Bartók: Violin Concerto no.2, BB 117; Five Hungarian Folksongs, BB 97 Falla: The Three-Cornered Hat
Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin)
Rinat Shaham (mezzo-soprano)
London Symphony Orchestra
Simon Rattle (conductor)
Images: Mark Allan
A busy few days for Simon
Rattle and the LSO: first two concert performances of The Makropulos Case,
then this concert with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Rinat Shaham. Both performances
proved, moreover, of the highest quality. Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto is a
substantial work by any standards; it seemed all the more so in this case.
Whether it was actually a spacious performance, I do not know, but it felt like
it in a positive sense, on a grand scale—that is, not a euphemism for dragging.
Kopatchinskaja’s opening statement was relaxed, almost louche, but certainly
not lacking in precision, any more than her highly energetic response. At
times, she seemed almost shamanic, but from within, not without, the music. It
was a highly personal account, though never without warrant, either in the
score or in the more general ‘idea’ of the piece. Rattle has often seemed to me
at his very best as an ‘accompanist’. This was no exception: he led the LSO not
only in kindred precision, but kindred direction, colour, and atmosphere,
always underpinned by harmonic understanding and communication. Kopatchinskaja proved
every bit as responsive to the orchestra as vice versa. Her cadenza was spellbinding,
an object lesson in line, commitment, and understanding. And throughout, performances
sang—and showed, moreover, that they had something to sing, and that there were
different ways in which to do so.
Another such way was on offer at the
beginning of the slow movement: fragile yet with undeniable inner strength, a
testament of intimacy that could yet turn outwards. The LSO and Rattle wove a gorgeous
tapestry of orchestral sound, which, in collaboration with the soloist, often
turned towards chamber music. Take, for instance, Bartók’s extraordinary writing
for violin, double basses, and timpani; or magical passages of well-nigh
suspended animation for harp, celesta, and woodwind. As the path became ever
more surprising, even when one ‘knew’, it remained ever secure and coherent,
both here and in a finale that combined improvisatory freshness with deep
knowledge and understanding. Various balances and relationship were key to this,
whether between solo and orchestra, or harmony and rhythm. It was a fantastical,
exhilarating performance that achieved that status through command of detail
and its integration into a keen sense of musical narrative. The piece felt
ultimately like a Mahlerian symphonic ‘world’: in idea, rather than expression,
but as an utterance of that stature. Kurtág’s ‘Ruhelos’ from his Kafka-Fragmente
said all that might be said as an encore, Webern to Bartók’s Mahler.
Bartók’s Five Hungarian Folksongs
made for an arresting opening to the second half, all the more so in such
committed, comprehending performances as we heard when Rinat Shaham joined
Rattle and the orchestra. My first and last question was: why on earth do we
not hear these songs more often? My fist and last answer were alas identical:
the language, of course. It is a great, if understandable pity. I cannot vouch
for Shaham’s Hungarian, but I can certainly vouch for her communication, which often
seemed so vivid as to transcend mere linguistic understanding. ‘In Prison’, the
first song, offered a sense of direct witness from the soloist, to another
beautifully woven orchestral accompaniment. From the house of the dead, one
might say. As Shaham’s delivery became ever more declamatory, her witness
chilled all the more. Every song was sharply characterised by all concerned,
the LSO warm and precise in the ‘old Lament’, Shaham colourful, even whimsical,
yet with something undoubtedly serious to the core of ‘Yellow Pony, Harness Jingling’.
A poignant ‘Complaint’ preceded ‘Virág’s Lamps Are Burning Brightly’, delivered
with palpable relish: a fine, spirited finale.
Seated at the back of the
orchestra, Shaham crafted two excellent cante jondo interventions, one in the
Introduction, one in the second act’s ‘Dance of the Miller’, to Manuel de Falla’s
ballet The Three Cornered-Hat. That Introduction and indeed the whole of
the first act seemed to need no theatre; theatricality lay in the score and the
images its performance evoked. The world of puppetry never seemed far away:
whether that of the composer’s puppet-opera El retablo de maese Pedro
or, increasingly, Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Diaghilev kinship was
certainly strong, though Falla’s score never quite sounded ‘like’ anyone or
anything else—which certainly included the Spain of Frenchmen such as Ravel and
Debussy. Fast and furious, this account shone a welcome midday sun on a dark
and wintry London evening. In the second act, Rattle imparted a fine sense of
inevitability, the Miller’s dance seemingly necessitating his arrest, which in
turn necessitated his escape. The Beethoven parody was clearly, wittily handled
and properly integrated into the narrative whole. The ‘Final Dance’ emerged as
if a mini-ballet in itself, eliciting rapturous applause from a capacity
Barbican audience.
Virtuosity of the highest degree, entirely
at the service of musical drama, characterised this Aix production under Barrie
Kosky’s direction. Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King and
György Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente formed a staged double bill, given
without a break, at that eighteenth-century jewel among theatres, the Théâtre
du Jeu de Paume. The ghost of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire haunted
proceedings, audibly in the Davies’s music theatre monodrama, written for the
composer’s own, Schoenberg-inspired Fires of London (here, Schoenberg’s
ensemble plus percussion), and more scenically in the Kurtág fragments, not of
course intended to be staged, but here given an intriguing new slant through
the mediation of expressionist cabaret.
Johannes Martin Kränzle’s assumption of the
mad king – referred to in the cast list simply as ‘Un homme’, though it is of
course George III – was something never to be forgotten. Quite how much was
his, how much was Kosky’s, we shall never know—and why should we particular
care? Theatre is collaborative, even in what might seem to be a one-man-show. With
a single spotlight, a single unsparing spotlight, this poor (rich) man, clad
only in sagging underpants, bared his soul to the birds, the audience, and
indeed the musicians of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, incisively conducted by
Pierre Bleuse, who in turn offered us their own, related musical tour of whimsy,
parody, and brutal violence. From an early promenade, through the haunting of
an imaginary yet ever-so-real queen ‘Esther’, via the king’s beloved Handel – with
biting irony, ‘Comfort ye…’, to the final, shocking smashing of the violin,
this was a psychological study, which in a sense revealed nothing other than
itself, and thus in another sense proved all the more revealing. Through the
countless ways he marshalled his voice and his entire body, Kränzle touched,
amused, and horrified us. It was gripping, concentrated theatre, which one
might well have wished to experience again, but knew one could not, even if the
attempt had immediately been made.
Anna Prohaska and Patricia Kopatchinskaja,
minus the EIC, were our guides for Kurtág’s extraordinary set of miniatures. The
violin provided, as it were the bridge: destroyed and now resurrected as a
one-woman orchestra who was also a protagonist—and
by her double-companion. Equality here, between two more
consummate musicians and communicators seemed, by virtue of staging and
performance, the former still astutely straightforward yet minutely observed, to
be both immediately, immanently manifest and yet also maintained through
ever-shifting dramatic power relationships: one conducting the other, one
pulling the other’s strings, one inciting and consoling, and so on. Where Davies’s
expressionist nightmare had stunned us into submission, here a different ghost
of Pierrot – perhaps surprisingly given the more ‘abstract’ nature of
the work – proved more founded in re-gendered harlequin character. We turned
inwards, Kurtág’s Webern-like miniatures commanding and receiving absolute
concentration, in more than one sense. Prohaska’s spellbinding performance –
imagine having to sing that by heart, and engage in minutely planned physical
performance too – was impossible to dissociate from Kopatchinskaja’s. The two
musicians seemed almost to emerge as two emanations of the same soul. A
response to their male counterpart in the first half, or something subtly yet,
in that subtlety, defiantly different? Why choose? Again, there was so much one
could not possibly have taken in, which cried out for another chance to do so,
yet which was tantalisingly lost in the passage of concentrated time. Above
all, though, and this may be the ultimate ‘lesson’, we learned a little better
to listen to one another.
Ligeti, arr. Elgar Howarth:Macabre Collage (UK premiere) Ligeti: Violin Concerto Beethoven: Symphony no.5 in C minor, op.67
Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin)
London Symphony Orchestra
François-Xavier Roth (conductor)
Image: Mark Allan
György Ligeti will turn 100 on 28 May. Let us
hope for many performances as excellent as this in celebration of perhaps the most
abidingly concert-hall-popular of postwar musical modernists. First, François-Xavier
Roth conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in Elgar Howarth’s 2021 revision
of his 1991 ‘collage’ from Le Grand Macabre. From the anarchic
Monteverdi hommage of the opening, L’Orfeo’s Toccata revisited via
twelve car-horns, to the closing passacaglia with swing, here to my ears
slightly suggestive of Kurt Weill, Ligeti’s ‘anti-anti-opera’ or ‘comic
apocalypse’ splendidly hit the absurdist spot of would-be annihilation in
edited, wordless version. (If ever we needed a return to Breugelland, it is
surely during our current NATO-Putin-Zelensky standoff.) Was that an allusion I
heard early on to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony? Perhaps, perhaps not. Does it
matter? Again, one can argue either way. A musical melodrama of drumroll and
offstage trombone set the, or at least a, drama proper in motion, Death
drunkenly fiddling offstage, having us both fear and ridicule him, caught in
the headlines of a Fate Ligeti (and Beethoven) may or may not have summoned.
The space was used resourcefully throughout, an E-flat clarinet peeking out
from a hole in the wall that suggests, yet does not contain, an organ, various
tricks beguiling and distracting as commedia dell’arte met something approaching
music theatre. A tango-ish Rite, or just a rite? Hard-edged, metallic,
it was splendidly theatrical, hallucinatory harpsichord, fairground Bach, and
all; unsettling, even frightening fun at its best.
The Violin Concerto emerged in context as a
microtonal dance of something between life and death, the first movement memerising
in its difficulties and in Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s (and the LSO’s) despatch
of them. A folklike, vibratoless solo ‘Aria’ constantly surprised as other,
hocketing instruments joined in deft evasion of the conventional, emotional or
otherwise. Ocarinas versus virtuosic violin; piccolo, percussion, and horns: the
‘weird ironic homelessness’ (Seth Brodsky) of this movement held us in its
thrall. Its successor, the ‘Intermezzo’ sounded as if an electronic Prokofiev
reverie; it is none of those things really, of course, but perhaps the ‘real’ has
been overrated. Another passacaglia, here of shifting stillness, ensued, lengthy
violin harmonic notes eventually rudely assailed, so as to turn things loudly
inwards—then outwards. Shaping from all concerned, Roth as much as the soloist,
showed both careful precision and febrile abandon. The finale’s virtuoso
fireworks emerged as strangely (in a good sense) hardwon: a further mystery of
the macabre. Kopatchinskaja’s own cadenza culminated in singing, whistling,
stamping, and more—and not only from her. Leader Carmen Lauri joined her for an
encore of the early (1950) violin duo Baladă şi joc, evoking more
strongly than anything in the concerto a Bartókian, indeed Hungarian, past that
soon would no longer be a desirable, or even conceivable, option for
composition.
As agile in his podium pirouette from receipt
of applause to commence Beethoven’s Fifth, applause still ongoing, as in his
musical direction, Roth offered us a first movement unquestionably fast by
historical standards, yet without being hard-driven. (For the nth time, speed
and tempo are not the same thing.) Crucially, Beethoven’s score throughout pulsed
with life: a banal cliché, no doubt, but sometimes words are truly
insufficient. This was not, nor would anyone have expected it to be, a
Beethoven in the line of Furtwängler, Klemperer, Barenboim,
et al.; it was clearly influenced by Roth’s work with his
period-instrument orchestra, Les Siècles, perhaps especially in the ripe,
fruity presence of the LSO woodwind. (Just how did that metamorphosis take
place?) But there was no dogmatism, simply a different, sincerely held, and
powerfully communicated view. The astonishing textural clarity we heard was not
an end in itself, but a means to hear, to feel, musical process. Just as the move
to the relative major for the second group inevitably—and irrespective of ‘intention’—sounded
a moral as well as a ‘purely’ musical transformation, so did the necessity of further
struggle in the recapitulation-as-second-development. The movement’s concision
shocked and enthralled as it must, and if, at the close, I felt energy had triumphed
over tragedy, or rather there had been a degree of dissociation, then not
everything, even in Beethoven, is or need be Romanticism.
In the second movement, flowing freely,
articulation enhanced rather than detracting from the longer line. The martial,
French Revolutionary quality to brass interventions was rich in resonance (of
various kinds). Every section of the LSO played superbly, but the gorgeous sound
of the cellos perhaps merits special mention. Again, this was a vivid
communication of form and melodic line as one: wholly involving, as was the implacable,
subjectively aware scherzo, whether first time around or in ghostly (here,
perhaps ghostlier than I have ever heard) reprise. The sheer energy of contrapuntal
outburst in the trio offered an excellent presentiment of the transition to the
finale, which was yet not foreshadowed by that presentiment. Again, Roth’s way here
was neither Wagnerian nor even especially post-Wagnerian, but that is not to
say it lacked its own metaphysics or at least philosophy. At any rate, the
sheer physical thrill of what unfolded had its own, perhaps more materialist tale
to tell. Later transitions were just as seamless, which is of course not to say
without import. This, then, was a reading of great cumulative power, to which
the LSO appeared and sounded entirely committed throughout.
Joel Järventausta:Sunfall (world premiere) Strauss:Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, op.28 Helen Grime: Trumpet Concerto (world premiere) Francisco Coll: Violin Concerto (UK premiere) Strauss: Tod und Verklärung, op.24
Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin)
Håkan Hardenberger (trumpet)
London Symphony Orchestra
François-Xavier Roth (conductor)
Three premieres, two of them
world premieres, and a couple of Strauss tone poems. Add concerto soloists of
the calibre of Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Håkan Hardenberger to the formidable
team of the London Symphony Orchestra and François-Xavier Roth, and what is not
to like? Nothing here, I think. Joel Järventausta’sSunfall, apparently
rooted in the composer’s synaesthetic response to the colour orange, made for
an impressive opening piece, subdued first chords swiftly, rudely interrupted
by a cataclysmic orchestral clap. That and other such contrasts in material
were worked out in an atmosphere of unease and natural-world majesty. A keen
ear for matching timbre and harmony, and for lone, fragile melodic against that
atmospheric backdrop imparted a sense of the ultimate amorality of the sun and
its light: it can give life, but it can also take it away. Increasing
animation, even frenzy, returned us to a transformed wilderness. Chatter at its
close—musical, yet speech—enhanced the enigma, but also the unapproachability
of that giant fireball now departed.
I do not think it would do Sunfall any disservice to call it a
contemporary tone-poem. At any rate, it was followed by the first of two
supreme masterpieces of the genre. Till
Eulenspiegel emerged in Roth and the LSO’s capable hands flexible,
colourful, and wry as ever. It shared with its predecessor a clear sense of
narrative, full of incident and clear of structure, though it was certainly not
to be reduced to its programme. There was an idiomatic swing where called for,
not so very far from Strauss’s waltz-king namesake. Throughout, Roth showed
that, like the best Strauss conductors, he could ‘play’ the orchestra with
ease.
Helen Grime’s new Trumpet
Concerto opened darkly, yet with a host of orchestral colours, harmonic and timbral,
not entirely un-Bergian. From that, the trumpet emerged magically, before
sinking once more into an orchestral cauldron that was itself home both to echoes
and pre-echoes of Hardenberger’s wondrously spun solo thread. Motivic threads were
knit tightly together in a way I am tempted to call Classical, though I do not
wish to imply something backward-looking. And in truth, the method probably had
little to do with such distant forebears, though the movement of particular
lines more than once recalled to me the late music of Boulez. Fantastic
descending orchestral spirals, scurrying, and more would surely have interested,
even delighted, him. Hardenberger’s lightly worn virtuosity became all the more
apparent, incited by magnificently idiomatic writing for the instrument. There
was, moreover an ebbing and flowing melancholy to the trumpet, not remotely
sentimental, but which rather seemed to bear witness, perhaps even to the
troubled time in which it was written (and first performed).
The opening éclat of Francisco
Coll’s Violin Concerto, more angular rhythmically, heralded a kinship that may
only have been of chance, but which in context spoke of twin conceptions of instrumental
and orchestral fantasy, replete in this case with punctuating percussion. At
any rate, we heard the music of two composers by now fully mature, even
contemporary masters. (For me, it has been quite a thing to acquaint myself
with their musical journeys over the past decade or so.) Kopatchinskaja’s explosive,
full-blown virtuosity led the way towards a lyrical blooming that was not so
much ‘traditional’, whatever that may mean, as intriguingly and, yes, movingly
haunted by some of tradition’s ghosts. The first movement (‘Atomised’) close,
with high-lying, silvery orchestral violins heightened a kinship I had already
felt with Prokofiev: not ‘influence’, nor a model, but perhaps simply a sense
that the two composers, mediated by Kopatchinskaja, might have something to say
to one another.
There was certainly a sense of
magic, drawing one in, to the second movement ‘Hyperhymnia’ and its lyricism,
both uneasy and (almost) easy, harmonic development propelling its motion. Indeed,
the expressive nature of Coll’s harmonic language, never to be reduced to that
of anything or anyone else, proved at times quite breathtaking. A section of almost
neo-Mahlerian climaxes, not in language, but in preparation and spacing, led to
a true cadenza of true, musical virtuosity, which in turn led us into a finale (‘Phase’)
of great invention (for instance, a passage setting violin against double
basses) and intensity. Passages of (relative) stasis and movement, of shifting
colours, transformational rhythms, and ghosts in the machine, seemed as
inspired by Kopatchinskaja’s playing as she by Coll’s writing.
Both concertos, indeed all the
works so far heard, had been journeys of transformation. So too, of course, was
Tod und Verklärung. Its ominous
opening heart-beats, vividly pictorial and crucial to subsequent, motivic
development, heightened rather than dignified the magic of life (and beyond).
There was high-operatic drama, presented with polish, precision, and grand
sweep. There were light and shade, including colours I had never fancied were
there. There was harmonic richness too, all revealed in a full-bodied
orchestral performance, with none of the thinness one sometimes hears in this
work. The glow of final transfiguration was echt-Straussian
and intensely moving.
Luigi Nono was many things: composer, human being,
quite often both. Nono was an artist of burning political commitment, never
more so than in his agitprop opera Intolleranza
1960, also to be heard at this year’s Salzburg Festival. He was a
modernist, an avant gardist, a serialist. At least as important as those
qualities, however, he was Venetian and a traveller, both personally and in his
music: to, from, and around the city of his birth (1924), death (1990), and
much of his life in between. Take the ravishingly beautiful yet equally
instructive late documentary from 1988, Archipel
Luigi Nono, madewhen Nono was at
work on La lontananza nostalgica utopica
futura. Olivier Mille interviews the composer about his work while the pair
walk around the city. No one could doubt that Nono was both utterly at home yet
capable of the considered distance of an inquisitive visitor, ever alert to the
intersection of Venice’s and, specifically, the island of Giudecca’s
geographical, historical and social boundaries.
Nono’s studies at the
Venice Conservatory with Gian Francesco Malipiero, crucial in the rediscovery
of Monteverdi, encompassed the golden ages of polyphony and the madrigal. He
loved the idea of the Venetian workshop, in which art, craft and community came
together as indissoluble artistic and political whole. Moreover, delight in
vocal writing would inform Nono’s composition from beginning to close; that
certainly includes his instrumental music, both with and without electronics.
Many composers, even of the most exalted rank, have found themselves, rightly
or wrongly, accused of ‘instrumental’ writing for voices. Nono’s deep grounding
in Renaissance music helped ensure he would be of Monteverdi’s party as well as
Mozart’s, Palestrina’s – and Schoenberg’s. Nono, like Chopin, avowed what is
perhaps a surprising interest in the operas of Bellini, fascinated by the
Sicilian composer’s combination of vocal writing and receptivity to a wider
Mediterranean culture. As Claudio Abbado attested in a tribute to his friend
and frequent collaborator:
[Nono] never lost the
deep-rooted ties to the long tradition of Venetian music, as demonstrated by
his unerring feeling for the relation of sound and space, recalling the music
[Giovanni] Gabrieli wrote for the church of San Marco. Gigi’s sense of an
espressivoor cantabileline also stems from this tradition.
In that respect, Nono differed from fellow
post-war Webern enthusiasts, such as Boulez and Stockhausen, though not from
his fellow Malipiero pupil, Bruno Maderna. That, as much as more overt
‘political’ concerns (or lack of them) may help explain why Boulez and
Stockhausen seem to have misunderstood Nono’s aesthetics and, indeed, his
music. To quote Jonathan Impett’s recent study of Nono, polyphony stands ‘at
the core of Nono’s musical thought, entailing simultaneity of directions,
perspectives, times and possibilities’. To those and to the crucial spatial
element highlighted by Abbado, we should never forget the spatial drama of
Venice itself. This is music whose mists, bells, rising waves, café and street
chatter are specific and yet, in that specificity, reach out toward the
universal. The relationship between performer(s) and composer, score, the
distorting sonic mirror of electronics, and listener is the very material of
Nono’s musical dramas, whatever the space – another crucial, considered
relationship – in which they unfold. Heir to the great tradition of Venetian
opera dating back to Monteverdi, Nono always conceives music as azione scenica, often in more than one
fashion simultaneously.
Artistically expressed
political commitment likewise took different forms. There is, however, no truth
whatsoever to the claim sometimes heard that, following his second opera, Al gran sole carico d’amore, a grand
1970s traversal of modern European, often female, revolutionary experience, his
work withdrew in some allegedly typical ‘late’ form from the political sphere.
It simply – or not so simply – addressed it differently, as we shall find in La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura.
For Nono, there was no absolute distinction to be drawn between the
individually and the socially transformative in music – so long, that is, as
such transformation were well directed.
No Roads, Only
Travelling
‘Caminantes, no hay caminos, hay que caminar’ (travellers,
there are no roads, there is just travelling): Nono derived inspiration for
several late works, La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura included, from an inscription on a Toledo
monastery wall. Written during a period of intensive collaboration with
Gidon Kremer – an heir to earlier partnerships with Abbado and Maurizio Pollini
– whose initial suggestion had been a contemporary response to Vivaldi’s
(Venetian) Le quattro stagioni,the work acquired its definitive title
– adding both ‘utopica’ and ‘madrigale
per più “caminantes” con Gidon Kremer’ – and its form several months
after the September 1988 Berlin Festival premiere. Salvatore Sciarrino, the
work’s dedicatee as an ‘exemplary traveller’, elucidated the title’s dramatic
and political space: ‘the past reflected in the present (nostalgica) brings about a creative utopia (utopica), the desire for what is known becomes a vehicle for what
will be possible (futura) through the
medium of distance (lontananza)’.
There was a good deal of
backstreet Venetian messiness involved, however, in reaching this madrigal of
many travellers. Nono and Kremer recorded the tape part – now heard digitally,
performed by André Richard, who assisted at the premiere – in February 1988 at
SWR’s Experimentalstudio in Freiburg. Its richness was both intentional and
accidental, incorporating not only Kremer’s violin improvisations, but sounds
of tuning, ambient studio noise, discussion between Nono and Kremer, and so on,
Nono having his soundworld expanded by sounds he had never heard before, Kremer
compelled to summon them, wittingly and sometimes otherwise. Impett’s account
of the unedited tapes makes for fascinating reading:
With quiet concentration, [Nono] asks Kremer to play high and as quietly as possible. These high sounds, sustained to focus on their inner life, are followed by the fifths and microtonal variations of Nono’s initial plan. Kremer continues with high phrases – mostly extracted from the core solo repertoire, but recorded closely to reveal subtones, additional partials, bow noise and instability – and the percussion of attack. […] While phrases from Beethoven, Bach and Bartók begin to emerge, the obsessive repetition of practising draws attention away from figure or reference to the particular sonic qualities of each sound, to the nature of individual connections. […] As the artists relax into their project, Kremer plays longer passages – entire movements of Bach, of Schumann – stopping to focus on sounds that fascinate or trouble him. […] As Kremer searches for sounds and gestures, and then rehearses his own actions, these tapes explore an entire strand of Western music as embodied in one musician.
Having edited the tapes with Freiburg’s Hans Peter
Haller, relentlessly organizing and reorganizing sounds until something
composed emerged, Nono struggled to complete the violin part in time. According
to Kremer’s account, he eventually, ‘nervously, apologetically’ proffered ‘some
bits of manuscript paper: here a line, there four bars, there three lines, and
said with almost fatherly calm: “No problem, no worry, I’ve got it all. Tonight
I’ll write it.” There were still 36 hours to the premiere.’ Dissatisfied with
that premiere or at least sensing that he could travel further, in January 1989
Nono revised the violin and tape parts, as well as, crucially, the relationship
between them. 1989 was, of course, a year whose strange, largely unanticipated
political events would throw questions of roads, travelling, nostalgia and utopia
further into confusion. It is not difficult to imagine, however, what the
communist composer, who died the following year, would have made of the
neoliberal triumphalism that ensued and of any claims concerning the end of
history or of travelling.
Six violin parts are split
between six music stands positioned around the performing space. Additional
stands will remain empty, heightening dramatic unpredictability for the
audience. The violinist makes her way between them, instructed to search for the
next stand rather as she is to search for sounds themselves, so as to be ready
to perform the next part of a score replete with performing instructions so
detailed that they require more printed space than the notes. Extremes of pitch
and dynamics take performer, listener and musical collaborator further to the
edge of possibility – even when rehearsal time has proved less limited.
Harmonics, microtones, all manner of musical mirroring both carefully conceived
and apparently spontaneous: the soundworld of Kremer’s virtuosity finds itself
both retained and transformed. Eight loudspeakers stand at the disposal of the
sound director, who will choose which of eight tracks, for Nono ‘a
multipolarity of elements’, to play when, at what varying (fading up to full and
down to zero) volume, so long as they are not all played at once, and in what
space. It is thus in the specific, human confrontation and collaboration
between violinist and sound director that the work will come to life.
This, then, is chamber
music, poised somewhere between creation and re-creation. For a host of
reasons, some structural, some contingent, no single walk around a
neighbourhood we ‘know’ will ever be the same; nor should it be. Yet it is
surely worthy of note that, from Berlin to final revision, the piece’s opening
gesture remained the same. In that, it is perhaps the musical counterpart to
the political ‘provocation’ Nono noted each of his artworks required, when
reflecting almost 30 years earlier on Intolleranza:
‘an event, an experience, a test in our lives, which provokes my instinct and
my consciousness, as man and musician, to bear witness’.
Remembrance
and Misremembrance
US poet Wayne Koestenbaum recalled a sabbatical
month he spent in Venice in 2004. He would pass what had been Nono’s house
every day.
I didn’t travel to Venice solely to pay homage, but I brought with me a CD of his music – La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura – and listened to it on my rented apartment’s boombox while shelling peas and broiling branzino and writing poems and taking naps; the sound of Nono’s music mingled with ambient sounds outside my window (church bells, footsteps on quarried granite, shutters opening and closing, cutlery clattering, adolescents laughing and shouting). Often I’d not be able to differentiate what was Nono coming from the boombox and what was Venice coming through the window. Listening, I’d drift into daydream, and then snap back to consciousness, and wonder, “for how long have I not been paying strict attention to the music?” but then I’d once again closely listen; Nono seemed to countenance my inattentiveness.
Should you fall into a similar trap, you may well
discover that Nono the humanist composer has already written in that lapse. If
not, you will assuredly find other aural Venetian lagoons and alleyways to
haunt and be haunted by, to explore and be explored by, and ultimately both to
remember and misremember.
(This essay was first published by the 2021 Salzburg Festival, to accompany a performance by Patricia Kopatchinskaja.)
(This essay was originally published in a 2020 Salzburg Festival programme for a concert by Camerata Salzburg and Patricia Kopatchniskaja.)
GYÖRGY LIGETI: Concerto for violin and orchestra ANONYMOUS: Byzantine Chant for Psalm 140 (arranged for violin and string orchestra by Patricia Kopatchinskaja) FRANZ SCHUBERT: First movement (Allegro) from String Quartet no.14 in D minor, D. 810 – ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ (arranged for string orchestra by Patricia Kopatchinskaja) FRANZ SCHUBERT: Der Tod und das Mädchen, D. 531 (arranged for string orchestra by Michy Wiancko) FRANZ SCHUBERT: Second movement (Andante con moto) from String Quartet no.14 in D minor, D. 810, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ JOHN DOWLAND: Pavane ‘Lachrimæ Antiquæ Novæ’ for string quintet from Lachrimæ, or Seaven Teares FRANZ SCHUBERT: Third movement (Allegro molto) from String Quartet no.14 in D minor, D. 810, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ GYÖRGY KURTÁG: Ligatura-Message to Frances-Maria (The answered unanswered question), Op. 31b GYÖRGY KURTÁG: ‘Ruhelos’ from Kafka-Fragmente, Op. 24 FRANZ SCHUBERT: Fourth movement (Presto) from String Quartet no.14 in D minor, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’, D. 810
Ligeti: Anxiety and Transformation of
Influence
Ligeti’s Violin Concerto stands as a truly indispensable work in its genre and a key musical work of the late twentieth century. Initially composed in 1989 and 1990, it underwent significant revision during which composer and work alike moved, so it seemed, towards a Platonic ideal, its sources lost, found, varied, and rediscovered.
During
hospital convalescence, the composer engaged in intensive study of Haydn’s late
quartets, which seems strongly to have influenced ensuing process of
clarification. ‘From Haydn,’ he told his assistant, Louise Duchesneau, ‘you can
learn how to achieve the clearest effect with the simplest means.’ When
choosing ‘between a more ornate structure and a skeleton, Haydn always chooses
the skeleton, never using one note more than he needs. I applied this principle
of avoiding unnecessary complexity … and thought that it brought me closer to
my ideal.’ Ligeti worried, however, that he had veered too close to Hungarian,
especially Transylvanian, folk music, replacing the first movement entirely. He
also revised and reordered the other two in an expansion to five movements that
yet never reached his originally anticipated eight. The version the work’s
dedicatee, Saschka Gawriloff, premiered in 1990 with Gary Bertini and the
Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra was always considered incomplete. Gawriloff and
Ligeti employed material originally intended for movements never completed for
the fifth-movement cadenza; Kopatchinskaja will play her own.
Ligeti’s
interest in different systems of tuning is very much in microtonal play. With a
few exceptions marked in the score, the soloist plays at concert pitch. Things
are difficult enough for her already with virtuosic writing, according to the
composer, born of models such as ‘Paganini, the Bach solo sonatas, Ysäye’s solo
sonatas, Wieniawski, and Szymanowski’. However, the concertmaster – one of only
five orchestral violins – and first viola – one of three – must play in
scordatura, tuned to the seventh harmonic partial of the double bass’s first string
and fifth of its third string respectively. Brass too offer natural harmonics,
while use of ocarinas, slide whistles, and harmonica both subverts and expands
our field of listening. By combining these ‘out of tune’ notes and harmonics
with those of the normally tuned strings, Ligeti sought to ‘build a number of
harmonic and non-harmonic spectra,’ such conflict between overtones resulting
in a veritable voyage of harmonic exploration. The more Ligeti listened to
non-Western music, the less he could allow himself to be constrained by equal
temperament. ‘It almost hurts’, he said.
The
opening is likewise elemental, alternating open A and D strings in lightning
succession, furthering Ligeti’s desire for a ‘glassy shimmering character’. In
this first movement, ‘Praeludium’, the solo
line gradually distinguishes itself from an apparent multitude of other solos,
emerging as a well-nigh traditional, first-among-equals virtuoso. Its magic can
be tender too, though, as in the violin’s duetting with an array of tuned
percussion.
Polymeters run riot, as they
will too in the finale, much of whose folk material and allusion Márton Keréfky
has discovered to have been reused, ‘albeit embedded in a totally new context’,
from the discarded original first movement. The impression of ideas, remembered
or misremembered, from earlier movements piling upon one another affords
reinvented climax, never quite as we have known it. Listening
to Thai, Khmer, and Laotian music afforded inspiration and example for Ligeti’s
consciously seeking ‘for a new kind of way of building a melody’. So too did continuing
influence from his Transylvanian heritage.
The second movement, ‘Aria,
Hoquetus, Choral’ opens with a low solo, G-string adaptation of a melody from
Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles for Wind
Quintet, and thus ultimately from his still earlier Musica ricercata for piano, the former being a transcription of six
movements of the latter. The movement seems to aspire to rootedness, be it
folk- or chant-like – are the two ultimately so different? – yet to find its way
thwarted, ‘continually splintering’, in Seth Brodsky’s evocative phrase, ‘into
weird ironic homelessness’. Such weird irony and modal aspiration are only
heightened by a quartet of woodwind pied pipers taking up their ocarinas for
the chorale. High, fantastical writing in the central Intermezzo has any number
of parallels in other violin concertos, yet can never be assimilated to their
party. The Passacaglia makes play once more with time-honoured form, riveting
in its never-quite-expected progress. Here beats the heart of the work and of
Ligeti’s generative anxiety of influence.
Byzantine Chant: To the source?
A chant-like, even ‘mediæval’ quality has been remarked on in Ligeti’s second movement. We now move closer to the elusive (illusory?) source, nonetheless mediated. Travel through musical history and you will find any number of instrumental works or movements based on song melodies. Such tended to be the practice in the writing of Byzantine chant. A text, in this case that of Psalm 140, ‘Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man’, would be set to a traditional melody and subsequently shaped – or not – to requirements of the verse. This tradition’s characteristic ‘four-element syllable-count cadence’ – four final syllables of a line, regardless of word accent, tied to four fixed, stylised cadential elements – has suggested to scholars an earlier psalmody than its Gregorian counterpart. To indulge in wild anachronism, is this also an early anticipation of modern clashes between words and music, given a further twist by arrangement for instruments alone?
Touched by Death
Schubert set Matthias Claudius’s Der Tod und das Mädchen in February 1817, two years after Claudius’s death. Here death approaches in instrumental sombre D minor. The Maiden vocally resists, bidding him not to touch her. He has his way, though, also vocally; he is not fierce and will have her sleep in his arms. The song closes with a foreshortened reprise of the introduction, albeit in an equally sombre yet peaceable D major. The manuscript might not have survived, having been cut into pieces by Schubert’s half-brother Anton, the Benedictine Father Hermann, yet was eventually reassembled. (It had in any case been published.) Ludwig Wittgenstein would muse on its fate more than a century later:
Recall that after Schubert’s death his brother cut some of Schubert’s scores into small pieces and gave such pieces, consisting of a few bars, to his favourite pupils. This act, as a sign of piety, is just as understandable to us as the different one of keeping the scores untouched, accessible to no one. And if Schubert’s brother had burned the scores, that too would be understandable as a sign of piety.
Showing the dead respect takes many forms.
Touched by Life
If the song is one of Schubert’s most celebrated, so too is the March 1824 string quartet taking its nickname and the theme of its second movement from it, touched by life rather than death. It stands as tall in its genre as Ligeti’s concerto in its. Resist undue romanticisation as we might, it is difficult not to think at least in partial relation to Schubert’s own coming appointment with the grim reaper. This was, however, the very time his friend Franz von Schober reported Schubert believed new medication had cured him. Either way, an artwork should not be reduced to biography, however tragic.
Tragedy is nevertheless present, vehemently so in the first movement, its second thematic group sweetly lyrical yet undoubtedly in the shadow of a furious D minor daemon not so very different from that which had captivated Mozart. The number of fortissimo and still more sforzando markings might visually suggest a score by Beethoven, although the triplet writing could not be more characteristic of Schubert: both in itself and for the particular variety of propulsion it offers. Such prospects of peace as there are, for instance a shift to D major during the recapitulation, find themselves swiftly, even brutally undercut. The uncertainty of where the coda will lead till it breathes its last offers an apt summation of tensions and overall tragedy in the movement as a whole.
We move to G minor for the Andante con moto theme and variations, five of them. Neither the first violin’s flights of fancy in the first variation nor the cello’s rapt lyricism in the second can forestall the pent-up fury unleashed in the third. If the penultimate variation, as might be expected, shifts to the tonic major and the final variation concludes likewise, this is as resigned, even exhausted a close as that to the original song. Only in the third movement trio, that Schubert can present a (relatively) sustained vision of major mode utopia. Sandwiched as it is, however, between the rhythmic insistence and almost bewildering syncopations of the scherzo itself, we know that it is too late. Is it fanciful to consider the rondo finale a Totentanz, a dance of death? Hardly, for this Romantic tarantella leaves us in no doubt as to the work’s ultimate destination, fury once more and now decisively winning out over resignation. Having the coda open in D major only prepares the way for the final nail in the coffin. Neither hope nor forgiveness is to be had; nor is it sought.
Old Tears New
John Dowland’s 1604 Lachrimae or seaven teares figured in seaven passionate pavans takes as its theme and first pavan Dowland’s existing song and lute solo, Lachrimae antiquae (‘Old Tears’). We hear here its immediate successor variation, ‘Lachrimae antiquae novae’ (‘Old Tears New’), its melodic melancholy and harmonic intensity both related to and a development – to borrow from the Viennese Classical future – of its thematic model. What Thomas Morley in his influential 1597 Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke had held necessary for expression of ‘a lamentable passion’ may be heard immediately: ‘motions proceeding by halfe notes. Flat thirds, and flat sixths, which of their nature are sweet’; semitones or ‘accidentall motions’ that will ‘fitly express the passions of griefe, weeping, sighes, sorrowes, sobs, and suchlike’. And yet, Dowland noted in his dedication to Anne of Denmark that tears differ in cause and effect. ‘No doubt pleasant are the teares which Musicke weeps, neither are teares shed always in sorrow but sometime in joy and gladnesse.’ Music mirrors yet relieves man’s fallen condition.
Kurtág’s re-enchantment
Two short pieces by György Kurtág ask further questions ‘answered’ and ‘unanswered’, perhaps even unanswerable in the case of Ligatura-Message to Frances-Maria, written in 1989, the year Ligeti began his Violin Concerto; and, in the excerpt from his Kafka-Fragmente, to continue the restless (‘Ruhelos’) Schubertian wandering that is our fallen lot. Solo strings and celesta in the former suggest re-enchantment of the traditional quartet, in a slow processional offering neither comfort nor discomfort but something beyond, magically or materially, even a foundational melody yet to be found. The latter piece’s whispered confidences and sudden eruption from intimate theatre into something finely balanced between cruelty and the absurd likewise seem beyond our ken, stretch our ears as we may. Like Ligeti’s Haydn. Kurtág never uses ‘one note more than he needs’. Musical mysteries endure.
Ligeti – Violin Concerto Mahler – Symphony no.4 in G major
Camilla Tilling (soprano) Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin) Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Simon Rattle (conductor)
It had been two years, almost
to the day, since I had last heard the Berlin Philharmonic (in the flesh,
anyway). Then it had been Mahler
(with Lachenmann) in London; now it was Mahler (with Rihm and Ligeti) in
Berlin. The contemporary (more or less) works fared splendidly on both
occasions; Mahler, I think, fared much better on this, the interventionism that
has latterly characterised Simon Rattle’s work with that composer less
distracting, more convincing. The orchestra, of course, remains a great one,
now as fearless in new music as its fabled earlier self was in Beethoven and
Brahms.
Wolfgang Rihm’s Gruß-Moment2 was not quite receiving its premiere: that had taken place on the
first of these three performances. It is nevertheless emphatically a new work,
albeit performed with a confidence that might suggest otherwise. Rihm’s piece –
allegedly five minutes long, but significantly longer – is one of twelve
commissioned by the Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker from different composers,
apparently given carte blanche as to
how they approached their ‘album leaf’ compositions. It also follows Gruß-Moment 1, written for the Lucerne
Festival, for Pierre Boulez’s ninetieth birthday in 2015; now, of course, we
live in the shadow of Boulez’s death, and the piece is dedicated to his memory.
Rihm has written for what looks
like an average-sized orchestra: neither Bach’s, nor Gurrelieder’s. There are interesting omissions, though: clarinets,
bassoons (not contra-bassoon, however), and trumpets. On the other hand, there
are four players apiece for flutes, horns, and percussion. It is with an
English horn solo that the lament or tombeau
begins, perhaps inevitably putting us in mind of Tristan und Isolde. (Whether I liked it or not, I could not help
but find intervallic and rhythmic correspondences and differences with Wagner’s
Shepherd Song.) Four horns follow on: as so often with Rihm, forging further
links with German Romanticism, albeit more obliquely here than sometimes. Was
that even a hint of Bruckner in the string unison lines to come? Oboe and
trombone duetting, still more English horn and trombone duetting, put me a
little in mind of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch,
but that was probably just me; for one can play the game of correspondences all
one likes, of course, and it is in many ways just a way of finding one’s
bearing. It was only really with the sounding of the quartet of flutes and
percussion together that my ears found something that might possibly remind me
of Boulez, and then not overtly. Such, however, is not necessarily the point of
a tribute. If this were a tombeau, it
was not gloomy, some post-expressionist Angst
prior to the close notwithstanding, but then why should it be? Perhaps this was
more akin to an ode from Berlioz, Gluck, even Stravsinky; perhaps not. It
intrigued, nevertheless, nowhere more so than in the soft, yet Fafner-like
timpani of the closing bars: ‘dolce, quasi cantando’.
‘György Ligeti’s violin concerto is perhaps the
most exciting violin concerto since Beethoven. It’s the concerto I most enjoy
playing.’ Would that more violinists thought like Patricia Kopatchinskaja,
whatever that might imply about some of those far from negligible concertos in
between. (I shall except Schoenberg’s, since it is surely the most criminally
neglected of all.) This was, it seems, the third time the Berlin Philharmonic
had played the work, previous outings having come from Tamsin Little, also with
Rattle, in 2003, and from Renaud Capuçon and David Robertson seven years later.
There will doubtless always be a little personal eccentricity from
Kopatchinskaja, but I cannot believe that her decision to play barefoot would
have troubled anyone. If it did, so much the worse for him or her. (Our
intrepid soloist even managed to persuade the leader, Daniel Stabrawa, to shed
one of his shoes, when he joined her for a splendid encore performance of
Ligeti’s very early (1950) Balad si joc.)
The solo opening suggested that this might be
Ligeti very much in ‘process music’ mode. What especially intrigued about how
both work and performance developed was that that was sort of true, but far
from entirely so. That, one might say, is where music comes in. Kopatchinskaja’s
solo line gradually distinguished itself more and more from the many other solo
lines in this first movement Praeludium, taking on an almost ‘traditional’
virtuosic tinge, at least in the manner of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale (squared). Kopatchinskaja’s duetting with tuned
percussion proved one of the multiple delights here. In the second movement, I
initially reflected how viola-like her tone sounded – until the viola soloist
entered. A sensibility that was far from un-Romantic grew, until the moment of
typical Ligetian madness when a quartet of woodwind players, Pied-Piper-like,
took up their ocarinas. If the chorale section inevitably brought Berg to mind,
what greater inspiration could there be?
The high, fantastical writing with which the
Intermezzo opens had me think of Prokofiev, although, of course, it went very
much its own way. Such was the intensity of the climax that it felt as though
the music were over all too quickly. The slow, inevitable, riveting progress of
the Passacaglia brought, as the movement came to its climax, further thoughts
of Berg. This was almost incredibly committed playing from all concerned.
Prokofiev sounded as if he were unwinding in the final movement, soon
characterised by the reinstatement of a virtuosity it is difficult not to think
of in some sense as ‘Hungarian’. Rattle left the stage, deadpan, for
Kopatchinskaja to play her own cadenza: great fun, both gesturally and
musically. There was a sense of trying to goad him and the orchestra to come
back, eventually successful when the conductor reappeared from the percussion
to bring the concerto to a close.
The second half was devoted to the Mahler symphony.
Its first movement cannot escape from a certain sense of molding, so perhaps
sets itself up better for Rattle’s approach than some of the composer’s more
(apparently, deceptively) simple inspirations. It certainly did not drag –
unlike, say, the well-nigh unbearable performance I heard from Vladimir
Jurowski last year. Rattle ensured that the score was treated
affectionately yet not too much so, and at times, with a little yet not too
much brusqueness. Stabrawa’s violin solo – and not just that – sounded sweetly
sardonic, or should that be sardonically sweet? Mediaeval, or rather
pseudo-mediaeval, pictorialism was appealing throughout, coexisting happily with
Mahler’s idiosyncratic neo-Classicism. I was not sure what it all ‘meant’, but
I am not sure that I should have been sure: that is not really the point, or at
least need not be.
I was delighted to hear some vinegar in the second
movement scordatura playing. Often,
that ends up sounding ‘just’ dissonant, rather than making something (though
never too much) out of the different tuning. Ligeti, I thought, would have
approved. Counterpoint was admirably clear: one could really hear a multitude
of lines, almost as if St Anthony of Padua were preaching to a shoal of
particularly wayward, individualistic fish. However illusory, there remained a
sense of essential simplicity to the slow movement, which sounded very much as
if it grew out of Mahler’s four-part string writing: an expanded string
quartet, almost. The sound was perhaps sweeter than one often hears, but not
unreasonably so, and in any case often tended towards silver too. Not that the
darker side was neglected, far from it, but the movement proved commendably un-hysterical.
Thematic foreshadowings of the finale were nicely brought out, and that
movement grew as ‘naturally’ as I have ever heard out of its predecessor,
without a break, yet not rushed. Camilla Tilling offered one of the most
interpretatively interesting accounts of the text I have heard. There was a
greater range of vocal colour than one often hears, very much at the service of
the words. Stylistically, she drew out, or so it seemed, the music’s kinship
with the world of Hänsel und Gretel,
whilst Rattle’s keen ear for instrumental detail enriched rather than
overwhelming. Rarely have I heard so touching a performance of the final
stanza, nor a more lingering, loving farewell from the harp. Mahler’s
progressive tonality had indeed opened up a new, heavenly world.
György Kurtág is the last man
standing. Although not quite a member of the ‘post-war avant-garde’ in the
sense that composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Berio, Ligeti, et al. were, he is of that generation,
and has had much in common with them. When, as a boy, I first became seriously
interested in music, all of those composers, bar Nono, was alive; now,
following the death of Boulez, only Kurtág remains. If his international star perhaps
burned a little less brightly to begin with, that was probably because, unlike his
fellow student Ligeti, he remained in post-1956 Hungary. Kurtág’s aphoristic
style, however, owes arguably as much to Webern as does the music of any other
of those composers; indeed, Kurtág learned a great deal from copying out
Webern’s scores. Kafka Fragments is one
of those Kurtág works constructed out of, yes, fragments; in 1985, it was the
largest such to date. Although it has received a good few performances
recently, this was my first opportunity to attend one, intriguingly programmed
as part of the Southbank Centre’s Changing
Minds 2016 weekend mental health festival.
Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who
had performed Schumann’s Violin Concerto as part of this same festival, the
night before, was joined by Anu Komsi to perform this work of forty fragments.
My impression was that this was an unusually broadly-conceived performance;
even allowing for having started five-or-so minutes late, and for pauses, it
lasted considerably longer than advertised. The work’s progress did not,
however, drag; indeed, on both a micro- and a macro-level, one was drawn in,
Nono-like, to listen. Collaboration between the two artists was, as it would
have to be, extremely close; this was a performance that partook of the
gestural, indeed almost of the staged, as much as of the musical, without in
any sense minimising the musical achievement. The fine booklet note by Bruce
Hodges offered an excellent simile, which, to me penetrated to the heart of the
performance as well as the work: ‘The singer and the violinist are equal
partners, like two gnarled branches, intertwining as they age, each subtly
affecting the growth of the other. (Kurtág loves the strange trees in the Parc
Montsouris in Paris.)’ From the weary tread of the violin’s Schritt in the opening ‘Die Guten gehn
im gleichen Schritt’, the voice itself emerged. Or had it been there all along,
silent? Such thoughts were not, I hope, just pseudery, although you may think
otherwise, but rather a consequence of the closeness of collaboration, both
musicians playing from a single score.
Mood – perhaps,
given the circumstances, an especially important consideration – ranged widely,
whilst rarely, if ever, registering as unambiguously bright. The texts are, after all, by Kafka.
Violinistic ferocity in ‘Ruhelos’, followed by the whispering of the fragment’s
single word, might have led anywhere; only after the event did it seem
necessary for Kopatchinskaja to have taken up her own challenge, in the
next-but-one fragment, ‘Nimmermehr (Excommunicatio)’, with virtuosic descending
figuration, quickly responded to by its inversion, or something close thereto.
The ultra-melismatic writing of ‘Die Weissnäherinnen’ was relished by Komsi,
just as was the alternation between Sprechstimme
and song in ‘Zwei Spazierstöcke (Authentisch-plagal)’. Dance rhythms from old Mitteleuropa haunted the ‘Chassidischer
Tanz’ as they did ‘Szene in der Elektrischen’, its kinship with Bartók especially
resonant. Webern naturally came to mind on several occasions, none more
strongly than in the high-altitude stillness of ‘Träumend hing die Blume
(Hommage à Schumann)’; so, however, perhaps did the mountain-lake tranquillity,
that yet moves, of the slow movement to the Hammerklavier
Sonata. My own fancies? Perhaps; who knows? The openness of work and
performance was, I suspect, not entirely neutral, though, in provoking such
reflection.
Liszt in Mephisto-mode had swiftly
followed in the closing number of the first part, ‘Nichts dergleichen’,
preparing the way, or perhaps not, for the single number in the second part, ‘Der
wahre Weg (Hommage-message à Pierre Boulez)’. This seemed, and I mean this not
at all in a negative sense, to last quite some time; as for minutes on the
clock, I have not the faintest idea. However, as something akin to a still,
small voice of calm spoke, we experienced the arduous nature of the path that ‘goes
by way of a rope that is suspended not high up, but rather just above the
ground’. As if, paradoxically, rejuvenated through the exhaustion that
entailed, the third part changed tack in nervy yet bright fashion with its
opening ‘Haben? Sein?’
Was it just the language of ‘Der
begrenzte Kreis’ that provoked a momentary thought of Pierrot? Difficult to say, but I think it was something more,
however difficult or impossible to put into words; the musico-dramatic prowess
of the performers almost certainly played a part too. When it came to the
fourth and final part, the opening ‘Zu spat (22 Ocktober 1913) sounded ‘too
late’ indeed: no hysteria, just quiet despair, all the more deadly for its
soft-spoken motion. The line ‘Ich lebe rasch’ in the ensuing ‘Eine lange
Geschichte’ seemed to burn itself out, almost as if delivered by Don Giovanni
himself. It was the ecstasy, the extremity of the post-Gurrelieder Wild Hunt that seemed to haunt ‘In memoriam Robert
Klein’: almost, yet not quite, necessitating the measured diagnosis of ‘Aus
einem alten Notizbuch’. I say ‘almost, yet not quite’, since the relationship
between the fragments is often difficult to describe; one feels it, yet one seems
not really to know it. The halting progress one makes in that respect as
listener is perhaps not unlike that the performance evoked in ‘In memoriam
Joannis Pilinszky’. The closing ‘Es blendete uns die Mondnacht’ provoked all
manner of conflicting reactions concerning the fragments and their assembly.
Such is surely as it should be, given the centrality of the fragment to any
consideration of the modernism whose flame yet flickers and burns in Kurtág’s
art.
Thomas Larcher – Violin Concerto Stravinsky – The Rite of Spring Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin) London Philharmonic Orchestra Markus Stenz (conductor)
This was a refreshing concert
from the LPO and Markus Stenz, with one work entirely new to me, and two works
I might have feared I knew too well, given thought-provoking performances.
Stenz’s approach to Beethoven’s First Symphony struck me from the outset as
refreshingly un-ideological, save for the puzzling use of natural trumpets
(though not horns, I had assumed that to be a quirk of Vladimir Jurowski, but
maybe it is an LPO ‘thing’ instead). A spruce and precise first movement,
particularly impressive with respect to accents and crescendi, did not, at
least on occasion, lack weight. It was certainly more ‘Classical’ than
Wagnerian, but there is no one way to perform this music. I should not have
minded more vibrato from the strings, but at least it was not absent. If Haydn’s
spirit had come to the fore structurally and motivically in that movement,
Stenz’s shaping of the opening theme in the second and indeed the progress of
the movement as a whole proved strikingly Mozartian: a different sort of
complexity, often overlooked in Beethoven. I thought in particular of the slow
movement of the Jupiter Symphony, but
that was far from the only kinship suggested. Kettledrums nevertheless reminded
us that this could only be Beethoven (or perhaps Haydn). My only complaint was
that the orchestra sounded a little as if it were being pressed to sound ‘small-scale’,
as if it were inhibited by something. There was no doubt whatsoever that the third
movement was a true Beethoven scherzo; it sounded the most ‘advanced’ of the
four. Its trio was graceful, though no less Beethovenian, for all the
reminiscence of ‘bucolic’ Haydn. A splendidly teasing introduction to the
finale captured its vocal and jesting quality. The movement possessed many of
the virtues of the first, sounding lithe and lively. Excitement was musical
rather than something imposed upon the music. Ultimately, this was a
performance that made me think.
Thomas Larcher’s frankly tonal
Violin Concerto was not quite what I had been expecting, and the surprise again
set me thinking. In two movements, it was written for Isabelle Faust, who have
its first performance in 2009; here, the dazzlingly virtuosic, although not
always tonally ingratiating, Patricia Kopatchinskaja was the estimable soloist.
The first movement’s opening slow section offers an interesting combination of
music-box sonorities and persistent, almost yet not quite minimalistic
simplicity. The repeated E minor arpeggio put me in mind, a tone up, of the
opening of The Art of Fugue: as if
Bach were unable to get going and simply went around in a loop. (I have no
reason to think that that is anything other than my own association.) The
abruptness of change to the second section of this movement is striking – and was
so too in performance. Tempo (very fast), sonority, harmony, rhythm: pretty
much everything changes really, certainly the need, met with verve, for
soloistic virtuosity. The close returns to the mood and material of the
opening. ‘Romantic’ does not seem quite the right word for the second movement;
nor does it seem entirely wrong (at least, I should stress, upon a single
hearing, and without having seen the score). There is a hint of the ecstatic,
which, despite its clear German Romantic roots, also put me in mind, perhaps
arbitrarily, of Vaughan Williams. Pictorial virtuosity seems a particular
hallmark of the violin writing. There is a strong narrative thrust, powerfully
conveyed by Stenz and Kopatchinskaja. The close again returns to the arpeggio
material and the general mood of the opening to the concerto, although it
seems, quite deliberately, incomplete: perhaps deconstructed, perhaps not.
A performance of The Rite of Spring should always be an ‘occasion’; it certainly was
here. As with the Beethoven, Stenz had clearly thought long and hard about the
work. There was nothing routine to his interpretation; it undoubtedly had a
logic and character of its own, without trying to be ‘different’ for the sake
of it. There was menace in the slightly unusual drawn-out quality (a notable
hairpin in particular) to Jonathan Davies’s opening bassoon solo. The teeming
strangeness of what followed from the woodwind section really sounded as if
being heard with fresh ears. Different sections of the work offered marked
contrast, perhaps occasionally at the expense of a longer line, but also
reflecting a strikingly balletic approach. That approach was reflected not only
in sharply defined rhythm, such as one could imagine having helped the hapless
corps on that notorious premiere, but as strong a kinship to the Petersburg
colours of Petrushka as I can recall
having heard. This was ‘Russian’, yes, but without stereotype. More ‘purely’
musical matters were not neglected. Stravinsky’s cellular method and his
screwing up of dramatic tension were admirably conveyed, with a striking sense
of theatre. The LPO brass’s screams straightforwardly demanded one’s attention.
Some electronic intervention from an audience member proved an unwanted
interloper in what should have been silence prior to the ‘Dance of the Earth’. The
weirdness of the opening to the Second Part seemed more clearly than ever to
refer back to where it had all begun, at the beginning of the First Part. By
the same token, and this combination intrigued, there was very much a
world-weary quality: perhaps not unusual in itself, but at least a little so in
its degree, which even had me think of the Prelude to the Third Act of Parsifal. (Sorry, Stravinsky, but your
Wagnerian inheritance was never shaken off quite so readily as you might have
wished to claim.) As the music proceeded, there was again nothing routine to be
heard. Stenz seemed to have rethought the music as a conscientious performer
should naturally do. Throughout, it was the spirit of the Ballets Russes and of theatre in general that was most intriguingly
apparent.
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