Musikfest Berlin (5) - Klangforum Wien/Pomàrico: Saunders and Aperghis, 4 September 2020

Philharmonie


Rebecca Saunders: Flesh, for solo accordion with recitation (2018)
Sole, Trio in F-sharp for mobile accordion, percussion, and piano (2019)
to an utterance – study, for solo piano (2020, world premiere)
Scar, for 15 soloists and conductor (2018/19)

Georges Aperghis: Der Lauf des Lebens, for 6 voices and ensemble (2019, world premiere)

Joonas Ahonen (piano)

Krassimir Sterev (accordion)

Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart

Klangforum Wien

Emilio Pomàrico (conductor)

Two concerts from Klangforum Wien: one a world premiere, the other including a world premiere and its ‘early music’ coming from 2018. New music indeed, then, however distant 2018—Theresa May: remember her?—may seem to those of us bewildered and exhausted by the current plague. I hope I shall be forgiven for any errors I might make, confronted with such a wealth of new sounds and their organisation, without so much as a programme note, coronavirus precluding such, let alone a score. Is that not, however, an ideal way for us to approach new music, whether ‘New Music’ or not? It was certainly welcome exercise for ears starved of such experience over the preceding months.


First, we heard works by Rebecca Saunders: not only one of the most important composers of her generation, but also one of my favourites. It certainly seems another world since I flew to Munich last June to see and hear her receive the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. Indeed, some of the music we heard had then yet to be written. The opening Flesh, however, had. We hear much about embodiment nowadays, but here the physicality of Saunders’s work and Krassimir Sterev’s astounding performance as accordionist and reciter could not have been more physical: quite erasing, like Molly Bloom’s monologue itself, any thought of dualism between mind and matter. This is not ‘programme music’, certainly not in the sense of mere portrayal, but it was difficult not to think or rather to experience the piece’s progress in extremely direct as well as more indirect terms. Squeezing, shuddering, rattling, shouting, screaming: this was a musical performance of musical material.


Sole for accordion, percussion, and piano was taken attacca, its predecessor necessarily influencing our reception, yet beautifully setting the scene, the next piece stealing in to our consciousness in the after-glow or -shock of Flesh. Resonance and even ritual—perhaps closer to Stockhausen than I might have expected—enabled pitch to be heard both ‘in itself’ and as the key to transformation of other parameters, such as timbre, rhythm, and dynamics. Put another way, post-Debussy and post-Webern tendencies united, without ever remotely sounding like Boulez or any other such forerunners. There were no electronics; yet, as so often in Saunders’s work, I could have sworn I heard them.


Next, Joonas Ahonen gave the first performance of to an utterance – study, for solo piano. Its opening pitted bass resonances, later spreading across the instrument, against glissandi and similar devices: some more scampering, some more furious, again in a not entirely un-Debussyan fabric (at least to my ears). Listening, one created and dissolved new aural hierarchies; and yet again, the sheer physicality of an outstanding performance proved just as crucial to one’s experience. Ahonen’s commanding virtuosity left one in no doubt one was hearing what one should be. Chases were as furious, perhaps even more so, as or than anything in the previous night’s Rihm Jagden und Formen. Ultimately, the piece seemed to me very much to take its part in the distinguished line of (extended) piano studies, growing into something emotionally and intellectually more all-encompassing. Were ‘symphonic’ not so obviously clichéd a misnomer, I might have been tempted to use it with less caution.


The opening of Scar, with its opening soft drum tattoos, dark pitched sounds emerging therefrom, put me in mind of Berg’s Op.6 Pieces. The tricks one’s ears and such resourceful writing can play, not to mention the ensemble performance under Emilio Pomàrico, convinced me at one point I had heard a voice. Slides, dark flashes, an aural landscape in their shadows, a liminal zone between tearing and torn: this was certainly the world of scars. Flights of fancy or of flesh took wing in a process of persistent metamorphosis, leading to dazzling climax and return to the opening material, transformed by our experience of listening.


In the second concert, the ensemble and Pomàrico were joined by the six voices of Neuevocalisten Stuttgart, for the premiere of Georges Aperghis’s Der Lauf des Lebens. Words, at least my words, are still more problematic an approximation here than usual, but I sensed something of a distinction between the dramatic use to which words were put in Saunders and a more ‘purely musical’—to resurrect a choice vintage chestnut—approach to their qualities from Aperghis. Accordion at the opening (the indefatigable Sterev) made for a nice link between the two worlds, but Klangforum Wien and the (initially) female Stuttgart voices immediately took our experience in a very different direction. A riot of sound, not without resonances from jazz, raucous riffs and all, put me a little in mind of Berio at times; that, however, was just me finding my bearings, for this was exuberance very much on its own terms. Vocal parts, sung and spoken, solo and ensemble, may or may not have made ‘verbal’ sense, yet who cared? Both work and performance offered a strong sense of a greater whole over an hour-long span, despite or perhaps on account of a host of mood swings and other transformations. In such winning superfluity, the overriding, most welcome sense was of fun, even of Alice in Wonderland-like wonder. 

Wien Modern (2): Ahonen/Klangforum Wien/Ceccherini - Sciarrino, 6 November 2015

Mozart-Saal, Konzerthaus

Sciarrino – Carnaval (2010-11, Austrian premiere)

Joonas Ahonen (piano)

Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart

Tito Ceccherini (conductor)

 

The Austrian premiere of Salvatore Sciarrino’s Carnaval was placed in trustworthy hands. One expects excellence from Klangforum Wien and the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, but one should never take excellence for granted. Joined by Joonas Ahonen as pianist (he is in fact a member of Klangforum Wien, but here had soloistic billing) and Tito Ceccherini as conductor, the two ensembles not only displayed musical excellence; they seemed also to express musical delight, a key concept in both the written texts and their musical setting, just as in so many madrigals of old, long an inspiration to Sciarrino. Five voices, piano solo, ten other instrumentalists (two flutes, two clarinets, two trombones, two cellos, three percussionists), and conductor united in a fashion not entirely different from that suggested by Monteverdi’s example.

 

In twelve movements, all but one of them with voices, Carnaval treads a madrigalian line, familiar yet reimagined, between what we might consider, however insufficient the terms, the popular and the aristocratic. But that is not perhaps the most important of its explorations. The written texts, all in Italian, mostly originate in ancient Chinese verse, an Odyssey-like (Sciarrino’s own comparison) homage to the art of Towitara Buoyoyu as well as the more obvious – to most in the West – character-piece homage to Schumann, the ‘fantastic’, and perhaps a tension between larger-scale form and the fragmentary. Masks, disguises, the play of appearance and whatever might lie behind it: such seem to be part of the material, both musical, verbal, and, I think we might say, even with cautionary quotation marks, ‘dramatic’ too. Monteverdi’s dramatic madrigals call into question rigid distinctions between concert and drama; so have many works since, not least some of Schumann’s, and certainly many of Sciarrino’s.
 

 

Voices such as Zhuang Zhou, from the fourth century before Christ, take us up to the final recitative text, elaborated by Sciarrino from a biography of Tao Yuanming. They all treat in some way with the idea and indeed the practical reality of music, and, in more general terms, that of artistic creation and performance too. Love for music and for its performance are not the least of their qualities: kissing the sound of a note sung, for instance (no.10, ‘Lasciar vibrare’: ‘Suono pieno/stordisce/tenue silenzio/trasporta I canti/tu lascia che il suono/baci la sua vibrazione/lascia’). Sometimes, the music offers a strong pictorial element, for instance the traditional word-painting, both instrumental and vocal, upon ‘tremante’ in no.7. In other cases, the relationship is more oblique or more complicated. Infectious joy in music-making is never far away, though, whether in the carolling – or so it seemed to me – of no.4, or the febrile, almost Boulezian – a comparison rather than thesis of ‘influence’ – proliferation of instrumental material in no.11. The social element of a musician’s endeavour – ‘inventing images’ for his friends – has all manner of historical and indeed geographical precedent: the Schubertiade or the heyday of the madrigal itself, as well as more folk-like instances. Here, it seems honestly, playfully reinvented.
 

One might consider the purely instrumental eleventh movement, ‘Stanze della pioggia (dedicato a Maurizio Pollini)’ a concertante piece for piano and ensemble, yet it came across here, most creditably, as perhaps closer still to chamber music. Virtuosity was shared across the ensemble; different soloists emerged as momentarily pre-eminent, but not for the sake of pre-eminence. It stands as longer than any of the other movements, longer than many of them put together. Repeated figures and their variants are passed through the ensemble, but certain instruments, not least one of the cellos, seem to retain a degree of ownership. Perhaps such figures and variants create their own narrative, even their own linguistic world. Do we need words after all? And yet, we return to words for the twelfth movement, that evocation of Tao Yuanming mentioned above. He could make no music, but he had a lute without strings, ‘un liuto senza corde’. Wine plays its part in the verbal resolution, as the piano does in its musical playing out. Such collegiality and conviviality seem not the least of the delights one might take home, at least in memory, from such a musical feast. A renaissance of the Renaissance, perhaps: or, so we fancy.