Andsnes/Hamelin - Adams, Schumann, Debussy, and Stravinsky, 30 May 2022

Wigmore Hall

John Adams: Hallelujah Junction
Schumann, arr. Debussy: Six Studies in Canonic Form, op.56
Debussy: En blanc et noir
Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

Leif Ove Andsnes, Marc-André Hamelin (pianos)

 

Two-piano recitals look, feel, and are very different from piano-duet recitals. Sometimes we have a mixture, but even then, performances look and sound very different, for obvious logistical reasons. Leif Ove Andsnes and Marc-André Hamelin offered four (five, if one counts the encore) works for two pianos, ultimately taking us to the very limits—sometimes, it seemed, beyond—of what is possible, even with two instruments and four hands, in The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky’s arrangement is actually for piano duet, but Andsnes and Hamelin reinstate some of the lines necessarily missing, at times giving a full orchestra a run for its money. A deservedly well attended, well appreciated concert heated up an otherwise dismal, late May evening. Maybe the gods were exacting revenge for a strange spring rite of unwitting lèse-majesté at Stonehenge.

 First, though, was neither Neolithic Wiltshire nor the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, but Hallelujah Junction, a truck stop on the border between California and Nevada. I am afraid John Adams’s piece does nothing for me. I could find nothing to signal compositional achievement beyond that of a generic, mid-1990s Channel 4 soundtrack, mixed with all-too-obvious ‘Americana’. As for the sentimental pseudo-Romantic harmonies of the central section, I presumed they were ‘ironic’, though perhaps not. The performance, though, was masterly, rhythmic tests passed with flying colours, not least in the final section in which the two pianists finally came into sync with one another, only to fall out again, ‘like a great malfunctioning mechanical player piano’, to quote Edward Bhesania’s evocative note. That I found diverting enough; the rest was evidently admired by most in the audience and enjoyed by both players.

 Adams over, I could breathe a sigh of relief and had no reservations whatsoever. Debussy’s 1891 arrangement for two pianos of Schumann’s Studies in Canonic form for pedal piano rarely disappoints, but here sheer ‘naturalness’ of musical response was second to none. Bach rightly emerged as the guiding spirit of the first, which paradoxically had one hear all that is not Bach all the more acutely. A melting performance, utterly pianistic, would surely have delighted Schumann and Debussy equally; Bach too, no doubt. From this ‘prelude’, greater pathos followed in the second study, its harmonic riches revealed with wisdom and ese. A winningly impetuous third study, harking back to the wide-eyed Romanticism of Schumann’s ‘Year of Song’ five years previously, filled one’s stomach with the loveliest of butterflies. Limpid, heartfelt, and noble in response, the fourth showed, in the building and subsiding of its more darkly involved central section, the truest virtues of such antiphonal performance. The fifth was resolute in a nicely post-Schubertian way, whilst the concluding study proved both developmental and summative: once more, a fine tribute to Bach.

Debussy’s own En blanc et noir opened as if paying brief homage to Schumann, then pressed on beyond. Its first movement offered clarity, direction, pianistic abandon and control, in as finely complementary duo playing as one could imagine—and then some. Tragedy penetrated necessary abstraction in the second movement, dedicated ‘ au Lieutenant Jacques Charlot tué à l’ennemi en 1915, le 3 mars’. Angels (la vielle France) and demons (war, Ein’ feste Burg) did battle, albeit with due ambiguity. This is music, not a tract, and so it sounded here. Anger, though, was barely suppressed, and why should it be? The scherzando, dedicated to Stravinsky, proved more elusive still, all the more so for resting on a rock-solid rhythmic base, above and sometimes beneath which passes all manner of musical entanglements.

 Debussy and Stravinsky gave a celebrated private performance of The Rite in the composer’s duet version. What it would have been to have heard that, though it is difficult to imagine it surpassing what we heard from Hamelin and Andsnes. Whenever one hears a good performance of the piano version, it is striking just how readily the opening bassoon lines, apparently so tied to their timbre, transfer. Who knows what wizardry is involved therein, but it was close to definitively unleashed on this occasion. More flexible at times than is possible (perhaps desirable) for orchestra, the performance lacked nothing in rhythmic solidity where it counted, its primitivism shockingly immanent. So too was clarity that enabled one to hear me manner of things I had never imagined were there, or so I fancied. Passages sounded closer to Petrushka than usual, surely in part on account of the medium. Others emerged hieratic enough to give Boulez a run for his money. Virtuosity took us to its limits and extended them. Yet for all the pounding, there was much delicacy too, and above all melody, which must lie at the heart (yes, the heart) of any Rite. What emerged more strongly than in any performance I can recall was the sheer tragic impulse of the second part, rooted harmonically, the radicalism of Stravinsky’s cellular organisation likewise becoming all the clearer as it progressed. Hamelin and Andsnes made the Rite strange again whilst remaining true to it: surely the ultimate goal of any performance worth our time.

 As an encore, we heard a tango composer by Hamelin himself, perfectly conceived for and realised on two pianos. Catchy and playful, it engaged in Ravel’s trick of having one ask what might lie beneath the beguiling, glittering surface, before immediately turning the joke on us by pointing out the silliness of the question.

Nash Ensemble/Kok - Birtwistle, Carter, and Adams, 26 March 2014

Wigmore Hall

Birtwistle – Fantasia upon all the notes (2012)

Carter – Enchanted Preludes (1988)
Esprit rude/Esprit doux (1985)
John Adams – Shaker Loops (1978)
Carter – Mosaic (2004)
Birtwistle – The Moth Requiem (2012)

Nash Ensemble

BBC Singers

Nicholas Kok (conductor)

A funny programme this: not the combination of Harrison Birtwistle and Elliott Carter, for they provided refreshing, invigorating contrast, but the presence of John Adams’s Shaker Loops, which really did not seem to have anything to do with either, and whose poverty of invention sounded all the more glaring in such august company. I am not sure how long it lasted, but it seemed interminable; waiting for the music to start proved a futile experience. Doubtless whatever objections one may level will be countered with an all too easy ‘but that is the point’. ‘Process music’ is all well and good – well, perhaps – in theory, but this does not even have the courage to be truly unbearable, in the ‘Yes, I’ll confess, just please let me out’ mode of Philip Glass. It seems more soft-centred, more pandering, and yet ultimately there seems at that centre to be nothing but a vacuum. The seven string players – two violins, two violas, two cellos, and double bass – of the Nash Ensemble could not be faulted in the incisive commitment of their response under Nicholas Kok. How on earth one keeps one’s concentration in such conditions I do not know. Still, at least it was good to be reminded of the æsthetic nullity of music too insubstantial even for a Michael Nyman soundtrack.

 

Enough of that! Birtwistle’s 2012 Fantasia upon all the notes, for flute, clarinet, harp, and string quartet, was given its world premiere by the Nash Ensemble, also at the Wigmore Hall. Its title does not refer, as one might have expected, to Purcell, but rather, in Bayan Northcott’s words, ‘hints at how, each time the harpist shifts a pedal between sharp, natural, or flat, a new scale is set up, and … how a shifting sequence of harp modes can interact with and guide the harmonies of a surrounding ensemble’. That said, there remains a typical, if somewhat intangible, evocation of an older England: real, not sepia-tinted, all the more moving for it. And beyond that, there is a still more typical sense of the archaic, Birtwistle’s sound world – the phrase may be clichéd, but here seems unavoidable – announcing itself unmistakeably at the very opening. Ghosts haunt the machine: is that a hint of Ravel’s Daphnis? (The work was commissioned by the Nash Ensemble and the Wigmore Hall, to fulfil Amelia Freedman’s desire for a companion piece to Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro.)  There certainly seem to be points of contact with, though not necessarily derivation from, Birtwistle’s own Punch and Judy and, of course, Stravinsky. But the ecstatic climate sounded here, again in an exemplary performance, as very much part of a post-Minotaur world. The final unwinding returns us ambiguously to a world of earlier mechanisation: almost like a parody of Webern.

 

Carter’s Enchanted Preludes for flute and cello followed, thereby sounding more mercurial, even flighty, though certainly substantial. It emerged as a true duet (not unlike Bach’s fascinating, strange BWV 802-5 pieces). Shifting of mood, for instance to slower material, adorned with cello harmonics, was highly accomplished. And the composer’s own genius in transformation of material shone through throughout – redolent, perhaps surprisingly, of Liszt. Esprit rude/esprit doux, for flute and clarinet, was written for Boulez’s sixtieth birthday. It sounds closer to Boulez – not just in the instrumentation, but also in the clarinet’s apparent announcement of reconciliation between Stravinsky and Schoenberg: Pierrot and Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Again, it proved a real duet, in a truly haunting performance.  

 

Following Adams’s piece and the interval, Carter returned with Mosaic, for flute, oboe, clarinet, harp, string trio, and double bass, another Nash Ensemble commission. Perhaps the presence of the harp could not fail to evoke the Stravinsky of Symphony in Three Movements, yet that haunting was again not simply a matter of instrumentation, but also of musical mechanisms. Soon, however, the material and its development takes a very different path. One sensed, even without necessarily knowing precisely what they were, the guiding presence of the ‘unusual developments in harp technique … too infrequently explored in recent times’ by Carlos Salzedo, whom Carter cited as an inspiration. Bursting with invention in more than one sense, Bach and Haydn did not seem so very far away either. Full of magical twists and turns, new vistas, there might also perhaps be sensed a distant kinship with the world of Romanticism. And, even if less overtly than Birtwistle, Carter also imparts – again, keenly realised in this excellent performance – a sense of unfolding drama. Instruments may sometimes be imagined almost to be characters, sometimes as narrators, sometimes as expression of character and narration. And yes, in the panoply of tesserae-like sounds, a mosaic was constructed – whether entirely or no – before our ears. Wonderful!

 

Birtwistle’s The Moth Requiem, for twelve female singers, three harps, and alto flute, was premiered in Amsterdam, coming to the Proms last year. I must have been away, for I cannot imagine that I should otherwise have missed it. At any rate, it received a highly accomplished performance. Interested in the mysterious beauty of moths from his teenager years Birtwistle offers a magical lament, which appears both to summon up childhood and yet also to touch upon death. A list of moth names – Scopula immorata, Depressaria discipunctella, Leucodonta bicolaria … – coexists with, is confronted by The Moth Poem (2006) by Robin Blaser, librettist for The Last Supper. (John Fallas, in his programme note, made a telling connection with the a cappella interludes from that work.) The nocturnal ‘moth in the piano’ makes itself felt, yet we are haunted by a melancholy induced by knowledge of the deaths of a number of those species. The alto flute, here played by the excellent Philippa Davies, seems almost to echo – whether intentionally or otherwise – the fairy world of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet, whatever the fantastical element, the hieratic, incantatory, perhaps surprisingly homophonic choral writing is at least equally important, once again expressing an archaic sense of loss. It is – and, in performance, was – one of the most striking acts of remembrance I have heard in quite a while: not, perhaps, entirely removed from the world of Stockhausen, or at least our memories thereof. Moreover, in its once-again-undefinable sense of ‘Englishness’, spirits one might have thought less than kindred – Britten, Vaughan Williams – seem also intangibly to incorporated into backstory and present. At the end, we had experienced both the sadness of loss and the exhilaration of experience.