The Bassarids, Komische Oper, 5 November 2019

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Dionysus – Sean Panikkar

Pentheus – Günter Papendell

Cadmus – Jens Larsen

Tiresias – Ivan Turšić

Captain – Tom Erik Lie

Agave – Tanja Ariane Baumgartner

Autonoe – Marisol Montalvo, Vera-Lotte Boecker

Beroe – Margarita Nekrasova

Dancers – Azzurra Adinolfi, Alessandra Bizzarri, Damian Czarnecki, Michael Fernandez, Paul Gerritsen, Claudia Greco, Christoph Jonas, Csaba Nagy, Sara Pamploni, Lorenzo Soragni

Barrie Kosky (director)

Otto Pichler (choreography)

Katrin Lea Tag (designs)

Ulrich Lenz (dramaturgy)

Franck Evin (lighting)

Vocalconsort Berlin

Chorus of the Komische Oper, Berlin (chorus director: David Cavelius) 

Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin

Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

I have been privileged to see – and hear – three excellent performances and productions of The Bassarids; I have also been privileged to attend many excellent performances and productions at the Komische Oper. In both respects, this new production by Barrie Kosky, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, was fully worthy to stand amongst any of its predecessors: complementary, in many respects highly contrasted, to stagings from Christof Loy (Munich) and Krzysztof Warlikowski (Salzburg), and perhaps still more highly contrasted in a typically formalist approach from Jurowski, whose relationship to Kosky’s staging proved thoughtful and revealing.

One enters to activity already proceeding onstage: not unusual in contemporary theatre, but important in its particularity. There are musicians, much of the large woodwind and brass sections, on stage as well as in the pit. (Alongside it too: even in Henze’s 1992 revision, as here, it is a large orchestra for which he calls.) There are others milling around too: later revealed to be chorus and dancers. But the milling around is perhaps the more important thing than who is doing the milling. There, as here (in the audience, that is), patrons, or, as we might prefer, citizens, are preparing for the performance, in whatever roles they might play. For, in this milling before the musicodramatic storm, it is part of an amphitheatre we see: not archaic, not archaeological, but of now – as it was for Euripides; as it is for him, for Henze, for WH Auden and Chester Kallman, for all of us. Attic drama, above all Attic tragedy, the cornerstone for our entire Western dramatic, including operatic, tradition, continues to live, to breathe, to adapt, and above all to enthral. Where Wagner, whether Henze liked it or not – in many ways, he did not – his most important predecessor, had seen decadence in the later tragedy of Euripides, and found greatest inspiration in Aeschylus, Auden led Henze here to a typically modernist conflict between immediacy and the highly mediated, a few turns of the dialectical screw on from Schiller’s naïve and sentimental, yet ultimately perhaps not so very different. On the one hand, Auden insisted that Henze, as part of his preparation for composition, attend Götterdämmerung: Karajan gave him his Vienna box. On the other, he and Kallman provided a highly literary, ‘poetic’, even in Wagner’s – and Nietzsche’s – terms, ‘decadent’ libretto, after Euripides, with which to work. All manner of dramatic conflicts in this opera, ultimately rooted in ancient tragedy and our reception of it, may be traced back to that – as well as to Henze’s own, personal musical conflicts: Germany and Italy, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, past and present, and so forth. The amphitheatre, of which we see only part, of which we, drawn in, are also part, stands as the arena for all that and more.

What Kosky proceeds to do is largely straightforward: direct, yet mediating between history’s various antiquities and today, belying most claims of ‘decadence’. The story is largely told straightforwardly, but with as fine a reinvention of the original artistic unity Wagner – and many German idealists – saw in the drama of Athens: a Gesamtkunstwerk, if you will. Every Kosky production, whatever one thinks of it conceptually, reveals him as a master of his craft; this is no exception. Individual and crowd scenes, both on stage and beyond it – around the enlarged pit, in the theatre of the Komische Oper, etc. – are blocked and executed with precision: not as some cold, clinical, ‘merely’ technical exercise, but so as to permit the drama to emerge. Mesmerising dance, as strange and alienating as it is mesmerising and erotic, heightens the sense both that we might have been ‘there’, that we might fall prey to Dionysus’s call, and that yet we can make sense of it, as spectators. Such is a Maenads’ Dance unlike any other I have seen, Otto Pichler’s choreography just the thing, as are the energy and sheer proximity of the dancers. The ultimate seduction, Pentheus by Dionysus; the ultimate tragedy, Agave’s bestial murder of her son; and her recognition of what she has done: these are presented with all the force and clarity one can imagine, however foolishly, one ‘might have’ experienced in Athens. Agave’s childish delight in the bloody quarry from the hunt is a particularly gruesome moment, but not for the sake of gruesomeness. To an extent I cannot previously recall, everything now seems to have led up to the moment of recognition. Dionysus’s self-revelation, intense vulnerability and all as wounded son of Semele, comes as an eminently musical coda to that.

For at the heart of the stage construction lies the orchestra, true locus of the Dionysian rite: for Kosky, just as it had been for Wagner, Nietzsche, and arguably Henze too. In an interview for Die Welt, to mark the first performance of The Bassarids, Henze proclaimed his belief ‘that the road from Tristan to Mahler and Schoenberg is far from finished, and with The Bassarids I have tried to go further along it.’ That will surely always come through, yet Jurowski’s approach also highlighted the countervailing force both onstage and in the pit, clarifying in Apollonian fashion Henze’s conception of this ‘music drama’ – he uses Wagner’s term – in symphonic form: four movements, with an intermezzo akin to the ancient satyr play (here rescored by Jurowski in keeping with Henze's revisions to the rest). One could not resist the sheer power of frankly superlative orchestral and choral forces, fully the equal of ‘starrier’ counterparts in Munich and Salzburg; yet, intriguingly mirroring, even extending the composer’s dramatised conflict between Schoenbergian and Stravinskian tendencies in Der Prinz von Homburg, a neoclassical, ordering element came with at least equal power to the fore. With Henze’s music, there is often a battle between expression, even over-expression, and the discipline required to express that raw expression, as it were. In this case, the Penthean, the monotheistic put up a stronger musical fight to the primaeval Dionysiac in Henze’s orchestral cauldron than I can hitherto recall. Occasionally, I longed for Jurowski to let go a little more, but even that slight frustration had its own dramatic rewards. The heartbreak, moreover, of Henze’s sacrificial quotation from Bach’s St Matthew Passion registered all the more starkly for being presented almost as an object, something removed from our religious and musical view.

Sean Panikkar as Dionysus offered a performance at least as frighteningly, irresistibly seductive as he had in Salzburg last year: a chilling yet smouldering portrayal of a being beyond good and evil, inhuman and yet palpably human, his movement almost as impressive as his more conventionally musicodramatic skills. This evening only furthered the thought that it is a role he was born to play. Günter Papendell’s Pentheus proved a moving, complex, yet ultimately hapless foe: an intelligent and powerful portrayal. Tanja Ariane Baumgartner’s Agave initially, quite rightly, kept us at arms’ length, before drawing us in movingly for the final tragic outcome, assisted by, among others, an excellent Marisol Montalvo, singing for an indisposed Vera-Lotte Boecker, who continued to act the role of Autonoe onstage, and a rich-toned, richly sympathetic Margarita Nekrasova as the nurse, Beroe. As so often with the Komische Oper, though, a sense of company among all concerned made for a Gesamtkunstwerk in another, related sense. A memorable evening indeed.

Wien Modern (1): Montalvo/ORF SO/Meister - Boulez, 5 November 2015

Grosser Saal, Konzerthaus

Boulez – Pli selon pli

Marisol Montalvo (soprano)

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Cornelius Meister (conductor)

 

The twenty-eighth season of Wien Modern, my first (at least in person), opened, as seems proper, with a contribution to the ninetieth anniversary celebrations for Pierre Boulez. It was with a disc from the Vienna Philharmonic and Claudio Abbado, who founded the festival in 1988, that, as a student, I was first made aware of Wien Modern. That recording offered works by Rihm, Ligeti, Nono, and Boulez, so it seemed especially fitting that my first visit should begin with a work by the composer the festival aptly describes as ‘the Grand Master of new music’. Pli selon pli, as sure a candidate for Boulezian masterpiece as any, also readily permits consideration of this season’s guiding theme. To quote its website, ‘One of the characteristics of contemporary music is the multiplicity of forms and genres and the means and forms of expression. Starting from the premise that all music is characterised by the cultural, historical and social parameters of the time in which it was written, WIEN MODERN will this season set out to explore the artistic intentions that shape the dominant fields of expression and composition today. As the motto Pop.Song.Voice suggests, the voice as instrument will act as mediator between the “masterpieces” of new music and advanced pop music.’

And, to that end, we listened first to an opening speech from Susanne Kirchmayr, which made a welcome change from the typical introductory address by a politician or bureaucrat. (I remember, as a child, enduring an introduction to a youth orchestra concert in which a local councillor regaled us for what seemed like hours on his alleged ‘discovery’ that the word ‘euphonious’, clearly a new word to him, was derived from the word, ‘euphonium’, thereby demonstrating the primacy of brass band music. Especially charming for those of us in other sections of the orchestra, this interminable address ended with the declaration that it did not matter whether what we did were any good, since we should all end up doing ‘proper jobs’ anyway, although music might remain a ‘nice hobby’.) Kirchmayr, who performs as a DJ under the name Electric Indigo, spoke interestingly about what New Music – I remain old-fashioned enough to use capitals from time to time – of all sorts might have in common, not least in its resistance to neo-liberal demands of the market. Stockhausen, Jimi Hendrix, Adorno, and others put in appearances, not for their own sake, but as part of an argument that would surely have had much to say to those who had not really considered such matters, as well as questioning those who had. A new Electric Indigo work will be performed on 26 November, during a concert entitled ‘No.1: A Phenomenology of Pop’.

Marisol Montalvo, the ORF Symphony Orchestra and Cornelius Meister then took the stage for Boulez’s Mallarmé ‘portrait’. A celebrated trick of eighteenth-century French orchestras was le premier coup d’archet; Mozart used the device in his ‘Paris’ Symphony. Boulez’s opening orchestral coup is just as impressive – and so it was in performance, followed by necessary, yet perhaps just as shocking, sultriness from voice and orchestra. Meister imparted a strong expository sense to this first movement, ‘Don’, allowing the material and its deployment in their turn to impart a strong sense of musical creation, not unlike, say depictions by Haydn or Berg. In this movement, stately orchestral progress worked very well, offering plenty of space for glances aside from the main procession. (I often thought in that connection of the later Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna.) The performance from Montalvo, especially once she reached the section, ‘…basalte… …y… …échos… [etc.]’, had something of an intervention to it, if not from another culture, then of a different way of considering that dramatised, if that be the right word, here. She seemed engaged in a dramatic delivery of (self-)discovery against Messieanic harmonies which, for once, moved slowly yet surely. Less hieratic, wilder, even frenzied at times: hers was a performance seemingly in conflict, even fruitifully so, with the more careful – perhaps on occasion in subsequent movements, too careful – path mapped out by the orchestra. Instrumental development again brought Messiaen, not always the most ‘developmental’ of composers, to mind, leavened by the Second Viennese School; or perhaps that should have been the other way around. Musical fertility abounded – and resounded.

‘Improvisation I’ offered what one might think of as a more conventionally ‘vocal’ performance, bearing in mind the mediating role of the voice proposed by the festival as a whole. It was recognisably the same ‘voice’, the same portrayal, whether in work or vocal performance, yet seemed also to hark back to earlier vocal and choral works, such as Le Visage nuptial and Le Soleil des eaux. And then, a different, Berg-like voice spoke from the orchestra, sounding or, perhaps better, suggesting catastrophe. Words and language clearly related to music and sound, yet, as in, say, Tristan und Isolde, the relationship, whatever the historical priority, appeared to manifest itself in both directions.

The opening éclat – so often an apt word for Boulez’s music – of ‘Improvisation II’ made its point; so did Montalvo’s vocal melismata, again offering points of departure for consideration of the voice and its mediating, or perhaps leading, role. The apparent naïveté of Montalvo’s performance at this point intrigued, especially when set against a more motoric instrumental performance. The idea of magic has perhaps been trivialized beyond repair in a disenchanted world; yet perhaps, ‘magical’ was not a silly description in this case. The allure of the impenetrable, in more than one sense, was rendered in ecstatic tones, both vocal and instrumental. Montalvo’s bright, bell-like delivery, stronger at the top of her range, was very different from Barbara Hannigan’s in her unforgettable 2011 performance with Boulez. If less overtly sensual a performance all around, this Wien Modern account had its own strengths, its own possibilities.

I loved the way, in ‘Improvisation III’, in which Montalvo’s voice melded with that of the flute. A new instrument, or a duet? Why need it be either/or? At times, and this was, I think, one of the greatest strengths of Montalvo’s performance, it was as if she were singing one of Messiaen’s (actual or camouflaged) alleluias. Tuned percussion responded in kind, yet interestingly, sounded, whether by design or by wordless default, more secular in concern: not the least intriguing of the dialectics set up here in performance. The near-identity between voice, flute, and sometimes other instruments continued to ravish and to perplex when we returned to the opening ‘A la nue accablante…’.

Finally, ‘Tombeau’. Boulez’s opening, seemingly doom-laden Klangfarbenmelodie sounded – a touch of Austrian orchestral colour, or something more? – as if spun from the same cloth as Webern’s op.6. There was a similar sense, moreover, of muffled procession as heard in the funeral march from Webern’s work. Grief was perhaps more abstract, although that is not to say less powerful. Mahler seemed present – and yet, composition of course preceded Boulez’s immersion in that composer’s work. Perhaps it Pli selon pli would actually inform his conducting of Mahler; ‘influence’, at least interesting influence, never runs in a single direction. At any rate, it did not seem a great step either to or from the world of Wozzeck. Vocal qualities of instruments were again readily apparent. A French horn might have been a soprano. And when the horn cried against the long-delayed soprano entry, echoes, musical and historical alike, resounded from the Nachtmusik of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. The final ‘mort’ and orchestral coup might have been too theatrical for some – I heard a similar criticism made at the recent Barbican performance from Yeree Suh, the BBC SO, and Thierry Fischer – but for me they worked very well indeed. Theatricality is not foreign to Boulez, and we are only just beginning to discover the multiplicity of performing possibilities his music offers. At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, it is vital that we continue to perform his music and do not restrict it to anniversary outings. Audiences are there; performers are there; there is no excuse.

 

Birtwistle and Dowland - 'Sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben,' Montalvo/Klangforum Wien/Rundel, 18 April 2011

Werner-Otto-Saal, Konzerthaus Berlin

Birtwistle – Nine settings of Celan, for soprano and chamber ensemble
interspersed with:
Dowland – Lachrimae, arranged by Andreas Lindenbaum for violin, two violas, cello, and double bass

Marisol Montalvo (soprano)
Klangforum Wien
Peter Rundel (conductor)

Yes, you did read that correctly: ‘Sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben,’ as in the final movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony. The Berlin Konzerthaus is organising something rather more interesting, indeed original, than many halls for the Mahler anniversary, a cycle of concerts in three parts of ‘Musik mit Mahler’. If the anniversary must be marked, then to use Mahler’s symphonies as a way of exploring other repertoire seems just the ticket.

Here resurrection took on a decidedly darker hue, with Birtwistle’s settings of Paul Celan, as translated by Michael Hamburger, scored for soprano, two clarinets, viola, cello, and double bass. Klangforum Wien gave the first performance of the complete work in 1996 and clearly has the music in its collective bones. The present performance was inspired and inspiring, not least on account of Peter Rundel’s intelligent direction. Marisol Montalvo made a generally good impression as soprano, though sometimes her American accent sounded a little out of place – at least to an Englishman. At the heart of Birtwistle’s music is a melancholy that Montalvo’s more showy delivery did not always quite capture, though the final sound of her unaccompanied voice, deserted by instruments, was chilling, likewise the iridescence of her voice in combination with instruments during ‘Mit Brief und Uhr’ . Clarinets are a typical vessel of Birtwistle’s expression, here (Reinhold Brunner and Bernhard Zachhuber) harking back on occasion to the hieratic timelessness of Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments as well as to the violence of Birtwistle’s own Punch and Judy, later arabesques ably echoed by soprano, and vice versa. ‘Tenebrae’ seemed to acquire further meaning when heard at the beginning of Holy Week – even when, perhaps particularly when, performed in one of the most atheistic cities in the world.

Every bit as inspired was the decision to perform the Celan settings interspersed with John Dowland’s Lachrymae, here arranged for strings by cellist Andreas Lindenbaum, on hand to perform, alongside Gunde Jäck-Micko on violin, violists Andrew Jezek and Dimitrios Polisoidis, and double bassist Uli Fussenegger. Vibrato was avoided, though I thought I heard a little more as time went on. Perhaps it was; perhaps my ears had adjusted. The motivation in recreating the world of the viol consort was clear, though I could not help but wish for a little more variation in tone quality on occasion. That said, the excellent players afforded ample opportunity to luxuriate in the plangent melancholy of Dowland’s harmonies. This was not quite Haydn’s Seven Last Words: for one thing, there is greater variety of tempo. However, the effect was not entirely dissimilar, suggesting another possible companion piece for Birtwistle’s settings. Dowland, however, remains closer in spirit to his great English successor than Haydn will ever be, with Purcell’s Fantazias another ghost at the feast.