Musikfest Berlin (5) - Klangforum Wien/Pomàrico: Saunders and Aperghis, 4 September 2020

Philharmonie


Rebecca Saunders: Flesh, for solo accordion with recitation (2018)
Sole, Trio in F-sharp for mobile accordion, percussion, and piano (2019)
to an utterance – study, for solo piano (2020, world premiere)
Scar, for 15 soloists and conductor (2018/19)

Georges Aperghis: Der Lauf des Lebens, for 6 voices and ensemble (2019, world premiere)

Joonas Ahonen (piano)

Krassimir Sterev (accordion)

Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart

Klangforum Wien

Emilio Pomàrico (conductor)

Two concerts from Klangforum Wien: one a world premiere, the other including a world premiere and its ‘early music’ coming from 2018. New music indeed, then, however distant 2018—Theresa May: remember her?—may seem to those of us bewildered and exhausted by the current plague. I hope I shall be forgiven for any errors I might make, confronted with such a wealth of new sounds and their organisation, without so much as a programme note, coronavirus precluding such, let alone a score. Is that not, however, an ideal way for us to approach new music, whether ‘New Music’ or not? It was certainly welcome exercise for ears starved of such experience over the preceding months.


First, we heard works by Rebecca Saunders: not only one of the most important composers of her generation, but also one of my favourites. It certainly seems another world since I flew to Munich last June to see and hear her receive the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. Indeed, some of the music we heard had then yet to be written. The opening Flesh, however, had. We hear much about embodiment nowadays, but here the physicality of Saunders’s work and Krassimir Sterev’s astounding performance as accordionist and reciter could not have been more physical: quite erasing, like Molly Bloom’s monologue itself, any thought of dualism between mind and matter. This is not ‘programme music’, certainly not in the sense of mere portrayal, but it was difficult not to think or rather to experience the piece’s progress in extremely direct as well as more indirect terms. Squeezing, shuddering, rattling, shouting, screaming: this was a musical performance of musical material.


Sole for accordion, percussion, and piano was taken attacca, its predecessor necessarily influencing our reception, yet beautifully setting the scene, the next piece stealing in to our consciousness in the after-glow or -shock of Flesh. Resonance and even ritual—perhaps closer to Stockhausen than I might have expected—enabled pitch to be heard both ‘in itself’ and as the key to transformation of other parameters, such as timbre, rhythm, and dynamics. Put another way, post-Debussy and post-Webern tendencies united, without ever remotely sounding like Boulez or any other such forerunners. There were no electronics; yet, as so often in Saunders’s work, I could have sworn I heard them.


Next, Joonas Ahonen gave the first performance of to an utterance – study, for solo piano. Its opening pitted bass resonances, later spreading across the instrument, against glissandi and similar devices: some more scampering, some more furious, again in a not entirely un-Debussyan fabric (at least to my ears). Listening, one created and dissolved new aural hierarchies; and yet again, the sheer physicality of an outstanding performance proved just as crucial to one’s experience. Ahonen’s commanding virtuosity left one in no doubt one was hearing what one should be. Chases were as furious, perhaps even more so, as or than anything in the previous night’s Rihm Jagden und Formen. Ultimately, the piece seemed to me very much to take its part in the distinguished line of (extended) piano studies, growing into something emotionally and intellectually more all-encompassing. Were ‘symphonic’ not so obviously clichéd a misnomer, I might have been tempted to use it with less caution.


The opening of Scar, with its opening soft drum tattoos, dark pitched sounds emerging therefrom, put me in mind of Berg’s Op.6 Pieces. The tricks one’s ears and such resourceful writing can play, not to mention the ensemble performance under Emilio Pomàrico, convinced me at one point I had heard a voice. Slides, dark flashes, an aural landscape in their shadows, a liminal zone between tearing and torn: this was certainly the world of scars. Flights of fancy or of flesh took wing in a process of persistent metamorphosis, leading to dazzling climax and return to the opening material, transformed by our experience of listening.


In the second concert, the ensemble and Pomàrico were joined by the six voices of Neuevocalisten Stuttgart, for the premiere of Georges Aperghis’s Der Lauf des Lebens. Words, at least my words, are still more problematic an approximation here than usual, but I sensed something of a distinction between the dramatic use to which words were put in Saunders and a more ‘purely musical’—to resurrect a choice vintage chestnut—approach to their qualities from Aperghis. Accordion at the opening (the indefatigable Sterev) made for a nice link between the two worlds, but Klangforum Wien and the (initially) female Stuttgart voices immediately took our experience in a very different direction. A riot of sound, not without resonances from jazz, raucous riffs and all, put me a little in mind of Berio at times; that, however, was just me finding my bearings, for this was exuberance very much on its own terms. Vocal parts, sung and spoken, solo and ensemble, may or may not have made ‘verbal’ sense, yet who cared? Both work and performance offered a strong sense of a greater whole over an hour-long span, despite or perhaps on account of a host of mood swings and other transformations. In such winning superfluity, the overriding, most welcome sense was of fun, even of Alice in Wonderland-like wonder. 

BPO and Academy/Rattle - Gruber, Bartók, Ravel, and Berio, 18 March 2017

Philharmonie

HK Gruber – Piano Concerto

Bartók – Bluebeard’s Castle, Sz 48
 

Ravel – Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé

Berio – Sequenza III
Berio – Laborintus II

Emanuel Ax (piano)

Magdalena Kožená (mezzo-soprano)

Rinat Shaham (mezzo-soprano)

Gábor Bretz (bass)

Ulrich Noethen, Dino Scandariato (narrators)

Members of the Berlin Radio Choir and Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart

Paul Jeukendrup (sound direction)

Orchestral Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Simon Rattle (conductor)

In this pair of concerts, the first a ‘standard’ Berlin Philharmonic concert, the second a shorter, ‘late night’ event with members of the orchestra’s academy, both conducted by Simon Rattle, we found our ideas concerning musical drama subtly challenged. The ‘principal’ event featured a somewhat odd pairing of HK Gruber’s Piano Concerto, receiving its first German performances, and Bluebeard’s Castle. Many stronger works would pale alongside Bartók’s opera; Gruber’s new offering certainly did. Its opening showed promise, as if straining to remember the 1920s jazz age, muted trumpet and all, then gradually appreciating that it did not need to remember; it could try something new. Except then it did not, at least to these ears. The piano seemed oddly to be on a different track from the orchestra, whether harmonically or rhythmically. In its part, ably performed, so far as I could tell, by Emanuel Ax, there was perhaps something at least analogous to the potential circularity of early twelve-note writing, but it did not seem to move beyond that circularity, to become generative. Otherwise, there was much post-Berg, post-Weill meandering – just as in any other work by Gruber I have heard. Dance rhythms – yes, waltzes and others – came and went. Perhaps the material might have lent itself better to a shorter piece: ten minutes? Two-and-a-half times that felt much too long.

 

That out of the way, there was a great deal to enjoy in the Bartók performance, Ulrich Noethen’s Prologue (in German) setting the scene nicely, with a fine balance between the theatrical and what a concert can provide much better, the suggestion of theatre. Rattle’s conducting of the Berlin Philharmonic was for much of the time, especially earlier on, unobtrusive, seemingly content (however illusory this impression might have been) to follow the highly dramatic performances, concert garb and setting notwithstanding, of Rinat Shaham and Gábor Bretz. Bretz showed considerable, even irresistible charm, as well as darkness, in a dangerous, silken-smooth performance. Dark violas, piquant woodwind solos accompanied, questioned him, even held him to account, although we knew that we, like Judit, must ultimately submit. His repetitive questioning – ‘Félsz-e?’ – had great cumulative force, as much musical as verbal. Shaham’s wilful yet sensitive portrayal was well matched, equally well contrasted; one followed her decisions, understanding them even as one knew how foolish they were. Her fear was very real, no mere recitation. Their interaction, visual as well as vocal, came across as the key to unlocking the particular secrets of this evening. Without slipping into banal psychological realism, their portrayals treated Bluebeard and Judit as characters, not simply archetypes. Words and, more broadly, drama came first, one felt, but where does the drama lie?

When the orchestra moved, as it were, centre stage, one certainly knew, for instance in the ominous yet never exaggerated ostinato writing following the closing of the iron door behind our unhappy pair. The effect was not entirely un-Wagnerian (Act II of Die Walküre, for instance): not the only time I thought of that particular predecessor in this performance. Each door brought full tragedy a step nearer; one felt that, score and performance telling one so, rather than ‘merely’ knowing it. Golden enchantment would have tempted us all, and doubtless did, all the more so for the fatalism surrounding it. And when that moment, the opening of the fifth door, came, not only did the earth tremble, as it never could on a recording, but the Berlin orchestra glowed – again, as it never could except in the flesh. As the world darkened, the orchestra increasingly took over: not to the detriment of Bluebeard and Judit, but to seal their fate: implacable, irresistible. Here, Rattle’s shaping proved just the thing, alert to the narrative, without imposing upon it. Judit’s pride, as she insisted on opening the final, seventh door, led to quite the orchestral climax, almost Wozzeck-like. Thereafter was the tale, in every sense, of Bluebeard coming home, the evening glow again more redolent of Wagner than of Strauss. The forbidden question of Lohengrin, then, turned dark indeed.

 

It was unlikely, indeed undesirable, that, having attended the earlier concert, one would not approach the ‘late night’ event with Bluebeard in mind. Berio’s works in particular shone in that light, as well as immediately providing their own illumination. First, however, Magdalena Kožená, the Academy musicians, and Rattle offered us a fine performance of Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé. One cannot but hear these songs and fail to appreciate the depth of Ravel’s response to, as well as his distancing from, Schoenberg. Debussy hovers too, of course, with all the (fruitful) problems of that relationship both in general and with particular reference to Mallarmé. Hearing the instrumental lines so soon after Bartók, though, one also felt a kinship in that respect: twin responses rather than ‘influence’ as such, no doubt, but no less interesting for that. The timbral radicalism of the very opening might almost have come from a chamber arrangement of Bluebeard or The Wooden Prince. Ravel’s word-setting, though, sounded as particular as ever, Kožená, like Shaham’s Judit before her, shaping the tonal universe before her, even as the conductor and instrumentalists might actually have been doing it for her. The precision and style of these young musicians left nothing to be desired; they might have been a crack new-music ensemble, and indeed that is precisely what they were.

 

Kožená turned Berio’s Sequenza III very much into a piece, if this is not too much of a paradox, of music theatre for voice. (I do not think it is too much, when one considers what Berio is doing both in his Sequenzas more generally and in this in particular.) Language emerged from music, drama from both, but the relationships were never one-way. She was almost a Mélisande torn between her husband (Rattle sat at the corner of the stage, ready to make a percussion intervention) and a younger man suddenly lit up above. She gestured, shouted, sang. Did she decide? Was she even interested in decision, or indeed in those apparitions? The ‘shadows of meaning’ of which Berio spoke were ever apparent, ever new: such is the essence of performance. Drama lay not only in ‘portrayal’, but in the relationship between the performer and her voice, again just as Berio envisaged – yet doubtless, in another sense, quite different. ‘The voice,’ to quote the composer, ‘carries always an excess of connotations, whatever it is doing.’ So it did here.

 

Laborintus II proved, if anything, more invigorating still. It is, of course, quite an occasion to have opportunity to hear it, to experience it in the flesh. Expectations were not only fulfilled; they were perhaps even exceeded. Members of the Berlin Radio Choir and Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart were, just as the soloists in the Bartók and Kožená in her pieces, active participants in shaping, in making the drama: no mere executants. So too were the instrumentalists. Berio is not a composer to erect barriers; this performance proceeded very much, then, in his vein, wisely directed by the collegial Rattle as first among equals. Musical references from Monteverdi onwards took their place in what one might, perhaps misleadingly, think of as a musico-dramatic collage, but which in ‘reality’, whatever that may be, was both ever connecting with anything and everything else, and yet never anything but itself. Memory rules, it seems: but do we remember or misremember those Biblical genealogies, those journeys of Dante, even the passages conventionally written, as it were, by Eduardo Sanguineti himself? Dino Scandariato proved, rightly, both a sure and questioning guide to our humanistic labyrinth. As often with Berio, Italo Calvino came to mind; La vera storia beckoned. If other works had tended towards music theatre, and if in some senses this might even have looked forward towards a reimagining of opera, this was nevertheless the real music theatre thing, however intangible definition and reality might be. My immediate reaction was to wish to hear it again, except differently; or, as Wagner put it, ‘Kinder, macht Neues!’

 

Wien Modern (2): Ahonen/Klangforum Wien/Ceccherini - Sciarrino, 6 November 2015

Mozart-Saal, Konzerthaus

Sciarrino – Carnaval (2010-11, Austrian premiere)

Joonas Ahonen (piano)

Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart

Tito Ceccherini (conductor)

 

The Austrian premiere of Salvatore Sciarrino’s Carnaval was placed in trustworthy hands. One expects excellence from Klangforum Wien and the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, but one should never take excellence for granted. Joined by Joonas Ahonen as pianist (he is in fact a member of Klangforum Wien, but here had soloistic billing) and Tito Ceccherini as conductor, the two ensembles not only displayed musical excellence; they seemed also to express musical delight, a key concept in both the written texts and their musical setting, just as in so many madrigals of old, long an inspiration to Sciarrino. Five voices, piano solo, ten other instrumentalists (two flutes, two clarinets, two trombones, two cellos, three percussionists), and conductor united in a fashion not entirely different from that suggested by Monteverdi’s example.

 

In twelve movements, all but one of them with voices, Carnaval treads a madrigalian line, familiar yet reimagined, between what we might consider, however insufficient the terms, the popular and the aristocratic. But that is not perhaps the most important of its explorations. The written texts, all in Italian, mostly originate in ancient Chinese verse, an Odyssey-like (Sciarrino’s own comparison) homage to the art of Towitara Buoyoyu as well as the more obvious – to most in the West – character-piece homage to Schumann, the ‘fantastic’, and perhaps a tension between larger-scale form and the fragmentary. Masks, disguises, the play of appearance and whatever might lie behind it: such seem to be part of the material, both musical, verbal, and, I think we might say, even with cautionary quotation marks, ‘dramatic’ too. Monteverdi’s dramatic madrigals call into question rigid distinctions between concert and drama; so have many works since, not least some of Schumann’s, and certainly many of Sciarrino’s.
 

 

Voices such as Zhuang Zhou, from the fourth century before Christ, take us up to the final recitative text, elaborated by Sciarrino from a biography of Tao Yuanming. They all treat in some way with the idea and indeed the practical reality of music, and, in more general terms, that of artistic creation and performance too. Love for music and for its performance are not the least of their qualities: kissing the sound of a note sung, for instance (no.10, ‘Lasciar vibrare’: ‘Suono pieno/stordisce/tenue silenzio/trasporta I canti/tu lascia che il suono/baci la sua vibrazione/lascia’). Sometimes, the music offers a strong pictorial element, for instance the traditional word-painting, both instrumental and vocal, upon ‘tremante’ in no.7. In other cases, the relationship is more oblique or more complicated. Infectious joy in music-making is never far away, though, whether in the carolling – or so it seemed to me – of no.4, or the febrile, almost Boulezian – a comparison rather than thesis of ‘influence’ – proliferation of instrumental material in no.11. The social element of a musician’s endeavour – ‘inventing images’ for his friends – has all manner of historical and indeed geographical precedent: the Schubertiade or the heyday of the madrigal itself, as well as more folk-like instances. Here, it seems honestly, playfully reinvented.
 

One might consider the purely instrumental eleventh movement, ‘Stanze della pioggia (dedicato a Maurizio Pollini)’ a concertante piece for piano and ensemble, yet it came across here, most creditably, as perhaps closer still to chamber music. Virtuosity was shared across the ensemble; different soloists emerged as momentarily pre-eminent, but not for the sake of pre-eminence. It stands as longer than any of the other movements, longer than many of them put together. Repeated figures and their variants are passed through the ensemble, but certain instruments, not least one of the cellos, seem to retain a degree of ownership. Perhaps such figures and variants create their own narrative, even their own linguistic world. Do we need words after all? And yet, we return to words for the twelfth movement, that evocation of Tao Yuanming mentioned above. He could make no music, but he had a lute without strings, ‘un liuto senza corde’. Wine plays its part in the verbal resolution, as the piano does in its musical playing out. Such collegiality and conviviality seem not the least of the delights one might take home, at least in memory, from such a musical feast. A renaissance of the Renaissance, perhaps: or, so we fancy.
 

Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart/EIC/Mälkki - Ivan Fedele, Johannes Maria Staud, and Bruno Mantovani, 17 June 2011

Salle des concerts, Cité de la musique

Ivan Fedele – Animus anima II, for vocal ensemble
Johannes Maria Staud – Par ici! (world premiere, Ensemble Intercontemporain commission)
Bruno Mantovani – Cantata no.1, for six singers and ensemble

Neue Vocalsoloisten Stuttgart
Robin Meier (IRCAM sound realisation)
Franck Berthoux (IRCAM sound engineer)
Ensemble Intercontemporain
Susanna Mälkki (conductor)



This was a splendid concert: three fine contemporary works, one of which was receiving its first performance, in performances that seemed fully worthy of their stature. One expects excellent things of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, of course, but that is no reason to take its achievements for granted. The concert slotted nicely into two slots, IRCAM’s Agora Festival, and the Cité de la musique’s Fifth Vocal Art Biennale, the latter ranging from Dufay to Scelsi via Monteverdi, Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, and many others.


First up was Ivan Fedele’s Animus anima II, a 2009 work to texts by Giuliani Corti. The solo voices of the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart seemed quite at home with it, as well they might, since that ensemble commissioned the work. Formed of four movements, lasting about twenty minutes in total, this is a piece made up of an array of words, more concerned, according to Corti, with animus, whilst voices provide the anima: a binary opposition fundamental to the work’s progression. Each of the four movements takes its name from a figure of the anima: ‘Incipit’, ‘Eros’, ‘Vox’, and ‘Anghelos’. The language being Italian, almost every word – but not quite – ends with a vowel, which, at least to a non-Italian ear, imparts a certain sort of musical vocalism already. Is it noteworthy that the first word, ‘caos’ (‘chaos’) provides an exception? Perhaps, for we seem to undergo some form of creatio ex nihilo, especially when one comes to consider Fedele’s music.


Corti’s programme note confined itself to aspects of his text, so, a newcomer to Fedele, I had no idea what to expect, a situation that lent an apt, expectant sense of creation to my listening. Sounds became song in ‘Incipit’, answering negatively my initial questioning as to whether the vocal writing might remain stranded in a world too overtly inspired by aspects of Nono and Lachenmann. The words’ sounds remain, however, of crucial importance, to musical development. There is, as sometimes with Nono, a sense of Renaissance music – in this case, the vocal consort – being refracted and rejuvenated through contemporary means. ‘Eros’ opens with a swifter, more jubilant tone, soon transformed into spoken debate, thereafter into whispering, before returning to jubilant song, often in triple time. At its more ornate, I sensed a kinship with Monteverdian madrigal-writing. Flowery solo moments, including an especially lovely mezzo contribution (Truike van der Poel) characterise ‘Vox’, along with an impression – not simply pitch-based – of ascension. ‘Anghelos’ opens at a fast tempo, not unlike ‘Eros’, with an almost Messiaenesque (bird) chorus – albeit here accomplished through words and the sound of words. Alternating between such material and slower sections, this ultimately proved an exultant finale. The performance had no conductor, but was directed where necessary – often it was not – by a member of the ensemble, whose contribution, so far as I could tell, was thoroughly excellent.


Johannes Maria Staud’s Par ici!, for ensemble, received its world premiere from the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Susanna Mälkki. Taking its name from a line in Baudelaire’s ‘Voyage’ (the last of his Fleurs du Mal), it is composed instrumentally for flute, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, percussion, violin, viola, cello, double bass, and electronic MIDI piano, the latter creating in effect a micro-tonal instrument whose temperament may be modified by touch, Staud’s inspiration being the piano scordatura of Gérard Grisey. ‘Impure’ intervals present not an out-of-tune instrument of weird ‘effects’ – we can leave that to the ‘authenticke’ brigade – but a micro-tonal array of new harmonic possibilities, quite in keeping with the perfumed possibilities of Baudelaire:


The opening flute line, here delivered by long-time EIC member, Sophie Cherrier, triggers off contributions from the other instrumentalists, including the modified piano (Dimitri Vassilakis). This is a febrile opening, full of tension within a slow tempo. Post-Ligeti (perhaps also post-Xenakis) string swarming continues the musical development. For there is a real sense of dramatic trajectory here, within the eight minutes of Staud’s work; it is almost a Lisztian tone poem for the twenty-first century. I very much look forward to hearing it again and indeed to further exploration of the composer’s work. Mälkki and the EIC seemed fully to have the piece’s measure: let us hope for a recording.

Nous nous embarquerons sur la mer des Ténèbres
avec le cœur joyeux d’un jeune passager.
Entendez-vous ces voix, charmantes et funèbres,
qui chantent : «Par ici ! Vous qui voulez manger
le Lotus parfumé !»

Finally came Bruno Mantovani’s Cantata no.1, in which instrumentalists (clarinet, horn, percussion, piano, viola, and cello), conductor, and vocal soloists were united. I admired Mantovani’s opera, Akhmatova, earlier this year; if anything, I thought this 2006 work finer still. Or perhaps it was that I found it easier to grasp as a whole. At any rate, the form is almost ‘traditional’, in that it takes eleven poems by Rilke, and sets them sequentially but as part of a greater whole, for the most part with instrumental interludes. The order is as follows: ‘Es ist noch Tag auf der Terrasse’, ‘Gesang der Frauen an den Dichter’, ‘Der Tod der Geliebten’, ‘Herbst’, ‘Das Lied der Bildsäule’, ‘Pietà’, ‘Träume, die in deinen Tiefen wallen’, ‘Ein weißes Schloß in weißer Einsamkeit’, ‘Wir haben lange im Licht gelacht’, ‘Um die vielen Madonnen’, and ‘Schlußstück’. I was actually put in mind more than once of a chamber reimagination of Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony, though have no reason to think that anything more than my own fancy.


The opening clarinet solo, here in the expert hands of Alain Damiens, announces a post-Boulezian musical legacy of arabesques, more violent than their counterparts in Akhmatova, against which a counter-tenor solo movement may be heard, Daniel Gloger’s rendition pure, precise, and yet nevertheless sensuous. That violence is resumed in the first interlude’s cello part, giving way to ravishing piano-led harmonies (the interludes between fourth and fifth songs, and fifth and sixth, sound frankly post-Debussyan), and a sustained horn note around which the piano can play, such play skilfully, sensitively accomplished by Vassilakis. Mantovani deploys a great deal of variation in terms of forces used: solo voices, higher or lower groups of voices, full vocal ensemble, and the a cappella writing of ‘Träume’ and ‘Um die vielen Madonnen’. Interaction with the instrumentalists provides further variation and continuity, as for instance in the viola and clarinet protests against a trio of higher voices in ‘Gesang der Frauen an den Dichter’, which seem to persist in the subsequent cello reaction to the vocalists, or the monotonal percussion response to four male voices in ‘Der Tod der Geliebten’. One really gains a sense, then, of a cantata written in a sense responding to, without imitating, Bach’s supreme and often highly experimental example. Indeed, the employment of bass and B-flat clarinet (both played by Damiens) in 'Herbst' reminded me of the richness of Bach’s woodwind family, only occasionally recaptured in subsequent music. Likewise, the tenor’s arioso-like writing in ‘Das Lied der Bildsäule’ necessarily has resonances with earlier music. Repeated attempts, eventually successful, to voice the word ‘Träume’ both recalled the opening of Fedele’s work and substitute for an instrumental interlude. Mantovani’s a cappella setting proved haunting in itself and an apt preparation for the resumption of Boulezian hostilities in the instrumental transition to the next song, ‘Ein weis Schloß in weißer Einsamkeit’, whose near-hysterical climax upon the ‘Schloß’ of ‘Es blinkt das Schloß’ leads ultimately to delirious entwining of two soprano voices, almost a duet-response to Strauss’s Daphne, in ‘Wir haben lange im Licht gelacht’. The opening warbling ensemble of the penultimate ‘Um die vielen Madonnen’ brought to mind the post-Messiaen writing of the final movement of the Fedele piece, but Mantovani’s setting proved more focused upon the words rather than their sounds, not unlike some of Schoenberg’s choral writing, though doubtless the German language is an issue here too. There was to be no interlude between that movement and ‘Schlußstück’, with its immediate, violent fortissimo outburst from all concerned, hanging over the rest of the poem. Percussion and viola sound the final instrumental voices, an equivocal signal of something akin to life in the light of Rilke’s verse:

Der Tod ist groß.
Wir sind die Seinen lachenden Munds.
Wenn wir uns mitten im Leben meinen,
wagt er zu weinen
mitten in uns.

Three excellent works then, by three excellent composers, in three excellent performances. Though I imagined that the highlight of this visit to Paris would take place at the Palais Garnier or the Opéra Bastille, there can be no question that it was here, in the Cité de la musique, at the intersection of two festivals.