Salzburg Festival (4) - Stefanovich, Lečić, Widmann, SWR: Debussy, Boulez, and Stravinsky, 20 August 2025

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Debussy, arr. Bavouzet: Jeux. Poème dansé
Boulez: Dialogue de l’ombre double
Stravinsky: Concerto for two pianos
Boulez: Piano Sonata no.2

Tamara Stefanovich, Nenad Lečić (pianos)

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

SWR Experimentalstudio

Michael Acker, Maurice Oeser (sound direction)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

The most radical of Debussy’s orchestral works, perhaps the most radical of all Debussy’s works, Jeux held a special place in Boulez’s conducting repertory. He even served as Myriam Chimènes’s co-editor for this instalment in the critical edition, incorporating several of the revisions Debussy made following the 1913 premiere. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s transcription for two pianos, published in 2005 and taking up the memory of a lost version Debussy mentioned in a letter to his publisher, was given here with further modifications from the performers, Tamara Stefanovich and Nenad Lečić. One piano (Lečić), then the other, then two pianos, quickly dissolving into the sound of one, equally swift in sonic reinstatement as two: this brought different, at least equal challenges to the performers as the magically elusive orchestral score. At times, pitch seemed to gain a certain priority among parameters (as Boulez’s generation would know them) but other substitutes, complements, and contrasts vied for position too, not least the fascinating distinction between piano touch and orchestral timbre. It flickered in different ways, inevitably sounding closer to the piano works, both solo and En blanc et noir, in some ways akin to a continuous suite of études. The narrative was there too, though, both in detail and mood, often insouciant, sometimes languorous, infinitely malleable, always unhurried, yet precise and directed (if neither in a Boulezian nor a Beethovenian way). Seemingly as overflowing with melody as a work by Schoenberg, the piece and its harmonies could barely have registered more irresistibly in a performance both responsive and responsorial (to borrow from the Boulezian future). Sly, ineffable seduction led to a nonchalant closing shrug as perfectly prepared as it was delivered. 

Dialogue de l’ombre double was dedicated to Berio for his 60^th birthday, coinciding precisely with that of Boulez, in 1985, thus neatly combining this year’s two great musical centenaries. Although the most recent performance will well-nigh inevitably stand freshest in one’s mind, I think I can safely say I have never heard a better performance than that from Jörg Widmann, doubling with his recorded self, courtesy of Michael Acker and Maurice Oeser of the SWR Experimentalstudio (another important Boulez link). In some ways – it can probably only ever be some – it may also have been the most faithful to Boulez’s conception, originating in Paul Claudel’s Le Soulier de satin in which a double shadow of the central pair Rodrigue and Prouhèze is projected onto a wall, yet surely also inspired by Antonin Artaud’s idea of the glimpse of uncorrupted reality afforded by theatre’s ‘double’, and indeed to the ‘double’ variation form of the French eighteenth century, as well. as the doubling and shadowing in the relationships of work/composer and performance/performer characteristic of all notated music. All were certainly present, from the lighting that created Widmann’s silhouette on the wall to the continuation of Jeux’s responsorial two-piano elements with new means, transforming in the hall around us, more than hinting at the work’s relationship to Boulez’s own Répons. There were surprises too, such as the plunge into darkness at the beginning, the first notes we heard being the double rather than Widmann, who must have come onstage during those magical first arabesques. Perhaps one could see him, perhaps not; my mind’s eye and ear where rightly elsewhere. Unending melody, punctuated and structured in highly visible as well as audible form, created a form of music theatre that yet remained above all music. 

Stefanovich and Lečić returned to the stage after the interval for another outstanding two-piano performance, this time of Stravinsky’s Concerto for two pianos: not the most Boulez-friendly Stravinsky, and thus arguably all the more welcome in this context. Scènes de ballet might have been provocative; this, the more one listened, was thoughtful and productive, complementing as well as contrasting, whatever the two composers might have thought (or said). It would make a fascinating companion piece to Structures one day, perhaps alongside Stockhausen’s Mantra—Mozart or Schubert too. Its quietly ferocious regularity – ‘who me? igniting a debate?’ – made for an opening contrast of equal intelligence and beauty, not least in the chiaroscuro of this performance. The first movement’s surprising yet undeniable approaches to Shostakovich registered with startling clarity, and then Stravinsky pulled another rabbit out of the hat, then another… Much could be learned – in my case, was – from simple observance of the pianists’ body language and again that responsorial quality. The hollowed-out quality of Stravinsky’s tonality shone keenly, even brazenly in the second movement. At the same time, so did its undeniably ‘Russian’ roots, for instance in Petrushka. The final two movements, increasingly involved, offered ever more radical complement and development the more closely one listened. There was play too, of course, categories slyly undermined as soon as they were established. Perhaps this was not so distant from Boulez, even from his Second Piano Sonata, as we might have imagined. 

Thus to Stefanovich’s thrilling, astounding climax. I have heard fine performances of this work but none finer. Indeed, I think it may well have been the most all-encompassing, red in tooth and claw, white in heat, and both desolate and bracing in numerous aftershocks, I have heard, whether live or on record. The work’s beauty and violence were dialectically present from the opening of the first movement. How Stefanovich had the piano yield, melodically and still more harmonically, brought a surprising yet welcome touch of Brahms (perhaps via the unstable ‘model’ of Beethoven). Phrasing too was just as crucial—and revealing, every bit as much so as in Mozart or Beethoven. Artaud was more palpably, viscerally to the fore than in the Dialogue: ‘organised delirium’ (the title both for Caroline Potter’s recent study for Boydell and for Stefanovich’s still newer Pentatone CD tribute: grab both!) As Messiaen recalled his young pupil, ‘like a lion that had been flayed alive’, so not only was the work, not only was the performance, but so were we in audience response. There was a quasi-religious fervour to a fire that also signalled Beethovenian concision (the Fifth Symphony’s first movement, for instance). It was over before we knew, yet remained with us. 

If the first movement in some sense prepared us for the second – the first moment of aftershock – it also could not, given the new paths taken. Given the enormous challenges of communication, Stefanovich’s command of line proved close to incredible. It built on unerring power and a sense of ‘rightness’, that it could not be otherwise. Doubtless it could be; there are always alternatives. In the moment, though, one should (generally) feel otherwise. The third movement, unsurprisingly given its earlier origin, connected most obviously with Boulez’s earlier piano music, yet only as a starting point. Once again, the clarity and direction of what we heard, work and performance, was striking. Reconstruction and annihilation on seemingly endless, yet soon ended, repeat were the hallmark of the fourth movement, at least its beginning, all at once—and yet with Mozartian clarity. Ever transforming, ever bewitching, it stretched mind and ears, inviting them to repay the compliment. It scalded, it froze, liquid extremes imparting simultaneous life and death. The final, undeniable aftershock offered, if not peace, then a sense of human spirit in varied abundance.

 

Karajan-Akademie/Petrenko - Mendelssohn and Widmann, 17 May 2024

Kammermusiksaal

Mendelssohn: String Octet in E-flat major, op.20
Widmann: Quintet for oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon, and piano
Mendelssohn: Symphony no.4 in A major, op.90, ‘Italian’

Karajan-Akademie

Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

The Berlin Philharmonic’s Karajan-Akademie, founded on the initiative of the man himself in 1972, is perhaps the ultimate in orchestral scholarships. Its graduates are to be found in orchestras across the world. On the basis of this evening concert whose second part was conducted by Karajan’s successor but two, Kirill Petrenko, it would seem unwise to bet against that continuing. Any good orchestra will excel in chamber music playing too. The first part of the concert, offering a work for strings by Mendelssohn and one for wind and piano by Jörg Widmann confirmed much to admire in that respect as well.

Mendelssohn’s music nearly always lifts the spirits—unless played poorly (which does not bear thinking about). The Karajan-Akademie’s Octet offered no exception. From the off, the first movement had a sense of rightness that implied spontaneity, yet doubtless entailed much preparation. Tempo, balance, poise, and sheer élan characterised the performance that mirrored Mendelssohn’s own extraordinary combination of youth and maturity. Counterpoint was vividly present without congestion of textures. Not that sterner passages, for instance in the development, were undersold. The melancholy of exhaustion and its differentiation told its own tale, as did the revival of spirits for the return. Above all, it made me smile. If Beethoven’s inheritance was not absent in the first movement, it was immediately more apparent in the second. A keen architectural grasp was combined with moral seriousness and due sense of the sublime (without a hint of pomposity). The featherlight, fairytale fantasy of a Mendelssohn scherzo held no fears for these players; their relish proved properly infections. They stepped forward and blended in ensemble like musical actors in a play (A Midsummer Night’s Dream only just round the corner). Beethoven’s influence, worn ever so lightly, also characterised a finale of vigour, rigour, and release, which seemed to delight in the very essence of music. The players’ delight both in their performance and the warmth of its reception were palpable, and rightly so.   

Next came Widmann’s Quintet for oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon, and piano, a 2006 commission from the Karajan-Akademie. The combination of piano, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon has as its most celebrated, unmatchable example that of Mozart, although Beethoven’s early work is a fine example too. Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet, op.26, and Suite, op.29 between them contain the instruments, though neither of course matches directly. It was Schoenberg’s music and perhaps also that of his alleged antipode, Stravinsky, that seemed more to haunt on this occasion, for who would dare follow Mozart’s KV 452 directly? Widmann claims to have done so, but that was not so apparent to me, and more to the point, seemed to matter. His longstanding – even then, as the recipient of the Akademie’s Claudio Abbado Composition Prize – preoccupation with German Romanticism registered strongly: not only in its Second Viennese School culmination, but also in Schumannesque (at one remove) piano writing. There was humour; there were what once we might have called ‘extended techniques’; and there was a ‘lost waltz’ that seemed to have strayed from the Vienna of Schoenberg and Berg (perhaps the Wozzeck tavern). Eighteen miniature movements in not much more than twenty minutes offered a vivid, youthful conspectus that again seemed just the thing for outstanding young performers. They seemed to enjoy it too. Piano was exchanged for celesta in the final movement, ‘Flugtraum’, casting a spell of enchantment not only over what had gone before, but also over what was to come.

Petrenko joined a full chamber orchestra (strings 6.5.4.3.2) for the return of Mendelssohn in his Italian Symphony. Lessons of chamber-musicmaking seemed very much to have been learned, both for the players in their listening and sheer responsiveness, and also for the conductor, who in his wisdom – again, one could also see and hear his enjoyment – knew precisely when and when not to conduct. If one could hear, even in the excellent acoustic of the Kammermusiksaal, this was not an especially large string section, that did not matter in the slightest: it was different, neither better nor worse, and balance with wind was impeccable throughout. The first movement got off to a fine start, as well-judged as the Octet. Fine clarinet solos deserve special mention, though there was nothing approaching a weaker link. Petrenko likewise shaped the second movement well, crucially without giving much impression of doing so. His task was to draw out the musicianship of his players, a task accomplished to a tee. Line persisted, however much the scenery changed: the procession, after all, never stops. The Minuet again gained much from the sense of chamber playing writ large; it is not the only way, of course, but it worked well. Its trio seemed all the more to breathe the air of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Presto Saltarello danced on hot coals, infectious and cathartic as a summer night’s fever. Mendelssohn at last seemed to have turned bad; perhaps it was so, if only in the moment.

Kozhukhin - Widmann, Schubert, Ligeti, and Liszt, 16 May 2024

Pierre Boulez Saal

Widmann: Idyll and Abgrund (Six Schubert Reminiscences for piano)
Schubert: Piano Sonata in G major, D 894
Ligeti: Études, no.13: ‘L’Escalier du diable’
Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor, S 178

Denis Kozhukhin (piano)

With this intelligently programmed and performed recital, Denis Kozhukhin reminded us what an interesting musician he is. Both halves presented a major piano sonata – two of the most celebrated and, in different ways, difficult in the repertoire – preceded by a more recent work either, in the first case, paying explicit reference to the earlier composer or, in the latter, holding something diabolically transcendental in common. 

Jörg Widmann’s 2009 Idyll and Abgrund, subtitled Six Schubert Reminiscences for piano, opened the programme. If its first ‘reminiscence’ certainly had melodic roots in Schubert, its harmonic world initially seemed closer to late Liszt, before heading in another direction altogether, heavy dissonant interventions in the treble sounding oddly like Schnittke. That composer also came to mind in the mode of expression of the second, though Schubert and indeed Brahms, as well as a more general (typically for the composer) relationship to German musical Romanticism were present. There were here and throughout so many ghosts that I cannot remember them all, and am not sure it would be helpful to list them even if I could. A charming waltz began, only to be partially obscured, yet soon returned to go a little haywire, pianist’s whistle and all. Kozhukhin offered a fine lilt, always idiomatic without sentimentality. There were starker passages. And surely that was Schubert’s final piano sonata I heard in the last movement, just before the close. But so what? Reference, allusion, or kinship were apparent, ‘meaning’ more allusive—and doubtless rightly so. 

Schubert’s own G major Sonata, D 894, followed. The first movement, Molto moderato e cantabile, was taken at no Richter tempo; how – why – would one imitate the inimitable? But it certainly took its lead from Schubert’s marking, as indeed did all four movements, in character as well as mere speed. A sense of sleepwalking, as in Thomas May’s programme note quotation from Alfred Brendel, was apparent, Schubert striding ‘across harmonic abysses as though by compulsion, and we cannot help remembering that sleepwalkers never lose their step’. Kozhukhin’s command of line certainly suggested this. One might, at any one moment, have been forgiven for thinking Schubert was not really in the business of development, but he was, through a stasis that was only apparent yet no less ‘felt’ for that. And he proved just as adept as summoning ghosts, albeit without any compulsion to name them. Form grew out of what we heard rather than being imposed upon it; that said, there was no doubting the moment of tonal return, nor the transformed nature of material thereafter. What a pity, then, that someone’s telephone went off at the first movement’s close, visibly disconcerting pianist and audience alike. The Andante received a similarly ‘interior’ reading, passages turning outwards where called for and not without violence. It made sense, again as if from deep sleep. This music can certainly be understood dialectically, yet it was less clear than with Beethoven that that would be the point. It came from a damaged world, a damaged psyche, Adorno’s Minima moralia coming to my mind, but showed great strength from within. The minuet asked and responded, the difference between question and response meaning all—both to pianist and composer. Its trio offered a vision of something beyond, perhaps heavenly, whilst unable or unwilling to let go of remaining, unbridgeable distance, as if a Bach musette found itself in the world of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, neither party knowing quite what to do. The final movement brought us back to earth, perhaps, whilst remembering what had just passed (and in truth, we had never really left). This was the wayward progress of music that wishes to approach Mozart, yet actually ends up further away. Might Kozhukhin have confronted the abyss more starkly? Perhaps, but his long, unbroken line told its own story. 

The thirteenth and longest of Ligeti’s Etudes, ‘L’Escalier du diable’, offered a strong pictorial sense of its titular inspiration without being bound by it, nor indeed by anything else other than a precision the composer would surely have admired. The craziness of its technical demands and their fulfilment were all part of the challenge—and the fun. Dynamic levels were as rock-solid as rhythm, a big, post-Romantic sound as present where required as interior unwinding. It was probably just my imagination, but I could have sworn a chord emerged, perfectly in keeping, as if from the world of Messiaen. In any case, the final resonance was surely one to rival Stockhausen. 

It made for an ideal curtain raiser to the Liszt B minor Sonata, which began with an almost modest precision that was actually more a case of knowing where the music must lead. That precision remained, as did tautness of conception, again with fine command of line to recall Schubert. There was no haze here, though, in a performance that was bright even when dark, and ever immediate. If there were sleepwalking here, it was of a more nightmarish quality. Kozhukhin did not shy away from rhetoric as such, the first statement of the second subject, for instance, highly declamatory, but form and, even on occasion, a certain formalism were more to the fore. Perhaps the performance, then, sprang from Ligeti in that sense too. Again, it was certainly not that Kozkuhkin could not spin a compelling, even spell-binding cantabile line; he could and did. Integration nonetheless always seemed his ultimate concern. Clarity of texture and purpose was admirable, even if I occasionally missed a little Romantic mystery. (Was that just me trying to have it all? Probably.) There were surprises, though, in the sense that new points of departure, the fugato a case in point, truly sounded as such, even when one ‘knew’. The true recapitulation sounded, again, with all the inevitability one could wish for. It was, perhaps, a more modernistic story than often, but that is inherent to Liszt. And on the very few occasions when the music threatened to escape even the most iron self-control, that is surely part of Liszt and Lisztian performance too. This sonata will never sound ‘perfect’; it is not Mozart and is not trying to be. It was something different from that and all the better for it. 

A moan: must audience members really tell each other loudly what an encore is when a musician begins to play it, or just as bad, give a stage-sigh of satisfaction? Well done: you have recognised Schumann’s Träumerei, one of the most celebrated and likely encores in the piano literature. Fortunately, Kozhukhin gave an honest account, beautifully voiced. To be fair, no one made such noises for the first encore, perhaps because – like me – they did not know what it was. Hymnal and, if I remember correctly, slightly modal, it had melodic and harmonic characteristics I might have guessed to be Russian. I wondered whether it might have ‘meant’ something beyond its notes; at any rate, Kozhukhin clearly believed in and winningly communicated those notes.

Musikfest Berlin (1) - Nagy/Concertgebouw/Fischer - Widmann and Mahler, 26 August 2023

 
Philharmonie

Jörg Widmann: Das heiße Herz
Mahler: Symphony no.7

Michael Nagy (baritone)
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Iván Fischer (conductor)

Image: © Fabian Schellhorn / Berliner Festspiele

Musical life in Berlin has been reignited before the summer festival season elsewhere has ended: first the season opening concert of the Berlin Philharmonic, after which the orchestra tours to a number of venues, Salzburg included, and the following night the opening concert of the 2023 Musikfest Berlin, which takes in ‘home’ and visiting ensembles. That concert fell this year to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Iván Fischer, in music by Jörg Widmann and Mahler, joined in the former by baritone Michael Nagy.

Widmann's short song-cycle, Das heiße Herz, originally written in 2013, was orchestrated in 2018, the new version's premiere being given by Christian Gerhaher, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, and Jakub Hrůša. Widmann sets five poems, two from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, providing an obvious connection already with Mahler, and one each by Klabund (‘Der arme Kaspar’), Heine (‘Das Fräulein stand am Meere’), and Brentano (‘Einsam will ich untergehn’). Klabund's poem is the first, an ear-catching opening of harp, celesta, crotales, and other percussion leading us (and the voice) into a post-Mahlerian soundscape in terms both of timbre and harmony without, at least here, regressing. Henze was another composer to come to mind, though this is certainly not pastiche, rather allusion and, later, reference. Here, as elsewhere, the orchestra gave a detailed, indeed authoritative performance, Nagy shaping the vocal line well in a similarly authoritative and communicative account. The Wunderhorn ‘Hab’ ein Ringlein am Finger’ gives a still stronger, arguably explicit, sense of refracted Mahler, via Wozzeck. Heine's song has something of the raconteur to it: a different, more popular mode of delivery, matched by Widmann’s harmonies and brass writing. ‘Kartenspiel’, the second Wunderhorn song, steps up its predecessor's demand that the ghost of tonality be acknowledged, though the vocal line in particular still went where it would in a post-tonal universe. A surprisingly jazz-like bass line took us on a path towards more or less fully fledged big band music at the close, via a polystylistic collage of allusion that offered a not entirely dissimilar sense of the disconcerting to Schnittke. 

The first four lines of the Brentano song open with solo voice, in folklike, even hymnal manner; I was put in mind, almost certainly coincidentally, of a nonconformist hymn recalled from my childhood. Solo instruments gradually joined to form a Webern-like ensemble on the path to fuller orchestra. There is here a stronger tonal pull, and increasingly so, an expressionist turn at one point rescuing the tendency from bathos. Whether the balancing act Widmann attempts here is entirely successful will probably be as much a matter of taste as anything else. It is rather what one would expect from him, yet never simply a reprise of earlier rummagings around the debris of German (post-)Romanticism. Reception was enthusiastic.

A considerably longer second ‘half’ was given over to Mahler's Seventh Symphony, in a brilliant performance that confounded expectations and opened up new perspectives on the work. Vigorous, determined, its tread in line with that of its counterpart in the Sixth, the first movement's notably faster initial tempo (faster than usual, I think) sounded a note of ambiguity that would never be shed, but rather joined by many more such notes. As a desperate fury took hold, Fischer embraced Mahler's parodies, self-parody included, and respected them by giving them their due without placing them in inverted commas or underlining them. Much the same could be said of his presentation of the way Mahler 'cuts' his material, not cinematic, but not entirely un-cinematic either. Those crucial liminal passages beguiled and shocked. Rapt hallucination took our breath away in preparation for a recapitulation that threw everything up in the air and saw where it landed, whilst always maintaining coherence. The Concertgebouw Orchestra, steeped in this music, sounded just right for Fischer's approach, doubtless informing it too. 

The opening of the first Nachtmusik was truly a thing of wonder, both in the perfection of the horn echoes and the way they spread, like a contagion. Fischer's conception of ‘night music’ was more of a nocturne than a Bernstein-like house of horrors, nonetheless showing ‘lightness’ to cover a multitude of sins, stylistic, textural, and otherwise, and certainly not without irony. All was finely articulated, without the slightest sense of self-satisfaction. It was strangely exhilarating, with a proper sting, even when one ‘knew’, to the close. A fascinatingly malevolent scherzo ensued, Mendelssohn dropped in acid, with the twin tendencies of control and finish on one hand, and ever threatening to veer out of control, that might imply. Skeletons danced in properly Alpine fashion. Berlioz taking a trip in more than one sense. The ending was similarly equivocal and violent. Listening to the second Nachtmusik, it struck me quite how close we stand here to Webern, but as a process rather than a fixed aesthetic, orchestra distilled into a Webern ensemble in real time, as it were. A host of solo instruments paraded in a rich tableau of the human, or perhaps the divine, comedy. Whilst one can hardly avoid mentioning the violin and mandolin, this held for so many, including almost the whole woodwind section, that it would be invidious to name names.

The Rondo-Finale’s timpani call-to-arms, or whatever it is, imparted a fitting suggestion of Don Quixote to its entire enterprise, continually upsetting the Meistersinger apple-cart in the service of a darker comedy. Perhaps. For there were no certainties here, and justly so. Fischer concentrated on drawing excellent playing from the orchestra and steering the vehicle, declining any attempt to ‘solve’ Mahler's enigmas. Once again, this was a tale of ghosts at the feast: the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, obviously, as well as earlier movements of this, but also the Second and even the Tenth-to-come: if Mahler had earlier showed a path to resurrection, perhaps purgatory, or even limbo, now seemed more fun, as well as more attainable. Bach, Mozart, and others made their bows, but what did it mean? The nihilist answer, ‘nothing’, was not necessarily right or wrong, it seemed, but there came another suggestion, not to be conflated with it, an affirmation rather of scepticism, albeit from one who truly believed. Perhaps that is the true horror of the Seventh.

Aristidou/Widmann/Boulez Ensemble/Barenboim - Schubert, Mozart, Berg, and Widmann, 1 September 2020

Pierre Boulez Saal

Schubert: String Quartet in C minor, D 703, ‘Quartettsatz’
Mozart: Clarinet Quintet in A major, KV 581
Berg: Four Pieces for clarinet and piano, op.5
Widmann: Labyrinth IV, for soprano and ensemble 

Sarah Aristidou (soprano)

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

Staatskapelle Berlin String Quartet (Wolfram Brandl, Krzysztof Specjal (violins), Yulia Deyneka (viola), Claudius Popp (cello))

Boulez Ensemble

Daniel Barenboim (piano, conductor)


The new season at the Pierre Boulez Saal could hardly have opened in more promising fashion, whether strictly musical or in the hope imparted for the year to come. I was there at its predecessor’s premature close in March; so too was Daniel Barenboim, completing just in time his series of the Beethoven violin sonatas with Pinchas Zukerman. Here we heard Barenboim as pianist and conductor, but as part of a greater ensemble, of which Jörg Widmann was at least as prominent a member.


The first piece featured neither Barenboim nor Widmann, but rather the Staatskapelle Berlin String Quartet, in Schubert’s Quartettsatz. It works splendidly as a quasi-overture, not least to a programme such as this: ‘first’ and ‘second’ Viennese schools, themselves inextricably interlinked, with a contemporary successor who has long gained inspiration from both, as composer and performer. The Staatskapelle players offered a balanced and dynamic reading, alert, even febrile, so as to draw one in not only to this piece but to the programme as a whole. Schubert’s instrumental drama already presented themes that with only a slightly tweak of melody or harmonic context would be at home in Berg. Growing unease led inevitably to the tragedy of a coda whose tragedy seemed also to be that of our present condition, albeit without an ounce of self-pity: rather, fate itself.


Such anxiety, often subtle yet all the more pervasive for it, was to be heard in Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, for which Widmann joined the quartet. Mozart’s cultivated mastery might mask such feelings to incurious players and listeners, but as we now know very well, masking is a strange and defective thing. There was no question here in the first movement as to the importance of Mozart for his Viennese predecessors, Berg and of course Schoenberg among them. Developing variation and extraordinary balance in complex phrasing—how many even notice?—were miraculously achieved in work and performance, proceeding in unfussy yet variegate fashion at a well-judged tempo. The drama of the development presented instrumental intrigue to rival any operatic ensemble, resolving with equal mastery.


So too in the second movement, which seemed to speak of the Countess a few years on. Detailed playing from all concerned had Widmann first among equals, if that. Why could harmony not have stopped here? It seemed a question as necessary to ask as it was impossible to answer; as the Countess would have told us, time moves on, such being both the comedy and tragedy of the human condition. Cultivated, composed, resolutely unsentimental, the minuet’s view on life was enhanced by trios in tragic, then serenading dialogue with its material, the second seemingly from a world poised between Don Giovanni and La clemenza di Tito, a world that might spin out of control yet never did. Mozart’s balance between joy and melancholy was once more finely judged in a finale of metamorphosis through variation: a message there for all wishing to listen. Inevitability, in which the darkness of the viola-led variation (wonderful playing from Yulia Deyneka) necessarily bubbled over into the high spirits of the next, afforded further immersion in Mozart’s tragicomedy of life.


Melodies from Mozart and Schubert, or reminiscences thereof, however imaginary, haunted the pages of Berg’s Four Pieces for clarinet and piano, in a commanding performance from Widmann and Barenboim, each movement a labyrinth and scena of its own, which yet formed part of greater mysteries. Berg’s alchemy of melody and harmony came as thrilling alive as had Schubert’s and Mozart’s, the frankly erotic charge stronger still. An expressionist chill of fate, culmination of a single yet multifarious breath, brought glowing, glistening, eruption, and death, and not only sequentially. This was a full-scale opera, or at least an instrumental drama, of its own.


Barenboim, the Boulez Ensemble (drawn from members of the Staatskapelle and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra), and Sarah Aristidou gave the premiere of Widmann’s Labyrinth IV last year. I was delighted to hear it and look forward to deepening my acquaintance with a compelling work for soprano and ensemble which, if not quite a song-cycle, suggests elements of that great Schubertian tradition in its setting of texts concerning Ariadne and the Minotaur—no Theseus, no other mediator—from Euripides, Brentano, Nietzsche, and Heine. An opening primal cry signalled much: not least that vocal music, for the first time since March for me, was now also back on the agenda. Instrumental interjections, from double bass to drums to accordion, heightened the sense of a primaeval drama which, if owing no evident debt to Birtwistle, perhaps shared with his music that sense of a violent, unsentimentalised prehistory. In this case, Ariadne must confront her half-brother and indeed her mother, the first number eventually moving to Euripdes’ words: ‘O miserable mother, tell me why did you bear me?’ (in Greek). It was Aeschylus, perhaps, who seemed to speak in the music, though, at least according to the still-influential typology dictated by the author of The Birth of Tragedy (and, of course, his mentor and ultimate, unknowing antagonist, Wagner).


For the following ‘Kinderlied für ein Ungeheuer’, we heard indeed a nursery rhyme for a monster, Aristidou, a born singing-actress, circling the hall on its first level, looking and singing into the orchestral labyrinth itself: again, first music, only latterly with words. A neo-Bachian (via Second Viennese School) canon marked the ‘Gang ins Labyrinth’, Ariadne’s progress delineated by ensemble alone, the labyrinth, in proper Bergian sense felt as much as observed. Were those echoes I heard of the Berg’s Violin Concerto and its inheritance from Bach? Barenboim led a performance of shattering intensity, a scream from above announcing the fourth number, ‘Im Labyrinth’, words from Nietzsche’s Dionysus-Dithyramben. A furious chase, ultimately to the death? In part, but an uneasy stillness and quest for recognition, both of which, as in Berg’s operas, proved as much instrumental and vocal, were equally important. Lyrical reminiscences of a German Romantic world from which a certain distance could yet be retained: could there have been a more in-keeping response to Heine, in the following ‘Traurig schau ich in die Höh’’? Wozzeck-like tread and post-Lulu harmonies continued to suggest a Bergian trail, which may or may not have been the true path through the labyrinth. For the final ‘Tötung des Minotaur’, Widmann, Aristidou, and indeed the ensemble as a whole suggested a revenge at first Ariadne’s, yet ultimately that of Dionysus. Yes, this was Nietzsche again. Blood-red sun above the stage brought visual as well as aural attention to trumpeters proclaiming in triumph glow of death against Ariadne’s white. We were all, however, in the labyrinth now; such is the power of music. Mahlerian explosion and death rattle lingered, even seduced. ‘Ich bin dein Labyrinth …’

Hagen Quartet/Widmann - Webern, Widmann, and Mozart, 30 January 2018

Wigmore Hall

Webern: String Quartet (1905)

Widmann: Clarinet Quintet (2017, UK premiere)

Mozart: Clarinet Quintet in A major, KV 581

Lukas Hagen (violin), Rainer Schmidt (violin)

Veronika Hagen (viola)

Clemens Hagen (cello)

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

 

The Hagen Quartet opened this concert with Webern’s 1905 String Quartet, not a work I can recall ever having heard ‘live’ before, although it has been well treated on disc. (Yes, I remain old-fashioned enough to say that and indeed to listen to recordings.) I was quite taken aback by the frozen, starkly modernistic opening in the Hagens’ performance: not only arresting in itself, but not quite what I should have expected from them. The music certainly warmed; yet, in that warming, it became more, not less, febrile, this fascinating early piece sounding almost as if it were sped-up and, later, slowed down early-ish Schoenberg. It does not – and did not – have the consistency of, say, Schoenberg’s own unnumbered quartet, let alone his four ‘official’ ones, nor indeed his fragments. The Hagens, however, captured very well its unsettled strangeness of style and method, whilst still pointing to those aspects, more than one might initially suspect, that look forward to Webern’s mature works. The unisons, quite rightly, did not ring true, nor the somewhat contrived cadences at the ends of sections. With equal justice, though, the final cadence did, as if a flickering reminiscence of Verklärte Nacht. This seemed to me an object lesson in performance of a problematical work, neither making excuses for it, nor running away from its difficulties.

 

Jörg Widmann joined the players for the rest of the concert, first in his own Clarinet Quintet, here receiving its first British performance, and then in Mozart’s supreme masterpiece of the genre. It is, according to the composer in a programme note, ‘a single 40-minute Adagio in which the initial tempo marking Lento assai could stand as a programme for the entire work. (I say ‘according to’, not because I disbelieve him, but simply because I did not consult my watch.) It is, not unreasonably for a clarinettist composer, something he had long wanted to write, yet, ‘in 2009, my humility and admiration of these masterpieces [the ones you would expect…] brought my life project clarinet quintet to a temporary halt. … Eight years later, in 2017, I returned to my plans.’ Immediately, Widmann continues, he ‘sensed that the long wait had been worth it.’ Without claiming any knowledge of what it would have been like had he continued earlier, I suspect that he was right, for what we heard proved to be a typically accomplished and absorbing reckoning with tradition.

 

That febrile quality heard in much of the Webern performance seemed to continue, indeed to be intensified, in the opening of this long slow(ish) movement, whose overall conception often brought to mind a Brucknerian conception of time, although not, I think, a remotely Brucknerian method. Perhaps, though, there were elements of deformation of an imaginary Bruckner Adagio, for, as is often the case with Widmann’s music, one perceived – or at least I did! – all manner of refractions of ‘original’, Classical-Romantic music, which had most likely never existed in the first place: at least not for us. Mozart, Brahms, perhaps Reger too, also hovered as ghosts in our musical consciousness: sometimes in a phrase, sometimes in a progression, sometimes goodness knows how. Interestingly, in context, some of the results of what appeared to have been a very different conception and process, did not sound so very different from Webern either. Or was that all a matter of my own historical baggage? We all have our Vergangenheitsbewältigung to do, after all, even if some countries are rather more advanced than ours in doing so. (It would hardly be difficult.) Haunted and haunting, just when the music might have seemed in danger of coming too close to a past, even if that past had never been, more recent, even living ghosts, or angels perhaps – Lachenmann, Stockhausen, Rihm? – appeared to join our musical host.

 

Then, through a performative virtuosity that sometimes we are in danger of taking for granted, Widmann suggested (again, at least to me) a glass armonica, perhaps even something older, a mediaevalism. Dactylic meter seemed to evoke Beethoven and Schubert, but did it? You can call that postmodernism if you like, but I do not think it is, not here, not straightforwardly. For there is an overall conception of form, of purpose, that is quite different, to my understanding anyway. At any rate, extended techniques, both in composition and performance, spoke both of a reinvented past as much as present and future. ‘Zum Raum hier wird die Zeit?’ Not really, or not at any rate, as the anti-historical Schopenhauer might have understood Gurnemanz’s words. Wagner, ever a student also of Hegel, knew better, though; so, I think, does Widmann. Ruptures intrigued, as, I fancied, they might have intrigued Adorno. Might a caesura bring back the past? Of course not, but why should it, or rather its composer, not try, knowing, like Mahler with a Luftpause, that he was bound at some level, to fail? The violence of such a rupture nevertheless remained: again, haunted and haunting.

 

A great performance of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet will, in different yet not mutually opposed ways, possess some of that haunted and haunting quality to us, as twenty-first-century listeners. This did, and I think may genuinely be accounted as ‘great’, or very close thereto. The utter perfection of Mozart’s work shone through. Even if there were occasional things one might have done differently oneself in the abstract – and if so, they were so minor, I have forgotten them – then there was nothing that jarred, nothing that screamed ‘look at me’, nothing that spoke of ‘reassessment’ for the mere sake of reassessment. We seemed, at any rate, to return to an Elysium from which we knew we should soon be expelled once again; or rather, we beheld it, in some sense partook in it, whilst knowing that it was never straightforwardly ours. Such is the particular pain of Mozart’s music, perhaps ever more so with the passing of every year (and his every January birthday).

 

This was as attentive a performance as anyone might have hoped for. Beauty of tone was certainly present, yet expressive, not a mere end in itself. Mozart’s formal concision as well as dynamism shone through, Webern in a sense remaining. And yet so did his command of the longest of lines and the way he plays with expectations: Widmann remained too. The first movement’s development section sounded as rare, as fantastical, as anything in Così fan tutte. Its recapitulation – with apologies to the Guardian journalist who recently declared, ex cathedra, that such talk should be banished from her brave new world of quinoa for all – functioned, or rather was experienced, very much as a second development, a new, wondrous world of wordless dramatic exploration.

 

Hushed equipoise characterised much, although not all, of the slow movement. There was nothing remotely sentimental to it. We were, however, called, drawn in to listen; and listen, I think, we did. Mozart’s music sang as if this were the only way to sing it. It is not, of course, but a sense of absolute ‘rightness’ is no bad thing, however much we know it, in retrospect, to have been relative. The minuet, alive, alert, in some sense again unattainable, contrasted duly, wondrously with its in turn contrasting trios, the one stern, without rupture to kinship, the other breathing the world of a remembered Salzburg serenade. The finale concluded and unified our experience without apparent effort: just as it should sound, however great the actual effort. Its profusion of melodic and, later, harmonic variation were relished with, again, that sense of ineffable ‘rightness’. How did anyone ever dare to write another clarinet quintet after this? We should nevertheless be grateful that some composers have. For if we are to believe in tradition at all, it must never stand still, always develop. Mozart will remain.

Pollini/Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim - Widmann, Schumann, and Debussy, 4 October 2017

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Widmann: Zweites Labyrinth

Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor, op.54
Debussy: Images

Maurizio Pollini (piano)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

View from my seat

Following the mixed fortunes of the opening night’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust, the second night at the reopened Staatsoper Unter den Linden showed, in addition to unalloyed musical excellence, that the theatre can work once again, indeed better than ever, as a fine concert venue too. Daniel Barenboim has been conducting quite a bit of Jörg Widmann’s music recently, not least at the newly opened Pierre Boulez Saal, at which Widmann himself has appeared regularly too. This concert opened with his 2006 Zweites Labyrinth, premiered by the SWR SO Baden-Baden and Freiburg (since, unforgivably, merged) under Hans Zender. It followed his Labyrinth for forty-eight strings from the previous year, albeit with very different forces: five instrumental groups, namely (1) two pianos, two harps, Hungarian and Ukrainian cimbaloms, zither, and guitárron; (2) bass clarinet, two contrabass clarinets, two bassoons, and two contrabassons; (3) eight horns; (4) four piccolos; (5) fourteen first violins and twelve second violins. It would be a spatial challenge for the most modern of halls – say, the Boulezian salle modulable around the corner. What struck me most clearly, as well as the excellence of the performance, was, in a tribute to the Staatsoper’s acoustic, how clearly and meaningfully the work sounded, without any unusual spatial arrangement. All instruments were simply on the stage, as one would have expected expect.

The performance – and work – opened forbiddingly. Forbidding, that is, in dramatic terms, rather than denoting anything especially ‘difficult’. The harsh strength – walls of the labyrinth? – of the opening gave way to aural ricocheting across the various instrumental groups, as if the orchestra were a giant keyboard, across which giant, timbrally transforming glissandi were played. (In programming retrospect, Debussy seemed to have been echoed.) The skill with which such quicksilver threads were sewn in performance proved mesmerising in itself. What a joy it was to hear the Staatskapelle Berlin in such music, not least as different instruments seemed almost to transform before our ears into each other, Widmann and the players displaying equal mastery of extended techniques. Barenboim and his musicians brought a keen sense of drama, almost of wordless opera to proceedings: not at all inappropriate for Widmann in general, nor for a concert in the Lindenoper.

Maurizio Pollini joined the orchestra for Schumann’s Piano Concerto, picking up the thread, as it were, from the previous evening. Seated where I was, in the third row of the stalls, just slightly to the left of the centre, I could hardly have had a better view of the pianist. The combination of acoustic – clear and warm – and visual proximity meant, if this makes any sense, that I could hear precisely what I saw, and vice versa. Music so well known to many in the audience, still more so to Pollini, seemed to be recomposed on the spot, before my eyes and ears, an equal or at least appropriate weight accorded to the horizontal and vertical, as if leading to Brahms or indeed to Schoenberg. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Pollini recorded the Schumann and Schoenberg concertos together with Claudio Abbado. The richness of string tone was truly a wonder in itself, especially when experienced with such physicality. Moreover, both Barenboim and Pollini brought a command of line to all three movements such as to hold absolute attention throughout. There was chamber music intimacy too, married to an undeniable sense of playing upon oscillation between tonic minor and major, which put me in mind of Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, op.73, only writ large(r). Schumann’s Beethovenian inheritance seemed especially apparent in the first movement: not just its scale, but its character too. The integrity, humanistic as much as ‘merely’ musical, of the cadenza spoke volumes: once again, Schoenberg beckoned.

The sense of derivation from a single phrase, even a single note, was perhaps still stronger still in the slow movement. I thought of something Webern writes, in The Path to the New Music: ‘To develop everything … from one principal idea! That is the strongest unity … But in what form? That is where art comes in!’ The music seemed once again to achieve an ideal balance between chamber and orchestral tendencies: not quite Mozartian, for this is not Mozart, but recognisably in his line. I was particularly struck by the way particular string sections sounded as one. The transition to the finale was emotionally as well as technically spot on, the swing from the tragic to the exultant effected within a single breath, without the slightest sense of abruptness. That was surely a brevity that would have impressed, perhaps put to shame, even Webern! And indeed, it was a quality of constant transformation, not entirely unlike the music of Liszt, that characterised the performance of the finale. Line was not sacrificed, far from it, but as in the very different work by Widmann, it proved to be a dramatic line.

The second half was devoted to Debussy’s Images, a work – and of course, composer – closely associated with one of Barenboim’s greatest musical collaborators, Pierre Boulez, Honorary Conductor of this orchestra. The opening of ‘Gigues’ sounded duly mysterious, combining haze and precision; it was as if we hearing the solo lines through an aural gauze of varying intensity. Not that the performance lacked rhythmic definition, nor indeed a strength, when required, that seemed almost to echo La Mer. There was mystery too, albeit a different mystery, to the opening of ‘Rondes de printemps’: germinative and generative, spiritual and material. The idea of ‘smudged dialectics’ may be a little too ‘Impressionist’ for some, but it is what came to me listening anyway. I loved the way in which instrumental colours and harmonies – are they actually two sides of the same coin or different ‘parameters’? – shifted into each other at times, suggesting a different variety of Klangfarbenmelodie from that generally associated with the term. Barenboim’s command of line, so different from that in Widmann and Schumann, and yet equally important, again proved crucial to the dramatic progress of the piece.

A sardonic quality marked the first panel of ‘Ibéria’, ‘Par les rues et par les chemins’: not unlike Stravinsky, yet not quite like him either. The players were clearly enjoying themselves; that one could see as well as hear. Once again, a Tarnhelm-like dissolution of boundaries between different varieties of colour was splendidly apparent. A sultry penumbra of timbre seemed to surround the pitches of ‘Les parfums de la nuit’. Harmonies shifted between ambiguity and more definite progression, preparing the way for a performance of ‘Le matin d’un jour de fête’ that was surely warmer, more southern, than Boulez’s, perhaps more sardonic too, not least in Soldier’s Tale-like fiddling (whether from the excellent solo playing of Jiyoon Lee or from the entire section). It made for a fine conclusion to a fine concert indeed.

Musikfest Berlin (5) – SWR SO/Rundel - Schumann, Andre, Marenzio, Vicentino, and Nono, 11 September 2017

Philharmonie, Berlin

 

Images: Kai Bienert

Schumann – Manfred, op.115: Overture

Mark Andre – über, for clarinet, orchestra, and live electronics
Luca Marenzio – Ninth Book of Madrigals: ‘Crudele, acerba, inesorabil morte’
Nicola Vicentino – Fifth Book of Madrigals: ‘L’aura che’l verde lauro et l’aureo crine’
Nono – Il canto sospeso

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

Laura Aikin (soprano)

Jenny Carlstedt (mezzo-soprano)

Robin Tritschler (tenor)

SWR Experimentalstudio

Michael Acker, Joachim Haas, and Sven Kestel (sound design)

SWR Vocal Ensemble (chorus master: Michael Alber)

SWR Symphony Orchestra

Peter Rundel (conductor)

A programme that promised much and, ultimately, ‘delivered’ – as they now say. The main attraction was Nono’s Il canto sospeso: one of the undisputed masterpieces of what I am still old-fashioned enough to call the post-war avant garde. I have been waiting twenty years or so to hear it ‘live’, since I first listened, astonished and terrified, to Claudio Abbado’s live Berlin recording: made, according to a declaration in the booklet note from Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic, ‘when ‘Germany … three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is once again in the grip of an increasing hatred of “foreigners”,’ when, across Europe, ‘nationalism, xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism are once more on the increase’. The recording was ‘intended as a message on the part of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Claudio Abbado that we condemn all brutality and resurgent violence against people who think differently and that we do so from the very bottom of our hearts,’ Il canto sospeso being ‘music born of deep dismay, painful and accusing’. Plus ça change… Except that, without wishing to minimise the poison from the German far Right – recently addressed by and cheering Nigel Farage – much of the rest of Europe (and the United States) now stands in a far more parlous state. Angela Merkel and Luigi Nono: strange bedfellows, to put it mildly, but they are or were both adults, willing to speak out.

 

Every work of Nono’s, he said, required a provocation: ‘The genesis of any of my works is always to be found in a human “provocation”: an event, an experience, a test in our lives, which provokes my instinct and my consciousness, as man and musician, to bear witness.’ Each of the texts we hear – here in the standard German translation of the original Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza europea – is testimony to and from a resistance fighter shortly to be killed by the Nazis. It is the eloquence of this music, which ‘speaks’ or ‘sings’, almost irrespective of whether it be actually vocal or otherwise, which bears witness here – and so it did. Peter Rundel and the SWR SO (the first time I have heard the orchestra since its despicable forced merger) gave a performance that seemed to me to lie very much in the line of Nono’s Second Viennese School inheritance: not just Webern, although he was certainly there, but his (posthumous) father-in-law Schoenberg too. (As Nono declared, in a lecture on A Survivor from Warsaw, it stood as ‘the musical-æsthetic manifesto of our era. What Jean-Paul Sartre says in his essay, What is Literature?, about the problem ‘why write?’, is witnessed in utterly authentic fashion in Schoenberg’s creative necessity.’) This was glowing post-Romanticism: painful, even agonising, in its beauty, as it should be, nowhere more so than in the sixth movement, when, after what I think of as a choral Dies irae without (metaphysical) end – the testimony of Esther Srul – orchestral music so horrendously beguiles us. Words, witness, their horror – for which many thanks must also go to the soloists and choir – continue to resist their aestheticisation, however ravishing, say, the melismata of Laura Aikin or the Webern aria-with-ensemble of Robin Tritschker’s preceding number (Chaim, a fourteen-year-old Jew from Galicia). We await, wish for, reconciliation, even benediction, but know, with Nono and Adorno, that it can never happen. The final silence truly terrified. It would, perhaps, have been better if we had had no applause, although I understand why we did.

 

The rest of the programming was intelligent: a model of its kind, to set the Nono in relief. I had a few qualms about it in practice, though. The Schumann Manfred Overture – an important work for Nono, not least in his use of the ‘Manfred chord’ in Prometeo – was played with a great deal of nervous energy, but somewhat at the expense of what else makes this very difficult piece work. Rundel drove very hard and Schumann’s music lost much of its humanity – and, I think, its sense. The two Venetian madrigals suffered in a different way. I am certainly no fundamentalist on such matters, and was intrigued to hear them sung by a chamber choirs, as opposed to by soloists. There was a smoothness, however, especially to Marenzio’s Crudele, acerba, inesorabil morte, which seemed to me both somewhat to fail the piece and to fail as preparation for Nono. Beauty, yes, but not blandness, is required here.

 

As for Mark Andre’s 2015 über, for clarinet, orchestra, and live electronics, I am afraid I found myself rather at a loss. I liked the idea, insofar as I understood it, and Jörg Widmann certainly offered compelling showmanship as the soloist. But it seemed to me a very drawn out, often featureless, counterpart to an extended (!) Bruckner slow movement. The aural waves I heard promised much – and seemed to allude to Nono and Venice, above all to Prometeo (or at least, in this context, could be understood in that way). There were beautiful sounds to be heard; the blurring of boundaries between clarinet, electronics, and other instruments and their electronic transformation, allured. Had I not known there was no glass harmonica present, I should have sworn at one point that there was. Shadow worlds posed intriguing questions as to what was shadowing what. What did it all add up to, though? Perhaps I needed to hear it again; however, much as I should have liked to be convinced, I was not on this occasion. And it is the Nono work, which I had waited so long to hear, that now I need to hear again. So does the world in which we live, alas.

 

Flury/VPO/Thielemann - Brahms and Widmann, 9 June 2017

Grosser Saal, Konzerthaus

Brahms – Academic Festival Overture, op.80

Widmann – Flûte en suite

Brahms – Symphony no.4 in E minor, op.98

Dieter Flury (flute)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (director)

This was a fascinating concert. I did not always like, or even agree with, what Christian Thielemann did with the two Brahms works on the programme. It was not only what seemed – although how much is this a matter of knowing things one cannot, alas, un-know? – to be disturbing ideological assumptions underlying the reading, but also a matter of what sometimes came across as self-regard, to be seen as well as heard. On the other hand, the Vienna Philharmonic was very much at its best, clearly relishing the relationship it has with this conductor as much as he does. And, whatever one might think or feel about the results, there is no denying that Thielemann has a point of view, which he is able to communicate, almost playing the orchestra as if it were a keyboard; this stood far away indeed from the blandness of much ‘international music-making’.

The febrile urgency of the orchestral sound (Klang is perhaps better here) at the opening of the Academic Festival Overture was something I had not necessarily expected. Moreover, as Brahms’s invention gathered pace, one heard roots in Beethoven, in German Romantic predecessors such as Mendelssohn and Schumann; tradition seemed to live. At times, indeed, the sound seemed close to what one might have heard from Furtwängler, albeit more often with an edge, even a brutality, perhaps more characteristic of Karajan. Thielemann proved more theatrical than both, however, for this was, if you can imagine such a thing, often a darkly, Wagnerian performance, culminating in the world, so it seemed, of Hans Sachs’s final peroration. There was something daemonic to it, quite unlike anything I had heard before: certainly not bland.

Dieter Flury, principal flautist with the orchestra, was the soloist for Jörg Widmann’s Flûte en suite. (Widmann’s present ubiquity seems quite extraordinary. I do not ask this in a hostile fashion at all, but wonder to what it is owed.) Marked as having been written ‘für Flöte und Orchestergruppen’, that is very much what one hears: movements to a greater or lesser extent inspired by the Baroque Suite present the solo instrument with a particular instrumental/orchestral group. Written for Joshua Smith and the Cleveland Orchestra, during Widmann’s residency with that orchestra, it certainly received a committed performance here from all concerned. Thielemann, when he conducts modernist music, broadly construed, is often at his very best. Indeed, he managed to coax the Vienna Philharmonic into playing as if it were enjoying itself; perhaps it was.

The first movement, an Allemande, opens with a slow solo, seemingly full of promise, uncertain quite where it might lead. Joined by other members of its family – alto, bass, and finally piccolo – its lines perhaps retain something of a Brahms-Schoenberg tendency, not so much in style as in idea. The chamber opening of the Sarabande is more strongly suggestive of the Baroque, likewise its strong sense of dance character; its solo line, in typical Widmann style, seems to play with misremembered – or never-quite-having-existed – Bach. A more pointillistic backdrop, this time from brass, characterised the third movement, ‘Choral I’, the fifth, ‘Choral II’ sounding much more overtly chorale-like. The latter chorale is darker in tone, mysterious, uncannily childish woodwind and percussion (Prokofiev perhaps, or Shostakovich) reacting in some sense against it, the flute mediating, even commentating. In between, a more refracted (Berio?), more referential Courante, with ‘busy’ pizzicato strings offered undeniable contrast. The sixth movement, marked ‘Venezianisches Gondellied (Barcarole)’, perhaps intrigued me the most. As if a response to Henze’s mediation between things German and Italian, rhythm and melody speak of the latter, a darker forest landscape of the former, without the demarcation ever being quite so straightforward. A cadenza, not entirely unaccompanied, followed, Flury’s expressive way with the melodic line as impressive as his technique. I was less sure about the final ‘Badinerie’, which seemed to me to try a bit too hard to be ‘fun’. ‘Contemporary’ – to us – Bach, very fast and ‘light’, with perhaps again a hint of Berio, veers down other allies, moves into other keys, but seems to rely too much upon its basis in that particular Bach Suite. Widmann’s homages are more persuasive, at least to me, when they suggest, when they misremember.

Thielemann’s way with Brahms’s Fourth Symphony once again persistently surprised, the VPO’s excellence of playing a welcome constant throughout. Its Klang was very much that of the Overture, with perhaps a still greater translucency enhancing its ‘traditional’, perhaps more North German than conventionally Viennese, darkness. Thielemann’s insistence on moulding the score will not have been to all tastes; yet, even when exaggerated, as sometimes it was, it never sounded merely arbitrary, as it does, say, in the Brahms of Simon Rattle. Again, it was a Lisztian, Wagnerian sensibility and method that came to mind in the first movement: transformative rather than straightforwardly motivic. I loved the stark sense of difference at the beginning of development; suspense was as palpable as I can recall. What I missed – and one cannot, perhaps, have it all in any one performance – is the sense of where this music would lead, of it being but a stone’s throw from Schoenberg and Webern. The stately processional opening of the second movement emphasised its roots in its counterpart in Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Thielemann built it into something sonically overwhelming, but is that quite the point? Whatever the answer to that, there was some exquisite inner voicing, not least from the violas. The scherzo was fast and not a little brutal, yet far from lacking in lighter moments. In the great, concluding passacaglia, I longed for a little more Klemperer-like inevitability. However incandescent the playing, the variations often sounded a little too characterised, a little too unconnected. Was the wood sometimes missed for the trees? At least, however, it made me think.

Boulez Ensemble - Octets by Schubert and Widmann, 28 May 2017

Pierre Boulez Saal

Schubert – Octet in F major, D 803
Widmann – Octet 

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

Mor Biron (bassoon)
Radek Baborák (horn)
Carolin Widmann, Krzysztof Specjal (violins)
Amihai Grosz (viola)
Claudius Popp (cello)
Nabil Shehata (double bass)
 

For a work so frequently lauded, Schubert’s Octet is not performed so very often. Perhaps it is the length, the forces required (although they are surely not that unusual), or the difficulty in finding a companion piece: probably a combination of those factors. At any rate, this was an excellent opportunity not only to hear Schubert’s masterwork, but to hear it fundamentally rethought, and followed by Jörg Widmann’s 2004 five-movement Octet, specifically written as a companion, at about half its length, to its great six-movement predecessor.

The attack and diminuendo on the opening F – no tonality as such, yet – offered, like the wondrous hall in which the performance took place, a near ideal blend of precision and warmth. But warmth, at least not in a traditional sense, was not to be a hallmark of this probing, often brazenly modernistic performance, in which oscillation between major and minor, and the forward looking tendencies of those long Schubert lines proved more suggestive of subsequent figures in his tradition, not least Schoenberg, but perhaps beyond him too (Widmann included). The first movement’s harmonies continually surprised, even if one ‘knew’ what was coming. Nothing was taken for granted. And there was very little in the way of Gemütlichkeit. To start with, I rather missed that aspect of ‘tradition’, but I have no doubt that I was wrong to have done so. If relative consolation came with Widmann’s opening clarinet solo in the second movement, agitation in the string ‘accompaniment’ duly warned against simplification. It was soon to blossom into something more, quite unsettling, which was in large part, I think, the doing of Widmann’s sister, Carolin, on first violin. She emerged very much as the questioning voice of modernism, intense, febrile, sometimes withdrawing vibrato, sometimes applying it in unnervingly neurotic, never comfortable fashion: neither ‘traditional’, nor ‘authentic’, but instead dragging the work into the twenty-first century. This, she and her colleagues told us, was not easy music; it should never, ever be considered as such. Other solos displayed their own instrumental character; there was never mere repetition. I loved the way in which, towards the close, as if echoing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, Nabil Shehata’s double bass suggested distant timpani rolls.

 

Beethoven was again suggested in the ghostly tension of the scherzo’s opening, although its developmental path was of course more ‘Austrian’, more – well, Schubertian, almost as if a Bruckner score had at last proved itself amenable to good editing. There was something mysteriously verging upon the chaste, yet not quite, with apologies to St Augustine, to the trio. Always, we were made to listen. It was Carolin once again who added grit to the oyster in the fourth movement theme and variations. Phrasing and articulation were always well pointed, whilst never different for the sake of it. Schubert’s harmonies, of course, continued to underlie everything we heard, cello (Claudius Popp), double bass, and bassoon (Mor Biron), as fresh and faithful as anyone could hope for. And how gorgeous those horn (Radek Baborák), bassoon, and clarinet solos sounded above: never just gorgeous, though, ever generative, and surprisingly so. Midway between Mozart and Brahms, and yet close also to Schoenberg, Schubert’s ghosts of Viennese past and future invaded our consciousness – whether we liked it or no.

 

If the Minuet relaxed somewhat in tempo, it was no more relaxed in mood than the scherzo had been. Even the wienerisch lilt unsettled – was this not taking us to meet Pierrot? – rather than comforted. Once again, major-minor oscillation was the thing, or at least one of the most important things. Restful it was not, for every note demanded to be heard, to be considered. The introduction to the finale, taken attacca, offered the suspense of the opening to a great symphonic finale, which essentially it is. And then, as if by magic, there came something of the spirit of Haydn: a benediction that did not eclipse what had gone before, but in part made sense of it. A divertimento is no easy option; Beethoven’s is not the only way, however tempting it may be for us all to think so. One could smile, at last. And yet … the return of that opening material rightly had us resume our guard. I should not always want to hear the Octet played like this, but I have little doubt that this performance will have changed my idea of the work forever.

 

The Intrada to Jörg’s Octet seemed deliberately to evoke Schubert’s opening, as if it had grown legs and extended itself into a movement of its own, a movement which yet could not conclude, being an ‘intrada’. Darkness and harmonic tension seemed to recall, to refract, but never to repeat Schubert. Interestingly, the playing style from all concerned registered as more ‘Romantic’, or at least post-Romantic. Those lines again, as if carried over from Schubert, yet distorted, deconstructed both attested to and questioned the composer’s claim, quoted in the programme, concerning Schubert: ‘The line is something so valuable, it must always be carried forth when playing. Once you drop it, it is destroyed.’ Baborák’s post-Mozartian hunting horn solo, announcing the second movement ‘Menuetto’ was similarly taken up, developed, and deconstructed.

 

The third movement is marked as a Lied ohne Worte. And yes, it is a song that sings, but it never sings, or is sung, quite as one thinks it ‘should’ be, suggesting a relationship to an ‘original’ predecessor that we have never heard, has never actually existed. Harmonies as much as melodic lines proved suggestive in that respect, tension heightened by a high Romantic, even expressionistic style of performance. Modernist interventions – both in work and performance – question everything we have told ourselves. Who are we now, then? Do we even want to know? A ghostly (again that word) passage for pizzicato double bass and horn could be heard ‘as if’ it were a passacaglia; maybe it had been, in its previous imaginary life. Double bass, now bowed, announced a chaotic free for all at the opening of the Intermezzo, which yet soon found its transformative way to return (or was it?) of material and mood from the Intrada. Transition and revisiting, though never quite, were clearly the thing. It was again the double bass, growling, discomfiting, that led us into the finale, its motifs emerging from the previous movement, so it appeared, in a strange passage of liminal suspense. Classical and Romantic misrememberings offered a non-transfigured night, Schubert both present and absent. And then, nothing.