Jake Arditti/Arditti Quartet - Sciarrino, Hurel, and Andre, 12 March 2018

Wigmore Hall

Salvatore Sciarrino: Sei quartetti brevi (1967-92)

Philippe Hurel: Entre les lignes (2017, UK premiere)
Mark Andre: iv 13 (Twelve miniatures) (2014-17, UK premiere)
Sciarrino: Cosa resta (2016, UK premiere)

Jake Arditti (countertenor)

Irvine Arditti Ashot Sarkissian (violins)

Ralf Ehlers (viola)

Lucas Fels (cello)

 

First, some early music – certainly by the Arditti Quartet’s standards: Sciarrino’s Sei quartetti brevi, the first of which was written in 1967, dedicated to Franco Evengelisti, added to with five further pieces in 1991 and 1992. Perhaps such a conception inevitably brings to mind Webern, at least for those of us with a centre of gravity in still earlier music, but it was only really in the second piece (that which was written first, in 1967) that he came strongly to mind in musical terms, at least in performances such as these, typically free of nostalgia. That intimate post-Webern riot – if you cannot imagine such a thing, just listen – was preceded by an opening movement of bowed whispers, transforming over its course, febrile yet always with a sense of a ground from which to take flight, into a language, perhaps even a world, of its own. A focused yet variegated – dialectics aplenty here! – third movement, suggestive at times almost of electronic sounds had in that respect much in common with the fifth piece, its short-wave radio intimations charmingly reminiscent of Stockhausen, even if only coincidentally. The ghostly swarming between of the fourth piece in between seemed in retrospect, again if only coincidentally, to prepare the way for a final movement in which I sensed something sung, somehow ‘behind’ the harmonics, and yet which was imaginatively recreated by them. Perhaps we had reached the air of ‘another other planet’.

 

At the close of the recital, we turned or returned to some early music refracted – or so, on occasion, it seemed, the air of the Italian Renaissance both palpable and yet not. In Sciarrino’s Cosa resta, Jake Arditti’s countertenor, finely balanced between the unearthly and the earthly, led us through the inventory of Andrea di Sarto, as accounted for after his widow’s death in 1570: first straightforwardly so, reminding me – doubtless only because I had just heard it from English Touring Opera – a little of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, then more playfully, mysteriously, broken and prolonged, as if cleansed and invigorated by the air of the post-war avant garde. Recitative, almost, followed by arioso, almost, eventually blooming into something quite different: there was a true impression of back and forth, not only between eras but within the text, verbal and musical. Instruments would sigh, imitating and developing ideas from the voice, from the words. At other times, especially towards the close, something intriguingly mechanistic emerged; perhaps significantly, that came perhaps as resistance to something more ‘sung’, less ‘spoken’. Performances from all concerned, not least Jake Arditti, were as engaging as the work itself. I look forward to hearing the items for soprano and mixed octet that surround this piece to form Sciarrino’s Immagina il deserto. There was certainly much scope for imagination, of the desert and beyond, here.

 

In between, we heard works by Philippe Hurel and Mark Andre. Hurel’s Entre les lignes, like the first Sciarriano and the Andre, a UK premiere, was forestalled for a minute or so by an electronic contribution from an unwitting audience member. No harm was done and a little amusement afforded when Irvine Arditti asked: ‘Is that a Sciarrino telephone? If so, I want one.’ Contrast with the Sei quartetti brevi proved considerable, not least in terms of initial volume and directness of attack, which would surely have more than drowned out any audience contribution. The other thing that immediately struck me was that Hurel seemed to be working very much more within the generally accepted tradition of string quartet playing: the sound, if not the language, of Schoenberg and Bartók, for instance. (I was then gratified later to see his words quoted in the programme: ‘I made no attempt to explore string techniques; those I have used belong to the familiar vocabulary.’) Had I not known better, I might have believed the intensity of polyphony arose from more than four instruments. The relationship between harmony and counterpoint again seemed to spring from tradition, without being reduced to it. And yet, ultimately, the programming also spoke of possible connections to, or at least similarities with, the preceding Sciarrino work. Dialectical contrast between often clearly demarcated sections, and in internal, cumulative narrative played against one another. A highly dramatic work and performance seemed to grow out of the physical and intellectual nature and potentialities of the instruments.

 

Andre’s ‘iv 13 (Twelve miniatures)’ belongs to a ‘long series of solo instrumental and chamber pieces, iv,’ on which the composer has been working since 2007. These pieces were composed between 2014 and 2017, and given their first performance by the Arditti Quartet last year. The soundworld, at least at times, seemed to me closer to Sciarrino than to Hurel. Sometimes towards, if not quite at, the edge of audibility, they seemed occasionally to hint (not necessarily a case of influence) at Nono too, perhaps also, as Paul Griffiths suggested in his note, at Lachenmann. Extended techniques were certainly the order of the day here: bowing on wooden dampers, retuning and ‘mistunings’ (Griffiths), col legno playing, and so forth conspiring to create, in the composer’s words, ‘a music of disappearance’. Its ‘presented compositional spaces breathe, disappear, and leave behind shadows, traces, which is how this intimate piece works musically and eschatologically.’ Whispered confidences certainly spoke of a kinship, if only in this particular programming context, with Sei quartetti brevi. It seemed both to bring various tendencies in the programme together and yet also to question them – just as one might have expected from the ever-excellent Arditti Quartet.  

 

Serse, Longborough Festival Opera, Young Artists Performance, 30 July 2015

Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music

Serse – Jake Arditti

Arsamene – Tai Oney
Amastre – Lucinda Stuart-Grant
Ariodate – Jon Stainsby
Romilda – Alice Privett
Atalanta – Abbi Temple
Elviro – Matthew Durkan
Chorus – Chiara Vinci, Laurence Painter

Jenny Miller (director)

Faye Bradley (designs)
Dan Saggars, Andy Bird (lighting)
Rebecca Hanbury (assistant director)
Michael Spenceley (choreography)

Longborough Young Artists Orchestra

Jeremy Silver (conductor)

What an excellent idea for the Longborough Festival to bring its Young Artist Production to London for a performance at the Royal College of Music! Yes, I know, a Londoner would say that, but like it or not, and I am sure we can all agree that centralisation in a not-remotely-central city is a curse upon all manner of activity in this country, London is the centre of English operatic life and metropolitan exposure can only help all concerned. (No one believes more strongly than I that the Royal Opera and ENO should tour, and to hell with the Arts Council’s absurd geographical demarcations! After its behaviour with respect to ENO alone, disbandment would, frankly, be too kind a fate for that organisation, presently headed by a friend of Jeremy ‘Hunt’, Peter Bazalgette, of Big Brother fame.) London performances are perhaps especially important in the case of young singers, all of whom performed creditably, and in most cases, considerably more than that. A taste of Longborough, especially for those of us without cars, is of course more than welcome at this end too. Perhaps we might even hope for more in the future? Would it not be wonderful, if the Proms were to invite the Festival next year, perhaps for Tannhäuser or Jenůfa?

A Handel opera, in any case, made for an eminently sensible choice in the present situation. Focused on singers, with a small (too small?) orchestra, Serse fared well in musical terms, save for the somewhat scrawny playing of the strings. I think they were modern instruments, but it was not easy to tell, testament to the near-total victory of ‘period’ imperialism. Apart from that, Jeremy Silver directed (from the harpsichord) a mostly sensitive performance, tempi appropriate, with little of the absurd rushing (with occasional, equally absurd grinding to a halt) that characterises the Handelian exhibitionism of our allegedly ‘authenticke’ times. For a full, noble orchestral sound, we must return to first-choice Rafael Kubelík in Munich (in German, with a tenor Xerxes, no less than Fritz Wunderlich!) or, in an Italian-language performance, Brian Priestman (with Maureen Forrester) in Vienna.

But as I said, the singing was really the thing. Jake Arditti offered a bravura yet eminently sensitive assumption of the title role: as well acted, with proud petulance and wounded humanity, as it was heroically sung. For those sceptics who (still) doubt the ability of the counter-tenor voice to portray the requisite range of emotions, the performances of Arditti and Tai Oney as Arsamene would surely have proved a useful corrective. Oney’s beautifully-sung performance pulled off without any difficulty the task of sufficient difference in timbre and character, without a hint of the hootiness which, in days gone by, infected far too many such performances. Alice Privett threw herself into the role of Romilda, passing with flying colours: a properly high dramatic performance. If they were my pick of the cast, that is probably as much a reflection of the opportunities their roles offer as anything else. I should certainly not be able to offer you a weak link, nor should I wish to. Longborough’s programme clearly engenders a real sense of company, something that cannot be feigned.

My principal reservation concerned Jenny Miller’s production. It was very pink, which may or may not be one’s taste. I learned afterwards, upon reading the programme, that it had been set in a ‘contemporary setting, more immediately familiar and neutral – a nightclub or hotel bar’. I could then see that it had been, but if I am honest, whether through stupidity or inattention on my part, or a lack of clarity on the director’s, I had not realised at the time. Initially, my thought was that we were amongst Mafiosi, but then it all turned surprisingly camp – and not a little silly. Anyway, we were supposed to have asked whether it was ‘Xerxes’s bar … [whether] he owns a string of them, planning global expansion,’ and so on. By ‘shedding many of the specifically period references, we can concentrate on the comedy of the lessons in love being handed out’. Perhaps; I certainly hold no brief for confining a work to its period, although some of the satire here might have worked better, had we experienced more of a dialogue between ‘period’ and ‘contemporary’. (Or perhaps I am too content with Nicholas Hytner’s seemingly evergreen ENO production, which can be caught on DVD with Charles Mackerras and Ann Murray.) I think Miller is probably right to say, with respect to the work itself, that ‘satire about the exercise of unlimited power … is not the main theme of the power’. However, I cannot help but wonder whether a more absorbing theatrical experience might be the outcome of a production that treated it as if it were. The cast did its best to make us care about the characters, but there is a limit to what can be done in that respect within the confines of a Handel opera seria. Besides, if the ‘period references’ can be rejected, cannot a too rigid conception of ‘intention’? Much of the audience seemed, however, greatly to enjoy the sometimes outlandish costumes and antics of the entertainment, and what I say immediately above should be considered as musing rather than prescription. I look forward to Longborough’s next visit to the capital.

 

 

 

 

L'incoronazione di Poppea, English Touring Opera, 9 October 2013

Images: Richard Hubert Smith
Poppea (Paula Sides), Nerone (Helen Sherman)

Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music

Nerone – Helen Sherman

Seneca – Piotr Lempa
Ottavia, La Fortuna – Hannah Pedley
Nutrice – Russell Harcourt
Lucano – Stuart Haycock
Liberto – Nicholas Merryweather
Poppea – Paula Sides
Arnalta – John-Colyn Gyeantey
Ottone – Michal Czerniawski
Drusilla, La Virtù – Hannah Sandison
Amor – Jake Arditti

James Conway (director)

Oliver Platt (revival director)
Samal Blak (designs)
Ace McCarron (lighting)

Old Street Band

Michael Rosewell (conductor)

(sung in English, as The Coronation of Poppea)

 

James Conway’s production of Monteverdi’s final masterpiece, L’incoronazione di Poppea was first performed last November by students from the Royal College of Music. Now it is revived, at the same Britten Theatre, but by English Touring Opera, as part of its Venetian season. It made a still greater impression upon me than last year; whilst the earlier cast had sung well and deserved great credit, the professional singers of ETO seemed more inside their roles, as much in stage as purely musical terms.

 

Conway’s production holds up very well. Its perhaps surprising relocation of the action to a parallel universe in which a Stalinist Russia existed without the prude Stalin – ‘just the breath of his world,’ as Conway’s programme note puts it – provides a highly convincing reimagination of the already reimagined world of Nero. ‘Stalin’s bruising reign convinced me,’ Conway writes, ‘that this was a place in which Nerone might flourish, from which Ottone, Drusilla, Ottavia, and Seneca might suddenly disappear, and in which all might live cheek by jowl in a sort of family nightmare, persisting in belief in family (or some related ideal) even as it devours them.’  And so it comes to pass, from the Prologue in which La Fortuna, La Virtù, and Amore unfurl their respective red banners, setting out their respective stalls, until Poppea’s (and Amore’s) final triumph. Claustrophobia reigns supreme, save for the caprice of Amore himself, here dressed as a young pioneer, ready to knock upon the window at the crucial moment, so as to prevent Ottone from the murder that would have changed everything. Samal Black’s set design is both handsome and versatile, permitting readily of rearrangement, and also providing for two levels of action: Ottavia can plot, or lament, whilst Poppea sleeps. Conway’s idea of Poppea as an almost Lulu-like projection of fantasies in an opera whose game is power continues to exert fascination, and in a strongly acted performance, proves perhaps more convincing still than last time. Where then, the blonde wig had seemed more odd than anything else, here the idea of a constructed identity, designed to please and to further all manner of other interests, registers with considerable dramatic power. The seeping of blood as the tragedy – but is it that? – ensues makes an equally powerful point, albeit with relative restraint; this is not, we should be thankful, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk or some other instance of Grand Guignol. Above all, the Shakespearean quality of Monteverdi’s imagination, unparalleled in opera before Mozart, registers as it must. One regretted the cuts, but one could live with them in as taut a rendition as this.

 

Michael Rosewell’s conducting had gained considerably in fluency from last time. I feared the worst from the opening sinfonia, in which ornamentation became unduly exhibitionistic – I could have sworn that I heard an interpolated phrase from the 1610 Vespers at one point – and the violins were somewhat painfully out of tune, my fears were largely confounded. It is a great pity that we still live in a climate of musical Stalinism, in which modern instruments are considered enemies of the people than the kulaks were, but continuo playing largely convinced and string tone, even if emaciated, at least improved in terms of intonation. For something more, we must return, alas, to Leppard or to Karajan.

 

Moreover, it was possible – indeed, almost impossible not – to concentrate upon the musico-dramatic performances on stage. Helen Sherman’s Nerone displayed laudable ability to act ‘masculine’, at least to the dubious extent that the character deserves it, and great facility with Monteverdi’s lines, even when sung in English. Paula Sides proved fully the equal both of Monteverdi’s role and Conway’s conception. Hers was a performance compelling in beauty and eroticism; indeed, the entwining of the two was impressive indeed. The nobility but also the vengefulness of Ottavia came through powerfully in Hannah Pedley’s assumption, her claret-like tintà a rare pleasure. Michal Czerniawski again displayed a fine countertenor voice as Ottone, engaging the audience’s sympathy but also its interest; this was no mere cipher, but a real human being. Much the same could be said of Hannah Sandison’s Drusilla, save of course for the countertenor part. Piotr Lempa has the low notes for Seneca, though production can be somewhat uneven, perhaps simply a reflection of a voice that is still changing. John-Colyn Gyeantey’s Arnalta was more ‘characterful’ than beautifully sung, but perhaps that was the point. Pick of the rest was undeniably Jake Arditti’s protean Amor, as stylishly sung as it was wickedly acted. The cast, though, is more than the sum of its parts, testament to a well-rehearsed, well-c0nceived, well-sung production of a truly towering masterpiece.     

 

Arditti Quartet - Premieres of Clarke, Ferneyhough, Fujikura, and Paredes, 3 February 2011

Wigmore Hall

James Clarke – String Quartet no.2 (2009, London premiere)
Brian Ferneyhough – String Quartet no.6 (2010, London premiere)
Dai Fujikura – Flare (2010, world premiere)
Hilda Paredes – Canciones Lunáticas (2009, world premiere of complete work)

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


In a better, let alone ideal, world, more concert programmes would resemble this. New music, performed by musicians at the height of their powers, would stand at the very heart of musical life, as was the case until not so very long ago. There would remain plenty of opportunities for forays into the museum of the past, but it would never be permitted to overwhelm contemporary musical production. Some works would be better than others of course, but an acceptance of risk – goodness knows, we risk enough mediocre or poor performances of, say, Tchaikovsky symphonies from our major orchestras! – would accept that. Doubtless this would all be decried by many as madness commensurate with that depicted in the verse of Pedro Serrano, set in Hilda Paredes’s Canciones lunáticas, but it need not be so; nor has it been for most of our musical history.

Back to the grey reality of late capitalist society, however. James Clarke’s second quartet here received its London premiere, the first performance having taken place in 2009 at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. The programme note hinted at why Clarke might not be the most readily accepted prophet in his own country:

The composer has written: ‘It is a quality of music and some of the visual arts that they do not communicate ideas in the same area as words. The substance is different. I prefer to allow the music to make a statement on its own terms and to avoid as much as possible the descriptive (including titles). … I believe that to attempt to describe the impulse or “inspiration” behind a work is to detract from its enigmatic potential and undermine the directness of its power.’

Fair enough: it is a perfectly respectable, though not incontestable, point of view. However, it does not necessarily help a naïve listener get to grips with unfamiliar music. It might not therefore have been entirely unreasonable to have had someone else contribute a note. It did mean, though, that one could, indeed must, listen more or less without prejudice. I had certainly never heard the work before, and I doubt that most in the audience would have done so, though, given the apparent preponderance of ‘contemporary music enthusiasts’, I suspect a few had. The opening impression was of intense drama, relative extremes of instrumental range navigated by rather appealing, rapid, quasi-scalic figuration. Considerable use of harmonics soon imparted a suggestion, though only that, of electronic means. (It is perhaps worth noting how in many works the suggestion of such can be at least as interesting as the ‘real thing’.) Violence was certainly present, but it never seemed to be there for its own sake, likewise the use of extended techniques: rhetorical, yet idiomatic. Silences appeared to play an important structural and expressive part, at times reminding me of Nono. Repeated notes and their treatment took on an increasingly pivotal role too. This may have been ‘complex’ music but it bore an overpowering sense of direction. There was, moreover, within Clarke’s personal idiom, a real sense of interaction between the four instrumentalists: that is, ‘proper’ quartet writing.

Ferneyhough is another English composer more sung on what we still sometimes refer to as ‘the Continent’ than upon this Sceptred Isle. Here, the composer’s note was certainly informative, though I can imagine its density of expression – surely, not least a parallel to Ferneyhough’s music – eliciting a dismissive chortle from would-be bluff English ‘empiricists’. Give them a good dose of Hegel to read! Much of the composer’s recent work has sought to reconsider how ‘awareness of temporal space can be heightened or redefined by staging a discrepancy of adequation between the emplacement and unfolding of sonic materials and the time available for their individual reception’. This sixth quartet in a sense takes that process further, and, according to the composer, overlaps and embeds fragments ‘so as to create an unpredictable tangle of conflicting materials and time frames’. In practice, I was actually less sure. Yes, there was tangling; much of this is relative, after all. However, I fancied at least that I could perceive different characters to the musical fragments, as well as in their interaction. The latter was, perhaps, more the thing, though, in that the toing-and-froing – that makes it sound rather milder than it is – of musical ideas appeared generative of the composer’s trademark complexity. Process as well as result at the very least sounded discernible or imaginable, doubtless in part a tribute to the superlative performances, here as elsewhere, from the Arditti Quartet. Melody, and I really could not conceive of why one should not call it that, took on many forms: an extended solo for the first violin, here mesmerizingly performed by Irvine Arditti, and a surprising unison passage, as well as a more typical near-overload of melodic profusion, redolent in its way of some of Schoenberg’s writing.

Dai Fujikura’s Flare was a Wigmore Hall co-commission, with the rupport of André Hoffmann. Other co-commissioners were the Ishibashi Memorial Hall, Tokyo, and the Edinburgh International Festival, perhaps suggesting a performance north of the border this summer. Pictorial imagery was explicitly evoked both in the composer’s programme note and in the music itself: ‘When writing this work I imagined sitting round a campfire as a child, watching the embers flaring off into the sky…’. Very different from Clarke’s æsthetic, one might say, or from Ferneyhough’s, and surely it is, yet perhaps accidentally, there seemed to be points of contact, not least in the use of repeated notes. The Webern-like shards – melodic shards, one might say – with which the piece opened soon gave way to ‘a lot [certainly true!] of rather wild percussive sounds (pizzicato, left hand pizzicato, col legno, spiccato, bouncing bow, finger tapping, snap pizzicato, pizzicato tremolo) and then combines with the imagined reverse sounds of those effects’. Left-hand pizzicati not only looked like but even sounded a little like the banjo, whilst it was intriguing to hear the ‘reverse sounds’, not least some rich-toned viola playing from Ralf Ehlers: a little neo-Romantic for some perhaps (the writing, that is), but the overall conception, arch-like in almost neo-Bartókian fashion, had its narrative and, I suspect, musical justification.

Finally came the first complete performance of Parades’s Canciones lunáticas, the second and third of the three songs having been first performed at the 2009 Heidelberg Spring International Music Festival. Jake Arditti, son of Irvine and of the composer, joined the players in what again was a magnificent performance. His is a countertenor voice of considerable richness; his rendition was spellbinding, attentive to words and music, for he and the quartet did not merely perform but interpreted. There is obvious scope for interpretation in this very different sound-world, more ‘atmospheric’ perhaps, certainly highly evocative of night, the moon, and madness. Opening with a dark, lonely night, the moon our only witness, we move through a second song of lunacy – wordplay apparent between ‘luna’ and ‘lunáticos’ – to a final dance for the liberated moon in the meadow. Pierrot lunaire inevitably came to mind, and the soloist’s whispering suggested a new version of the old idea of Sprechstimme. Here, focused upon the letter ‘s’, a link was perhaps also suggested with some of Nono’s vocal techniques, though that may simply just have been coincidence. If one could hardly but think of Pierrot, that was not the only Schoenbergian reference, or at least suggestion: Verklärte Nacht came to my mind more than once in the first song, the moon’s passing by and disquiet – ‘pasa la luna, inquieta’ – proving, not least in Jake Arditti’s delivery of the line, a turning point akin to that half-way through Schoenberg’s sextet: transfiguration perhaps? Some imagery was almost straightforwardly pictorial – harmonics and glissandi, for instance – but it always seemed to make musical as well as narrative sense, likewise the iridescence of ‘for the moonstruck’ (‘a los lunáticos’) in the second song. The final dance of the moon, ‘a slowed-down version,’ according to Paredes, ‘of the Mexican huapango, that changes from ternary to binary,’ was fantastical, quite enchanting.