Salzburg Mozartwoche (4) - Aimard/Camerata Salzburg/Guzzo: Haydn and Mozart, 24 January 2026

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Haydn: L’anima del del filosofo, Hob.XXVIII:13: Overture
Mozart: Piano Concerto no.27 in B-flat major, KV 595; Six Minuets, KV 599: nos. 1,2, 5, and 6
Haydn: Symphony no.94 in G major, ‘Surprise’/’mit dem Paukenschlag’

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

Camerata Salzburg

Giovanni Guzzo (violin/director)

Images: Wolfgang Lienbacher

And so, to a Mozart Week concert devoted entirely to Mozart’s last year, the partial exception being his final piano concerto, certainly completed and first performed in 1791, but whose origins may date back as far as 1788. In December 1790, Mozart had said goodbye, perhaps farewell, to Haydn as the latter prepared to leave for London with Johann Peter Salomon, also present at their dinner. Accounts in early Haydn biographies differ, Albert Christoph Dies having tears well from the yes of both composers, as Mozart suggested they ‘would probably be saying’ their ‘last farewell in this life,’ Georg August Griesinger telling of a happy meal at which Mozart forecast Haydn would be back soon, ‘because you are no longer young’. At any rate, it was to be the last time they saw each other, Haydn returning only in 1792.

It was during that first of his two visits to London that Haydn wrote his opera L’anima del filosofo, ossia Orfeo ed Euridice for the newly built theatre at the Haymarket (the old one having burnt down in 1789). Several of the composer’s London concerts would take place there too. It was fitting, then, that the Overture should open this excellent concert from Camerata Salzburg, led from the violin by Giovanni Guzzo. A dark hued, richly dramatic introduction both led to and contrasted with a lively ‘Presto’ section: fast, but not too fast, beautifully judged throughout and with evident delight in Haydn’s invention from the whole orchestra, perhaps all the more so for being led by one of their ‘own’. Harmonic, timbral, and other surprises registered with meaning, yet without exaggeration. It proved the perfect (metaphorical) curtain-raiser. 

Pierre-Laurent Aimard joined the orchestra for the piano concerto, which, whenever it is written, is so inextricably connected with our (at least my) ideas of late Mozart, its spareness, fragility, and rare beauty, its glimpse of the beyond, that effort to deromanticise seems almost, if not always, beside the point. That is not, of course, so say that it should sound lachrymose, which it certainly did not here, but simply that Mozart was in many ways as much a Romantic – he was certainly held to be so by ETA Hoffmann et al. – as a Classicist, all the more so by 1791, and that we lose something if reasoned scruples harden into puritanism. Whatever or whoever Mozart may have been, he was certainly no puritan, nor did this performance treat him as such. The first movement offered a tutti balance different from what we might once have expected, wind unquestionably more forward, although there was never ‘one way’: just listen to Klemperer’s Mozart, in other respects very different, but not in this. The crucial thing was the cultivated, detailed, tender playing, smiling through tears as this of all the piano concertos surely must. Moreover, it led inexorably to Aimard’s first solo entry, which also turned inwards – very 1791 – chromaticism implied even when not present, a little like Carl Dahlhaus’s idea of ‘secondary diatonicism’ that incorporates the chromatic exploration of Tristan in the unabashed C major of Die Meistersinger. The turn to the minor was exquisitely, movingly handled, all aware of the crucial role played here by oscillation between major and minor modes. Occasionally, balance between soloist and orchestra seemed a little tilted to the former, but this soon corrected itself. Aimard here and elsewhere offered certain embellishments, all effected with discernment. Mozart’s cadenzas said all that was required.

Warmth and tenderness characterised the slow movement, simplicity underlain by complexity and vice versa: another crucial, perhaps the most crucial, key to understanding late Mozart. Harmony guided the performance: one felt it throughout in deeply moving fashion. The finale’s character was born from equally keen senses of detail and the whole, strength and fragility united in opposition that is part balance, part dialectic. As an encore, Aimard offered an early contribution to Kurtág’s centenary: ravishing, at times well-nigh Debussyan accounts of three of the composer’s Játekók. Mozart remained, in the sense that every note, every touch of the piano counted. 

The second half took us first to Vienna’s Redoutensaal, to music for dancing—and one certainly felt it to be so in four of the KV 599 Six Minutes, my sole regret that it was not all six. At any rate, the four we heard were exquisite in every respect, whether lilt, colour, or otherwise, culminating in the symphonic grandeur (and Haydnesque surprise) of the sixth. Whereas in the first concert of the festival, Ádám Fischer’s occasional turns to solo instruments could sound mannered, here it seemed the most natural thing in the world, as indeed did the performances as a whole.

We then returned, now with the violas absent from Mozart’s band, to Haydn: for the ‘Surprise’ Symphony, or, as it is known in German, emphasising a different, yet related aspect of his writing, ‘mit dem Paukenschlag’. The first movement introduction, echoing the concert opening, was spacious, full of promise, yet miraculously concise, the Vivace assai bursting forth likewise with evident kinship to the opera overture. Spirited delight characterised both detail and the whole, colour, concision, and coherence inextricably connected. It developed, returned, and continued to develop: the essence of sonata form. This was, quite simply, glorious. The Andante offered a surprise of its own, extra percussion jolting us out of our knowledge-born complacency. The working out of form and content was the true delight, though. What a musical mind Haydn’s is, and what a joy it was to be guided by it in so enlightened a performance as this. There followed another wonderful minuet, taken at a more rollicking tempo than Mozart’s, unquestionably one-to-a-bar, but then this was never intended for dancing. In my heart of hearts, I may prefer something statelier, but this worked well on its own terms, and lacked nothing in sparkling of the eye, replete with further ‘purely musical’ surprises. Chamber playing in the trio evinced a similar naturalness to that heard in Mozart. The finale was every inch a ‘Haydn finale’. Tempo, character, lilt, grandeur, edification, and intellectual coherence: this had it all. Bravo!

Uchida - Beethoven, Schoenberg, Kurtág, and Schubert, 7 March 2025

Royal Festival Hall

Beethoven: Piano Sonata no.27 in E minor, op.90
Schoenberg: Three Piano Pieces, op.11
Kurtág: Márta ligaturája
Schubert: Piano Sonata no.21 in B-flat major, op.posth., D 960

Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

An evening with Mitsuko Uchida is rarely less than a privilege, and this was no exception. One audience member at the start seemed to take the idea a little too far, resolutely continuing to film her despite verbal and gestural requests to stop. An usher had to walk across the hall and point a sign forbidding use of telephones in the person’s face. Extraordinary! What with that and an onslaught of coughing that again occasioned requests in vain from the platform to desist, we certainly experienced the worst of live performance. Fortunately, there was enough of the best to compensate. 

The first item on the programme, Beethoven’s E minor Sonata, op.90, took a while properly to get going (a state of affairs perhaps not entirely unrelated to the case of the manic telephone user). Contrasts, especially dynamic contrasts, were immediately present. More broadly, the strange, wonderful world of Beethoven on the cusp of ‘lateness’ was with us. If some of the first movement in particular was a little brittle, that was not entirely inappropriate for this fractured world. Accentuated by very sparing use of the pedal, much of it entirely unpedalled, here was a Beethoven that was anything but comfortable or routine, even if I sometimes felt a slight lack of the continuity that underlies discontinuity. An almost Schubertian intimacy to the close, presaging the second half of the recital, came close to erasing any such reservations. The second movement seemed to breathe the air already of the late Bagatelles, in particular their lyricism, even when turned outward. Occasional technical faltering was of little import; the crucial things were engagement with and expression of Beethoven’s truculent humanism. 

Voice-leading in the first of Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces seemed in context to take its leave not only from Brahms but directly from Beethoven. So, indeed, did much else: contrasts now here become fully dialectical; melodic fragments wending their necessary yet sometimes difficult way; and harmony, yes harmony, too. Above all, there was here a not entirely dissimilar obstinacy—and nobility of spirit. Formal command was unquestionable, as founded on harmony as, say, the Beethoven of Daniel Barenboim (or Wilhelm Furtwängler). Much the same could be said of the second piece, over which the spirits of Wagner and Liszt hovered still more clearly. The third felt very much like the final movement of a ‘sonata’ of a dark variety that was yet possessed of magical chiaroscuro. 

The second half opened with Kurtág’s 2020 miniature Márta ligaturája, written for cimbalom, but here played directly from what seemed to be small manuscript pages (presumably copies), rendering the tribute to the composer’s beloved wife Marta all the more moving. Again, harmony and voice-leading seemed to pick up from where we had left off, only all the more distilled. If kinship with Schoenberg’s op.11 came across with particular strength, the emotional import came closer to his evocation of funeral bells for Mahler in the last of the Six Piano Pieces, op.19. Harmonies, not least pristine major chords, surprised and beguiled. 

Schubert’s final piano sonata followed less attacca than might have been the case, given the audience’s inability to keep quiet. The opening was nevertheless a thing of magic, possessed of seemingly intimate dynamic gradations, strength lying in intimacy and fragility, in persistence. This movement, indeed the sonata, as a whole reminded us what happiness can be built on pain, and vice versa. The last thing one needs here is a maudlin path, tempting though it may be. (I recall my own youthful attempts.) Instead, Schubert’s nobility of utterance was treasured, allowing it to speak ‘for itself’, however illusory that performative idea might be in practice. Ambivalence ran deep, especially in oscillation between major and minor. The recapitulation was, quite properly, a second development: one of a very different nature from those of Beethoven, one that seemingly never gave him a moment’s thought. The sound of Uchida’s chords in the coda would have been worth the price of admission alone 

Beautifully judged in tempo, as in all else, the slow movement neither dragged nor was rushed. It built; it sang; it said what needed to be said. The revelation of C-sharp major silenced any questions about how to understand it enharmonically and in relation to the tonality of the piece as a whole; Schubert, Uchida, and we knew.  A light-footed scherzo, if not quite lifting the clouds, suspended them for a moment. Its trio’s ambiguity, strange even by Schubert’s standards, duly registered, thus paving the way for the manifold, still deeper ambiguities of the finale, its decidedly non-Beethovenian subjectivity simply present, immanent. That said, there was here too a decidedly human, as well as humanist, obstinacy that seemed to bind together all the compositional voices on this programme: in this case, both aptly and surprisingly, in the returns of the rondo theme and the alternative, fleetingly Mahlerian vistas of the episodes.

Fin de partie, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 24 January 2025

Hamm – Laurent Naouri
Clov – Bo Skovhus
Nell – Dalia Schaechter
Nagg – Stephan Rügamer

Director – Johannes Erath
Set designs – Kaspar Glarner
Costumes – Birgit Wentsch
Lighting – Olaf Freese
Video – Bibi Abel
Dramaturgy – Olaf A. Schmitt

Staatskapelle Berlin 

Alexander Soddy (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Just short of his 99^th birthday, György Kurtág sees Fin de partie, his sole opera to date, receive a new full staging, what I believe to be its third. The first, by Pierre Audi, was seen in several European houses. I reviewed its 2022 French premiere here; it had already been seen in Milan and Amsterdam. Last year, Ingo Kerkhof directed Fin de partie anew in Dortmund, its German premiere; Herbert Fritsch directed the Austrian premiere in Vienna; and both London and Cologne offered semi-stagings. There have also been concert performances in Budapest. There may have been others of which I am unaware. Not bad, then, for a new opera, but to call this crowning masterpiece of the last man standing from what once we called the postwar avant garde ‘not bad’ would be akin to saying that of the Beckett play in which its ‘scenes and monologues’ have their origin. At a point in which the titans of Kurtág’s generation reach their centenary – Nono last year, the unholy alliance of Boulez and Henze this year, Kurtág himself next – the twin urgency and poignancy of this work and others become ever more apparent. The wider musical world at last seems ready to recognise and acknowledge them. 

That Paris performance made a huge impression on me. Indeed, it inspired a chapter due to be published later this year by Edinburgh University Press (part of a volume edited by colleagues Christine Dysers, Peter Edwards, and Judith Lochhead, The Music of Absence: An Aesthetics of Loss in the New Millennium). Coming to my second production – if only I had known of the Dortmund staging – following a period of further and, I hope, deeper acquaintance with the work, was necessarily a different experience, as will be the case for all of us as the opera takes its place in the repertoire. (For that reason, I do not intend here to give an account of the work ‘itself’; my initial review may be read for first impressions.) I do not think it was entirely down to me that it seemed more conventionally ‘operatic’ – these things are relative – under Alexander Soddy’s musical direction than when conducted by Markus Stenz, though that may well be part of it. This was for the most part a fluent account, keenly alert, as was the Staatskapelle Berlin, to Kurtág’s colouristic invention. That a sort of Klangfarbenmelodie could and did work motivically was triumphantly affirmed in dramatic context. 

Soddy’s conception of the work and his role seemed, moreover, concerned to consider and highlight the role of the singers; indeed, a vocal conception, extending to instruments and their combination, may be a good way of considering it. Taken as a whole, the work’s course seemed more sectional, even on occasion dragging a little, although a sectional quality can work both ways: Kurtág’s description is, after all, of ‘scènes et monologues’. (That may also have been in part a consequence of Erath’s production, conceived more as a succession of scenes than Audi’s.) What I missed above all was a greater sense of the intricacy of texture—even, paradoxically or rather dialectically, when spare. There seems in Kurtág’s writing to be a Beckettian implication of loss or absence, rarely apparent here. How sympathetic one’s response to a performance that came across as locating Kurtág in surprising succession to Verdi – not unlike Antonio Pappano’s Covent Garden occasional forays into contemporary music – may ultimately be as much a matter of taste than anything else, though I think this was also, to its advantage, more conversational than that might imply. 

Erath’s staging offered further surprises, perhaps all the more so given not only the familiarity of the play but also the familiarity of what it should look like and how it should unfold, carried forward into the premiere production. I had assumed familiar issues with the Beckett estate had played a part in determining the ‘fidelity’ of Audi’s approach, and perhaps they did; perhaps they even played a part in permitting the transformation into an opera in the first place. I was therefore a little taken aback by a staging that would not necessarily have seemed radical in any other case. Designs from Kaspar Glarner and Birgit Wentsch brought a fitting (in a more meaningful sense, ‘faithful’) sense of vaudeville to proceedings, culminating in visual transformation from living room domesticity to the external, even metaphorical world of a crashed Ferris wheel. That definitely separated Hamm and Clov, only for Nell (at least in the guise of the reader of the opening Roundelay) to reappear at her mound at the close. 

There was, then, a strong suggestion something circular, similarly in the emergence of the new, differently apocalyptic scene as if through the looking glass of the dustbin lid. Like Soddy, Erath seemed keen, moreover, to emphasise the opera’s conversational qualities, very much including the crucial blind alleys, non sequiturs, and misunderstandings. Changes of perspective and scale incorporated such disruption, in some ways heightening the episodic sense discussed earlier, though perhaps also helping put things ‘back together’.

A key difference, one of relatively few, between Beckett and Kurtág is the treatment of Nell’s death. What passes unnoticed in the play, Nell unmourned, is signalled by a terrible cry of grief from Nagg and the orchestra in the opera. Soddy treated the latter in duly operatic fashion, whilst Erath hinted at the dislocation between the two genres. having a giant, video-founded Clov take out a body bag – presumably Nell – earlier. Dislocation was the name of the game, or at least of one of the games. Whether in Kurtág, as in Beckett, we can ‘know’ anything beyond the text, whether the question borders on the illegitimate, was a question not only posed but also given a provisional and unsettling answer.

Laurent Naouri’s Hamm is unlikely to have provoked any such controversy. His ready, communicative way with the French text and its musical expression seemed not only to serve Beckett and Kurtág, but also to act as an animating as well as controlling presence for the cast as a whole. Bo Skovhus’s Clov, powerfully physical, not only of gesture but of character too, contrasted with whimsical performances from Dalia Schaechter and Stephan Rügamer as Nell and Nagg, though I confess to missing the deeper and perhaps more deeply familiar tones of Hilary Summers in the former role for Stenz and Audi. That we are already in a position, though, to draw comparisons between different interpretations, even to form views on emergent performance practice, testifies not so much to the work’s stature – there are many fine pieces never heard again – as to its popular acceptance. Endgames may be more ominously apparent than ever in the world around us; this is anything but an endgame for opera.

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (3) – ‘Songs and Fragments’: Eight Songs for a Mad King and Kafka-Fragmente, 10 July 2024

Théâtre du Jeu de Paume

Man – Johannes Martin Kränzle
Woman – Anna Prohaska
Violinist – Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Director – Barrie Kosky

Design and lighting – Urs Schönebaum  

Ensemble Intercontemporain

Pierre Bleuse (conductor)

Images: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence 2024 © Monika Rittershaus

Virtuosity of the highest degree, entirely at the service of musical drama, characterised this Aix production under Barrie Kosky’s direction. Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King and György Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente formed a staged double bill, given without a break, at that eighteenth-century jewel among theatres, the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume. The ghost of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire haunted proceedings, audibly in the Davies’s music theatre monodrama, written for the composer’s own, Schoenberg-inspired Fires of London (here, Schoenberg’s ensemble plus percussion), and more scenically in the Kurtág fragments, not of course intended to be staged, but here given an intriguing new slant through the mediation of expressionist cabaret.   

Johannes Martin Kränzle’s assumption of the mad king – referred to in the cast list simply as ‘Un homme’, though it is of course George III – was something never to be forgotten. Quite how much was his, how much was Kosky’s, we shall never know—and why should we particular care? Theatre is collaborative, even in what might seem to be a one-man-show. With a single spotlight, a single unsparing spotlight, this poor (rich) man, clad only in sagging underpants, bared his soul to the birds, the audience, and indeed the musicians of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, incisively conducted by Pierre Bleuse, who in turn offered us their own, related musical tour of whimsy, parody, and brutal violence. From an early promenade, through the haunting of an imaginary yet ever-so-real queen ‘Esther’, via the king’s beloved Handel – with biting irony, ‘Comfort ye…’, to the final, shocking smashing of the violin, this was a psychological study, which in a sense revealed nothing other than itself, and thus in another sense proved all the more revealing. Through the countless ways he marshalled his voice and his entire body, Kränzle touched, amused, and horrified us. It was gripping, concentrated theatre, which one might well have wished to experience again, but knew one could not, even if the attempt had immediately been made. 

Anna Prohaska and Patricia Kopatchinskaja, minus the EIC, were our guides for Kurtág’s extraordinary set of miniatures. The violin provided, as it were the bridge: destroyed and now resurrected as a one-woman orchestra who was also a protagonist—and by her double-companion. Equality here, between two more consummate musicians and communicators seemed, by virtue of staging and performance, the former still astutely straightforward yet minutely observed, to be both immediately, immanently manifest and yet also maintained through ever-shifting dramatic power relationships: one conducting the other, one pulling the other’s strings, one inciting and consoling, and so on. Where Davies’s expressionist nightmare had stunned us into submission, here a different ghost of Pierrot – perhaps surprisingly given the more ‘abstract’ nature of the work – proved more founded in re-gendered harlequin character. We turned inwards, Kurtág’s Webern-like miniatures commanding and receiving absolute concentration, in more than one sense. Prohaska’s spellbinding performance – imagine having to sing that by heart, and engage in minutely planned physical performance too – was impossible to dissociate from Kopatchinskaja’s. The two musicians seemed almost to emerge as two emanations of the same soul. A response to their male counterpart in the first half, or something subtly yet, in that subtlety, defiantly different? Why choose? Again, there was so much one could not possibly have taken in, which cried out for another chance to do so, yet which was tantalisingly lost in the passage of concentrated time. Above all, though, and this may be the ultimate ‘lesson’, we learned a little better to listen to one another.

Musikfest Berlin (4) – Gerhaher/BPO/Petrenko: Xenakis, Illés, Hartmann, and Kurtág, 14 September 2023

Philharmonie

Xenakis: Jonchaies
Márton Illés: Lég-szín-tér (world premiere)
Hartmann: Gesangsszene
Kurtág: Stele

Christian Gerhaher (baritone)
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

Now this is what I call a programme. To have Xenakis and Kurtág on the same programme from the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko was extraordinary enough, yet together with a new piece from Márton Illés and Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s final work, the latter involving Christian Gerhaher as soloist, this would surely have been the envy of any hall and audience in the world; it certainly should have been.

Iannis Xenakis’s Jonchaies, premiered in 1977 by the Orchestre National de France and Michel Tabachnik, may have been receiving its first performance by the Berlin Philharmonic, but it was a performance of security, commitment, and understanding belying any local novelty. The upward string sweep, not the last arresting string opening of the evening, sounded as if an aural concrete sculpture, turned by a giant butterknife. Loneliness and excitement in the landscape painted – I may as well continue this excess of metaphors – evoked not so much another world as a world in another solar system, even galaxy. As percussion joined, this seemed to be a Rite of Spring without spring, and perhaps even without a rite. Whatever it was, it mesmerised, complex yet above stark and elemental. Wind entered almost imperceptibly, yet one knew when they were fully there. This was a performance that grabbed one by the throat and never let one go, to make Stravinsky and even the sirens of Varèse, here trumped by Berlin trombones in woolly mammoth mode, appear well-nigh fainthearted by comparison.    

Illes’s Lég-szín-tér, roughly a scene, setting or colour space for air, is the latest in a series of such ‘scenes’, this instalment commissioned by the Stiftung Berlin Philharmoniker and financed by the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung. In three short movements, it displayed an almost classical command of form. Not that there was anything formulaic or indeed backward-looking to it, but rather it sounded as natural and at home in itself, and indeed as concise, as a Haydn symphony (which might have made a splendid alternative bedfellow). In any case, the swarming string opening to this marked it out as a nice pairing with the Xenakis, though the strings were far more quickly joined by the rest of the orchestra in a first movement that was at times almost pretty, or at least delicate—though perhaps anything would be when compared with Xenakis. Accordion (Teodoro Anzellotti) here and elsewhere made its presence felt too. Indeed, at times, the string section almost sounded as if it were a giant version of that instrument. If there were something of the scherzo to that movement, that impression was still stronger in the second, which occasionally in texture, rhythm, and harmony suggested an affinity – I do not think it was more than that – to Messiaen. Throughout, the orchestra and Petrenko traced its contours as expertly as if it were a repertoire piece. The third movement opened with more string music, led by Amihai Grosz on slithering solo viola, from whom the lead was taken and dispersed. This was a movement of very different character, coming across as a necessary response to the first two, the pace of harmonic change considerably slower. Its understated, witty sign-off too was not the least virtue in a work and performance that again, albeit in different ways from Xenakis, never failed to hold one’s attention. 

Hartmann’s Gesangsszene was for me just as much a revelation. I suspect some readers will know it; I have the impression it is, or at one point may have been, more often heard in German- than English-speaking halls. If so, that is a great pity, for this setting of words from Jean Giraudoux’s Sodom et Gomorrha (in German translation) is unquestionably the real thing: powerfully moving, a fitting, if sadly incomplete, culmination to a career of honour as well as great compositional craft. I am not sure it is not the finest thing I have heard from Hartmann, though I have probably heard far too little in total. Certainly, it is difficult to imagine superior performances than those heard from Gerhaher, the BPO, and Petrenko, ideally paced and voiced. A lengthy introductory orchestral section opened with a flute solo of great quality (both as writing and in Sébastian Jacot’s supremely involving performance). One might call it Schoenbergian or post-Schoenbergian, I suppose, yet it never sounded ‘like’ anything other than itself. The orchestral writing that developed again might have put me in mind of Berg, a veritable labyrinth, yet always clear of purpose, but it did not. Here was captivating drama without a stage and, indeed, to start with, without even a voice. When Gerhaher entered, recitative-like, my immediate thought, apart from following his crystal-clear diction and pitching, was that we really ought to hear him soon in Busoni’s Doktor Faust. That moment is approaching, if someone will offer it; it came as little surprise to learn the piece was written for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. This is a different kind of warning, though, one for the atomic age, with a different, still more immediate sense of the apocalypse, and that shone through—as surely it did for Hartmann at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Death unquestionably hangs over proceedings, yet there is no self-pity, but rather dignity, the dignity of a lifetime of resistance. When Gerhaher came to speak the final words, their setting prevented by Hartmann’s death, it was a tribute to what we had heard that they seemed very much part of the same musical performance. If only our ‘leaders’ would learn; if only they would even listen. 

György Kurtág’s Stele was an earlier BPO commission, from the Claudio Abbado years (1994, when the composer was in residence), and it has been conducted by at least two others here in the meantime, Simon Rattle and Bernard Haitink, prior to this outing under Petrenko. Rattle once likened it to ‘a gravestone on which the entire history of European music is written’, and so it sounded here, a fitting aesthetic pendant to Hartmann, and just as moving in its way. In three short movements, like the Illés piece, its opening reference to the third (arguably to any) Beethoven’s Leonore Overture was as unmistakeable as it was properly enigmatic. There is memorialisation here, to be sure, yet to what end? The path taken is certainly different, not un-Webern-like. The agitation of the second movement fairly terrified, like a Mahlerian nightmare fashioned by the ghost of Webern and quite without the vistas of a better world with which Mahler might have cruelly consoled and disappointed us. Perhaps Beckett, bearing in mind Kurtág’s past and future, is present already, another ghost at the feast. For an almost dizzying array of paths opened up, without prejudice to the sole direction taken. Webern, if anything, seemed still stronger a presence in the third and final movement, without the slightest hint of imitation. Here the mode, as it were, was that of the Funeral March, though the sense of Klangfarbenmelodie sounded, if anything, more Schoenbergian. It was as simple as it was complex, returning us in a way to Xenakis, and vice versa. And how the rests, the silences, told, as musical as any sound.

Gerstein/Fejérvári - Mozart and Busoni, 2 July 2023

Wigmore Hall

Mozart: Sonata in D major for two pianos, KV 448/375a
Busoni: Improvisation on JS Bach’s Chorale ‘Wie wohl ist mir, o Freund der Seele’, BV 271
Mozart-Busoni: Fantasia in F minor for mechanical organ, KV 608
Busoni: Duettino concertante after the finale of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no.19 in F major, KV 459, BV B 88; Fantasia contrappuntistica for two pianos, BV 256b

Kirill Gerstein, Zoltán Fejérvári (pianos)

 

Mozart ran like a golden thread through Busoni’s life and music—though, as for many composers, Schoenberg included, he only became more important as time went on. It was only fitting, then, that in the last of Kirill Gerstein’s Wigmore Hall series, we should be treated to a combination of the two, alongside the inevitable Bach. Joined by the equally outstanding Zoltán Fejérvári, Gerstein offered us a two-piano recital that will linger long in the memories of those who heard it. Here was a splendid recreation – reconstruction suggests something far too dry – of two concerts Busoni and Egon Petri gave in London (in this very hall) and in Berlin’s Beethoven-Saal in 1922 and 1921 respectively. Where London had heard the F minor Fantasia and Berlin the Sonata for Two Pianos, London 101 years later was treated to both. 

According to Erinn Knyt’s informative note, Edward Dent and Jürgen Kindermann refer to an arrangement of the Sonata, but all that survives is a ‘marked up performance score with numerous annotations and suggested textual alterations,’ and a ‘cadenza handwritten in the back of the score’. I presume this is what we heard here; there were certainly numerous, delightful departures from Mozart’s letter in something akin to Busoni’s – and, I think, our twenty-first century pianists’ – spirit. The first movement began and proceeded in inviting fashion. Warm, stylish, in the best sense bustling, it was unobtrusively well shaped and finely ornamented. One startling turn taken in the recapitulation I had never heard – nor played – before, but there were other departures too, for instance unfailingly stylish flourishes and filling in of textures (arguably) to suit better our modern instruments or at least (some of) our tastes. The Andante received a similarly glorious performance, lyrical and harmonically founded, musical threads shared and seamlessly passed across the stage. Ornamentation was once again imaginative and welcome: Busoni, Mozart, and, I imagine, Richard Strauss would surely have admired this greatly. Observation of repeats again offered a rare and welcome luxury. An affectionate and infectious finale proved full of buffo incident. I presume the interpolated cadenza, essentially an extended lead-in, was Busoni’s; likewise the decision to take certain passages sotto voce. Whoever was responsible, the results were a sheer delight.

The Improvisation on JS Bach’s Chorale ‘Wie wohl ist mir, o Freund der Seele’, obviously rooted in Bach, is also a drastic reworking of the finale of the Second Violin Sonata. We were immediately plunged into a Faustian world of new seeking: new harmonies, new touch, new half-lights, new rhetoric. Bach, after all, is ever new—and ever old. Busoni rarely, if ever, takes us where we might expect: his surprises here were most welcome. The music sounded ripe for orchestration without in need of it. Fantastical yet dignified, its tonality near-suspended and reinstated, soft-spoken yet diabolically eruptive: this was another fine performance indeed. 

Mozart’s Fantasia in F minor for mechanical organ, transcribed and, sparingly, elaborated by Busoni, opened the second half. A grand, unabashedly pianistic introduction, with counterpoint clear and directed, made the case for a more ‘objective’, indeed ‘mechanical’ performance, which yet somehow did not preclude metaphysics. Busoni’s octaves, when they came, sent shivers down the spine. And the extraordinary double cadenza taking us from F major back to F minor truly took on the character of a fugal recapitulation-cum-coda. The Duettino concertante after the finale of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no.19 in F major was conceived, it seems, also as a sort of finale to the Fantasia, though here it was performed as a separate piece. More overtly pianistic as work and performance, it was treated to a delightfully responsive performance, which seemed to speak of a love for the material to match Busoni’s own. The cadenza proved a bizarre, rather wonderful surprise, as did Busoni’s new ending. 

Finally, we heard the two-piano version of the Fantasia contrappuntistica, returning us to Bach and ‘original’ composition in equal measure. Its opening outlined Busoni’s scale of ambition as well as elements of material and expression, dreamlike in concision, transition, and its paradoxical remembering before the event. Touch and voicing from both pianists summoned the spirit of Busoni, both as secure, imaginative guide to Bach, and Faustian voyager beyond. At times, the two keyboards seemed miraculously to merge into one; at others, almost equally so, they separated once more, as if antiphonal keyboard choirs. There was something Mephistophelian to what we heard—and rightly so. Not that a constructive, even constructivist, element was absent, but rather it emerged through the effort and experience of the variations. Gerstein and Fejérvári showed that it was perfectly possible, indeed mandatory, to exploit their pianos as pianos, not generic keyboards, to beguile, to thrill, even to seduce, without loss to direction. Far from it, those qualities were key to that achievement in neo-Lisztian necromancy. We were led in directions we had never imagined, yet which seemed after the event the only option, all the way to yet another surprising conclusion.

After that, a fitting encore: Kurtág’s transcription for four hands at one piano of the opening Sonatina from the Actus Tragicus, BWV 106, ‘Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit’. Touching in its intimate dignity, it was the perfect choice in as perfect a performance as we are likely to hear.

Fin de partie, Opéra national de Paris, 30 April 2022

Palais Garnier

Hamm – Frode Olsen
Clov – Leigh Melrose
Nell – Hilary Summers
Nagg – Leonardo Cortelazzi

Pierre Audi (director)
Christof Hetzer (designs)
Urs Schönebaum (lighting)
Klaus Bertisch (dramaturgy)

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Markus Stenz (conductor)

Images: Sébastien Mathé/OnP

Modernism’s endgame, modernist opera’s endgame, opera’s endgame: all have been proclaimed time and time again. One might say the same for Romanticism, Classicism, sonata, symphony, and other isms and genres. Whatever the truths of the matter—we can no longer justifiably speak in the singular, if ever we could—this first opera by György Kurtág, first heard in Milan in 2018 and now receiving its French premiere, suggests that twilight, however prolonged, has once again proved as productive, as challenging, as illuminating as first dawn or zenith. The owl of Minerva may or may not be spreading its wings; Kurtág may or may not be almost the last modernist standing; opera may or may not be stronger, more varied, more resistant than ever before. These are inevitable and may even be important questions. What matters above all, though, is that Kurtág’s Fin de partie/Endgame emerges, even from a single hearing, a single experience in the theatre, as an unqualified masterpiece.   

Janus-faced, like most—all?—artworks of stature, Fin de partie takes Beckett’s masterpiece, which Kurtág first saw in Paris in 1957, and, in concluding a modernist chapter, perhaps even a book, appears also to open several more. Although it feels very much a finished work, it remains at least in theory a work-in-progress, to which Kurtág might add further ‘scenes and monologues’ from Beckett’s play—or even conceivably from elsewhere, given its second Prologue (the first being purely orchestral) is a setting for Nell, startlingly in English rather than French, of the poem Roundelay. This ‘dramatic version’ of the play, in most respects literal, with the slightest addition here or somehow seems always to have been conceived for music, indeed seems never to have existed without it. Libretto (if one may call it that) instructions are as detailed musically—‘comme une mélodie de Debussy’—as they are scenically, or both: ‘mouvement très lent d’interrogation avec la main gauche esquisse le “et puis” de Gr. C. et Piatti … assez grand changement de ton’. Many thanks are due to the Opéra national de Paris for reprinting it: an invaluable resource for future study and reflection, as well, I hope, as for subsequent preparation.   

The ultimate synthetic distillation, though, is musical—just as one often fancies Beckett’s words to point not only to the limits, the endgame, of language, but to the beginning, the necessity of music. (His Schopenhauerism extended way beyond mere ‘pessimism’, to the truly aesthetic.) Words here are everything—one hears, and hears measured every one—until they are not. That ancient operatic alchemy we trace back at least as far as Monteverdi is once more at work, and Monteverdi—the Monteverdi of the dramatic madrigals and the two surviving late operas in particular—comes to mind among many ghosts of the opera-as-sung-play past. Mussorgsky, Debussy, Berg, Janáček stand prominently among them, as well inevitably—if perhaps more tangentially—as Wagner, Bach (‘not an opera composer, but’), and even Boulez (ditto?) Are these affinities or similarities, or are they actual influences? Does it really matter? It seems both to do so, as we reach the end of the game, but also not. After all, what does matter when we reach the end of the game, that any game, any game? 

For, apart from his own voice—what a strange provision!—that which comes most strongly to mind is another supreme writer of vocal-dramatic music on the smaller scale, whom we yet imagine desiring, wishing, ultimately aiming to bring forth an operatic synthesis. As it was in the beginning, it still is now: Webern. Perhaps not even in Webern have I heard such sustained, certainly not such dramatic, development of intervallic relationships, in themselves and in relation to timbre (probably other parameters too) so as to fulfil the tragic necessity of rebuilding a shattered universe: the same task, yet always different. Every note counts, of course, yet every note is heard and felt, and bears the ultimate weight of tragic and tragicomic existence that we may know it counts. The affinity with Beckett’s language and what some understandably, straining at the bounds, will term in despair anti-literature is clear; but music is no representative mirror, any more than it is in Monteverdi, Wagner, or Webern. Its autonomy, its pairings—here as crucial as any in Bach or Bartók—and so much else continue: in hope, if you like, yet only in the strange sense that Beckett does. Until, I think, the close, when something strange happens, a musical synthesis taking wing and building, such as can often happen almost irrespective of intention. Think, for instance, of Wagner. This is less evidently redemptive, though stirrings of sympathy for Hamm and Clov are not entirely denied. Fin de partie, however, seems to speak or sing of something that might refashion redemptive ideas through shattered glass, shattered lives, the fragmentary challenges of modernity and modernism.

 

An orchestra used sparingly and with very different balances from that of the Romantic past—a modern ‘ensemble’ writ large—tells us that throughout. Just five first violins and five seconds, against eight violas, eight cellos, and six double basses, and indeed five flutes, six percussionists, two bayans (Beckettian vaudeville movingly transmuted via Sofia Gubaidulina), and so on have seeped into our consciousness, yet rarely if ever together. Mahler haunts, but he cannot live. Conducting, as he did earlier performances in Milan and Amsterdam, Markus Stenz understands or at least appreciates—can anyone ‘understand’?—communicates, and lets that fragility breathe and expire. We all listen, whether something can be said or sung, or not. For what else is there to do? Not listen, of course, but which of us wishes to assume Nagg’s fate? We know there will be no sugar-plum at the end, celesta notwithstanding. 

And yet, music endures, as does theatre—as, perhaps, do literature and drama too. A wonderful quartet of soloists ensures that, as does Pierre Audi’s careful direction, doubtless treading a minefield of what the dread estate, as well as the dedicated composer, would permit. Action/inaction takes place outside the house, but it looks very much as we should expect, without ever feeling expected: post-drama, we might think, of the post-absurd. Frode Olsen, struggling with illness, nonetheless held the stage with a fiercely committed performance as Hamm, holding it all together, in the tragicomic absence of any ‘it’ to hold. Leigh Melrose’s protean Clov, wounded yet spirited, alert and alive, yet quite without hope, struck me as definitive, however illusory the idea. An outstanding artist whenever I have heard him, Melrose may have given his finest performance yet. Hilary Summers offered a masterclass in extracting much from little, as Kurtág and Beckett do themselves. Transformation of a vocal line, through pitch, dynamics, shifting colour said, as with the rest of the cast, the rest of the work, both something and nothing, often in chamber collaboration with an instrument or two from the pit. Crucially, Nell’s death could neither have been more nor less heartbreaking. Leonardo Cortelazzi’s made for a fine sidekick, his Nagg splendidly, pointlessly excitable yet resigned. Steeped, like the others, both in the text and in its twin possibilities and impossibilities, he closed and opened the square that should have been a circle. 

Here, then, is a masterpiece in a way that seems, both modestly and defiantly, not of our age. Many composers would now, quite understandably, tell us such is not their interest. They are not attempting to write works such as Fin de partie and failing, ‘better’ or otherwise. Given the ideological issues at play, we can all understand that. When, however, a work—and this is, emphatically, A Work—such as this comes along, it brooks no dissent. To be there is akin to being there for Gawain (may its composer now rest in peace), for Mittwoch (likewise, on Sirius), maybe even for Wozzeck or for Tristan. Kurtág may or may not have been writing for posterity. Until one of our politicians hastens the final endgame, perhaps tomorrow, posterity will nonetheless hear and listen to Kurtág.

Musical mysteries: melodies lost and found - works by Ligeti, Schubert, Dowland, and Kurtág, and Byzantine Chant

 

(This essay was originally published in a 2020 Salzburg Festival programme for a concert by Camerata Salzburg and Patricia Kopatchniskaja.)

GYÖRGY LIGETI: Concerto for violin and orchestra
ANONYMOUS: Byzantine Chant for Psalm 140 (arranged for violin and string orchestra by Patricia Kopatchinskaja)
FRANZ SCHUBERT: First movement (Allegro) from String Quartet no.14 in D minor, D. 810 – ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ (arranged for string orchestra by Patricia Kopatchinskaja)
FRANZ SCHUBERT: Der Tod und das Mädchen, D. 531 (arranged for string orchestra by Michy Wiancko)
FRANZ SCHUBERT: Second movement (Andante con moto) from String Quartet no.14 in D minor, D. 810, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’
JOHN DOWLAND: Pavane ‘Lachrimæ Antiquæ Novæ’ for string quintet from Lachrimæ, or Seaven Teares
FRANZ SCHUBERT: Third movement (Allegro molto) from String Quartet no.14 in D minor, D. 810, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’
GYÖRGY KURTÁG: Ligatura-Message to Frances-Maria (The answered unanswered question), Op. 31b
GYÖRGY KURTÁG: ‘Ruhelos’ from Kafka-Fragmente, Op. 24
FRANZ SCHUBERT: Fourth movement (Presto) from String Quartet no.14 in D minor, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’, D. 810

 

Ligeti: Anxiety and Transformation of Influence

Ligeti’s Violin Concerto stands as a truly indispensable work in its genre and a key musical work of the late twentieth century. Initially composed in 1989 and 1990, it underwent significant revision during which composer and work alike moved, so it seemed, towards a Platonic ideal, its sources lost, found, varied, and rediscovered.

During hospital convalescence, the composer engaged in intensive study of Haydn’s late quartets, which seems strongly to have influenced ensuing process of clarification. ‘From Haydn,’ he told his assistant, Louise Duchesneau, ‘you can learn how to achieve the clearest effect with the simplest means.’ When choosing ‘between a more ornate structure and a skeleton, Haydn always chooses the skeleton, never using one note more than he needs. I applied this principle of avoiding unnecessary complexity … and thought that it brought me closer to my ideal.’ Ligeti worried, however, that he had veered too close to Hungarian, especially Transylvanian, folk music, replacing the first movement entirely. He also revised and reordered the other two in an expansion to five movements that yet never reached his originally anticipated eight. The version the work’s dedicatee, Saschka Gawriloff, premiered in 1990 with Gary Bertini and the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra was always considered incomplete. Gawriloff and Ligeti employed material originally intended for movements never completed for the fifth-movement cadenza; Kopatchinskaja will play her own.

Ligeti’s interest in different systems of tuning is very much in microtonal play. With a few exceptions marked in the score, the soloist plays at concert pitch. Things are difficult enough for her already with virtuosic writing, according to the composer, born of models such as ‘Paganini, the Bach solo sonatas, Ysäye’s solo sonatas, Wieniawski, and Szymanowski’. However, the concertmaster – one of only five orchestral violins – and first viola – one of three – must play in scordatura, tuned to the seventh harmonic partial of the double bass’s first string and fifth of its third string respectively. Brass too offer natural harmonics, while use of ocarinas, slide whistles, and harmonica both subverts and expands our field of listening. By combining these ‘out of tune’ notes and harmonics with those of the normally tuned strings, Ligeti sought to ‘build a number of harmonic and non-harmonic spectra,’ such conflict between overtones resulting in a veritable voyage of harmonic exploration. The more Ligeti listened to non-Western music, the less he could allow himself to be constrained by equal temperament. ‘It almost hurts’, he said.

The opening is likewise elemental, alternating open A and D strings in lightning succession, furthering Ligeti’s desire for a ‘glassy shimmering character’. In this first movement, ‘Praeludium’, the solo line gradually distinguishes itself from an apparent multitude of other solos, emerging as a well-nigh traditional, first-among-equals virtuoso. Its magic can be tender too, though, as in the violin’s duetting with an array of tuned percussion.

Polymeters run riot, as they will too in the finale, much of whose folk material and allusion Márton Keréfky has discovered to have been reused, ‘albeit embedded in a totally new context’, from the discarded original first movement. The impression of ideas, remembered or misremembered, from earlier movements piling upon one another affords reinvented climax, never quite as we have known it. Listening to Thai, Khmer, and Laotian music afforded inspiration and example for Ligeti’s consciously seeking ‘for a new kind of way of building a melody’. So too did continuing influence from his Transylvanian heritage.

The second movement, ‘Aria, Hoquetus, Choral’ opens with a low solo, G-string adaptation of a melody from Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet, and thus ultimately from his still earlier Musica ricercata for piano, the former being a transcription of six movements of the latter. The movement seems to aspire to rootedness, be it folk- or chant-like – are the two ultimately so different? – yet to find its way thwarted, ‘continually splintering’, in Seth Brodsky’s evocative phrase, ‘into weird ironic homelessness’. Such weird irony and modal aspiration are only heightened by a quartet of woodwind pied pipers taking up their ocarinas for the chorale. High, fantastical writing in the central Intermezzo has any number of parallels in other violin concertos, yet can never be assimilated to their party. The Passacaglia makes play once more with time-honoured form, riveting in its never-quite-expected progress. Here beats the heart of the work and of Ligeti’s generative anxiety of influence.  



Byzantine Chant: To the source?

A chant-like, even ‘mediæval’ quality has been remarked on in Ligeti’s second movement. We now move closer to the elusive (illusory?) source, nonetheless mediated. Travel through musical history and you will find any number of instrumental works or movements based on song melodies. Such tended to be the practice in the writing of Byzantine chant. A text, in this case that of Psalm 140, ‘Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man’, would be set to a traditional melody and subsequently shaped – or not – to requirements of the verse. This tradition’s characteristic ‘four-element syllable-count cadence’ – four final syllables of a line, regardless of word accent, tied to four fixed, stylised cadential elements – has suggested to scholars an earlier psalmody than its Gregorian counterpart. To indulge in wild anachronism, is this also an early anticipation of modern clashes between words and music, given a further twist by arrangement for instruments alone?

Touched by Death

Schubert set Matthias Claudius’s Der Tod und das Mädchen in February 1817, two years after Claudius’s death. Here death approaches in instrumental sombre D minor. The Maiden vocally resists, bidding him not to touch her. He has his way, though, also vocally; he is not fierce and will have her sleep in his arms. The song closes with a foreshortened reprise of the introduction, albeit in an equally sombre yet peaceable D major. The manuscript might not have survived, having been cut into pieces by Schubert’s half-brother Anton, the Benedictine Father Hermann, yet was eventually reassembled. (It had in any case been published.) Ludwig Wittgenstein would muse on its fate more than a century later:

Recall that after Schubert’s death his brother cut some of Schubert’s scores into small pieces and gave such pieces, consisting of a few bars, to his favourite pupils. This act, as a sign of piety, is just as understandable to us as the different one of keeping the scores untouched, accessible to no one. And if Schubert’s brother had burned the scores, that too would be understandable as a sign of piety.

Showing the dead respect takes many forms.

Touched by Life


If the song is one of Schubert’s most celebrated, so too is the March 1824 string quartet taking its nickname and the theme of its second movement from it, touched by life rather than death. It stands as tall in its genre as Ligeti’s concerto in its. Resist undue romanticisation as we might, it is difficult not to think at least in partial relation to Schubert’s own coming appointment with the grim reaper. This was, however, the very time his friend Franz von Schober reported Schubert believed new medication had cured him. Either way, an artwork should not be reduced to biography, however tragic.


Tragedy is nevertheless present, vehemently so in the first movement, its second thematic group sweetly lyrical yet undoubtedly in the shadow of a furious D minor daemon not so very different from that which had captivated Mozart. The number of fortissimo and still more sforzando markings might visually suggest a score by Beethoven, although the triplet writing could not be more characteristic of Schubert: both in itself and for the particular variety of propulsion it offers. Such prospects of peace as there are, for instance a shift to D major during the recapitulation, find themselves swiftly, even brutally undercut. The uncertainty of where the coda will lead till it breathes its last offers an apt summation of tensions and overall tragedy in the movement as a whole.

We move to G minor for the Andante con moto theme and variations, five of them. Neither the first violin’s flights of fancy in the first variation nor the cello’s rapt lyricism in the second can forestall the pent-up fury unleashed in the third. If the penultimate variation, as might be expected, shifts to the tonic major and the final variation concludes likewise, this is as resigned, even exhausted a close as that to the original song. Only in the third movement trio, that Schubert can present a (relatively) sustained vision of major mode utopia. Sandwiched as it is, however, between the rhythmic insistence and almost bewildering syncopations of the scherzo itself, we know that it is too late. Is it fanciful to consider the rondo finale a Totentanz, a dance of death? Hardly, for this Romantic tarantella leaves us in no doubt as to the work’s ultimate destination, fury once more and now decisively winning out over resignation. Having the coda open in D major only prepares the way for the final nail in the coffin. Neither hope nor forgiveness is to be had; nor is it sought.


Old Tears New


John Dowland’s 1604 Lachrimae or seaven teares figured in seaven passionate pavans takes as its theme and first pavan Dowland’s existing song and lute solo, Lachrimae antiquae (‘Old Tears’). We hear here its immediate successor variation, ‘Lachrimae antiquae novae’ (‘Old Tears New’), its melodic melancholy and harmonic intensity both related to and a development – to borrow from the Viennese Classical future – of its thematic model. What Thomas Morley in his influential 1597 Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke had held necessary for expression of ‘a lamentable passion’ may be heard immediately: ‘motions proceeding by halfe notes. Flat thirds, and flat sixths, which of their nature are sweet’; semitones or ‘accidentall motions’ that will ‘fitly express the passions of griefe, weeping, sighes, sorrowes, sobs, and suchlike’. And yet, Dowland noted in his dedication to Anne of Denmark that tears differ in cause and effect. ‘No doubt pleasant are the teares which Musicke weeps, neither are teares shed always in sorrow but sometime in joy and gladnesse.’ Music mirrors yet relieves man’s fallen condition.

Kurtág’s re-enchantment






Two short pieces by György Kurtág ask further questions ‘answered’ and ‘unanswered’, perhaps even unanswerable in the case of Ligatura-Message to Frances-Maria, written in 1989, the year Ligeti began his Violin Concerto; and, in the excerpt from his Kafka-Fragmente, to continue the restless (‘Ruhelos’) Schubertian wandering that is our fallen lot. Solo strings and celesta in the former suggest re-enchantment of the traditional quartet, in a slow processional offering neither comfort nor discomfort but something beyond, magically or materially, even a foundational melody yet to be found. The latter piece’s whispered confidences and sudden eruption from intimate theatre into something finely balanced between cruelty and the absurd likewise seem beyond our ken, stretch our ears as we may. Like Ligeti’s Haydn. Kurtág never uses ‘one note more than he needs’. Musical mysteries endure.

Aimard - Anderson, Benjamin, Ligeti, Kurtág, Stroppa, Carter, and Messiaen, 26 October 2017

Pierre Boulez Saal

Julian Anderson: Sensation (2015-16): ‘Toucher’

George Benjamin: Shadowlines: ‘Tempestoso’ and ‘Very freely’ (2001)
Ligeti: Études: ‘Der Zauberlehrling’ and ‘Entrelacs’ (1994, 1993)
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Passio sine nomine’ (2015)
Marco Stroppa: Miniatura estrose (1991-2001): ‘Passacaglia canonical in contrappunto policromatico’
Carter: Caténaires (2006)
Messiaen: Catalogue d’oiseaux: ‘La Rousserolle effarvatte’ (1958)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

If it would be an exaggeration to describe this as a recital of music that ‘belonged’ to Pierre-Laurent Aimard – music, surely, belongs to us all – then it would be a pardonable exaggeration, whose purpose and meaning were clear. Here were pieces, mostly drawn from larger works or collections, with which Aimard has a particular connection, and with which he could – and did – speak not only with great authority but with eminently thoughtful musicality. Nothing was taken for granted; indeed, the music spoke both with the freshness of the new and the understanding of a grounded repertoire.

I wish I could feel the enthusiasm so many friends, colleagues, fellow musicians and music-lovers clearly feel for the music of Julian Anderson. That includes, clearly, Aimard, who gave the premiere of Sensation at Aldeburgh last year, and here extracted from it, in what he believed to be its German premiere, the second movement, ‘Toucher’. I have never actively disliked any of Anderson’s music, but rarely have I discerned much beneath an often attractive surface. Perhaps that is the point; I am not so sure. At any rate, this piece, conceived, in Anderson’s words, ‘with particular emphasis on the French tradition of the jeu perlé – playing of great lightness, speed and clarity – of which Pierre-Laurent Aimard … is such a brilliant exponent,’ made for an impressive pianistic opening. It sounded as if conceived more or less in a single, dare I say melodic, line, with certain additions or elucidations, often chordal, around it. The chords certainly sounded very ‘French’, Messiaen in particular coming to mind in some of the harmonies.

 

George Benjamin’s Shadowlines, from which we heard here the fourth and fifth movements, followed: another work of which Aimard had given the first performance. This emerged very much as a re-examination, more to my taste, even perhaps to my understanding, of canonical procedures, thereby offering our ears and minds as much vertically as horizontally. It seemed, in performance as well as in the work ‘itself’, that not only had polyphony been reinstated, but so too had its typical dialectic between freedom and organisation. Or perhaps that is just someone speaking who has been spending too much time with Schoenberg recently. At any rate, the piano writing (and playing) had an intriguing sense of the Germanic too it as well: far from exclusive, or even predominant, but unmistakeable, at least to these ears. Aimard clearly relished its complexities; so too did I.

 

Aimard’s collaboration with Ligeti verges upon the ‘legendary’: (not, of course, in the sense that it did not happen!) Aimard gave the premieres of many of the composer’s later piano works, these two Études included. What immediately struck me, both in no.10, ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, and no.12, ‘Entrelacs’, was the ‘finish’ to what we heard, again both as work and as performance. This, one felt, was a mastery, compositional and performative, worthy of, say, Ravel. If the first offered something of a connection to the Anderson piece, its emphasis perhaps in a broad sense ‘melodic’, the metrical transformations and layering of ‘Entrelacs’ seemed both to speak of kinship with and difference from Elliott Carter (still to come). The energy was impossible to resist – and why on earth would one try?

 

I suspect that, by now, you can guess who gave the 2015 first performance of Kurtág’s ‘Passio sine nomine’, from his compendious Játékok. He seemed to do it proud again here in Berlin. I was especially struck by a certain obstinacy, an almost religious truculence – although was that a thought elicited by the title? – a Credio quia absurdum, both to the material and to the performance. All that Bach the Kurtágs have played sounded with something I am tempted to call immanence.

 

Aimard gave the premiere of Marco Stroppa’s Miniature estrose in 1995; a second premiere, of the completed version, was given by Florian Hölscher in 2000. Here, Aimard’s performance of the ‘Passacaglia canonical in contrappunto policocromatico’ seemed very much to make use of the Pierre Boulez Saal – there, of course, is another composer to whom Aimard could hardly have stood closer! – as an instrument in itself. (How very different it must have sounded in that premiere at the Opéra Bastille!) The almost whispered intimacies and indeed the entire dynamic range sounded very much a product of the hall as well as of the keyboard. So too did their interaction with other parameters, and with other, more malleable aspects of the music. The sheer beauty of work and performance shone through.

 

Ever youthful, the work of Carter ended the first ‘half’; here we heard the composer at 102. In Caténaires, we heard once again consummate mastery. I thought of Ligeti’s ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, and perceived – if sometimes only just – a penumbra of polyphonic possibilities surrounding what is, for Carter, as Aimard explained, an unusually un-polyphonic work. The composer indeed spoke of having ‘become obsessed with the idea of a fast one-line piece with no chords’. Was it perverse for me to have heard it that way? Perhaps, but nevertheless I did. Truly, though, its energy sounded as music for the age of computers, even of the Internet.

 

Aimard did not, of course, give the first performance of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux; Yvonne Loriod did, in one of Boulez’s Domaine musical concerts. His association with all concerned, however, is strong and deep, and so it sounded here. Aimard’s recording of the complete work will be released next year. This performance of the vast ‘La Rousserolle effarvatte’ (‘The Reed Warbler’), at about half an hour, offered quite the calling card. More than that, it seemed, whether this were the illusion of performance and programming or something more, to unite and indeed to develop many of the tendencies we had heard earlier, whilst remaining of course very much itself. No one else could have written this music! The opening, as much for the different sonorities heard simultaneously as for their pitches, sounded as if performed with three hands. Admittedly, I could not see the keyboard, but I am reasonably sure that it was not. Through the violent eruptions, the silences (what silences!), the different colours (whether one actually ‘sees’ them or no), the luscious harmonies, the obstinate rhythms, the undeniable religious mysticism, and of course the birdsong, both a singularity of voice and a multiplicity of voices seemed to assert themselves – and to express a joy in being, in music-making that penetrated to the essence of Messiaen’s art. Everything sounded refracted through, not just related to but derived from, everything else. Perhaps ‘total serialism’ had not passed after all; it had simply, or not so simply, reinvented itself.

 

Uchida - Mozart and Schumann, 31 January 2017

Royal Festival Hall

Mozart – Piano Sonata no.16 in C major, KV 545

Schumann – Kreisleriana, op.16
Schumann – Fanatasie in C major, op.17


Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

In a well-nigh perfect performance of Mozart’s ‘sonata for beginners’ – how treacherous that claim! – Mitsuko Uchida gave the impression and not far, I think, from the reality of utter effacement of the self. This was not anonymity, yet the sense, however illusory, of unmediated access to the work ‘itself’ could rarely have been felt more strongly. Come scritto, certainly; but not just as written, as we know it in the concert hall, or the parlour, of our imagination. The first movement’s passage work was second to none, articulation not only true, but a true joy. (How I wished my schoolboy left hand had permitted me to play a single bar, let alone a single phrase, like that. Not that my right hand had come so much closer…) ‘Just’ scales for so much of the development: not at all? The subdominant surprise in the recapitulation registered with subtle strength, preparing the way for Mozart’s concomitantly surprising path back ‘home’. The second movement offered similar virtues. Its transparency is cruel, even by Mozart’s standards, yet that posed, so it seemed, Uchida no difficulty whatsoever. The music flowed beautifully, its legato ‘like oil’. And how a chromatic note made all the difference in the world: so much from what might have looked so little! The turn to the minor mode evinced no exaggeration, but any degree of honest, even heart-rending drama. Uchida resisted the common impulse to rush the finale, which received a reading full of charm, delight, and yes, again, subtlety. Childlike? Perhaps, but certainly never childish. Mozart’s – Uchida’s too? – second naïveté worked its magic nevertheless.

The rest of the programme was devoted to Schumann. First came Kreisleriana. The opening piece benefited from admirable clarity. Perhaps it might have had a little more of the tempest to it, a little more flexibility too; nevertheless, the clearing of the skies still registered – again magically. I found myself comparing the difference in Mozart’s and Schumann’s use of arpeggios: not as some abstract distraction from the ‘poetry’, but by putting technical means at the heart of that poetry. There was greater flexibility in the second movement and thereafter, its intermezzi contrasting and responding to the opening material in a finely traced musical arc, as etched by Uchida (and Schumann!) Brahmsian compositional technique seemed unusually apparent in many of these movements, yet quite without Brahms’s ‘lateness’. Here was an earlier Romanticism, and rightly so. A little untidiness in the third and seventh was ultimately of little import; if anything, it reminded us that this music is not supposed to be easy to play (not, I hasten to add, that technique should ever be belittled.) The poise and dignity Uchida showed in the fourth, the whimsy that yet spoke of something darker in the fifth, and the ambiguity of the lullaby, intensified by the intrusion of contrasting material, in the sixth: all were movingly, perceptively portrayed. So too was the concluding movement, here sounding very much as in Harriet Smith’s programme note description: ‘less like the end … than the quiet closing of that door, the illicit listener tiptoeing away.’

The C major Fantasie followed the interval. Uchida’s first movement opened magisterially – a word overused, but not, I think, inappropriate here – yet capable of yielding. One always ‘knows’ that this is one of Schumann’s greatest works; here one undoubtedly felt it too, not least through the ongoing sense of perpetual development: ‘developing variation’, as any Schoenbergian would tell you. Here, comparisons with Liszt’s B minor Sonata seemed fully apposite. So did Schumann’s marking: ‘Durchaus phantastisch und leidenschaftlich vorzutragen’. Originality and eloquence were to be heard equally in all three movements: work and performance. The second had a fine, almost Elgarian swagger to its opening. It was questioned thereafter, again not unlike Elgar, although it was Chopin who came to mind in the serenity with which ensuing contrast was sung, likewise in the flickering, even dissolving, tendencies of Uchida’s left hand. Out of that extraordinary march emerged mystery and clarity in equal measure, in contest and collaboration. The quiet dignity with which the musical narrative was constructed, or perhaps better, constructed itself, brought an intriguing combination of methods with roots in both Chopin and late Beethoven. As for the Innigkeit heard and felt: that was entirely Schumann’s own. So were the paths down which the musical journey led us and its conclusion: they could hardly have been envisaged, let alone navigated, by anyone else. Uchida reminded us keenly of that ineffable individuality.

In a similarly exquisite fusion of process and poetry, she did that too in an encore of breathtaking delicacy and unerring direction. I guessed (correctly) that it had been by Kurtág. Only this morning did I find out which piece: Play with Infinity. Quite.