Festival d'Aix-en-Provence (3) - Quatuor Diotima: Saariaho, Boulez, and Debussy, 9 July 2025

Villa Lily-Pastré

Saariaho: Terra memoria
Boulez: Livre pour quatuor, Ia, Ib, V
Debussy: String Quartet in G minor, op.10

Yun-Peng Zhao

Léo Marillier (violins)

Franck Chevalier, Alexis Descharmes (cello)

(picture: my own, taken from audience)

  

Whilst a concert of string quartet music on a balmy evening in the garden of a Provençal villa might sound idyllic, many would add that there is good reason for outdoor music being largely given by wind rather than string instruments. The Hôtel Maynier d’Oppède having become unavailable, this substitute venue nonetheless offered an excellent setting, the Quatuor Diotima seemingly unfazed by the acoustical and tuning challenges that must have confronted it. The screen placed at the back of the stage doubtless played a part, but so surely did the skill and sangfroid of this ever-excellent ensemble. 

Programming was canny, two composers strongly influenced in rather different ways by Debussy, one of whom we lost recently, the other whose centenary we celebrate this year, preceding Debussy’s sole string quartet, for which we are all thankful whilst understanding that the genre was not necessarily for him. Who knows what might have emerged from his ‘late’ style, had it not been abruptly curtailed by death? But then we can say that of so many. Here, on all three counts, we were grateful for what we heard. 

Kaija Saariaho’s 2007 Terra memoria marked her second work for quartet, not so much taking up where she had left off with Nymphéa of twenty years earlier as doing something quite different, whilst affirming her love for the expression born of intimacy that characterises so much writing for these forces. If conversation is a quality we attribute above all to the Classical heyday of the quartet, it re-emerged in different guises in all three works, here in comprehending performances that seemed to shape that conversation not only between players but between us and the ‘departed’ to whom the work is dedicated, and also the earth (terra) and memory (memoria) of the title, encapsulating both the composer’s shaping of material – always surprising, yet always apt – and the performers’ shaping of what she in turn offered them. Flashes, memories haunted and perhaps consoled us too. It was difficult not to think of Derridian hauntology, not least in figures flying off the bows that seemed both to owe their being to what we might think of both as spectralism and its spectres and yet confidently also to progress beyond them. 

Pierre Boulez was a regular visitor to the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and led, as cellist Alexis Descharmes reminded us in his spoken introduction to the concert the creation of its Académie. Alas, I never heard him lead conduct here, though I did hear a splendid Berlin Philharmonic concert of Bartók, Ravel, and Boulez in 2009. If Boulez’s presence – haunting in the best sense – continues to mark various aspects of the Festival, it is surely right that in his centenary year we should hear his own music: in this case parts – or, as he preferred, feuillets, (leaves) – of the Livre pour quatuor, an essential Boulezian work-in-progress that, once withdrawn, is now experiencing a welcome renaissance in performance. I long to hear it all – whatever ‘all’ might mean in this context – one day, but in the meantime it would be beyond churlish to complain at the fragments given in scintillating performances such as this. Here, perhaps inevitably, I thought of Webern first, yet also, perversely or otherwise, the late Beethovenian inheritance one might have thought shaken off by the Second Piano Sonata, but which to my ears here endured in that connection, in fragility as well as in fury, of fragments that characterised both work and performance.   

Debussy’s ghost might have warned Boulez against such a path, yet he too could not quite escape such a reckoning in his Quartet. It is often slyly bypassed; it would, moreover, be absurd to fail to acknowledge both the charm and method of French, Russian, and other string quartet forebears in composition. Yet in a performance of often astonishing concision, sonata and other ‘old’/’German’ forms worked Debussyan magic not only in their haunting but also in their ambiguity. One could identify them, yet so what? What did they – or better, work and performance – express? For a Festival strongly yet far from exclusively devoted to the lyric arts, it was the melodic lines, their intertwining, and their corrosion of expectations that proved most immediate and, in retrospect, so prophetic of the Saariaho and Boulez works heard first that yet remained, in one sense, yet to come.

Innocence, Royal Opera, 17 April 2023 (UK premiere)

Royal Opera House

Images: Tristram Kenton

The Waitress (Tereza) – Jenny Carlstedt
The Mother-in-law (Patricia) – Sandrine Piau
The Father-in-law (Henrik) – Christopher Purves
The Bride (Stela) – Lilian Farahani
The Bridegroom (Tuomas) – Markus Nykänen
The Priest – Timo Riihonen
The Teacher (Cecilia) – Lucy Shelton
Student One (Markéta) – Vilma Jää
Student Two (Lilly) – Beate Mordal
Student Three (Iris) – Julie Hega
Student Four (Anton) – Simon Kluth
Student Five (Jerónimo) – Camilo Delgado Díaz
Student Six (Alexia) – Marina Dumont

Simon Stone (director)
Chloe Lamford (set designs)
Mel Page (costumes)
James Farncombe (lighting)
Arco Renz (choreography)
Aleksi Barrière (dramaturgy, translation)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Genevieve Ellis)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

 

Kaija Saariaho’s latest opera, first seen at the 2021 Festival d’Aix en Provence, has now reached another of its co-commissioners, the Royal Opera House. It would be difficult to overstate the impression it made, not only on me but clearly on the rest of a nearly full house. Moving away—on account, it seems, of Kasper Holten’s initial brief—from various reimaginings of different pasts to the near-present, Innocence, written with librettist Sofia Oksanen and translator (from Finnish into multiple languages) Alekis Barrière, is a concentrated work, ideally judged on an Elektra-like timescale, with neither a spare note nor moment.

 The work ranges between a nearer past and present, as guests and workers at a wedding find themselves confronted still more strongly than they are every day by the trauma of a school shooting that took place ten years previously. The complementary complexity of their memory arcs— musical as much as verbal, linguistic as well as harmonic, all seemingly conceived as one, albeit through collaboration rather than through Wagnerian control—is on the one hand readily apparent, yet on the other, as two scenarios, two times merge, one fancies at least that one can readily take in what is taking place as well as what has, what is sung and spoken as well as what the orchestra says, what unfolds in Simon Stone’s staging (and Chloe Lamford’s Alvar Aalto-inspired sets) as well as in the score. There is no contemporary overload, no video, let alone live film, nothing especially post-dramatic. If this is rather more than a ‘well-made play’, there is something satisfyingly clear and balanced to its route, to its proportions, and indeed to its accessible yet far from simple musical language.

 Collaborations take many forms, some relishing conflict and contradiction; here, we stand dramaturgically closer to recent works by the likes of George Benjamin than, say, Harrison Birtwistle. There is room for both and for more—and there always has been. There seems no reason, however, to doubt that Saariaho’s opera – and that is unquestionably a shorthand for all involved, the composer first among equals – deserves, indeed quietly, subtly demands to be spoken of in the same breath as works such as Lessons in Love and Violence and The Minotaur, to take two exemplary full-scale contemporary operas seen relatively recently here at Covent Garden.

The Father-in-law (Christopher Purves), The Waitress (Jenny Carlstedt)

For more often than not – some might take an essentialist, neo-Aristotelian line, but let us not go there for now – tragedy ultimately takes a straightforward trajectory. Here, two tragedies feed and merge, feeding on one another, indeed finding their being in memory and trauma. Trauma is perhaps the key to the libretto, fragmented and united in translation, the children and parents of an international school each finding their mode of musical and verbal expression, written and performative, through negotiation of complementary ‘nationality’. Some characters speak (for better or worse, amplified); some sing; some do both. One, Markéta, employs Finno-Ugric folksong techniques. Saariaho writes for all in turn, even having made computer analyses of the words she had also heard spoken by natives. ‘It was a crazy, long, complex composition process and one that I will never in my life return to,’ she owns in the programme. 

Some characters flit between languages, just as many Europeans and ‘citizens of the world’ do on a daily basis, translating or not, testing the limits of so much often without realising. (I recalled an extraordinary Don Giovanni at Vienna’s Volksoper, in which Achim Freyer mixed German and Italian, even within numbers, to heightened dramatic, if often inexplicable, effect.) This is not, thank goodness an opera for Mrs May of Maidenhead. And, indeed, to a London audience, thoughts of our own hostage situation with a nationalist far-Right, removing us from our own international school, can never be far away. We, traumatised as we are by the events of not far short of a decade, reliving them as if they were yesterday, whilst confronted by their consequences and, for their perpetrators, apparent lack of them, will make our own connections—even as the rest of our fellow Europeans have moved on, or seem to have done so.

The Mother-in-law (Sandrine Piau), The Waitress, The Bridegroom (Markus Nykänen),
The Bride (Lilian Farahani), The Father-in-law

Yet no one ever really moves on, it seems; and though such reception is doubtless beside the point for many, and will surely seem self-indulgent in the wake of events to the east, it is our lot as heightened familial and interfamilial clashes are to the world created here. Stone’s tendency, in classical works, to ‘reduce’ or at least to ‘translate’ to new contemporary worlds is more or less redundant in this case. He concentrates, with considerable self-effacement, on telling the stories, layered as in words and music, and does so very well. Polyphony – perhaps a nod to Berio and Eco, or at least a similarity or two – is the order of the constructive day. Its web, though, is weaved with that still-strange hyper-immediacy one recognises from the most successful spectralist music (if we should still label it that or indeed anything other than itself). Saariaho’s ear for instrumentation never errs, yet likewise never merely conforms to the expected, however ‘natural’, even necessary, her choices may sound.

The opening, de profundis piano, contrabassoon, and timpani, scrunching seconds necessitating melody, light, and development that yet will always return to the source, contain within itself the seeds of what is to come. Its Fatal quality balances Nature and chance, summoning spectres to a feast as terrible in its way as that of Mahler’s Das klagende Lied. If I heard parallels with, say, the passage of Gérard Grisey’s  Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, I am not sure that tells us more much than that one might sometimes hear Schumann in Brahms. Perhaps the way of handling development in time, the directed proliferation that seems to create a genuinely new musical dramaturgy, might claim roots there, albeit germinating and spreading in the different setting of an actual theatre. I note it just in case. At any rate, to seek ‘influence’ at this stage of Saariaho’s career may be to turn down a blind alley. There is trauma, though, in the musical shadows as much as the verbal, in Arco Renz’s choreography too.

 

The Teacher (Lucy Shelton), Students

And there are shockingly good performances too, whether from the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, which might have convinced one it played such music all the time; from Susanna Mälkki, who surely had more than a hand in making one think so; or from an excellent cast recreating the work before our eyes and ears. Sandrine Piau and Christopher Purves, parents to the shooter and the bridegroom, turned their mutually uncomprehending argument over whether the new addition to their family, Stela (Lilian Farahani), should learn of ‘the tragedy’ into something musically and dramatically generative. Farahani and her intended, Markus Nykänen’s Tuomas, engaged our sympathies and our frustrations, often at once, as they struggled through an impossible, fatal (re)discovery. Jenny Carlstedt’s Tereza, mother of one of the slaughtered children and now a waitress at the wedding, transformed her inability to forget, let alone to forgive, into the centrepiece of the work. But all contributed sincerely and, in their different ways, exceptionally, be it Julie Hega as the French friend of the boy pushed beyond endurance, Vilma Jää’s haunting Markéta, or Lucy Shelton’s helpless, terrified, yet ultimately strong Teacher, responsible yet not. Such, we learned, was true of all concerned, the bullied, harried boy-shooter included. Without tricks of false empathy or other sleights of hand, the complex polyphony of the piece offered above all a powerful reminder that scapegoating, that easy solutions, are often the truest source of our problems.

For International Women's Day

Esfahani - Bull, Kalabis, D’Anglebert, Borup-Jǿrgensen, Saariaho, Kidane, and Scarlatti, 19 July 2016

Wigmore Hall

John Bull – Chromatic Pavan and Galliard, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s’
Viktor Kalabis – Aquarelles, op.53
Bull – Fantasia XII
Jean Henry d’Anglebert – Pièces de clavecin: selection
Axel Borup-Jǿrgensen – Tarocco, op.124
Saariaho – Jardin Secret II, for harpsichord and tape
Daniel Kidane – Six Etudes (new version)
Scarlatti – Sonatas: in F major, Kk518; in G major, Kk259; in G major, Kk260; in A major and E major (Barcelona MS 1964 nos 34 and 31); in D minor, Kk516; in D minor, Kk517

Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord).


One would be hard put to find a more varied programme from any instrumentalist today, or indeed in the past. It was indicative of Mahan Esfahani’s typically venturing spirit – and achievement – that this harpsichord recital, sadly my final visit to the Wigmore Hall of the 2015-16 season, was listed under both its Early Music and Baroque Series and its Contemporary Music Series. I think we can forgive him for the lack of Chopin and Liszt. Instead, we heard intriguing juxtapositions, the intent not, insofar as I could tell, didactic, but willing or, perhaps better, permitting the listener to make what connections and contrasts he or she would. Where unapologetically modernist artists such as Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Maurizio Pollini would more often than not present us with a guiding, almost Schoenbergian Idea behind a programme, Esfahani’s approach might be considered more post-modern, which is not in any sense to imply unconsidered, far from it.

What a joy it was to start with John Bull, whose waywardness clearly attracts Esfahani. The Chromatic Pavan and Galliard seemed almost to look forward to Purcell, albeit with a knack for surprising one that made me think not so much of English contemporaries or successors, but of Gesualdo. (Would that we had more keyboard music from him!) There was great flexibility to the performance, but flexibility with reason that always announced itself. Both dances seemed to gather up complexity as they developed – in a fashion that, doubtless fancifully, put me in mind of Schoenberg and his school. Viktor Kalabis’s Aquarelles, which I had also heard Esfahani play at a Milton Court recital a little more than a year ago, opened with an intriguing hint of Poulenc (the Concert champêtre), but developed – that word again – in a very different way. There was perhaps more than a hint of Shostakovich to the second, marked ‘Andante’; what struck me, though, more than any mere correspondence, was the sense conveyed of what lay between and beneath the notes. There was an intimacy in the spareness of halting progress. The third and final piece proved kaleidoscopic and adamant in its rhythm, in turns and also together. Bull’s Fantasia XII emerged from it as if a cousin, which then proceeded upon its own, highly virtuosic, wonderfully realised way.

Five pieces from Jean Henry d’Anglebert’s 1689 collection followed: a ‘Prélude’, an ‘Air d’Apollon du Triomphe de l’Amour,’ an ‘Air ancient: Ou estes vous allé,’ ‘Les Songes agréables d’Atys’, and the ‘Passacaille d’Armide’. The opening Prélude was gravely rhetorical, or should that be rhetorically grave? And yet, it sounded full of light and shade. The airs were sung gracefully, kinship and differentiation both perceptible. The Lully ‘Passacaille’ was imbued with proper grandeur and impetus, which yet proved capable of more tender yielding.

The first half closed with two pieces of what we might consider to be Scandinavian modernism. First was Axel Borup-Jǿrgensen’s Tarocco. Its twists, turns, and above all, guiding thread were communicated with a winning sense of adventure. Logic and fantasy were revealed not so much as in competition but as two sides of the same musical coin. Kaaija Saariaho’s Jardin Secret II I found harder to get on with, but the fault may well have been mine. It opened in almost concertante fashion, but the relationship between harpsichord and tape seemed to be in a state of constant, or at least continuing, flux. Some of the rather strange electronic noises – the work was written using IRCAM technology – puzzled me in themselves, but that was perhaps the point. I was delighted, in any case, to have the opportunity to hear such music – music, I must admit, I had not even known existed, and which the ‘Early Music’ crowd would not touch with an authenticke bargepole.

A new version of Daniel Kidane’s Six Etudes, an earlier version given in that 2015 recital, opened the second half. Before looking at the programme, I was struck by the varying transformative techniques running throughout these six beautifully crafted miniatures. I was then delighted – and relieved – to see the composer’s own reference to an ‘inbuilt transformative aspect [which] also adds a playful nature to the pieces’. That was certainly how it sounded here, particular ‘problems’ set up – as is traditional with a ‘study’ – and explored within certain restrictive parameters. Cellular is probably not quite the right word – I have had no opportunity to read the score – but I am not sure that it was entirely the wrong word either. And yes, it was great fun to welcome back the hotel reception bell, wryly described by Kidane as ‘an external pitch’, in the sixth piece.

Finally, we heard several sonatas by Scarlatti. That in F major, Kk518, offered characteristic insistence but also variety of figuration, clearly, meaningfully brought out in performance. The turn to the tonic minor was splendidly, even heartrendingly, inward in quality. G major (Kk 259 and 260) proved warmer and, in the first sonata, perhaps gentler, also, I think, more exploratory. The second of those two sonatas offered relatively extrovert contrast, surprising both harmonically and melodically; Esfahani proved an expert judge, moreover, of its rhetoric. The two sonatas from a Barcelona manuscript, discovered by Barry Ife, may well have been receiving their modern premieres. They sounded very much as a pair here, their different key signatures notwithstanding: contrast and kinship, as in earlier works in the recital, were both apparent and to be questioned. There were, even by Scarlatti’s standards, some striking disjunctures to be relished in the E major sonata. The D major Sonata, Kk516, seemed at times to evoke the world of John Bull in its manner, at least before highly contrasting material took it along a quite different path. It struck a note of melancholic relief, Esfahani, having heard some of its material performed by Spanish folk musicians, taking it at a significantly slower tempo than marked. Keyboard fireworks returned in the closing D minor work, Kk517. And then, it was time for another, charming surprise: a Richard Rodney Bennett encore, Little Elegy.