Karajan-Akademie/Petrenko - Mendelssohn and Widmann, 17 May 2024

Kammermusiksaal

Mendelssohn: String Octet in E-flat major, op.20
Widmann: Quintet for oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon, and piano
Mendelssohn: Symphony no.4 in A major, op.90, ‘Italian’

Karajan-Akademie

Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

The Berlin Philharmonic’s Karajan-Akademie, founded on the initiative of the man himself in 1972, is perhaps the ultimate in orchestral scholarships. Its graduates are to be found in orchestras across the world. On the basis of this evening concert whose second part was conducted by Karajan’s successor but two, Kirill Petrenko, it would seem unwise to bet against that continuing. Any good orchestra will excel in chamber music playing too. The first part of the concert, offering a work for strings by Mendelssohn and one for wind and piano by Jörg Widmann confirmed much to admire in that respect as well.

Mendelssohn’s music nearly always lifts the spirits—unless played poorly (which does not bear thinking about). The Karajan-Akademie’s Octet offered no exception. From the off, the first movement had a sense of rightness that implied spontaneity, yet doubtless entailed much preparation. Tempo, balance, poise, and sheer élan characterised the performance that mirrored Mendelssohn’s own extraordinary combination of youth and maturity. Counterpoint was vividly present without congestion of textures. Not that sterner passages, for instance in the development, were undersold. The melancholy of exhaustion and its differentiation told its own tale, as did the revival of spirits for the return. Above all, it made me smile. If Beethoven’s inheritance was not absent in the first movement, it was immediately more apparent in the second. A keen architectural grasp was combined with moral seriousness and due sense of the sublime (without a hint of pomposity). The featherlight, fairytale fantasy of a Mendelssohn scherzo held no fears for these players; their relish proved properly infections. They stepped forward and blended in ensemble like musical actors in a play (A Midsummer Night’s Dream only just round the corner). Beethoven’s influence, worn ever so lightly, also characterised a finale of vigour, rigour, and release, which seemed to delight in the very essence of music. The players’ delight both in their performance and the warmth of its reception were palpable, and rightly so.   

Next came Widmann’s Quintet for oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon, and piano, a 2006 commission from the Karajan-Akademie. The combination of piano, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon has as its most celebrated, unmatchable example that of Mozart, although Beethoven’s early work is a fine example too. Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet, op.26, and Suite, op.29 between them contain the instruments, though neither of course matches directly. It was Schoenberg’s music and perhaps also that of his alleged antipode, Stravinsky, that seemed more to haunt on this occasion, for who would dare follow Mozart’s KV 452 directly? Widmann claims to have done so, but that was not so apparent to me, and more to the point, seemed to matter. His longstanding – even then, as the recipient of the Akademie’s Claudio Abbado Composition Prize – preoccupation with German Romanticism registered strongly: not only in its Second Viennese School culmination, but also in Schumannesque (at one remove) piano writing. There was humour; there were what once we might have called ‘extended techniques’; and there was a ‘lost waltz’ that seemed to have strayed from the Vienna of Schoenberg and Berg (perhaps the Wozzeck tavern). Eighteen miniature movements in not much more than twenty minutes offered a vivid, youthful conspectus that again seemed just the thing for outstanding young performers. They seemed to enjoy it too. Piano was exchanged for celesta in the final movement, ‘Flugtraum’, casting a spell of enchantment not only over what had gone before, but also over what was to come.

Petrenko joined a full chamber orchestra (strings 6.5.4.3.2) for the return of Mendelssohn in his Italian Symphony. Lessons of chamber-musicmaking seemed very much to have been learned, both for the players in their listening and sheer responsiveness, and also for the conductor, who in his wisdom – again, one could also see and hear his enjoyment – knew precisely when and when not to conduct. If one could hear, even in the excellent acoustic of the Kammermusiksaal, this was not an especially large string section, that did not matter in the slightest: it was different, neither better nor worse, and balance with wind was impeccable throughout. The first movement got off to a fine start, as well-judged as the Octet. Fine clarinet solos deserve special mention, though there was nothing approaching a weaker link. Petrenko likewise shaped the second movement well, crucially without giving much impression of doing so. His task was to draw out the musicianship of his players, a task accomplished to a tee. Line persisted, however much the scenery changed: the procession, after all, never stops. The Minuet again gained much from the sense of chamber playing writ large; it is not the only way, of course, but it worked well. Its trio seemed all the more to breathe the air of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Presto Saltarello danced on hot coals, infectious and cathartic as a summer night’s fever. Mendelssohn at last seemed to have turned bad; perhaps it was so, if only in the moment.

BPO/Petrenko and Wood: Stravinsky, Zimmermann, Rachmaninov, and Grisey, 15 February 2020

Philharmonie

Stravinsky: Symphony in Three Movements

Zimmermann: Alagoana: Caprichos Brasilieiros

Rachmaninov: Symphonic Dances, op.45

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

Grisey: Le Noir de l’Étoile

Raphael Haeger, Simon Rössler, Jan Schlichte, Wieland Welzel, Matthias Kessler, Laura Melero Beviá (percussionists)

James Wood (conductor)

Reviewing the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony last month, I referred to the ‘monstrously metronomic’ quality of its opening march, ‘by design: of course’. I might almost have used the same phrase for the opening of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements from the same forces, save for the implication of life in ‘monstrous[ly]’. ‘Brutal’ would perhaps be better here, for whatever humans were perpetrating the wartime images said to have inspired the composer’s musical gestures, they seemed to have become practically disembodied, automated in their robotic quality. Not only in this first movement, but certainly here, it was rhythm above all that had become dramatically generative, music thereby projecting its own motion picture. There was as much darkness, moreover, in the cracks between the music’s chamber dialogue and in its self-automated retransformation into fuller orchestral music. In what sense, however, is this a symphony, is this a symphonic movement? That, probably rightly, remained as unclear as ever. Balletic? Perhaps; it certainly had an iron structure that it does not always. The second movement was possessed of an uneasy yet – in its way – delightful interiority: another form of balletic self-automatic, Marie-Pierre Langlamet’s harp here as crucial as Majella Stockhausen’s piano in the first movement. A mechanistic brutalism that cannot fail to voice historical and political resonances once more characterised the finale, the goose-stepping soldiers of whom Stravinsky spoke coming vividly to death, all the more so for the music’s infernal catchiness. Desiccated woodwind clucking showed how an allegedly Haydnesque gesture could be transformed into something so dramatically lifeless. Repetition and even transformation, yet without development; the mysterious fugal combination, at last, of solo piano and harp: such were the Stravinskian riddles brought so vividly to our attention, yet rightly never solved.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s ‘ballet suite’ – actually a ballet in its own right, for there is no further material – Alagoanoa: Caprichos Brasilieros followed. The first of its five movements, the Overture, benefited from similar rhythmic precision, albeit precision which could now be bent, indeed swung – and its was. Delightfully grotesque yet ultimately seductive instrumental combinations shone through, Hendrik Heilmann’s harpsichord instructively, even wittily, quizzical. The following ‘Sertanejo’ likewise caught a fine balance between observation and involvement, all the while dancing – or being danced. More ‘human’ than Stravinsky, yet not necessarily less inscrutable, there was something undeniably chilling to its weird climax. Foreboding in the ‘Saubade’ was founded on, yet not restricted to, cello and double bass pizzicato. Repeated guitar figures; strange woodwind solos; percussion machinations, tuned or untuned: all contributed to an unease both general and specific. The ‘Cabachio’ was jazzier and relished as such, bass pizzicato once more put to excellent use, Wenzel Fuchs’s clarinet solo; yet compositional and performative control necessarily also emphasised distance, even alienation. A hallucinatory interlude seemed to foretell the suspense prior to brutal climax in the finale. Its fallout – this was, after all, music for the nuclear age – spoke both humanly and enigmatically. Die Soldaten lay just around the corner.

It was welcome to hear a performance of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances that did not sentimentalise the score, though whether the music might sometimes have yielded a little more will remain mostly a matter of taste. Certain exaggerations will have overstepped the mark for some. At any rate, Petrenko seemed to understand rhythmic precision rather than harmony as the ultimate key, not only in the first movement but throughout. Even the string sound spoke with poignant alienation of a composer long in hopeless exile: familiar sounds, yet uprooted. The opening of the second movement had more than a hint of Debussy both to its brass fanfares and waltzing response. Some will perhaps have found the orchestral solos a little distant, but I rather liked the continuing sense of exile. Far better this, certainly, than the sort of muddy chaos one might hear from the likes of Valery Gergiev. Petrenko declined to coerce the finale into answering questions, thereby permitting it to ask a few more of its own. Materials, even the composer’s life and career, were once again revisited from a different standpoint: enigmatic and, like Stravinsky and Zimmermann, not without reference to a brutal external world.

There followed a bonus downstairs in the Philharmonie’s foyer. Six percussionists, four from the Berlin Philharmonic, two from the orchestra’s Karajan-Akademie, and James Wood performing Gérard Grisey’s Le Noir de l’Étoile. Inspired, as we heard from an introductory recorded text (Andreas Sparberg) by the 1967 discovery by a young astronomer of, to quote the composer ‘a rapidly varying radio signal, in the form of periodic impulses 1.3 seconds apart’, this performance, aided by simple yet powerful lighting and projection, seemed to tread a line between the initial suspicion that the irregularity betokened signals from an extra-terrestrial civilisation and the subsequent discovery of ‘a truth … just as surprising: the signals were being emitted by a pulsar, the fantastic compact residue created by the supernova explosions that long ago disintegrated the massive stars.’ We listened intent, following the signals, trying to make sense of them, making connections that may or may not have been there – not so very unlike what we had done in the evening’s earlier performances. Just as a pattern, be it rhythmic, timbral, spatial, emerged, it transformed itself so as to confound lazy and even informed expectations. There was an undeniably powerful sense of forces beyond our comprehension at play: like the gods of old, yet unlike them too. This was a vision, an experience, not so much without hope as beyond it. Our world would do well to remind itself more often of such concerns; that is, if it is not too late already.

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?