, a common theme perhaps more the utterly compelling advocacy and virtuosity of Tamara Stefanovich than any intrinsic musical connections between the works. That did not matter a jot. Stefanovich’s welcoming manner – she prefaced the Carter pieces and the Ives with very helpful introductions – would have drawn anyone in. The warmth and volume of the applause following Charles Ives’s First Sonata said it all.

If Aaron Copland wrote a better work than his 1930 Piano Variations, I do not know it. Stefanovich gave at least as good a performance as any recording I have heard. (I do not think I had previously had the opportunity to hear it live.) The opening sounded stentorian, provocative. It took, quite rightly, a little while to yield, construction and drama revealed to be as one. I loved Stefanovich’s grand, Romantic manner with the work, sounding every bit as much music for the Steinway as Rachmaninov; indeed, at times, Copland sounded positively Lisztian. The music could melt, tenderly, in similar fashion too. Leonard Bernstein called the work ‘as hard as nails’. That was not really how it sounded here. Rather, Stefanovich seemed to posit – or at least I heard – something of a rapprochement avant la lettre between Schoenberg and Stravinsky; perhaps there was even a sense of Prokofiev at his most radical. More importantly still, Stefanovich proved herself here an unmistakeably original musical thinker, beholden to no performing tradition; I really must hear her again in Boulez’s Second Sonata, since I now fear that, on a previous occasion, I listened far too much with my own preconceptions to the fore.

 

Elliott Carter is widely recognised as the greatest of all American composers. Here we heard works from his extraordinary final period, approaching his century. Slipping in a cunningly unattributed Ivesian reference (his father’s advice) to her introduction, Stefanovich told us that this was music to ‘stretch the ears’. It was indeed, but so had Copland’s work been too. Different metrical speeds ‘in a very confined space’ was an apt frame of reference for us to hear the three miniatures of Tri-Tribute. They sounded, in their way, as something of a petite suite, and had a wonderful sense of playfulness. In Two Thoughts about the Piano, ‘Intermittences’ brought what sounded like a post-Messieanic hierarchy of dynamics. And again, I thought: what wonderful use of the Steinway! Sparks flew, as it were, in ‘Caténaires’: electric as well as electrical, with an intriguing, indeed delightful post-Webern sonority. The sense of a single line – akin to a cable – was unmistakeable, a moto perpetuo for the Internet age.  

It was also my first opportunity to hear Ives’s Sonata no.1 in concert. If less single-minded than Mahler, it emerged certainly as more akin, in that most celebrated of symphonic contrasts, to Mahler’s vision than to that of Sibelius. If it did not quite embrace everything, it had a wonderful stab at doing so, perhaps all the more touching, all the more daring, for its defiant lack of polish. Again, Schoenberg came to mind, especially at the beginning; I had to remind myself that Ives’s writing preceded Schoenberg’s op.11. Thereafter, take your pick: everything seemed to be present. The grand, Romantic sound we had heard in Copland seemed revivified here; we did not seem so very far from the challenge of the Hammerklavier Sonata. The revelations and mysteries of Ives’s compositional choices – what are we to make of the appearance of What a Friend we have in Jesus, and the use to which it is put? – were as extraordinary, as baffling, and yes, as moving, as ever. This was a bravura performance, if ever I heard one. ‘Silent’ Kurtág was the perfect encore response: witty and surely just as loving.

 

Happy New Year!

For a moment, I fancied that I felt like Charles Ives. Haydn's Surprise Symphony was playing, when I accidentally added Nono's Intolleranza 1960 to the aural mix. The result was strangely compelling. You may or may not wish to experience the works together, but feel free to experiment. Both works, I think, will stand us in good stead for 2016, should we care to listen.

 

Haydn remains scandalously neglected. One needs to listen, just as one does with Nono. Then, an infinitely inventive universe opens up: as intellectually challenging as it is warm-hearted and adorable. Haydn reminds us of the true wonder of music, something not even the darkest of times can entirely obliterate. Both composers are great humanists.

 

Nono's first opera might have been written for today; indeed, we might do well to restage it as Intolleranza 2016. As neo-fascist governments, whether overt as in Hungary and Poland or slightly covert as in the United Kingdom, increasingly tighten their grip upon Europe, spewing forth hatred for those who are different, Nono's humanist cry resounds with greater relevance than ever.  The composer always felt the necessity of response to what he called ‘provocations’. Here, they were many: negligence leading to a mining accident in Marcinelles in Belgium, Italian popular demonstrations in July 1960 resisting the return of fascism, events in colonial Algeria, and the catastrophe ensuing in Polesine from flooding by the River Po. (Does any of that sound familiar?) Such provocations are transformed by Nono into scenes from the life of an emigrant – or immigrant – worker, an everyman of sorts. However, the Emigrant is not, according to Nono, in himself the true protagonist. Rather there are two conceptual ‘principal elements’, viewed in those different situations: intolerance and opposition thereto. Please, will some opera house show the courage, the humanity of the composer, and stage this work? Not at some unspecified point in the future, not as an ‘aspiration’, but as an urgent, immediate necessity.