London Sinfonietta/Kemp - Boulez and Cage, 9 March 2025

Purcell Room

Cage: Six Melodies
Boulez: Improvisé—pour le Dr. K
Cage: Credo in US
Boulez: Dérive 1
Boulez: Domaines
Cage: Variations I

Francesca Amewudah-Rivers (actor)

Michael McCarthy (director)

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

Sarah Nicolls (prepared piano)

London Sinfonietta

Thomas Kemp (conductor)

Images: Monika S Jakubowska

This London Sinfonietta concert, ‘innovative’ in the best rather than the debased, trivial way, framed performances of works by Pierre Boulez and John Cage with engaging readings from their correspondence by Francesca Amewudah-Rivers and short filmed contributions. It made for an enthralling and enjoyable evening at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room, precisely because the level of performance was so high, ‘additions’, though they were far more than that, genuinely complementing rather than substituting for musical excellence. It was a delight, moreover, to see a sold-out venue, once again giving the lie to claims that no one is interested in hearing this music. Many of us have a deep thirst for it; the only reason we do not go more often is a lack of opportunities to do so. Many do not, just as many do not like all manner of things, whether Mozart, Beethoven, the Beatles, or anything else; there is no reason to be dishonest and substitute one’s own preferences and interests for the voice of the world-spirit. And there is every reason to welcome an all-too-rare opportunity to hear, rather than simply talk about, this music, especially in so illuminating a juxtaposition, which offered great musical contrasts as well as points of mutual historical fascination. 

The first reading came not from the correspondence as such, although it is included in the Cambridge University Press Nattiez-Samuels edition as its first item. It was instead taken from Boulez’s 1949 spoken introduction – both manuscript and a rough draft are part of the Paul Sacher Stiftung – to the performance he helped organise of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, given at Suzanne Tézanas’s Paris salon. A brief filmed excerpt was juxtaposed with a live excerpt from Boulez’s own Second Piano Sonata of the previous year. Different worlds indeed, though the excerpted correspondence that followed suggested genuine interest in mutual exploration too, Boulez’s apology for sometimes writing in French – ‘my [English] grammar is still too shaky’ (3/11/12 January 1950) – typical of a humility for which he is still too infrequently credited. 

Cage’s Six Melodies for violin and keyboard (piano) from this same year were given a delightful performance by Clio Gould and Elizabeth Burley, the rhythmic progression Boulez admired strongly yet far from didactically to the fore. Initially un-, even anti-‘violinistic’, the music seemed to grow both as music and as violin music, the third and fourth pieces in particular splendidly ‘fiddling’. It felt like a gateway to the meditative sensibility as well as to the chance operations that would increasingly characterise Cage’s music in the years to follow. Boulez’s 2005 revision of his 1969 tribute for the eightieth birthday of Aldred A. Kalmus of Universal Edition, Improvisé—pour le Dr. K, opened with typical piano éclat. A very strong initial sense of Schoenberg – and he is there somewhere – faded slightly when I realised: ‘of course: like the other Kalmus pieces, this was written for the Pierrot ensemble’. Flute trills and their generative tendency seemed prophetic of later explorations, not least … explosante-fixe …, though its progress was very different. It was over in a flash, as ever leaving one wishing for more. 

A clip from the film Works of Calder, also from 1950, followed, including Cage’s music: ‘the first time I have felt the music to be necessary to a film’ (Boulez, 30 December 1950). Although Cage’s Credo in US was written earlier (1942) it seemed here to pre-empt the composer’s growing interest in chance operations through its use of radio music. Rhythm and sounds of percussion were truly infectious, leading up, so it seemed, to those Sonatas and Interludes. Boulez’s Dérive 1 (1984) offered more contrast than complement, though was no less welcome for that; it seemed to take up the baton from his earlier piece, the SACHER reference’s generative quality seductively palpable. Febrile, ever-transforming, a feast of Messiaenic colour, it spoke of and through Debussy rather than Cage’s Satie, and in its woodwind arabesques, similarly proclaimed a Stravinskian inheritance thoroughly internalised and transformed. 

Mark van de Wiel’s performance of the solo version of Domaines (1961-8) proved a stunning tour de force. Whatever Boulez’s intention, the element of choice and mobility, the clarinettist selecting the order in which the pages, each on a different stand, are played, brings an inescapable element of what soon would be called music theatre to proceedings, the performer’s one-man show extended to two, counting his instrument. Apart from – though who could it be apart from? – van de Wiel’s equally outstanding virtuosity and musical understanding, one of Boulez’s triumphant reinstatements of the performer, what truly stood out was an almost Wagnerian unendliche Melodie. One felt vividly as well as merely heard the procedures at work in all parameters, attack included, in the longest of constructed lines.   

Is Cage’s layering of transparencies in Variations I (1958) – to be performed by any number of performers on any instruments and any number thereof – more radical? Perhaps. Less ’Western’? Perhaps. Less ‘musical’? Perhaps. Given the presentation, it is hardly unreasonable to have felt led to ask such questions. Again, though, it was the contrast brought by something no less triumphantly ‘itself’ that was truly the thing. It brought with it a breath of the fresh air many felt Cage had imparted to Darmstadt.

London Sinfonietta/Piero, Paterson, et al. - Vivaldi and Grisey, 21 May 2023

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, op.8
Grisey: Vortex temporum

Michael Morpurgo (narrator)

Clio Gould, Oliver Wilson (violins)

Oliver Wilson (viola)

Clare O’Connell (cello)

Jonas Nordberg (archlute)

David Gordon (harpsichord)

Katherine Tinker (chamber organ)
Karen Jones (flutes)

Mark van de Wiel (clarinets)
Paul Silverthorne (viola)
Tim Gill (cello)

Daniel Piero (violin, director)
Andrew Zolinsky (piano)

Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)
 

All music unfolds in time. Here, two musical works, separated by the greater part of three centuries, in turn explored time’s unfolding. It has become such a cliché to moan about the ubiquity of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons that perhaps now it is time, as it were, to welcome it back to the fold. (In any case, apart from telephonic descents into hell punctuated by reminders of the value of our call and eagerness of Corporation X to answer us, we can readily avoid it. I have for years.) It is certainly time to do so if treated to so engaging a performance as this from Daniel Pioro and friends. Comparisons between Baroque music – a well-nigh meaningless term, but anyway – and jazz are overdone, yet here there really was something akin to that spirit of listening and responsiveness on show, Pioro often at most first among equals, sometimes even ready to cede that position, as well as stepping up – and around the stage, as if it visit his colleagues – to the solo spot when the moment seized him. Introduced and punctuated by similarly engaging readings on the four seasons by Michael Morpurgo, this was no ordinary Vivaldi, which is surely the best plan for rescue of these concertos. 

‘Spring’ showed us many things, reminded us of a good few more. The greater prominence assumed by the continuo players, both on account of chamber scale but also their conception both of work and role, marked it from the start, as did Pioro’s camaraderie with his fellow string players. Duetting, trios, jamming: it was all there in the first movement, yet also beyond. If he were more a conventional soloist in the slow movement, such is the material. The third took a folk-like route, Pioro as head fiddler in foot-stomping mood, rock-solid continuo providing rhythmic underpinning. 

Bird-calls of ‘Summer’ came not only from the violin, but also from organist Katherine Tinker’s moonlighting, also prefiguring the world of Grisey. Stormy rumblings and other aspects of the natural world eventually erupted, leaving us with something old and new, known and unknown: perhaps a metaphor for Vivaldi’s cycle as a whole, as well as its modern reception. Jonas Nordberg’s animating presence on archlute for the first movement of ‘Autumn’ again dissolved expectations of genre, writing, and performance. What was Vivaldi here, and what was extemporisation? Why should one care? After the vivid contrasts of the two succeeding movements, ‘Winter’ concluded in vivid pictorial and extra-pictorial fashion. It was still full of surprises, not least an unexpected pedal, above which various solo lines prepared for the final fireworks. 

For Gérard Grisey’s Vortex temporum, Pioro joined the ranks of the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Geoffrey Paterson. If any player were first among equals here, it was pianist Andrew Zolinsky. There from the opening éclat, along with flautist Karen Jones and clarinettist Mark van de Wiel, those instruments’ pulsating sound serving, among other things, to introduce the strings, the piano would close the first movement with a fearsome, ferocious solo. In between, one experienced much of that strange hyper-clarity of sound that seems to come with the best of spectralism. (Like others with serialism, I prefer results to aesthetic.) Out of that, sound itself seemed to re-emerge, transformed and even recreated in the second movement, as we passed from ‘normal’, human time to the ‘expanded’ time of whales. A hypnotic quality to the piano’s descending figure, varied in repetition – dare one say ‘development’? – as enveloped by ensemble penumbra, did indeed suggest Grisey’s titular vortex. 

There and in the third movement, strings elevated us to the world of birdsong and its ‘compressed’ time. They seemed indeed to breathe as naturally as us humans, perhaps more so. Balances, roles, techniques were reinvented before our ears; proliferation remained, unlike that of, say, Boulez, centripetal rather than centrifugal. A universe was not being created, but rather turning in on itself, ‘compressed’. Piero and others had solo moments, but this was even more an ensemble piece, a collaborative effort, than Vivaldi. Or was it? Perhaps it was simply a different way to do something similar, to make music, as indeed we should find in Boulez too. Not only to make music, of course, but to make it interestingly, both as work and performance—and, one hopes, in listening too.

Southbank Centre - Xenakis at 100, 8 October 2022

Queen Elizabeth Hall

O-Mega; Palimpsest; Echange; Thalleïn for ensemble

Concret PH; Kottos; Rebonds A, Rebonds B

Psappha; Ikhoor; Tetras; Mikka and Mikka ‘S’; Pléïades

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

Philip Howard (piano)

Tim Gill (cello)

Oliver Lowe, Colin Currie (percussion)

London Sinfonietta

Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)

JACK Quartet

Colin Currie Group

Iannis Xenakis’s music does not age. It is an ahistorical cliché to say so, likewise to say how stark, elemental, uncompromising, visceral, mysterious, unique, and so on it is. Those descriptions retain their force, whilst remaining open to exception and to broader questioning. But they came to many listeners’ mind, judging by the general conversation at the Queen Elizabeth Hall throughout this Xenakis Day, seeming to lodge themselves in a sort of collective consciousness through which works and performances could be heard. I did not, alas, hear all of the day’s events, but I attended the two principal concerts in the hall itself, hearing also three of the works on offer in the foyer in between. It was, I think, enough—although the way the closing Pléïades left one aurally bludgeoned was less on account of the astounding performances from the Colin Corrie Group of six percussionists than the unsuitability of the hall: a pity, one necessarily felt, whilst recognising that the Southbank Centre had done what it could.

The first works I heard were four from the London Sinfonietta and Geoffrey Paterson, in performances like everything here that seemed quite beyond reproach. (If you are going to play Xenakis, you tend to do it well.) O-Mega, for percussion and ensemble, made for a splendid opener; after that, his final work, we could only go back, at least temporally. Oliver Lowe’s opening bongo tattoo, a call to something, it seemed, met with implacable wind response, a hieratic ritual initiated in a theatre of music that might always have been, except it had not. Moving from 1997 to 1979, Palimpsest, for eleven instruments, offered piano (and other) scales reinvented before our ears, its lines unmistakeably architectural, even engineered—to borrow a little too readily from the composer’s other callings. Sawmill strings, wind fractals in which one could see as well as hear the geometry, virtuoso drumming and so much more: this was not easy listening, nor was it supposed to be. It was quite a journey to final, mesmerising piano-and-drum-led climax.

Échange, for bass clarinet (Mark van de Wiel) and ensemble, was similarly yet entirely differently primal. Again, it sounded unmistakeably that ‘this was how it must be’, in a world of violence (like our own) quite unconcealed. How can we continue so blithely, it seemed to ask, in a world imperilled by nuclear attack? Xenakis must have asked the same thing, or so we fancied. And yet, life in all its physicality, all its mental wonder, continued. The bass clarinet, somewhere between priest and Pierrot, bade new sounds emerge at will, though that will was again sometimes no mean effort. The ensemble could, though, and did respond. The startling weirdness of an E-flat major chord could hardly have sounded more alien: a signal, it seemed, from yet another planet.

Thalleïn, the Sinfonietta’s first commission (1984) from Xenakis, was as implacable as anything yet heard, perhaps still more so. Siren-like—ambulance, not temptress—its opening had us browbeaten, and thereby strangely receptive to proliferating subtleties to come, even to the point of finding them inviting. Masses of sound continued to confront us to exhilarating effect. Ascending and descending scales led both ways, so it seemed, to hell, their mockery a deeply serious business. Piccolo pierced our consciousness, at times painfully, like a moment of alarm on an intensive care unit screen. There was blood-letting aplenty, the final string swarms, punctuated by percussion, as far as ever from consolation. 

Concret PH, like most, possibly all, musique concrete actually did seem to have aged—though even that is dependent on our knowing the unknowable Rankean ‘how it really was’, and how can we? Even if we had been there, in the 1958 Expo Philips Pavilion Xenakis as Le Corbusier’s assistant designed, memory would play its tricks. There is no ‘authenticity’; there never was; and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool or a charlatan. How admirably full of integrity Xenakis and his fellow avant-gardists seem contrasted with those snake-oil-salesmen to come. No, you cannot hear the St Matthew Passion as if you had never heard Xenakis; more to the point, why would you wish to? Or is that just to invest my own fantasy of postwar ‘inauthenticity’ as super- or supra-authenticity? There was, at any rate, room for fantasy here, if one closed one’s eyes and listened. Here was another world: inaccessible, perhaps, like that of Bach’s Leipzig, yet an idea not without its own seduction. 

Tim Gill’s performance of Kottos for cello really deserved the main hall, as did Lowe’s Rebonds A and Rebonds B. They were mightily fine accounts, though, wherever one heard them, the first’s evocation of the horrible hundred-armed creature, progeny of Uranus and Gaia, a song both fragile and stark: deeply rooted, if hardly in the conventional harmonic sense. Or perhaps it was, for I felt the implication at least of a harmonic language, even if I could never know it, even if it were in fact unknowable. There was whimsy in the asides, even as the ‘creature’ gained strength. And the music reached something akin to ecstasy, doubtless more effortful than that of Messiaen, yet no less genuine for that. The state of frenzy reached was a liberation of sorts, not least amidst the hell of our current existence. Both Rebonds pieces, A in particular, invoked—even if we knew not what (that inscrutability again). One was drawn in, less hypnotised than converted, in powerfully cumulative, remarkably different experiences of control and abandon. 

In the evening, Colin Currie’s Psappha seemed almost designed to cement our growing sense of structure as fundamental in an emphatic, again quasi-engineered sense to Xenakis’s work. The extraordinary musicianship on show never threatened to take on a life of its own; structure remained paramount. There seemed no other way. And the silences: they might almost have been from Bruckner. Here, again, was a summoning both archaic and not. Pléïades, here ordered ‘Metaux’, ‘Claviers’, ‘Peaux’, ‘Mélanges’, suffered, as I said, from an ear-splitting quality that made it, for me at least, too difficult to take, the sixxens too rarely emerging, to quote Xenakis, as ‘clouds, nebulas, and galaxies of the fragmented dust of beats’. Even here, though, ‘the idea of periodicity, repetition, duplication, faithful, pseudo-faithful,’ and above all ‘unfaithful copy’ shone through. ‘Claviers’ came closer to polyphony, its ripples even a little Boulezian, though I am not sure either composer would have approved of the comparison. Its patterns emerged as if on multiple screens before our ears. Drummed hypnosis in ‘Peaux’ prepared the way for less a synthesis or recapitulation than a gigantic rehearing, even rewriting when all instruments united in ‘Mélanges’. It was ear-splitting, again, at times, but in quite an aural landscape, at times almost dreamed.

Rhythm, its problems and opportunities, had haunted much of the string music in between, especially Ikhoor for string trio and Tetras for string quartet, both given by the JACK Quartet. Vivid, fiercely directed narratives marked out both, as did superhuman unanimity of purpose. Tetras seemed somehow both stranger and familiar, the strangeness heightened by sounds I might have sworn had emerged from electronics, did I not know otherwise. Voices, of whatever sort, bore witness, as if from Luigi Nono’s long-estranged cousin. Two works for violin solo, Mikka and Mikka ‘S’, were given by the quartet member absent for the trio, Austin Wulliman. Measured swarming, control in dilemma, line tracked as if in a real-time graph: throughout one ‘felt’ the mathematics, or imagined one did. As in every performance here, there was a rightness that left one knowing, like this music or not, it deserved as well as demanded to be heard.

Proms Saturday Matinée 4: London Sinfonietta/Fischer - Boulez, Grime, and Mason, 29 August 2015

Cadogan Hall

Boulez – Mémoriale (‘…explosante-fixe…’ Originel)

Helen Grime – A Cold Spring

Boulez – Domaines

Christian Mason – Open to Infinity: A Grain of Sand (United Kingdom premiere)

Boulez – Eclats/Multiples

Michael Cox (flute)

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

London Sinfonietta

Thierry Fischer (conductor)

 

And so, the Proms celebration of Pierre Boulez’s music drew to a close. I have previously lamented the lack of Répons, but otherwise, we have much for which to be grateful. Here, three of Boulez’s works were interspersed with works by two admiring young British composers, Helen Grime and Christian Mason.

First up was Mémoriale, hot on the heels of the Albert Hall performance of …explosante-fixe.... It was interesting to hear the two works in close succession, not least since that experience offered a reminder that the ear can sometimes play tricks: is one hearing electronic sounds or not? Clearly not on this occasion, but I might have guessed so, had I not known otherwise. The flute’s trills, the general contours: all were quite familiar by now; yet of course, they sounded different in a different performance (Michael Cox first among London Sinfonietta equals) and in a very different acoustic, that of Cadogan Hall. The ensemble here seemed to offer something of an aural shadow, reminiscent perhaps of Dialogue de l’ombre double. Boulez’s short piece sounded somewhere in between, or rather somewhere beyond, Debussy and Stravinsky, mediated by hints of the Bergian labyrinth. The horns’ final dying away into nothingness was not the least magical moment.

Helen Grime, in conversation with Tom Service, said how struck she had been, even at music college, by Boulez’s ear for harmony and colour. Her ear is formidable too, in no sense replicating, but happy to admit inspiration. The three movements of A Cold Spring (after a poem by Elizabeth Bishop) offer highly virtuosic writing, each having a featured solo instrument or pair of soloists. The first opens teeming with melody, as if paying updated homage to The Rite of Spring, albeit very much in its own voice. I thought also of Schoenberg – a work such as the First Chamber Symphony – in its melodic profusion, although I am unsure whether such associations are merely my affair. The stiller, second movement (‘Calmo’) brought to me a colouristic hint or two of Birtwistle, perhaps a hint too of a melancholy not entirely dissimilar to his. Dark bass lines (cello and double bass) seem to colour the invention above. Calmness is transformed into something else, prior to a final enchantment, blessed, so it seemed, by all instruments, but perhaps especially the harp. The transition to the third movement is led by the double bass, that movement itself sounding very much as a development of what has gone before, not least in its darkness – melody and harmony, as well as its instrumentation.

In Domaines, the number six is prevalent: the clarinettist, here the excellent Mark van de Wiel, plays from six different stands, each with an original page and a ‘mirror’ thereof, each of those twelve pages having six musical fragments, thus totalling seventy-two in all, ranging in length from forty seconds or so to – temporally speaking, at least – little more than the twinkling of an eye. The collision, navigated by the performer, between ritual theatre and a single instrument’s kaleidoscopic array of colours is not the least of the piece’s claims to drama. And that particular instrument, the clarinet, perhaps inevitably has one listen – and, indeed, watch – mindful of kinship with Birtwistle. Indeed, I could not help but think there was something, whether coincidental or otherwise, of Punch and Judy, albeit suaver, to this performance. One would certainly never have guessed the textual complexity of this assemblage of ‘single’ lines in a performance of such  mesmerising musical theatre. Was Boulez’s aspiration – sorry, not in the Liz Kendall sense – to unendliche Melodie even at this stage perhaps born of Wagner (Parsifal at Bayreuth)? And/or Pelléas? Every so often, there seemed also to be an instrumental, even melodic, reminder of Webern. At any rate, score and performance seemed endlessly generative. The idea of ‘mirrors’ offered other, French resonances, whether with respect to Ravel or even old, Baroque ‘doubles’. One could hear, or fancy one heard, such connections, but this was above all Boulez’s own path, the performer’s, and the listener’s.

Open to Infinity: A Grain of Sand (the title, I assume, inspired by Blake) is the second of Christian Mason’s works dedicated to Boulez, and intended as a tribute. As Mason put it, all three movements were as yet at the ‘grain of sand’ stage, but were open to expansion: a highly Boulezian conception. (Boulez acted as mentor to him at Lucerne.) Another nod to Boulez lies in the use by all fourteen players of crotales, intended as a reference to Le Visage nuptial. In each movement, one can hear, even in a first encounter, the varied working out of the same pitch material (almost Berg-like in its audible presence).  The éclat of the first, ‘In a Grain of Sand’, though it could not be mistaken for Boulez, could certainly be heard as homage. The second, ‘In a Wild Flower’, has almost jazzy inflections: perhaps a touch, dare I suggest it, of Boulez’s would-be antipode, Henze? Whatever the truth of that, there is certainly revealed a keen ear for colour and its relationship to rhythm (which, I admit, could equally be inspired by the orchestral Notations: pure speculation on my part). Dramatically insistent figures characterise the third, ‘In the Palm of Your Hand’, with the London Sinfonietta offering, in a true array of colours, all the performative commitment one would expect.

Eclats/Multiples depends upon split-second decisions from the conductor, not the first and certainly not the last of Boulez’s insistence on the importance of performance. It certainly received a splendid performance from the Sinfonietta and Thierry Fischer. The opening piano éclat announced its Messiaenic inheritance; hearing John Constable, one could almost imagine the ghost of Yvonne Loriod. Such resonances, even echoes, again began to make their own way, however: to construct, perhaps even to destroy, and to suggest further creative-destructive connections (whether thinking of the Second Piano Sonata or the endlessly misquoted interview with Der Spiegel). The illusion and the construction of line familiar from Domaines took on new life in ensemble. The ‘pointillism’ of 1950s serialism has generally been exaggerated, give or take an odd Stockhausen piece; this seemed an object lesson in compositional and performative constructivism from the following decade. (Just, one might say, as in Boulez’s conducting of Webern.) It was a joy to meet in new garb old aural friends from the world of Le Marteau sans maître: to know, with hindsight, where they might lead – or not. Why is this wonderful work not more often performed?

 

London Sinfonietta - Messiaen, 21 February 2014

Hall One, Kings Place

 Préludes: ‘La Colombe’ and ‘Plainte calme’

Thème et Variations
Quatuor pour la fin du temps

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

Alexandra Wood (violin)
Oliver Coates (cello)
John Constable (piano)

 

I had not realised that Kings Place’s current ‘Chamber Classics Unwrapped’ series had found its repertoire by virtue of a public vote. Still more surprising was the fact that such a poll had resulted in Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time coming in at number eleven. But then, I suppose that those likely to participate in such an exercise are probably not members of the Katherine Jenkins fan club. At any rate, it was a welcome opportunity to hear this extraordinary work, here given a degree of context in being prefaced by a little more Messiaen.

 

Two of the piano Préludes received rather wooden performances by John Constable – surprisingly so, given his record as pianist in the London Sinfonietta. ‘La Colombe’ never really took flight; as with ‘Plainte calme’, one heard the notes, and had a sense of how they might otherwise be despatched, but little more. Debussy’s influence nevertheless shone through, though how could it not? At any rate, the great leap forward to his mature style would be indicated in retrospect. The Thème et Variations fared somewhat better, gaining freedom as the performance progressed, though Alexandra Wood’s violin was not always in tune with the piano. We were reminded, though, quite how much Messiaen owed to Franck, not only in his organ works. And ultimately, a sense of the ecstatic, later to be more fully, theologically developed, was achieved.

 

Ensemble was undoubtedly strengthened by the arrival of Mark can de Wiel and Oliver Coates for the Quartet. Although the music does not ever really sound ‘like’ Schoenberg, I could not help but be put in mind from time to time of the ever-versatile Pierrot ensemble, here of course minus the flute, but given the varying combinations nestling itself in the musical subconscious. From the opening ‘Liturgie de cristal’ one is here in unmistakeable Messiaen territory, both in terms of eschatology and musical process – though for him, and indeed for us, they are one and the same. Coates’s cello and Constable’s piano offered reassuring irregular regularity of pulse, above which the birds could – and did – sing. Pitch repeated and rhythm rotated, showing once again how much ‘total serialism’ owed to the composer who, in a very strong sense, was its founding father. So was the scene set for the Angel’s announcement of the End of Time, angelic power and what might just have been the sweetness – ‘blue-orange’ –  of the Beatific Vision juxtaposed so as somehow to make sense of each other. Van de Wiel’s ‘Abîme des oiseaux’ was a tour de force, but far more than that: musical sense was ever present, likewise the birds’ heavenly opposition to the abyss.


Following the ‘Intermède’, almost charming in a more conventionally Gallic sense, and yet reminding us, through thematic recollection, of its pivotal role, the Word appeared in the beginning of ‘Louange à l’Eternité de Jésus’. Rearranged though it may be from an earlier work for six (!) ondes Martenots for the 1937 Paris Exposition, its ecstatic manner, Coates’s cello reverent and possessed of seemingly endless reserves of bow, shone through. Time shaded almost into eternity, ‘infiniment lent, extatique’. The ensuing ‘Danse de la fureur’ reinstated the primacy of rhythm as the apocalyptic seven trumpets were evoked. All players ensured once again that crucial irregular regularity, without which the music would have degenerated into nonsense. The climax duly struck terror into our hearts. With the ‘Fouillis d-arcs-en-ciel, pour l’Ange qui annonce  la fin du Temps,’ there was achieved a proper sense of summation of what had gone before, and yet hearing, perhaps even sighting, of something new through the tangle of rainbows. With the closing ‘Louange à l’immortalité de Jésus,’ Wood and Constable beautifully, movingly, brought Messiaen’s earlier organ Diptyque into what seemed in retrospect as though it should always have been its home. Paradise, just maybe, was gimpsed through the Word made flesh.

 

Bronfman/Philharmonia/Salonen: Bartók, 27 October 2011

Royal Festival Hall, London

Contrasts
Suite: The Wooden Prince
Dance Suite
Piano Concerto no.2

Yefim Bronfman (piano)
Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay (violin)
Mark van de Wiel (clarinet).

The penultimate concert in the Philharmonia’s series, ‘Infernal Dance: Inside the World of Béla Bartók’ maintained, indeed built upon, the high standards heard earlier this year: Esa-Pekka Salonen really seems to be in his element in Bartók’s music, as does the Philharmonia. First off was Contrasts, for which soloist Yefim Bronfman joined the orchestra’s leader, Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay and principal clarinettist, Mark van de Wiel in a true chamber-music performance. Balance between the players was as finely judged as that between slinkiness – as Malcom Gillies put it in his programme note, ‘creative reinterpretation of [commissioner Benny] Goodman’s musicianship, deliciously filtered through Bartók’s remarkable ethnomusicological ear’ – and echt-modernist Bartókian rhythm. From the first movement onwards, musical kinship with composers such as Prokofiev and Ravel (I thought especially of the latter’s violin sonata) was in evidence, likewise a real sense of the three musicians as dramatic protagonists. The clarinet cadenza was superbly despatched. Mystery was struck from the outset of the second movement, ‘Pihenő’ (‘Relaxation’), its bitter-sweetness properly touching, violin harmonics and subdued piano rumbling – casting a glance backward to the First Piano Concerto – exemplary, the music’s growing intricacies finely charted. Visontay’s violin set the pace for the others in the third movement’s diabolical drama – I was put in mind of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale – though van de Wiel’s clarinet riffs sounded every bit as impressive, likewise the softer, creepier passages, which emerged both menacing of full of delight in the composer’s fabulous musical invention.

The 1932 suite from The Wooden Prince followed, perhaps for me the highlight of the concert. Bartók’s Prelude evoked Nature’s Rheingold-style awakening more evocatively than one had any right to imagine. The music grew with great cumulative power, magnificent orchestral weight, and Ravelian colouristic fantasy in more or less perfect equipoise. Salonen did not lose sight of the ballet; one could certainly picture the music being danced to, though alas it would be unlikely to sound anything like as good as this in a danced performance. The dances were all characterised by sharp rhythmic profile, with some especially splendid brass playing, but the fantastic realm vied equally for attention, a Szymanowski-like magic carpet brought before our ears. Both luxuriant warmth and the more forward-looking elements of the score were equally apparent; even the celesta hinted at the Music for Strings. If only we could have heard the entire ballet from these musicians: maybe another time…

The Dance Suite opened almost as if pure rhythm, gradually melodised, as it were, by Amy Harman’s superb bassoon solo, Bartók’s far-from-easy piano part – I remember playing it in a student performance a few years ago – in the highly capable hands of guest principal, Elizabeth Burley. More wistful moments, in the first movement and elsewhere, displayed Salonen’s astute distinction between sentiment and sentimentality. The third dance, ‘Allegro vivace’, was taken at a considerable pace, yet seemed just right – as Bartók must. (That one need not slavishly follow his metronome markings is illustrated by his own performances, yet the tempo has to sound as though it is the only one possible.) Rhythmic precision and depth of string tone distinguished a fine performance throughout.

Bronfman returned to the stage for the Second Piano Concerto, the first movement’s solo part immediately pounding and implacable, yet equally notable in dialogue with wind – the Philharmonia brass especially – and percussion. Bronfman imparted clarity as well as power, permitting Bartók’s Bachian heritage to shine through. Silent during the first movement, strings at the outset of the second sounded anything but lush, Bartók’s glassy alienation arguably going further than ever Stravinsky dared; the piano could therefore not only respond coolly, but had ample opportunity to grow in intensity. Lively, even helter-skelter episodes were not purchased at the cost of bite, though I occasionally wondered whether it was all a little too unremitting. (One might with justice respond that so the music should be.) The finale united the virtues of both earlier movements, never losing sight of Bartók’s profusion of lyricism. Bronfman’s Romantic manner was arguably not always quite to be identified with Salonen’s more modernistic impulse, but the slight tension proved productive rather than glaring.