Komsi/Fauchère/EIC/Bleuse - Illès, Mundry, Feierabend, and Kurtág, 5 June 2026

Salle des concerts, Cité de la musique, 

Márton Illés: Four SkEtches (French premiere)
Isabel Mundry: The I’s (French premiere)
Tobias Feierabend: Précipitations (world premiere)
Kurtág: Messages de feu Demoiselle R.V. Troussova

Anu Komsi (soprano)

Hélène Fauchère (mezzo-soprano)

Emmanuelle Ophèle (flute)

Carlo Laurenzi, Augustin Müller (IRCAM electronics)

Sylvain Cadars (IRCAM sound diffusion),
Ensemble intercontemporain

Pierre Bleuse (conductor)

György Kurtág’s centenary celebrations continue to delight and enrich the musical world, paying tribute only to his undeniable artistry, but also of course to the extraordinary rarity of a working composer still being around to experience them for him- or herself. Has anyone else been present at his second opera, premiered in his second century? It is conceivable that Betsy Jolas, 100 later this year, might beat that, having exceeded Kurtág’s operatic tally already; we shall see. At any rate, it would always have been a rare treat, centenary or no centenary, to hear live his Messages de feu Demoiselle R.V. Troussova, all the more so from the Ensemble intercontemporain, for whom it was written between 1976 and 1980, premiered the following year, and itself celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year, as part of the now-49-year-old IRCAM’s ManiFeste 2026 feast of contemporary music. Needless to say, the friendly ghost of Pierre Boulez, now also in his second century, haunted proceedings, not least given the Cité de la musique venue, and his 1983 recording of Troussova, made in Kurtág’s presence at IRCAM.

My first live experience of the work that truly introduced Kurtág to the French public, did not disappoint. Quite the contrary: it confirmed its status as an unqualified masterpiece, a non-operatic monodrama that seems with every hearing to rank alongside defining works such as Pierrot lunaire and Le Marteau sans maître. The EIC, conducted by Pierre Bleuse, conjured up a world before our ears even before Anu Komsi’s entry, somehow announcing, though neither we nor they could know for certain, that every number would play it allotted place in the span of an almost Mahlerian-symphonic whole. With Komsi we had a soloist, to be sure: a soloist who offered detail, character, and line in equal, expressive, virtuosic measure. We had in equal measure, though, an instrumentalist, a member of the ensemble, whose instrument’s counterpoint with others was the stuff of a chamber music that took its leave from Schoenberg and Webern, without ever sounding ‘like’ them. Stravinsky (The Soldier’s Tale in particular) and the songs of Bartók were other ghosts at the feast, perhaps even on occasion the Berg of Lulu. (Is it a coincidence that the three-act version came into being during the work’s composition?) But if any earlier composer shone more brightly than others, it as Kurtág’s beloved Bach. We were led through a vocal and instrumental laboratory that seemed to bring the myriad expression of the cantatas, perhaps even their expressionism, once again to life, possessing and in turn possessed by the fire of Rimma Dalos’s verse (even though mediated, as for me it must, via French surtitles). Beguiling, mesmerising, and terrifying, this non-operatic, Beckettian monodrama reminded us why, for all its visceral thrills, it took Kurtág so long to come to opera. He had no need to—until he did. 

It was preceded by Emmanuelle Ophèle’s world premiere of Précipitations for solo flute by Tobias Feierabend, a performance so assured one might have thought it a   piece. Indeed, I can imagine it may well one day become one, such were the similar assurance and rewards of the writing. In four short movements, it showed an almost Classical sense of structure, converted into form with a hint of theatre—not so much in the sense of music theatre, the soloist’s move across the stage notwithstanding, but something intangibly, perhaps imaginarily ‘dramatic’ rather than narrative. Arabesques connected to, yet not of, the past announced the first movement, itself followed by almost traditionally contrasting slower, often haunting music. There was grace in both writing and performance, with the final music, for bass flute, offering both synthesis and conclusion. 

The first ‘half’, significantly longer, presented two works new to France, both IRCAM commissions, by Márton Illés and Isabel Mundry. Initially bemused, I realised at a certain point the announced order must have been reversed, and was relieved to find that confirmed by Illés receiving applause at the end of the first. It was an interesting test and experience, though, initially to be approaching the work as if it were by Mundry, especially since I had not yet read the programme note for either. Illés’s Four SkEtches for ensemble and live electronics, premiered in Vienna this April, has roots in an earlier work for violin and electronics, though not having heard the latter I cannot say more. What we heard was bold and ambitious, painted on a large, three-dimensional canvas, at times in near-surround sound that evoked an almost sci-fi, monstrous ‘beyond’ – whether friendly, hostile, ambivalent, or plain indifferent remained ambiguous – but growing and shrinking before our ears. A quizzical opening of multifarious voices proliferated polyphonically, as instruments extended themselves electronically in almost biological fashion. Out of an electronic world of possibility and of shadows, there could emerge an acoustic sound – a xylophone arabesque, a piano flourish, or a flute breath – as if newly minted. Both sounded as if sides to the same coin, clash and combination in similar measure. 

Mundry’s The I’s embeds a vocal setting of words by M’barek Bouhchichi from his series The Silent Mirror. Hélène Fauchère’s rich-voiced performance had me think a little of 1950s Boulez: the thread of Pli selon pli, with the tone of Le Marteau. But this world was very much our own, urban too, in which instruments seemed to ‘speak’ almost operatically in contradistinction to a menacing, electronic, yet live collectivity. It was a sense of theatre, of an invisible stage, that immediately struck me even before the first vocal entry. In a highly accomplished, beautifully ‘finished’ work, the voice’s slow, often melismatic progress, whether sung or tilting towards the spoken, created and evoked, as did each of the works heard this evening, another world that was bound in strong, if complex, ways to our own.

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.