Stefanovich - ‘Labyrinth’: Bach, Kurtág, Debussy, and Liszt, 19 February 2026

 

Milton Court

Bach: Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother, BWV 992
Kurtág: Eight Piano Pieces, op.3; Játékok: ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin – enragée’
Debussy: ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Birthday Elegy for Judit – for the second finger of her left hand’. ‘Apple Blossom’
Liszt: Nuages gris, S 199; Unstern! S 208
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Adoration, Adoration, Accursed Desolation’, ‘Dolna’
Debussy: ‘Des pas sur la neige’, Études: ‘pour les huit doigts’, ‘pour les arpèges composés’
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Objet trouvé’, Twelve microludes, ‘Antiphony in F-sharp’, ‘Les adieux (in Janáčeks Manier)’
Bach: The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080: Contrapunctus I
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Ligatura y’
Bach: The Art of Fugue: Contrapunctus XIV
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Pantomime’

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)  

Images: Ed Maitland Smith

György Kurtág is the last man standing of the 'postwar avant garde': not merely standing, but writing too. Elliott Carter’s late period was unprecedented, a regular source of wonder, but even he did not write two operas in his nineties, the second, Die Stechardin, to be premiered in Budapest on the first full day of his second century. For the centenary itself, cities across the world offered thanks and celebration. London’s response was offered in typically imaginative form by Tamara Stefanovich. 

Bach’s music has proved a lodestar for Kurtág’s creative life, whether in his piano transcriptions or deeper intellectual and emotional influence upon his own ‘original’ compositions. It was fitting, therefore, that he should feature so prominently in this finely constructed programme. The first piece, the early Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother, might have seemed a strange choice, but its uncharacteristic aspects reminded us quite how adventurous, even avant-gardist Bach was, how broad his terms of reference were, and how he could confound as much as any other composer. Stefanovich played up its character, especially at the outset, not least in the instrumental – in more than one sense – role of ornaments. It might almost have been a work by a French. Navigating a fine line between harpsichord terraced dynamics and piano shading, she showed not only how one need not choose, but how the interaction both on a local and a more sectional level could contribute to form and, in this unusual case, programmatic narrative. As it progressed, its chromaticism truly told: melting yet directed, in almost Mozartian fashion. Bachian joy in extravert, major mode was just as apparent and felt. Bells pealed, horns called, the labyrinth that gave its name to the recital as a whole deepened: here was a mini-recital in itself as well as a curtain-raiser of blazing originality. 

Taken attacca, Kurtág’s bagatelle-like Eight Piano Pieces, op.3, now sixty years old, emerged in similarly declamatory, expressive, and original fashion. They formed a coherent whole, whilst exuding individual character of their own, contrast, complement, and dialectical mediation between what had passed before a guiding thread through this section of the labyrinth. Given the authority of the piano playing, one could readily take its virtuosity for granted, but of course one should not; not only was it laudable in itself, it is a key aspect to Kurtág’s exploration of his instrument, just as would be the case in Bach, Debussy or Liszt. Though Kurtág could not have known them at this time, Boulez’s Notations sounded as if a reference point, albeit distilled into still more starkly concentrated form. Webern was doubtless a crucial mediator here. 

Pairing of Debussy and Kurtág’s ‘Fille aux cheveux de lin’ pieces likewise ensued with the inevitability – and initial serendipity – of a fine pairing of food and wine. A barrage of coughing from all quarters was unfortunate, to put it mildly, but the emergence of Debussy’s understated radicalism, through Stefanovich’s endlessly variegated piano line, from within the world of Kurtág suggested a performance very much for this programme; had the programming been otherwise so would the programming, which is just as it should be. Kurtág in turn seemed to prepare the way in musical transformation for the more overtly world of late Liszt. The Venetian haze of Nuages gris was now tinged with further shadows cast and faintly dappled light shed by Kurtág and Debussy. So much twentieth- and even twentieth-first-century music is rooted in this strange, twilit world, yet that should not lead us to overlook its more formal, generative legacy. There was little chance of doing so here, no more than in a post-Mephistophelian performance of Unstern! Collective rhetoric harnessed to musical ends, the notes seemed to extend in all directions, Liszt the seer momentarily elevated. 

Returning to the world of Játékok, or perhaps better that world renewed, Kurtág very much created his own world in a few notes from those ashes, Webern again the principal, though far from the only, ghost at the feast. The combination of insistence and fantasy in, say, ‘Dolna’ suggesting distillation of Bach’s Capriccio into a fleeting yet unmistakeably tangible essence. Falling back into Debussy in an archlike form reminiscent of Kurtág’s beloved Bartók, the recital brought us steps in the snow without hammers followed by a pair of Études to remind us that ‘technique’, both as composition and performance, can and should be just as ‘poetic’ and thrilling as anything else. A succession of further Kurtág miniatures seemed, like the music of his forebears, to extend the piano keyboard and its capabilities before our eyes and ears. Every twist of the kaleidoscope brought a statement both consequent and new, the spectre of Ligeti listening, nodding, and, I think, smiling. 

Then to Bach’s Art of Fugue, perhaps as far removed in character as well as chronology from the opening Capriccio. The relationship between freedom and organisation is always complex, whether in Bach, Kurtág, Debussy, Liszt, or others—or indeed in performance. Yet the absolute ‘rightness’ of what we heard here, even if it could readily be heard otherwise, seemed perfectly suited to Bach’s testament, its first Contrapunctus both prepared by all that had preceded it and a cleansing, nourishing sorbet. Dignified and directed, its harmony and counterpoint were in excellent balance. Kurtág’s ‘Ligatura y’ seemed in its way to mirror Bach by way of Webern and Messiaen, in turn preparing the way for the crowning glory of the unfinished Contrapunctus XIV, symmetry and development indivisible—until the labyrinthine thread broke off: silence! Kurtág’s ‘Pantomime’ proved the perfect, Beckettian response in near-silence of its own. As Simon Rattle remarked of the composer’s Stele, it is ‘a gravestone on which the entire history of European music is written’. Yet Kurtág, this recital reminded us, is alive—and writing.

LSO Chamber Ensemble et al./Pascal - Boulez, 27 January 2025

Milton Court

Initiale
Messagesquisse
Dérive 1
Sonatine for flute and piano
Anthèmes 2 for violin and live electronics

Benjamin Marquise Gilmore (violin)

David Cohen (cello)

Gareth Davies (flute)

Joseph Horvat (piano)

Sound Intermedia

LSO Chamber Ensemble

Guildhall School Cellos

Maxime Pascal (conductor)

The Boulez centenary celebrations are underway. If London’s – and much of the rest of the world’s – response so far looks more muted than one might have hoped, something is better than nothing and there is all the more reason to cherish what we have. Following an afternoon symposium (oddly timed on a Monday, when most of us must work) the Barbican Centre offered an excellent chamber concert of five works, from LSO musicians and friends, directed where appropriate by Maxime Pascal.

What could have been better as an opening than the 1987 brass fanfare Initiale, which I had last heard at the opening of Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal thirty years later? Although Milton Court lacks a ready possibility – at least unless electronics are employed – for the Gabrieli-like spatial element deployed in Frank Gehry’s Berlin hall, the LSO players’ balcony elevation nonetheless signalled development of our concert expectations beyond Boulez’s ‘museum’ of the musical past. Metrical complexity, rubato implied through exactitude, was there from the off. More kaleidoscopic and varied in mood than your typical fanfare, its cascading, proliferating echoes of Répons helped establish aural expectations for what was to come.

Messagesquisse was given by David Cohen and six cellists from the Guildhall School (Gabriel Francis-Deqhani, Kosta Popovic, Nathaniel Horton, James Conway, Theo Bently Curtin, and Seth Collin), conducted by Pascal with properly Boulezian precision and commitment. I was again intrigued and delighted by the tricks music could play on my perception—or perhaps the other way round. Initially, I could have sworn one cello was not playing, only to see and then hear that it was, at a pitch I had mistakenly thought another was: a smaller-scale sense, perhaps, of that sense of spatial magic squares that would so inform a later masterwork such as sur Incises (via, perhaps, common inspiration ultimately in Les Noces). Brimming with melody, impassioned of mood, harmonically compelling: it was everything Boulez is, and everything his detractors would say his music is not. Dynamic contrasts and all manner of other post-Beethovenian dialectics abounded in ‘organised delirium’. Contagious proliferation of a single line suggested at times a very French inheritance in the music of the clavecinistes. At times, I even thought of Nono. And what performances these were, reminding any who might need it of the crucial role of performance in Boulez’s music.

The shifting transformations of Dérive 1 proved an similar yet different delight, music spiralling before our ears in a mesmerising tour of aural pleasure. The temptation was to ask for more, which of course we should eventually have in its successor, Dérive 2. This music, though, spoke for itself, no mere precursor but a masterwork of proliferation in its own right.

The Sonatine for flute and piano received an outstanding and confounding performance from Gareth Davies and Joseph Havlet. No one would dispute the work’s allure, yet the array of elements in its first movement that might – just might – have to them something of the more neoclassical Schoenberg (and Debussy) seemed more than ever to rejoice in the necessity of internal and eternal explosion and destruction. It might not sound quite ‘like’ the Second Piano Sonata, but the Sonatine’s progress suggested ever closer kinship, emotionally and intellectually. Here, it felt, was instantiated a post-Notations world of infinite possibility.

Last up was Benjamin Maruise Gilmore with Ian Dearden and Jonathan Green of Sound Intermedia in Anthèmes 2. Its world of violin and electronics sounded, like much else, both old and new: not so very different from Messagesquisse or other works with solo and double/shadow, and yet… Echoes expected and unexpected beguiled and surprised as music from plainchant to Messiaen and beyond ricocheted around us. Indeed, an unsuspected harmonic sweetness suggested what remain less acknowledged lessons learned from Boulez’s teacher. As waves of sound lapped upon our consciousnesses, it was Debussy’s La Mer, endlessly transformed, that next suggested itself as fons et origo; that and, of course, the composer’s own endless imagination. The museum lives and develops; so do music and performance history of Boulez, one of its newer recruits.

Esfahani - Rasmussen, Berio, Srnka, Cage, and Abbasi, 17 January 2019

Milton Court Concert Hall

Sunleif Rasmussen: Quadroforone no.1 (2018, world premiere)

Berio: Rounds (1965)

Miroslav Srnka: Triggering (2018)

Cage: HPSCHD (1967-9): 'Solo VII'

Anahita Abbasi: Intertwined Distances (2018, UK premiere)

Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord)

Electronic Music Department of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (electronic realisation)

Images: Mark Allan/Barbican

Now this is what I call a harpsichord recital programme. We have all the time in the world to hear more Bach, Rameau, Byrd, et al., and shall very happily do so. But what could be more important than to establish and, just as important, to strengthen the instrument’s standing as an instrument of the present? This, moreover, was what I should call a harpsichord recital performance too. In such a situation, one can all too readily take virtuosity and musicianship for granted, concentrating, as is only natural, on the music ‘itself’. It may be unnatural, but it is also unfair, for nothing does new music a greater service, alas, than well-meaning yet incompetent performance. Such were the circumstances in which Pierre Boulez founded the Domaine musical. Let us steer clear of the cul-de-sac of ‘discipleship’ and say that Boulez has many successors. Mahan Esfahani certainly took his place among them in this Milton Court recital.

Sunleif Rasmussen’s Quadroforone no.1, a Barbican commission, received its world premiere. It is intended to be the first – as the numbering may have implied – in a series of four pieces that will set a live instrument against recorded, transformed sounds of itself. Ironically, or perhaps not, my first impression, prior to hearing any electronic transformation, was the unadulterated sound of Esfahani’s instrument: very much a modern instrument, in a grand line we might trace back at least to Wanda Landowska. What struck me throughout the twenty minutes or so of the performance was above all a sense of material turning around, not just in the spatial realisation, although that must have played a part, and of never quite repeating: a spiral, then, at least to this confirmed, even obsessive Hegelian. Electronics conveyed a sense, almost old-fashioned, of a round: interesting, and perhaps noteworthy, that that rather than ‘canon’ was the word that first came to mind. Confrontation and integration alike between solo instrument and electronic at times suggested a reinvention before our ears of a Baroque concerto. Then came a slower section, apparently, according to the programme, entitled ‘Nocturne’, in which a duet between hands, between manuals, co-existed, indeed interacted, with duetting between soloist and electronics. There was a sense of unwinding: again circular, spiralling, but downwards. Gathering pace once again, upwards (even when not in pitch), the music arrived at a final section, seemingly going nowhere but going nowhere interestingly. Harmonies and hierarchies of hearing continued to reproduce themselves, albeit with ever greater difficulty, until – nothing.

Luciano Berio’s classic Rounds followed, our early music for the evening. Square notes and round notes, turning the page around, upside down too: it emerged in contrast very much as a successor to, and/or precursor of, Rasmussen’s piece. The delicacy of playing and writing, silence included, registration changes telling, offered a keen sense of the ludic. But if procedures were audible – rightly, helpfully audible – they were never the music ‘itself’, any more than in Berg. Wit of work and performance alike proved fleeting in the best sense.

Miroslav Srnka’s Triggering appears to be relatively scant in its notation. (I am judging simply from Esfahani’s typically engaging, informative spoken introduction, since I have seen the scores for none of these pieces, save the Berio – and that many years ago.) About 85 per cent, we were told, of the instruction to the performer is in pitch classes alone: time or better times, central to the composer’s conception, may in his words, be ‘political, social, private, metaphorical, sporting, humorous, existential, climatic’. In this piece, he attempts ‘to construct all these different times – the instants and the betweentimes – until the mechanism of playing dissolves and the times change in nature.’ That ‘instant’ lies between the pressing of the key and the plectrum plucking the string: very much, then harpsichord music. Electronics come later – in the guise of e-bows attached to the strings of a second harpsichord – but even in the first of the eight short movements or sections, ‘Digital Wounds’, the digital binary being one of either plucking or not plucking, the low pitches speak in a fashion that does not sound entirely un-electronic; or so, at least it sounded in performance and listening. Esfahani’s extraordinary virtuosity, first over two manuals, and even over two harpsichords, was very much part of the theatre, but this was a theatre of musical drama, no ‘happening’. Major scales in ‘Major Rain’ again played with our notions of what was predictable: a connection, surely, with Rasmussen’s piece. We more or less ‘knew’ what would happen, but never quite: how extended would it be? In which direction would the ‘rain’ fall? What would the note values be? In sum, this seemed a highly visual work, in an almost programmatic sense, albeit for a digital, video age. Electronics came to evoke the unearthly, ‘historical’ world of the glass armonica, until work and performance alike subsided into silence – and, as the lights went down, darkness too.

John Cage’s ‘Solo VII’ from the installation, HPSCHD, is still more scantily notated – or rather not notated at all. His instruction is simply: ‘Practice and/or perform any composition(s) by Mozart. Amplitude and registration free.’ Esfahani chose the D minor Fantasia, KV 397/385g, and via an I Ching website, divined the parameters for questions he had previously defined. At which bar to start practising? Bar 57. At which point after the electronics had started, should he start practising (in multiples of ten seconds)? 110 seconds in. At what point should he stop practising? 2 minutes. And at which point after that, should he start to perform (in, if I recall correctly, multiples of thirty seconds)? 90 seconds. All the while, the electronic realisation by the Guildhall School’s Electronic Music Department, with its own questions and divinations, albeit founded upon the original, if you like ‘period’ electronics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ran its course: an absolute, set duration. There was wit, for instance when Esfahani pencilled something in (a fingering?) whilst practising, but it was also deadly serious: as surely Cage must be. It never came across as a joke, as whimsy. I was led to reflect on ways of listening, of being able to listen, of not listening too. A wonderfully free performance of the Mozart Fantasia unfolded, insofar as one could hear, far freer in tempo than I should ever have dared imagine, let alone convincingly despatched. Was that the point? The very question seemed beside the point; so too, perhaps, did any point.

Finally, we came to the United Kingdom premiere of Anahita Abbasi’s Intertwined Distances, a commission from Esfahani himself. Here, the quadrophonic electronics are taken from an improvisation (if I remember correctly!) Esfahani gave as part of a recital in San Diego. The composer plays with conceptions of distance, writing: ‘According to Merriam-Webster, distance is a separation in time, an extent of advance from a beginning; and in mathematics it refers to the degree or amount of separation between two points, lines, surfaces, or objects.’ How do they intertwine, then? How did they intertwine in time? Figures sounded generative and (almost) repetitive, sometimes simultaneously, yet (again) never quite predictably. A quasi-Ligetian swarm arose as the work gathered pace– probably more my seeking for ways to describe than an ultimately meaningful comparison – out of which electronic sounds emerged, whatever the truth of the material’s actual origins. Distance and dialogue, dialogue in distance: such seemed to be the crux of performance and listening as activity. There was, without doubt, an extraordinarily inventive musical imagination at work, but it was never merely invention: it was a sonic and instrumental drama that seemed somehow to summarise, to extend, and quite properly to question many of the tendencies we had heard so far. This was, then, a programme and performance of harpsichord music for the here and now.

Neuwirth/Breslauer - Die Stadt ohne Juden, PHACE/Paz, 15 November 2018

Milton Court Concert Hall

Images: Mark Allan/Barbican

PHACE

Nacho de Paz (conductor)

The rediscovery of Hans Karl Breslauer’s 1924 silent film, Die Stadt ohne Juden (‘The City Without Jews’), has involved a degree of reconstruction. Based on Hugo Bettauer’s novel of the same name, published two years earlier, the film was long thought lost and had indeed pretty much disappeared from broader public consciousness. Olga Neuwirth saw the first fragmented discovered in the Netherlands when she was twenty-two; further material for the ‘new’, present version was later spotted in a Paris flea market, but this reconstruction and restoration by the Austrian Film Archive almost certainly diverge from what was originally seen (especially when it comes to the ‘dream’ conclusion). Neuwirth’s approach from the head of the Vienna Biennale to compose a new score to accompany performances came as a consequence of that Paris rediscovery. She initially declined, not least since she was at work on her new opera for Vienna, Orlando, but was eventually persuaded to take a break from work on that score. The co-commission comes from the Barbican Centre, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, ZDF/ARTE, and the Basel Symphony Orchestra.

Bettauer’s novel seems to have been darker than the film. (I say ‘seems to’, since I must rely on secondary information, not yet having had chance to read it for myself. I shall now certainly try to do so.) His other writings include treatments of US ‘interracial’ marriage and various women’s issues. He was also an early victim of Austrian Nazism, condemned as a ‘red poet’ and ‘corrupter of youth’, and murdered in 1925 by Otto Rothstock, a dental technician and (most likely) party member. Breslauer, on the other hand, seems to have been an opportunist: happy to make films with Jews, to introduce scenes of Viennese Jewish life – fascinating as historical documents too – into the film, scenes not present in the book, yet also willing later on to join the Nazi Party and to make propaganda films. Such is obviously in itself a fascinating, disturbing context for a twenty-first-century composer, let alone one so socially and politically aware as Neuwirth.

It is, of course, impossible for us not to view a film about Vienna, sorry Utopia, let alone a film in which that city votes to expel its Jewish population – here with the happy ending that it staves off economic collapse by welcoming that population back, a Jewish hero also getting the girl – through post-Holocaust spectacles. That said, it does us no harm and indeed much good to attempt additionally to view it from a 1920s standpoint. (That holds even, perhaps especially, when we are trying to come to terms with what would later ensue.) Neuwirth’s score, for live ensemble of amplified instruments and tape, plays with distance and avoids the potential Romanticism – as she sees it – of writing portentously for a large orchestra, as was initially requested of her. There is an irony here that it is tempting to view in part as Jewish; I cannot help but think Heine would have approved. It was important for Neuwirth not to fall into the trap, as, following Hanns Eisler, she see it, of mere representation. Nevertheless, she employs fragments of found material, be it Austrian popular song, sonorities of the twenties (for instance, saxophone salon music) to bridge the gap between ‘then’ and ‘now’. This is emphatically not something to consign to ‘history’, nor should it be. The excellence of performances from PHACE under Nacho de Paz, perfectly synchronised with the demands of film accompaniment, did likewise. Neuwirth’s longstanding interest in film – at eighteen, she studied both film and music, before opting to concentrate on the latter – takes, after Long Highway, another productive turn.

In brief discussion with Bryony Gordon beforehand, Neuwirth related the irony of having arrived in London to hear Theresa May echo the words of the Utopian Chancellor on ‘leadership’. This is not, repeat not, an issue to be consigned to ‘history’. Alas, as history shows us time and time again, by the time we start to think, artistically to create, it is almost always too late. We ‘citizens of nowhere’: we know, like the Windrush Generation, like our EU27 brothers and sisters, where May’s Utopia will lead.

Clayton/Britten Sinfonia/Adès - Beethoven and Barry, 23 May 2018

Milton Court

Beethoven: Six Ecossaises, WoO 83

An die ferne Geliebte, op.98

In questa tomba obscura, WoO 133

Gerald Barry: Jabberwocky

Beethoven: Quintet in E-flat major, op.16

Allan Clayton (tenor)

Alex Wide (horn)

Timothy Rundle (oboe)

Joy Farrall (clarinet)

Sarah Burnett (bassoon)

Thomas Adès (piano)

As a whole, this concert proved a curious affair. It probably made more sense in the context of Thomas Adès’s series of Beethoven and Barry concerts with the Britten Sinfonia. The idea of a night off from the symphonic Beethoven to turn to chamber works was, in principle, a good one, but the sole Gerald Barry piece here seemed oddly out of place – and not in a productive, provocative way. Even the Beethoven pieces did not really seem to fit together especially well. A lovely performance of the op.16 Quintet nevertheless made the evening worthwhile.

The first half, however, put one in mind of that proverbial, clichéd curate’s egg. Adès walked onto the stage and apologetically informed us that two works had been added to the programme. Nothing wrong with that, although Beethoven hardly requires apology. The first was his Six Ecossaises, WoO 83, which many of us will recall from childhood piano lessons. Adès’s performance proved a curious mixture of the reticent – as though he would rather be playing the dances at home – and the heavy-handed. It became more flexible, to good effect, as it went on. Ultimately, though, little was made of these charming miniatures, whether individually or as a whole.

An die ferne Geliebte followed, Adès continuing to show a good deal of reticence, for most of the time very much the ‘accompanist’. Allan Clayton offered a sincere, verbally attentive performance until the final song, in which he sounded curiously harsh of tone, even hectoring. Still, there was a good deal to savour, for instance a true hint of sadness at the close of the fifth stanza of ‘Es kehret der Maien’. Adès seemed to come into his own as the cycle progressed. If he still came across as shadowing the singer at the beginning of ‘Leichte Segler in den Höhen’, his shaping of a minor-mode phrase at the end of the third stanza – ‘Klagt ihr, Vöglein, meine Qual’, offered just the sort of touching insight I had hoped he would bring to the music of a composer with whom he is not so obviously associated. The transition to the next song, ‘Diese Wolken in den Höhen’ was also skilfully handled.

The second additional work was In questa tomba oscura, WoO 133, Beethoven’s setting of a poem by Giuseppe Carpani, amongst other things an early biographer of Haydn (and royalist spy!) This proved a duly haunting performance of a song whose text has a man visit the grave of his beloved, albeit from the standpoint of the latter, who reproaches her lover for not having thought more of her whilst she was alive. Perhaps again Adès might have brought out the piano part more strongly. Beethoven’s harmonies nevertheless told – and there is much to be said for understatement. Clayton clearly relished its challenges, heightening without overstating its curious drama.

‘Curious’ is certainly a word to be applied to Lewis Carroll, and to Gerald Barry, let alone to their combination in Jabberwocky, commissioned and premiered by Britten Sinfonia in 2012. The idea of performing its nonsense words in French and German translation is typically brilliant – and makes just as much (non)sense as the original. Clayton’s declamatory performance perhaps inevitably put one in mind of Barry’s brilliant operatic comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest. Alex Wide’s bizarre horn flourishes added another level to the studiously inexplicable entertainment unfolded. The song – should one call it a ‘song’? – seemed, almost in spite of itself, to grow, even to develop. And then it was over.

Additional wind players joined the ensemble after the interval for Beethoven’s Quintet for piano and wind instruments, op.16. It was the sheer gorgeousness of their sonorities that struck me first – and Beethoven at his most Mozartian (or, his tragedy, post-Mozartian). Balance with the piano here sounded much improved; there was greater impetus to the performance too. This is music that needs plenty of space, a grandeur of scale if you will, as well as chamber intimacy; it received both. The second movement was again well paced, its post-Mozartian sadnesses again given space to breathe, yet also to progress. Here, Adès could prove a little indulgent, his solo rubati occasionally puzzling; in concert, however, everything delighted. The hunting finale again summoned up Mozart’s ghost – as opposed to Haydn’s ebullience. Yet, quite rightly, not all was subtlety, not all was interiority. That balance and others were finely judged, in a performance of almost tiggerish enthusiasm.

LSO Chamber Orchestra/Antonini - JS Bach, WF Bach, CPE Bach, Telemann, Haydn, 13 January 2017

Milton Court Concert Hall

JS Bach – Orchestral Suite no.1 in C major, BWV 1066

WF Bach – Symphony in F major, F 67
CPE Bach – Symphony in G major, Wq 182/1
Telemann – Recorder Concerto in C major, TWV 51
Haydn – Symphony no.49, La Passione

LSO Chamber Orchestra

Giovanni Antonini (recorder, conductor)

It is a rare delight to hear the LSO, even if in ‘chamber orchestral’ formation, play music from the first half of the eighteenth century. Since the death of Colin Davis, it has even been something of a rare delight to hear the orchestra in eighteenth-century music at all. (I suppose we should at least be grateful to have been spared ‘Gergiev’s Haydn’.) Moving across the road from the Barbican to Milton Court was, in such circumstances, a sensible move; it certainly ensured that a small orchestra did not sound too small. The one problem, and I am afraid it was at times well-nigh insurmountable, was the conductor, Giovanni Antonini. Frankly, the LSO – and we – deserved better.

I kept an open mind for as long as I could. If, for these ears, trained on Klemperer and Richter, the introduction to the first movement of Bach’s C major Orchestral Suite sounded light, airy, and, alas, all too short-breathed, perhaps there would be a way of challenging those ears to listen differently, to take the performance on its own terms. The problem, despite the break-neck speed that ensued, was less of tempo as such, then of the lack of space for the music to breathe. Gorgeous, bubbly, woodwind playing offered some compensation, though. A courtly, undeniably Gallic Courante fared better, as did a surprisingly vigorous first Gavotte, its companion quite the textural contrast. Counterpoint was admirably clear. Alas, Antonini conducted with all the musical awareness of a sewing machine. The Forlane impressed with its vigour too, although greater warmth from the strings – low, but thankfully not no, vibrato – would have been welcome. The Minuets had a reasonable sense of character; the Bourrées were excitable, closer to Vivaldi (!) than to Bach; the Passepieds were suavely enough despatched. I listened in vain, however, for Antonini to show the slightest awareness of harmonic rhythm; and without that, Bach is lost.

 

The F major Symphony by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach is more of a rarity, and thus scored points on that alone. Its first and third movements were performed with a sense of the strangeness of their disjuctures, yet Antonini seemed incapable, or at least unwilling, to mould a series of rhetorical gestures into something greater than the sum of their parts. Nervously dramatic playing again offered some compensation. The intervening Andante really needed more space, less metronomic regularity, although the LSO strings sounded impressively dark. An air of galanterie was welcome in the closing pair of Menuets, but Antonini needed to dig more into the music, the prevailing impression being one of curious neutrality – as if the players were being prevented from playing.

 

CPE Bach’s G major Symphony, Wq 182/1 concluded the first half. The opening Allegro di molto offered greater continuity: that is partly the work itself, but was not, I think, just the work. The seeds of something Mozartian were to be heard, if one so wished – a turn of phrase, a harmonic progression – without compromise to this most individual of musical voices. The slow movement emerged stylistically similar – too much so? – with Antonini again far too static in his conception. A finale somewhere in between again had me wishing that he might take more account – some account – of harmony and its role in propelling the action. This is, after all, the composer who declared that his ‘and my deceased father’s basic principles are contrary to Rameau’s’; we need to think about what that might mean.

 

The C major Recorder Concerto by Telemann, TWV 51, is no masterpiece. It, however, received perhaps the most compelling performance of the evening, at least until the interminable finale. One was better advised to close one’s eyes, though, unless one wished to follow the lead of many audience members, attempting, some with greater success than others, to stifle the giggles. Even before Antonini began to play, we were treated to bizarre dance movements; once connected with his instrument, the impression was of a cross between a snake charmer and something more pornographic. It was, I suppose, a spectacle of sorts. Poor Telemann seems increasingly to attract the bizarre: a couple of years or so ago, it was Simone Kermes in a state of perplexing ecstasy. There was alert, characterful playing, especially from the orchestra, which seemed to benefit from not being conducted. In the slow movement, having given a passable impression of a baby eagle not quite managing to take flight, Antonini concentrated on his playing, the LSO’s performance sounded all the more cultivated as a result. At one point, however, I felt it necessary to stare at an emergency exit sign. Solo playing became more wayward in the Andante, Antonini seemingly not listening to the orchestra, concentrating instead on his own peculiar self-choreography. The Lang Lang of the recorder? Perhaps, but with lesser technical ability. There was undeniable virtuosity, though, to the finale. It went on and on and on, though. Until then, I should have been happy to testify to a Telemann performance that had at least not bored me.

 

Seemingly emboldened by that display – and cheers from a small yet vocal group of partisans – Antonini continued to inflict ‘flamboyant’ gestures on the music, in this case that of Haydn. Quite unconnected with what we heard, they might have offered amusement, but there is more than enough interest in Haydn’s music for such an ‘approach’ to be quite unnecessary. The LSO’s playing had a grave, sonorous beauty; if only Antonini had had some conception of how to phrase. In the first movement, and indeed beyond, bar followed bar, at best phrase following phrase, with no sense of a greater whole. Alert, febrile playing characterised the second movement; if only Antonini had permitted the form to fulfil its dramatic potential. The Menuet and Trio were definitely better heard than watched; if only Antonini had not stunted the dances’ lilt with such metronomic regularity. Likewise in the finale, the energy of the playing notwithstanding. I should love to hear the LSO play this symphony with another conductor, or indeed with none at all.

Andsnes and friends - Brahms Piano Quartets, 28 May 2016

Milton Court Concert Hall

 

Piano Quartets nos 1-3

Leif Ove Andsnes (piano)

Christian Teztlaff (violin)

Tabea Zimmermann (viola)

Clemens Hagen (cello)

 

I remain sceptical about this sort of programming. Performing, say, Beethoven’s three final piano sonatas in a single recital makes a great deal of sense, although so likewise does performing them separately with other works, attempting to suggest, even to draw, connections. Performing all five of Prokofiev’s piano concertos does not, however much that combination of works might be helpful to collect as a 2-CD set. This concert, part of Leif Ove Andsnes’s LSO Artist Portrait series (albeit without any members of the LSO!), fell somewhere in between. It made for a long evening, especially when programmed in chronological order, with a single interval separating the first and second quartets. On the other hand, we do not hear these works nearly so often as we should – much the same might be said for any piano quartet – and hearing Brahms’s development is always interesting. If I should have preferred two or three concerts, including works by other composers, that was no reason to look a gift-horse in the mouth, for these were excellent performances from beginning to end, much as one might have expected from Andsnes, Christian Tetzlaff, Tabea Zimmermann, and Clemens Hagen.

 

First was the First, in G minor, op.25, as orchestrated, unforgettably, whether you like it or not, by Schoenberg. It was a strength of this performance, the first movement opening straight away with an echt-Brahms sound, that one did forget, and indeed I am now still hearing the original, not Schoenberg’s version, in my head. Strings, and then piano, sounded ‘right’ – which is not to say that there is only one ‘right’, of course, although there are surely many ‘wrongs’. It was not just the sound, though; phrasing and, cumulatively, paragraphs evinced a similar sense of ‘rightness’, all richly Romantic. (The disjuncture between literary and philosophical Romanticism and its musical counterpart, if counterpart it be, means that we cannot really call this ‘late Romanticism’. We probably should, but it would only serve to confuse.) A viola solo from Zimmermann, rich-toned and beautiful in itself, also brought so much more, heralding not only Andsnes’s elaboration, but, so it seemed, the whole of the second group, even the development. The development section itself brought half-lights (yes, this ‘early’ in Brahms’s career) and, of course, vehemence; both propelled the music. So, fundamentally, did the composer’s motivic working, which surely must have been the greatest attraction of all for Schoenberg, here heard meaningfully throughout, quite without pedantry. This was indeed ‘Brahms the Progressive’.

 

Romantic unease (earlier?) from Hagen’s underpinning cello characterised the second movement, permitting of great ambivalence, great ambiguity. Andsnes’s way with rhythm and its relationship, inextricable, to harmony assured motivic integrity, not that that was ever in doubt! Much the same might be said of the Andante, despite its different character. Menacing currents made their point without cheap exaggeration, for they had been prepared and understood harmonically by all concerned; this was true chamber music-making. There was vehemence in those martial rhythms later on, but harmony remained the ultimate mover. They cast their shadow over the return of the opening material, just as they should. There was likewise no doubting the urgency of the finale, taken at quite a lick, nor the astounding virtuosity of the players, but that was not at the expense of chiaroscuro. Contrasting episodes certainly contrasted, but within a greater unity to which they contributed.

The A major Quartet, op.26 followed. If I found this slightly less compelling, that is more a reflection of my response to the work than to the performance, which again was of the highest quality. Andsnes opened the first movement in intriguingly neutral fashion, having us wonder where it might lead. There was certainly a lightness to what immediately followed, underlining the vehemence that followed that, and so on. But ‘difference’ never seemed in retrospect to have been for the sake of it. From Teztlaff’s golden- or silver- or various other- hued violin line – no all-purpose ‘beauty’ here – to the twists, turns, and pedal points of the bass, in whichever part, this performance knew where it was heading. The spirit, and not just the scale, seemed to owe as much to Schubert as to Beethoven, which is surely right in this particular work. The second movement progressed similarly – yet in difference, with more than the occasional hint of Brahms’s Mozartian inheritance (highly welcome!) Nostalgia and distance seemed thereby evoked and dramatized, grief in response all the more heightened. In the third movement, tendencies from both predecessors seemed united, played off against one another: form here was dynamic, never a mere framework. The finale, taken attacca, sounded very much a finale (not always as evident a quality as one might expect). If the ghost of Beethoven had sometimes been placated, here he returned with a vengeance; he had never gone away.

 

The first movement of the Third, op.60 in C minor, registered a very different character from the outset. Internalised anger of an almost Webern-like concision, tension screwed up, at times almost unbearably: this was a performance (as it is a work) still more dialectical in quality. There was nothing appliqué to this terror: it emerged from musical necessity. Rhythm was the progenitor, at least at first, of the different character to the scherzo, as one might expect. Relative rhythmical relaxation was predicated upon what it was relaxing from. The changing relationship between piano and strings, the latter sometimes ‘led’ by Teztlaff, at other times in quite a different formation, proved a crucial element to the drama unfolding. The movement came to a close with such fury that it might almost have been the close of the work; except… The cello sonata-like opening to the Andante thus came as relief (not unlike the Andante to the Second Piano Concerto). Then a piano trio, in perfect balance; then the full quartet, transformed by experience, melancholy heightened. Again, the changing relationship between parts, between ensembles, was very much of the essence. In context, we heard the opening to the finale almost as part of an ‘additional’ violin sonata; in the hands of Andsnes and Teztlaff, how could it not, if only momentarily? So subtle were the entrances of viola and cello, one hardly noticed them. The intensity, emotional and intellectual, of what followed, could not, however, have been missed by anybody.

Ridout/Melos Sinfonia/Zeffman - Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, Clarke, and Haydn, 15 January 2016

Milton Court Concert Hall

Mendelssohn – Overture: The Hebrides, op.26

Schoenberg – Chamber Symphony no.1 in E major, op.9
Desmond Clarke – Void-Song (world premiere)
Haydn – Symphony no.88 in G major

Timothy Ridout (viola)

Melos Sinfonia

Oliver Zeffman (conductor)

 

Mendelssohn’s evergreen Hebrides Overture typically adventurous programme from the Melos Sinfonia under its artistic director, Oliver Zeffman. This was an impressive reading, although occasionally I felt the lack of a greater number of strings. Generally, however, a gorgeous orchestral sound was the order of the day. Zeffman directed with a fine sense of inevitability, everything in its place. Perhaps there were occasions when he might have driven a little less hard, especially during the recapitulation, but I think that is more a matter of personal taste than anything else. There was, throughout, great clarity to the orchestral textures, permitting Mendelssohn’s often astonishingly original instrumental combinations to shine through.

Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony is an extraordinarily difficult work to bring off, and was less entirely successful. There was much to admire: some splendid instrumental playing, again great clarity, and woodwind lines that seemed often to point their way to the apparently different world of Pierrot lunaire. During the ‘slow movement’, they sounded transmuted – which, in a sense, they are – into lines from late Brahms, almost cast adrift from tonal moorings, yet not quite. There was also a creditably strong sense of Lisztian transformation. Set against that, balance was often a problem. Likewise tempi – especially the very fast tempo set early on – were not always maintained. There were a few cases when the ensemble was not wholly together too.

 

Desmond Clarke’s Void-Song, a single-movement viola concerto, received a very convincing world premiere. Repeated or additive pulses, as the composer explained in his programme note, and stochastically generated fields of events offer contrasted compositional principles with which the work proceeds, both in contrast and in combination. A string-dominated orchestra offers considerable opportunity for interplay between soloist and ensemble; even at the opening, the way the music rises – quickly – from the lower strings seems to prefigure the appearance, albeit with very different material, of the soloist. The closing winding down is another immediately noticeable feature, whistling (literally) woodwind offering an intriguing effect in combination. Zeffman and his orchestra seemed very much on top of the score, as did the excellent soloist, Timothy Ridout. This was perhaps the finest performance of the evening, insofar as I could tell (!)

Haydn’s Symphony no.88 might perhaps have smiled a little more, but there was real rigour to the performance it received. Motivic integrity was very much the hallmark of the first movement, which it was good to hear in resolutely unsentimental fashion. I wondered, however, whether the interplay between first and second violins would have been heard to greater advantages, had they been split to the left and right of the conductor. The slow movement flowed nicely, ‘details’, if one may can call them that, well integrated into the longer line. It retained a welcome air of mystery, of discovery. The minuet and trio were taken one-to-a-bar, without losing necessary grandeur; the trio’s rusticity was especially delightful. However, the finale sounded a little too careful. It need not be taken ruinously fast; indeed, it should not, by definition. However, alongside a welcome sense of the sheer profusion of Haydn’s ideas, a little more abandon might not have gone amiss. It must, however, have been a devil of a programme to rehearse.

 

 

Esfahani - Tomkins, Gibbons, Scheidt, Bach, Jones, Kidane, Kalabis, and W.F. Bach, 27 April 2015

Milton Court

Tomkins – Barafostus Dreame

Gibbons – Pavan in G
Scheidt – Also geht’s, also steht’s
Bach – English Suite in D minor, BWV 811
Patrick Jones – Santoor Suite
Daniel Kidane – Six Etudes (world premiere)
Viktor Kalabis – Akvarely, op.53
W.F. Bach – Sonata in E-flat major, Fk.5

Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord)

 

The Guildhall’s recently appointed Professor of Harpsichord, Mahan Esfahani, gave an inaugural recital, his first at Milton Court, in music by composers ranging from the Elizabethan virginalists to the present day. An ‘English’ emphasis was unmistakeable, even Bach represented by one of his English Suites, that in D minor. Far from that indicating any restriction, the hallmark of the recital was more variety, excellent performances throughout proving the guiding thread. In a typically engaging programme note, Esfahani wrote: ‘In English hands, the harpsichord truly came alive in all its guises – as a marvellously clear vehicle for counterpoint, as an effective imitator of whole ensembles and consorts, as an instrument of great sensuality as made possible by the confluence of various registers and harmonics naturally occurring in the sound made by a plucked string.’ Such was certainly what we seemed to hear on this occasion.

Thomas Tomkins’s variations on a broadside ballad, ‘Barafostus Dreame’ proved as ‘magnificent’ as was claimed in the performer’s note. Compositional and performing virtuosity sounded as one in a splendidly developmental account. Metre was subtly ‘bent’ on occasion, but always, it seemed, with a greater plan in mind, not for its own sake. Above all, there was a real sense of fantasy; it made sense as a performance in its own right, but also as the opening to a programme (perhaps rarer than one might expect). That characteristic ‘English’ melancholy which persists unto Birtwistle and beyond was certainly to be heard in the Orlando Gibbons Pavan. What sounded as if it were an infinitely flexible subdivision of the beat indicated a good deal of art concealing art – again both in work and performance. Samuel Scheidt’s seven variations on the German song, Also geht’s, also steht’s, offered a well-chosen staging-post on the way to Bach: a different voice, yes, even a different accent, but subtlety in technique that seemed also to offer continuation of a line.

Bach’s D minor English Suite completed the first half. In a short spoken introduction, Esfahani offered a way in to some of the composer’s complexities with a strikingly simple – in the best sense – demonstration of palindromic tendencies, both melodic and rhythmic. The opening Prelude initially resounded as if it announce Bach’s French inheritance – let us remember that a hallmark of earlier eighteenth-century German art, especially as understood by contemporaries, was its openness to different national ‘styles’ – but Bach’s undoubtedly Germanic legacy soon manifested itself ever more strongly. In the following Allemande and Courante, Esfahani struck a fine balance between phrases, paragraphs, and the whole, offering plenty of time, though never too much, for Bach’s music to speak in all its glory – and all its necessary complexity. The Sarabande’s proliferation seemed to this listener, doubtless partly on account of so much of his recent listening, to look forward to later Boulez. (If only we could hear some of the younger Boulez’s Bach performances!) The ‘busy’ quality of the first Gavotte was founded upon secure command of line, whilst the second benefited from typically imaginative yet idiomatic registration. The closing Fugue, perhaps in the light of my recently having heard Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet, sounded as if a danse macabre. And of course, there were the inevitable labyrinthine presentiments of the Second Viennese School too. A well-shaped account throughout ensured that, once again, we heard that there is no composer less archaic than Bach.

There followed three very much more recent works, two from the twenty-first century, one from the twentieth. Patrick Jones’s Santoor Suite takes its cue, or at least a cue, from the composer’s study of south Indian raga, ‘specifically,’ according to Esfahani, ‘the “gat” (a cyclical, fixed melody)’. In its brief span, roughly five minutes in total, we heard an inventive response both to that world and indeed to the Baroque suite, a nicely, naggingly persistent Courante particularly striking to me on a first hearing. Daniel Kidane’s Six Etudes received their first complete performance. They definitely sounded as studies, for instance in the first piece’s treatment of repeated notes, the intervallic explorations of the second (and not just the second), and so on. A hotel reception bell made an appearance as duet partner (albeit operated by Esfahani’s foot) in the final piece.

Viktor Kalabis’s 1979 Akvarely (‘Aquarelles) seemed, again on a first hearing for me, almost to start, in its first movement, where Poulenc, in his Concert champêtre, had left off, and then, as it were, to run with whatever the composer had picked up. In this performance, I found it impossible to dissent from Esfahani’s view that this was most definitely music for the harpsichord, as opposed to ‘so much modern harpsichord music which seems like the word “piano” has simply been crossed from the title page’. The second piece revelled further in possibilities both musical and instrumental. At one point, it sounded almost as if a response to the celebrated solo in The Rake’s Progress.

Finally, there came a rare opportunity to hear a piece by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. I cannot say that I was entirely convinced, especially in the finale, by its stopping and starting: rhetorical, perhaps, but not with the mastery of the eldest son’s younger brother, Carl Philipp Emanuel. At any rate, this was a brilliantly ‘free’ performance, the slow movement at the work’s heart proving especially eloquent, indeed possessed of considerable harmonic depth.

Birtwistle at 80 (2) - Baerts/BCMG/Knussen

Milton Court Concert Hall

Cantus Iambeus (2004)

Cantata (1969)

Tragœdia (1965)

Monody for Corpus Christi (1959)

Fantasia on all the Notes (2011)

Four Poems by Jaan Kaplinski (1991)

Silbury Air (1977)

Katrien Baerts (soprano)

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group

Oliver Knussen (conductor)

What a joy it is to attend an intelligently-programmed concert of music, all of it receiving excellence in performance! The latest of the Barbican’s ‘Birtwistle at 80’ concerts offered music for ensemble, some with and some without soprano, from throughout the composer’s career. Although not presented chronologically, there was method in the ordering of Birtwistle’s mechanisms, Silbury Air seeming to bring various strands together and certainly offering a fitting climax. So many of Birtwistle’s preoccupations were there – both in work and, crucially in performance. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a more commanding performance than that given by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Oliver Knussen; it came across as just as much a ‘classic’ as Tragœdia. Landscape, ritual, processional, mechanism, the processes of re-viewing and re-hearing from different standpoints: all were there, all contributed to an overwhelming culmination. Such was the variety of expression, such was the strength of the inner trajectory, that one simply ‘knew’ one was hearing a masterwork. And beneath it all, beneath the ‘invented logic’ of which the composer has spoken, still lay the example of Stravinsky, above all here that of The Rite of Spring. Snatches of sound, elements of cellular writing, and of course the generative precision of rhythm; Stravinsky demeure, as Boulez once put it.

 

The concert had opened with Cantus Iambeus, which, in context, sounded very much as a curtain-raiser. We heard Birtwistle’s process, not just for the work but perhaps for the concert as a whole, set in motion; Stravinsky, both in rhythm and in colour, remained and inspired. Piano and harp inevitably brought the Symphony in Three Movements to mind, but it was not only a matter of instrumentation. There was drama aplenty, of course, in what seemed almost akin to a miniature tone-poem. This incisive performance enabled us then to take a step back to the 1969 Sappho-derived Cantata, for which the excellent Katrien Baerts joined the players. Sometimes the voice sounded instrumental, sometimes the instruments vocal; sometimes the relationship was more of contrast, sometimes more of affinity. The opening glissandi offered a wonderful case in point. Knussen and his players wrung out an intensity that was well-nigh Schoenbergian; perhaps it was no coincidence that this was a piece written for the Pierrot Players. Birtwistle has in any case rarely sounded so close to ‘Darmstadt’. The closing words, ‘No longer will my mouth utter sounds nor the clapping of hands follow,’ resounded as if a mini-Liebestod, as if refracted through the word-setting of Nono. There was heady, even drunken eroticism, precision enabling rather than detracting from dark expression.

 

Tragœdia presented the composer more fully still as dramatists – even without words. At the close, one knew one had witnessed and indeed experienced a ritual. The opening ‘Proloue’ offered toughness, violence, the obstinacy of the ostinato; the following ‘Parodos’ sounded again with a more Schoenbergian language than one might necessarily have expected, though there was certainly no denying Stravinsky’s example too. Inevitable ‘traditional’ horn resonances in the first strophe of the ‘Episodion’ – I think in particular of certain intervals – interacted intriguingly with the material, preparing the way for the hieraticism to follow. Birtwistle’s unsentimental melancholy found its true voice in the central ‘Stasimon’, after which the almost Renard-like instrumental exertions of the second ‘Episodion’ sounded as necessary, tragic continuation of the drama, likewise the relative still of its concluding antistrophe. As the ‘Exodos’ had us hear the opening material with new ears, varied and yet somehow the same, I sensed Punch and Judy in the making.

 

In the second half, Baerts, equally precise and alluring of tone, joined the ensemble twice more, in the early Monody for Corpus Christi and Four Poems by Jaan Kaplinski. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the former work, not unlike Cantata, gave obvious hints of Damstadt, not least the flute writing, here in the excellent hands of Elizabeth May. Vocal writing and performance alike offered an extraordinary range of accomplishment; tension and affinity between ‘old’ mediæval and new were our dramatic crucible. Four Poems by Jaan Kaplinski proved a revelation in terms of the continuity of composition and performance, its colours cohering mosaic-like: never too easy, but all the more tellingly for the effort involved. In between came Fantasia on all the Notes, which I have now had occasion to hear a few times in concert. Its myriad of colours did not disappoint, nor did the mastery of dramatic construction, leading to the inevitable yet still troubling winding down of the mechanism.