Musikfest Berlin (11) - Karajan Academy/Mälkki: Neuwirth and Grisey, 18 September 2019

Kammermusiksaal

Image © Monika Karczmarczyk

Neuwirth: Aello: ballet mécanomorphe (2016-17)

Grisey: Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (1998)

Emmanuel Pahud (flute)

Juliet Fraser (soprano)

Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

All good things must come to an end. This year’s Musikfest Berlin has been a very good thing indeed. I had hoped to go to Rusalka in concert performance to round things off, but alas that was not to be. This concert of works by Olga Neuwirth and Gérard Grisey, however, proved if anything a more fitting way to conclude, in performances from the young players of the Berlin Philharmonic’s Karajan Academy, under the wise leadership of Susanna Mälkki, to rival those of many a new music ensemble.

I first heard Neuwirth’s Aello as part of the Swedish Chamber Orchestra’s Brandenburg Project’, in which new works were commissioned to accompany Bach’s six concerti grossi. Then I wrote that it was ‘to my ears, by far the strongest of the new works’. Two years later, my ears found at least as much to fascinate and to enjoy. Having Emmanuel Pahud on flute (later bass flute) is unlikely ever to be a bad thing; it certainly was not here, in a performance of expressive virtuosity. As soloist, or first among equals, he was joined by two muted trumpets (piccolo in B-flat and in C), and three first violins, all at the flute pitch of 443 Hz; three second violins (431 Hz); two violas (443); two cellos (450); synthesiser (433, with guest artist, Majella Stockhausen); mechanical typewriter (Olivetti Lettera 22); hotel reception bell; wine-glass, with unknown (to me) liquid content, at pitch e’’; and small triangle with milk-frother. The machine element, then, is – and, in performance, was – important, acknowledgement no doubt of recent, to my mind highly regrettable, tendencies in Bach performance, from 1950s ‘sewing machine Baroque’ onwards. There was nothing, however, puritanical to what we heard, quite the contrary. Not only were there ghosts aplenty in the machine; they were having fun. Rhythms were tight, in a good way, facilitating metrical, melodic, and harmonic turns. Memories of Bach, often in the foreground, offered a framework for listening, in a fashion that perhaps might recall Berio, albeit without straightforward, evident ‘influence’. One listened, was aided to listen, on several levels at once. A closing climax both mechanistic and thrilling still left space for a fine surprise, whose secret I shall not spoil here, on the final note.

Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, for which the players were joined by the ever-excellent Juliet Fraser, made for an intriguing contrast, evolution perhaps replacing mechanism. (Does that implicit contrast not already, however, beg several questions?) A pattern of almost, yet never quite, imperceptible openings – the first, in the Prélude, surely most so, and not only because one’s ears have yet to adjust – sets up such expectation; though expectations are there to be, if not confounded, then at least developed and questioned. Fraser’s emphatic intonation of her opening pitches received ‘backing’ that might almost have seemed ambient, until one listened. Process was clear: settling and unsettling, almost yet not quite according to one’s strategy of listening. How a voice’s, or rather this particular voice’s, timbre might be echoed, continued, by a trumpet or a clarinet was not the least of the mysteries to be savoured rather than resolved. Tuning, for instance in the Interlude between the first and second songs, continued to unsettle, somehow being both right and wrong simultaneously, the harmonic spectrum working its wonders, yet working them against an occasionally nagging backdrop of what we, or at least I, otherwise ‘knew’. By the time we had reached the fourth song, ‘La mort de l’humanité’, from the Epic of Gilgamesh, I began to wonder whether the change effected on my listening might have negative consequences for returning to the music I love, and perhaps know, so well. A brief, pointless fantasy, no doubt, yet testament to the transformational qualities of work and performance, whose form seemed to have something both natural and magical to them. We had observed, heard, perhaps experienced the deaths of an angel, of civilisation, of the voice, and now of humanity, but that did not necessarily seem to have been a bad thing. There will always, after all, remain ghosts in the machine; or will there?

Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, 7 June 2019

Prinzregententheater

Images: Stefanie Loos

Annesley Black: Tolerance Stacks: excerpts (2016/19)

Ann Cleare: on magnetic fields (2011/12)

Mithatcan Öcal: Ein musikalischer Spaß (2017-19): ‘Birds with Beards’ (world premiere)

Rebecca Saunders: Skin (2016)

Juliet Fraser (soprano)

Ensemble Musikfabrik

Enno Poppe (conductor)

The first woman composer to receive the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize could not have been a worthier candidate. From the first time I heard Rebecca Saunders’s music, in a 2012 Arditti Quartet concert at the Wigmore Hall, I have been intrigued, fascinated, and thrilled by it. At this ceremony and concert in Munich’s Prinzregententheater, we heard not only Saunders’s Skin (given in London this January by the same soloist, Juliet Fraser, with the Ensemble Modern and Vimbayi Kaziboni), but also music by the three winners of Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Composers’ Prizes: Annesley Black, Ann Cleare, and Mithatcan Öcal. When three out of four of the composers are women and the other a Turkish man, perhaps the tide is finally beginning to turn. In addition to prize money, the three recipients of composers’ prizes will also receive portrait CDs from the Kairos label, to be released at the end of this year – so helping others to discover their music for themselves.

First we heard excerpts from Black’s Tolerance Stacks, followed by a greeting from Peter Rusicka and a short film showing the composer at work. (Each composer received such a film, in other cases seen before her or his music was performed.) Fraser was the soprano soloist here too, excellent as ever. Piano, responded to by clarinet and percussion, in turn responded to by piano, set the scene, the pianist thereafter moving across to one of two electronic mixing desks in preparation for the vocal entry. Was it pain or pleasure being evoked? Why choose, amidst such a colourful, dramatic frenzy? Might one characterise what we heard as post-Stockhausen in a meaningful rather than merely chronological sense? I think so, but am not sure quite how much that would matter. The sense of electronic and vocal play was keen throughout. So too was an intriguing relationship – which I could not yet put my finger on to describe, let alone analyse, yet could certainly perceive – between sound and structure.

Cleare’s and Öcal’s works were both for ensemble without voice, all in the superlative care of Enno Poppe and Ensemble Musikfabrik, longstanding Saunders collaborators. Cleare’s on magnetic fields added to the ensemble what I presume was an instrument of her own, hybrid instrumental design being a particular musical interest of hers. (I do not even know what it was, or what it was called, but such is part of the fun!) At any rate, three chamber groups conversed, collaborated: made music, two violins from two separate groups coming across as first among equals in dialogue and competition. Sounds were often metallic, mechanical, industrial, creative, but they were no mere sounds: this was a true musical narrative, finely paced both in writing and performance. Likewise every note, attack, timbre, and duration seemed deeply considered and dramatically necessary.

Öcal’s ‘Birds without Beards’ was prefaced by a duly entertaining film, in which a member of his Istanbul Composer Collective remonstrated with him for having included a pitch, C-sharp, he had expressively ruled out, whether in itself or even as suggested by harmonic structure. Repeated pitches and their implications, perhaps rhythmic as well as harmonic, seemed to be one of the concerns from the outset here, wind notes jabbed and intoned, initially set against scurrying string figures. One was intended, I think, to notice just as keenly when those pitches were repeated and varied. Öcal offered on occasion an almost Mahlerian sense of echoed reminiscence of ‘found’ material, actually found or imagined. But those were just two aspects of an absorbing, colourful, witty showcase for the composer’s work, types of material coming into intriguing collaboration and conflict – just, perhaps, like the Collective itself.

‘It sounds how it’s played,’ as Robert Adlington once put it, cited in trumpeter Marco Blauuw’s oration, as intelligent as it was heartfelt, for Rebecca Saunders and her music ‘Stay stubborn, self-willed,’ Saunders advised her three predecessors on this evening, having dedicated receipt of her prize to her undoubtedly stubborn and self-willed predecessor as composer, Galina Ustolvskaya. Those and many other aperçus helped guide our appreciation of the performance of Skin; but mostly, like Samuel Beckett, another guiding spirit, this music spoke with a bleakness and humanity, the two quite indivisible, of its own. If the opening starkness, at least in the context of Saunders’s words, obliquely brought Ustolvskaya to mind, the poetry of music and silence, music as silence, distillation in instrumental combination, and that combination in distillation, bore Beckettian witness more strongly than ever. Breath and cries from voice and instruments alike, often in tandem, both formed and inhabited landscape and narrative. (Sometimes we need such metaphors to speak about music, but we should always be wary of ascribing them importance that is greater than whatever that music may be ‘itself’). As ever, properties of instruments, the voice included, indeed the voice foremost among them, were both respected and extended, testament to the composer’s searching, collaborative way with performing colleagues. No silence, though, was more pregnant, more magical than that following Fraser’s final, solo ‘skin’. It rightly proved a prelude resistant to, then part of, that warmest of applause that ensued.

SoundState Festival – Fraser/Ensemble Modern/Kaziboni - Gedizlioğlu, Abbasi, Grütter, Fure, Žuraj, and Saunders, 19 January 2019

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Zeynep Gedizlioğlu: Kesik (2010, UK premiere)

Anahita Abbasi: Situation II/Dialoge (2016, UK premiere)

Martin Grütter: Die Häutung des Himmels (2016, UK premiere)

Ashley Fure: Feed Forward (2016, UK premiere)

Vito Žuraj: Runaround (2014, UK premiere)

Rebecca Saunders: Fury II (2009, UK premiere)

Saunders: a visible trace (2006)

Saunders: SKIN (2015-16)

Paul Cannon (double bass)

Juliet Fraser (soprano)

Ensemble Modern

Vimbayi Kaziboni (conductor)

Musical performance comes in many varieties, many of which I love. I should be lying if I claimed not greatly to look forward to evenings with the likes of Maurizio Pollini or Daniel Barenboim, or my annual visit to Salzburg. There is nothing, however, quite like being confronted with new music: either brand new, in which case only the performers and perhaps the odd rehearsal observer will have heard it, or verging upon it, as for instance in the first of these two concerts in the Southbank Centre’s new SoundState Festival, which, as its publicity puts it, ‘bringing together an unrivalled concentration of global creativity, … celebrates the artists,’ or at least some of them, ‘who are defining what it means to make new music in the 21^st century’. It is good for the ears and the mind: I have nothing on which to go other than what I hear there and then. It is crucial for the future of music. And it is far more exciting than any run-of-the-mill subscription concert, with an equally run-of-the-mill audience. A severe spot or two of bronchial activism is likely to prove the most surprising thing in the latter case. Here, who knows what might happen?

The two concerts I heard were both given by the Ensemble Modern and conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni. Performances, insofar as I could tell, were just as excellent as one would have expected from such players. The first concert offered five works by young composers, chosen by the ensemble as musicians they admired, the second three works by Rebecca Saunders, one of my most admired living composers, who just two days previously had been awarded the 2019 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the first woman composer to have received the prize and only the second woman at all (the first having been Anne-Sophie Mutter). That, of course, tells its own tale, so it was heartening to hear one concert in which three of the five composers featured were women and another in which the sole composer was Saunders. Such is again another advantage of much, if not yet quite enough, that happens in the world of new music.

Zeynep Gedizlioğlu’s Kesik, or ‘Cut’, opened the first concert. Its opening wind éclat promised much, repeated yet never quite: different outcomes, different potentialities. ‘Lacerating’ was another word that came to mind – not only, I think, on account of the work’s title. Part way through, the oboe cut in, with a microtonal melody line more or less unbroken, that spoke perhaps of the ‘oriental’ or ‘orientalism’, or was that my orientalist projection? There was little or nothing in the way of repose until that oboe line ceased, followed by a thwack of the bass drum.

Two United Kingdom premieres of Anahita Abbasi works within a couple of days of each other: first it had been her Intertwined Distances for harpsichord and electronics, courtesy of Mahan Esfahani; now we heard her ensemble piece, Situation II/Dialoge. A sense of landscape was strong, at least to my ears and imagination: wind, or something like it, something like its effects, rustling through bunches of leaves shaken by two of the players; sounds from inside the piano; cello and double bass working together in crude (from the standpoint of a Mozart orchestra) sounds heard in more or less contrary motion. Sounds that were (relatively) more expected emerged out of that eery calm before a storm, without the storm ever truly materialising. Unisons were achieved rather than a given, quickly lost, prior to a return to the aural world of the opening, chimes fading away a niente.

Martin Grütter’s Die Häutung des Himmels (‘The Skinning of the Heavens’), scored for seven instruments (flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet/bass clarinet, horn, trombone, double bass, and distant percussion), came next. The distance of the percussion, behind and above evoked the celestial or at least skyward dimension – like many languages, French does not distinguish between ‘sky’ and ‘heaven’ as English does – of a distant world whose goings on (aural in this case) shaped, even determined those back down on earth, or onstage. A sense of musical drama was strong: almost a scena without words. Teeming wind lines, jazzy (yes, I know, but the cliché seems to work here) bass pizzicato-led riffs: quickly changing moods, like products of the weather or warring gods – are they perhaps the same? – processed before our ears. It felt – and I am doubtless romanticising here, as is my wont – as if a new Alpine Symphony were less being presented then already reimagined, reinterpreted, redramatised.

Ashley Fure’s Feed Forward was the only one work I found over-extended, but that may well have been my misunderstanding: I should happily re-listen in order better to find my feet, should the chance arise. There was, at any rate, some initial overlap or affinity with sounds in Grütter’s piece: happenstance, maybe, or good programming? Structure was quite different, as was the overall sound world, accordion sounding surprisingly unearthly in context. A sense (deliberate, I think!) of tiring, of gesture wearing thin, seemed integral to the work and its course.

The first concert came to an end with Vito Žuraj’s Runaround, for brass quartet (two trumpets, trombone, and horn) and ensemble. This was, I think, the second time I had encountered Žuraj’s music, the first having been at the Salzburg Festival in 2013. (Salzburg and new music, you see, are anything but antithetical, whatever false dichotomy I drew at the opening.) Žuraj, it seems, is a tennis enthusiast, many of his pieces (French Open, Changeover, etc.) finding inspiration in some aspect of the game. In this case, it was table tennis: a game in a hotel room with brass players from the Ensemble Modern. There was certainly a sense of everything to play for, aleatoric elements apparently being present. Another thing that struck me was the fineness of ear: even when using extended techniques, there was always a sense of working with rather than against the instruments and their possibilities. Spirits of jazz bands past hovered in fond parody, prior to a whirling, intermittently waltzing vortex that for me faintly echoed – not necessarily a matter of ‘influence’ – Ravel’s La Valse.

Comparison with Saunders would be futile: an established, if woefully underrated (especially in this country) composer spoke for herself, or rather her works spoke for themselves. First to be heard was Fury II, for double bass and ensemble, here with Paul Cannon as soloist. He seemed to me very much first among equals, though, for at heart this is as much an ensemble piece (piano, accordion, bass clarinet, cello, double bass, two percussionists) as anything else. The dark, low rumbling from various instruments played on their affinity: any might have emerged as the ‘soloist’ – or none. Indeed, other instruments seemed often almost to speak as if they were double basses. Saunders’s finely honed, post-Webern writing once again revealed the importance of every note, timbre, combination, and so forth. There was drama – drum thwacks and all – but with the tightest of focus, no ‘mere’ effect. Highly wrought, pent up in the best sense, this was a work of undeniable mastery both as written and in performance.

 a visible trace again offered much affinity and elision between instrumental lines that yet remained clear: for instance, opening transformation of viola into trombone. Intensity of string playing (and writing) was striking indeed, an agent ultimately of distillation that was not quite spare. This is not parsimonious writing, any more than Webern’s is. There is fragility, even lack, yet neither is accidental. As in Italo Calvino’s inspiring words, ‘The word,’ or perhaps the note, ‘connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.’ Slow, yet ever-changing (not to preclude frenzy within), this is a piece whose timbral and other relationships never cease to fascinate in their unfolding, in their paths, in the traces they leave and mark out. As one instrument falls silent, another has (almost) imperceptibly already begun.

Juliet Fraser’s soprano performance proved the crowning joy of the evening and of SKIN, a work catalysed by lines from Beckett: ‘… this is the room’s essence/not being/now look closer/mere dust/dust is the skin of a room/history is a skin’. Interrelationships again came to the fore, perceived as if through a skin-like membrane. What was the sound of, say, a string instrument and what suggested it? Breath and its possibilities seemed to permeate the membrane of perception, of consciousness. The eloquence of every differentiation in stages from speaking to not-speaking, from speech to song, created and deconstructed words and music before our ears. Words could speak, but so could instruments; likewise with song. How meaningful was the distinction at all? Was it not the all-embracing drama of something not so very distant from what we should once have called a cantata the thing, the non-staged play, the drama of notes and their performance? It is a large-scale work, yet every note counted: just as much as in its two predecessors. A cry of ‘Sk – in’ at the close reminded us of the work’s origin, course, and destination. End: or, as Beckett might have put it, ‘fin’.