Salzburg Mozartwoche (4) - Baborák Ensemble: Mozart, Reicha, and Michael Haydn, 29 January 2024

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Mozart, arr. Radek Baborák: Horn Concerto no.4 in E-flat major, KV 495
Anton Reicha: Quintet for horn, string quartet, and double bass in E major, op.106
Michael Haydn: Horn Concerto in D major, MH 134: ‘Larghetto’ and Allegro ma non troppo’
Mozart, completed Süssmayr (ed. Baborák): Rondo for horn quintet in D major, KV 514
Mozart: Horn Quintet in E-flat major, KV 407

Radek Baborák (horn)

Milan Al-Ashhab, (violin)

Martina Bačová (violin, viola)

Karel Untermüller (viola)

Hana Baboráková (cello)

David Pavelka (double bass)

Not very often does one have opportunity to hear a chamber concert led by a horn player. Still less will it be by one of the distinction of Radek Baborák. Still less than that will the rest of the ensemble be of the distinction of the players Baborák brought together for this, the fourth of my Mozartwoche performances this year. Mixing the familiar and the considerably less so, it proved a joy from beginning to end. 

The former was provided by Mozart’s fourth horn concerto, arranged for ensemble by Baborák. Such an ensemble will never quite sound as if it were an orchestra, perhaps especially in such familiar music, but it imparted a proper sense of ensemble tutti nonetheless. At the very opening, it could perhaps have afforded to play out a little more given the new balance, but solo playing was of such calibre that it mattered not. Phrasing, articulation, dynamic contrasts: all were achieved with apparent effortlessness, married to profound chamber sensitivity from all in a first movement of grace, light, and shade. Baborák’s own cadenzas were stylish and, at times, in the best sense surprising. Grace characterised the slow movement too, its course traced with affection and understanding, players taking all the time in the world but never too much. The finale was likewise possessed of the kind of ‘rightness’ one does not notice, that is a Mozartian rightness. It was a further delight, with a further, foot-stomping surprise to come in the cadenza. 

Anton Reicha’s Horn Quintet followed, written about forty years later in the mid-1820s, given here with its ad libitum double bass. The first movement revealed an accomplished work with plenty to hold the interest, not least given a performance of accomplishment such as this. There was, at least to my Romantically inclined mind, a poignancy to its historical position in the wake of Mozart and Haydn, as with all such Austro-German music, Beethoven and Schubert included. Some intriguing harmonic turns both made sense and helped ensure the music never quite sounded ‘like’ anyone else’s. The development section’s counterpoint convinced, Reicha’s preparation for the return perhaps less so. If an editor might have shortened this movement, there was much to enjoy in its amiable, decidedly non-Beethovenian temperament and course. Likewise in the Lento second movement, though with its own particular character. Baborák’s playing was wonderfully long-breathed, readily complemented by sweet-toned strings, a surprisingly ardent episode keeping all of us on our metaphorical toes. Light fun was had with the minuet’s syncopations, a touch of something deeper offered in the trio. A sunny finale reflected much of work and performance; I cannot imagine the latter bettered. 

The selection from Michael Haydn’s D major Horn Concerto, MH 134, might have seemed puzzling, in that a ‘Larghetto’ and ‘Allegro non troppo’ suggested a second and third movement, in turn to preface Mozart’s fragmentary Rondo in D, KV 514. Tempo indications can be misleading, though, for these were in fact the first and second movement. In any case, the first took us back to more Mozartian climes: Mozart’s (Salzburg) world, if not necessarily more than that, albeit with telling points of contact. This was another beautifully judged performance of considerable grace and, yes, depth, if worn lightly. Harmony and perhaps not only that stood closer, say, to Mozart than to the composer’s brother. Horn playing was to die for, with deeply sympathetic string accompaniment. I did not miss the full orchestra at all. The second movement was perhaps more distinctive, arguably a little closer to Joseph Haydn, though with a few harmonic touches very much Michael’s own. Mozart’s Rondo sounded every inch the classic hunting finale, though with a few strange turns doubtless to be ascribed to its peculiar nature and completion. Ultimately, though, the sense of ebullience with an implication of fragility were spot on, and there was no question who was the presiding master. 

Mozart’s Horn Quintet, obviously without double bass and with one of the violinists taking up the viola, was arguably the sole ‘masterwork’ played ‘as it should be’, but here it was at most first among equals. In any case, the first movement offered all of the virtues from what had gone before: judicious tempo, excellent phrasing and playing, a keen sense of chiaroscuro, collegiality, and so on. It seemed very much to penetrate to the heart, in more than one sense, of the matter; but then, so did everything else. Directness of emotion in the slow movement was not at odds with implicit and explicit compositional sophistication, far from it. Likewise, in different vein, for the finale: sunny, yet never quite without the implication of something darker. Joy is a strange, even difficult thing in Mozart’s universe, as we also heard in the extraordinary encore performance of the slow movement from the Clarinet Quintet.

Salzburg Mozartwoche (2): Baborák/VPO/Barenboim - Mozart, 25 January 2020

Grosses Festspielhaus

Symphony no.33 in B-flat major, KV 319

Horn Concerto no.3 in E-flat major, KV 447

Piano Concerto no.20 in D minor, KV 466

Radek Baborák (horn)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Daniel Barenboim (piano, conductor)

Mozart’s music requires but one thing in performance: perfection. Needless to say, it rarely receives what it needs. That is hardly the fault of us mere mortals; it is, however, our fault when we impose absurd ideological constraints upon his music, consciously reducing and impoverishing it. On this occasion, I am delighted to report that an all-Mozart concert came as close as I can recall to that perfection in performance it required. Radek Baborák, the Vienna Philharmonic, and Daniel Barenboim did Mozart, his music, and their audience proud.

Bewilderingly neglected – have I ever heard it in concert before? - the B-flat major Symphony, KV 319, benefited from that ‘rightness’ that is difficult to put either into words or practice, but which one knows when one hears it. Tempo, balance, articulation, sound, line: everything was there, just as it should be, in the way one used to hear from Sir Colin Davis, though never quite to be identified. (Near-perfection takes more forms than one might suspect.) Barenboim clearly heard the first movement, indeed the whole work, as if in a single breath, but that did not preclude a host of characters making their mark on Mozart’s invisible stage. The development section contrasted and complemented what had gone before. There was no need to make a meal of the four-note contrapuntal tag that to us inevitably presages the finale of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony; it was simply put to its post-Fuxian work, thereby blending in and generating. A graceful return smiled and led to a thrilling climax and coda.

Poised and poignant, the slow movement also boasted an oboe solo to die for, not that the Vienna strings were any less gorgeous to hear: warm, translucent, inviting. Barenboim’s harmonic understanding underlay and underwrote it all. The Minuet had a fine swagger to it, an equally fine developmental edge too. This was a dance that recalled or looked forward to the ballroom, but was certainly not to be confined to it. Its trio, often underestimated, was afforded due weight (not heaviness!), thereby singing, seducing, and effecting a Don Giovanni-like response in the reprise of its elder sibling. Champagne of the finest vintage characterised the finale, corks bursting, wine overflowing. ‘Finch’han del vino!’ Style and symphonic drama emerged as one in a performance whose stature was underlined by Barenboim’s opting to take the second repeat. Why, after all, should anyone wish such music and such music-making to end?

I wonder whether Baborák’s performance in the Third Horn Concerto may have offered the finest horn playing I have heard. I can safely say that I have heard none finer. Flawless of phrasing and of line, despatched with supreme aristocratic elegance, the first movement set expectations impossible high, only for them to be fulfilled. A slightly smaller string section, just as warm and polished as before, and delectable woodwind followed Barenboim’s lead to effect a partnership poised between chamber and orchestral music, or rather navigating between them. What riches of musical thought were revealed anew, not least some of Mozart’s most breathtaking modulations. A splendidly directed cadenza, Baborák’s own, presented us both with a true microcosm of the whole and a witty surprise. Sung with perfect consolation, human in its divinity and vice versa, the slow movement spoke of tragedy too, its turn to the minor all the more affecting for the lack of underlining lesser musicians would have brought to it. The quintessence of a hunting finale ensued, detail and sweep, balance and propulsion all finely weighed and communicated.

Dark, mysterious, soon explosive, the opening tutti of the D minor Piano Concerto again had expectations run unreasonably high, only to meet, even to surpass them. Dialogue between first and second violins, not only its clarity but also its import, left us in no doubt this was to be no run-of-the-mill performance. It set the scene, however, for a movement of great contrasts, responsorial and otherwise. When I had last heard Barenboim play this concerto, his technical control had not always been what it might; here, technique proved the liberation of the imagination, as Peter Pears once put it (at least according to a quotation on my A-level music teacher’s wall). The sweetness of tragedy, that ineffably Mozartian smiling through tears, was my abiding memory of a first movement as terrifying as anything in Don Giovanni, anger repressed as crucial as anger unleashed. It was, however, a more intimate performance than I expected, once again showing that, at his best, Barenboim is never a musician to rest on his laurels. That said, the lead up to the cadenza and the voice of Beethoven himself was seamless. And if that were not the Angel of Death hovering in the penumbra of the coda, I cannot imagine what it was.

Piano legato flowed like oil in the slow movement, as Mozart famously prescribed. It was in the half-lights and shadows, however, that the truest revelations – in every sense – lay. It was played with all the ease of a young man and all the wisdom accumulated since. The grief of which the central minor mode section spoke was harnessed thereafter to something seraphic, which managed to sing through the memory, through the trauma. Barenboim’s opening finale solo leapt off the page onstage, inciting a demonic rage from the orchestra that surely would have thrilled Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner too. The dramma giocoso balance to this movement, however, was Mozart’s and Mozart’s alone. Our destination, D major, proved balm for the soul and all the more painful for it. Whatever the horrors of our world, Mozart remains.

Boulez Ensemble/Barenboim: Beethoven, Bartók, and Boulez, 9 September 2019

Pierre Boulez Saal

Beethoven: Sonata for horn and piano in F major, op.17

Bartók: Sonata for two pianos and percussion, Sz 100

Boulez: sur Incises

Radek Baborák (French horn)

Karim Said, Denis Kozhukhin, Michael Wendeberg (piano)

Aline Khouri, Susanne Kabalan, Stephen Fitzpatrick (harp)

Lev Loftus, Dominic Oelze, Pedro Torrejón Gonzáles (percussion)

Daniel Barenboim (piano, conductor)

Two-and-a-half years after the opening of Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, in a programme climaxing in Pierre Boulez’s sur Incises, the hall’s resident Boulez Ensemble, drawn from members of the Staatskapelle Berlin and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, returned, neither for the first time, nor, I suspect, for the last, to a work that seems almost to define not only the performing space, not only its memories, but just as much its potentialities. In that, it takes its leave from Boulez’s own method of proliferation, his own pattern of works-in-progress, his own incomparable, endlessly proliferating legacy for all musicians and music-lovers, and indeed for all those interested in reimagination of performing spaces in the line of Boulez’s cherished concept of the salle modulable.

First, however, came two other Bs: Beethoven and Bartok; and a third, that other presiding musical presence of the Boulez Saal: Barenboim. What a joy it was not only to hear Beethoven’s Horn Sonata, op.17, but to hear it in such an enlightened performance, from Radek Baborák and Daniel Barenboim. A horn call as forthright as it was perfectly judged of tone seemed the perfect way to open a new season: rooted not only in the Austro-German musical past, but in Beethoven, a prelude to next year’s anniversary. (And if people do not like that prospect, they should, quite frankly, stop their childish posturing and grow up.) Barenboim’s melting, post-Mozartian response reminded us why he stands as one of the very few great Beethovenians alive (indeed the only one, as conductor). A few first movement exposition smudges, of interest only to carpers, were banished upon the repeat. What mattered was Beethoven’s spirit, revealed in a performance of perfect balance and tempo, the latter flexible, yet never drawing attention to itself in the subtlety of that flexibility. It was, above all, a performance grounded in harmonic understanding, without which all else will be in vain (and more than often is, in contemporary Beethoven performance). The recapitulation brought a fine sense of return, and some magically soft playing, Baborák’s phrasing, here and elsewhere, to die for. A gravely beautiful, properly vocal Poco adagio quasi andante led to a finale that proved, again, quite perfectly judged in its post-Mozartian spirit. Darker passages told, albeit without exaggeration, in an account both poignant and ebullient.

It was a welcome occasion indeed to hear Bartók’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion: not only as precursor to sur Incises, but also in relation to Peter Eötvös’s Sonata per sei, heard the previous day at the Berlin Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal. The first movement’s opening, imbued with suspense, erupted in well-nigh Boulezian éclat; and again, although quite rightly, differently. This was to be a performance that surprised, even when one ‘knew’: that is to say, it was to be a performance in the emphatic sense, pianists, Michael Wendeberg and Denis Kozhukhin, and percussionists, Dominic Oelze and Lev Loftus, alike revelling in the potentialities of live thinking and communication. Bartók’s music was made strange in the best sense, these fine musicians riding a defiantly untamed tiger and (more than) living to tell the tale. How inevitably. The score unfolded, grew, developed, taking in predecessors such as Beethoven and Bach in a sense extending far beyond the relative banality of ‘influence’. Its spatial element, prophetic for Boulez among others, felt especially immediate in this space. Inevitability – not in the sense of dullness, but a ‘rightness’ that, in retrospect, could not have been other – characterised the slow movement too, percussion processional joined by Wendeberg, then by Kozhukhin, in playing of almost Mozartian perfection (not only the pianists!) Form dramatically revealed itself; so too did the wildest, most compelling of night music. As in the Beethoven sonata, the final movement proved in every sense a finale, almost as fascinating to watch – for instance, how the percussionists, sometimes unexpectedly, shared their load – as to hear. Counterpoint lived and thrilled in a performance that was not remotely safe, and was all the better for that, culminating in a splendidly witty and beguiling close.

sur Incises has many roots: most obviously in the solo piano piece, Incises (written originally for the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition, with which Maurizio Pollini had a strong association). Boulez’s first intention, as he explained in a 1998 interview, was to ‘transform this piece into a longer one for Pollini and a group of instrumentalists, a kind of piano concerto although without reference to the traditional form.’ Other ghosts reared their head, though, such as Bartók’s Sonata and Stravinsky’s Les Noces. In this context, unsuprisingly, Bartók offered a strong point of departure – opening similarly, yet differently, de profundis – yet, as with so much of Boulez’s music, it was his conception of serialism as open-ended, ever-expanding, that dazzled. The spatial element is, of course, crucial. Here, again, it was greatly assisted by the hall and its acoustic, enabling us not only to hear but truly to feel the interplay between the ensemble as a whole (a giant reinvention of the piano, one might say), solo lines, and differently constituted groups within: three groups, considered vertically, each of percussion, harp, and piano, and, horizontally, the three percussionists, the three harpists, and the three pianists. Here, in the line of Boulez’s – and Barenboim’s – beloved Parsifal, not only did space become time, both became music. The way a trill passed across all three piano keyboards, Wendeberg and Kozhukhin joined by the equally excellent Karim Said, would offer but one case in point. Magic squares sensual, musical, conceptual, above all thrilling played themselves out and reinvented themselves before our eyes and ears (the ‘thinking ear’, as the hall’s motto has it). Whatever the antecendents, it was vividly clear that Boulez’s own proliferating method of generation actually had little in common with either Beethoven or Bartók; likewise his, and Barenboim’s, control of liminal suspense and propulsive release. The work, like the two that had preceded it, passed as if in no time, whetting the appetite for more, much more, in the weeks, months, years to come. This hall and the events within, then, continue as a work-in-progress, very much in Boulez’s sense.

Boulez Ensemble - Octets by Schubert and Widmann, 28 May 2017

Pierre Boulez Saal

Schubert – Octet in F major, D 803
Widmann – Octet 

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

Mor Biron (bassoon)
Radek Baborák (horn)
Carolin Widmann, Krzysztof Specjal (violins)
Amihai Grosz (viola)
Claudius Popp (cello)
Nabil Shehata (double bass)
 

For a work so frequently lauded, Schubert’s Octet is not performed so very often. Perhaps it is the length, the forces required (although they are surely not that unusual), or the difficulty in finding a companion piece: probably a combination of those factors. At any rate, this was an excellent opportunity not only to hear Schubert’s masterwork, but to hear it fundamentally rethought, and followed by Jörg Widmann’s 2004 five-movement Octet, specifically written as a companion, at about half its length, to its great six-movement predecessor.

The attack and diminuendo on the opening F – no tonality as such, yet – offered, like the wondrous hall in which the performance took place, a near ideal blend of precision and warmth. But warmth, at least not in a traditional sense, was not to be a hallmark of this probing, often brazenly modernistic performance, in which oscillation between major and minor, and the forward looking tendencies of those long Schubert lines proved more suggestive of subsequent figures in his tradition, not least Schoenberg, but perhaps beyond him too (Widmann included). The first movement’s harmonies continually surprised, even if one ‘knew’ what was coming. Nothing was taken for granted. And there was very little in the way of Gemütlichkeit. To start with, I rather missed that aspect of ‘tradition’, but I have no doubt that I was wrong to have done so. If relative consolation came with Widmann’s opening clarinet solo in the second movement, agitation in the string ‘accompaniment’ duly warned against simplification. It was soon to blossom into something more, quite unsettling, which was in large part, I think, the doing of Widmann’s sister, Carolin, on first violin. She emerged very much as the questioning voice of modernism, intense, febrile, sometimes withdrawing vibrato, sometimes applying it in unnervingly neurotic, never comfortable fashion: neither ‘traditional’, nor ‘authentic’, but instead dragging the work into the twenty-first century. This, she and her colleagues told us, was not easy music; it should never, ever be considered as such. Other solos displayed their own instrumental character; there was never mere repetition. I loved the way in which, towards the close, as if echoing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, Nabil Shehata’s double bass suggested distant timpani rolls.

 

Beethoven was again suggested in the ghostly tension of the scherzo’s opening, although its developmental path was of course more ‘Austrian’, more – well, Schubertian, almost as if a Bruckner score had at last proved itself amenable to good editing. There was something mysteriously verging upon the chaste, yet not quite, with apologies to St Augustine, to the trio. Always, we were made to listen. It was Carolin once again who added grit to the oyster in the fourth movement theme and variations. Phrasing and articulation were always well pointed, whilst never different for the sake of it. Schubert’s harmonies, of course, continued to underlie everything we heard, cello (Claudius Popp), double bass, and bassoon (Mor Biron), as fresh and faithful as anyone could hope for. And how gorgeous those horn (Radek Baborák), bassoon, and clarinet solos sounded above: never just gorgeous, though, ever generative, and surprisingly so. Midway between Mozart and Brahms, and yet close also to Schoenberg, Schubert’s ghosts of Viennese past and future invaded our consciousness – whether we liked it or no.

 

If the Minuet relaxed somewhat in tempo, it was no more relaxed in mood than the scherzo had been. Even the wienerisch lilt unsettled – was this not taking us to meet Pierrot? – rather than comforted. Once again, major-minor oscillation was the thing, or at least one of the most important things. Restful it was not, for every note demanded to be heard, to be considered. The introduction to the finale, taken attacca, offered the suspense of the opening to a great symphonic finale, which essentially it is. And then, as if by magic, there came something of the spirit of Haydn: a benediction that did not eclipse what had gone before, but in part made sense of it. A divertimento is no easy option; Beethoven’s is not the only way, however tempting it may be for us all to think so. One could smile, at last. And yet … the return of that opening material rightly had us resume our guard. I should not always want to hear the Octet played like this, but I have little doubt that this performance will have changed my idea of the work forever.

 

The Intrada to Jörg’s Octet seemed deliberately to evoke Schubert’s opening, as if it had grown legs and extended itself into a movement of its own, a movement which yet could not conclude, being an ‘intrada’. Darkness and harmonic tension seemed to recall, to refract, but never to repeat Schubert. Interestingly, the playing style from all concerned registered as more ‘Romantic’, or at least post-Romantic. Those lines again, as if carried over from Schubert, yet distorted, deconstructed both attested to and questioned the composer’s claim, quoted in the programme, concerning Schubert: ‘The line is something so valuable, it must always be carried forth when playing. Once you drop it, it is destroyed.’ Baborák’s post-Mozartian hunting horn solo, announcing the second movement ‘Menuetto’ was similarly taken up, developed, and deconstructed.

 

The third movement is marked as a Lied ohne Worte. And yes, it is a song that sings, but it never sings, or is sung, quite as one thinks it ‘should’ be, suggesting a relationship to an ‘original’ predecessor that we have never heard, has never actually existed. Harmonies as much as melodic lines proved suggestive in that respect, tension heightened by a high Romantic, even expressionistic style of performance. Modernist interventions – both in work and performance – question everything we have told ourselves. Who are we now, then? Do we even want to know? A ghostly (again that word) passage for pizzicato double bass and horn could be heard ‘as if’ it were a passacaglia; maybe it had been, in its previous imaginary life. Double bass, now bowed, announced a chaotic free for all at the opening of the Intermezzo, which yet soon found its transformative way to return (or was it?) of material and mood from the Intrada. Transition and revisiting, though never quite, were clearly the thing. It was again the double bass, growling, discomfiting, that led us into the finale, its motifs emerging from the previous movement, so it appeared, in a strange passage of liminal suspense. Classical and Romantic misrememberings offered a non-transfigured night, Schubert both present and absent. And then, nothing.