Karim Said - Schoenberg, Webern, Gerhard, Cage, Wolpe, Boulez, 9 June 2013

Purcell Room

Schoenberg – Piano Pieces, op.33a and op.33b

Webern – Variations, op.27
Gerhard – Three Impromptus, op.8
Cage – The Perilous Night
Wolpe – Three Pieces for Youngsters
Boulez – Notations

 

This third and final recital in Karim Said’s Purcell Room series, part of the broader Southbank Centre festival, ‘The Rest is Noise’, made me wish I had been able to attend the previous instalments. Each recital had centred around Schoenberg’s piano music; this mostly looked forward. That Said had given due thought to the works concerned was clear from the introductory discussion with Sara Mohr-Pietsch: a welcome change from the dreadful platitudes such introductions often bring. The proof of the aural pudding was in the listening, though, and it was very good indeed.

 

I do not think I have heard either of the Schoenberg op.33 Pieces in recital before (save, years ago, when I played them myself, which does not really count). Said immediately revealed a fine ear for sonority, making excellent use of his Steinway, and line, including rhythm: a parameter which one still hears the ignorant deride in music of the Second Viennese School. Ghosts of Vienna danced – and remembered. The very different characters of the two pieces was evident, and yet, the second was certainly in context made to follow on from the first, Schoenberg’s writing seeming poised between the expressionism of the op.11 Pieces and the somewhat more neo-Classical world of the Piano Concerto.

 

Webern’s Variations brought a more analytical, though certainly not dry, approach. My sole reservation would be that the work perhaps opened a little stiffly, but if that were the case, this remained an accomplished, indeed beautiful performance. There was certainly joy in the pianism of the second variation. Real sense was made of dynamic contrasts as well as the phrasing: all those sighs! Said, we had learned earlier, had studied a score with performing instructions by the composer – presumably, though he did not say, those given to Peter Stadlen. The experience seemed to have offered him the opportunity to penetrate deep beneath the surface in a highly committed performance.

 

Roberto Gerhard’s 1950 Impomptus offered, both in work and performance, an intriguing and convincing injection of Iberian rhythms in their encounter between Schoenbergian and post-Granados soundworlds. (Gerhard studied with both Schoenberg and Granados.) Said proved an excellent advocate, playing the pieces as if they were repertoire works, Debussy also more than once coming to mind in passages of intensity and languor. Above all, however, there was life: this was music as colourful as anything in, say, Images. Moreover, one could undoubtedly hear the composer’s twelve-note workings, testimony to the pianist’s understanding and communication.

 

For John Cage’s The Perilous Night (1944), the piano was transformed into an Eastern percussion ensemble, the composer having employed the prepared instrument in his work as dance accompanist at the Cornish School. To my ears, rhythm rather than pitch ruled, although the latter was not entirely irrelevant. Whether the very business of preparing the piano were intended as performance, it certainly came across as such. Intriguingly, a degree of rhythmic kinship emerged with Boulez’s Notations, be it by ‘chance’ or otherwise, though the latter pieces are of course far more varied, Cage being both less terse and more repetitive.

 

The harmony of Stefan Wolpe’s Three Pieces for Youngsters imparted a sense of returning home after Cage’s experimentalism. (Whatever one might go to Cage for, it is certainly not harmony.) Wolpe’s chiselled miniatures were not entirely unlike Webern’s own Kinderstück, op. posth., though more reflective and without its almost Scarlatti-like hypertension. There were hints of Berg, too, not least in the harmony of the third. Teachers really ought to offer these pieces to children – and adults should relish them on their own accord. Or rather, that might happen, if only someone would publish them.

 

Finally, Boulez’s Notations. Said displayed clarity and purpose in his delineation of their character and expressive power. The second offered éclats in abundance, whilst Debussyan languor – insofar as that be possible in pieces of twelve-bar duration! – could be heard in its successor. Boulez’s suggestion of improvisation – ‘Doux et improvisé’ – was communicated in the fifth, though rigour, never didactic but rather enabling, was always the order of the day. The suggestion of bass drum in the left hand of the ninth, apparently communicated personally by the composer to Said, came across highly convincingly, putting me in mind of Schoenberg’s op.19 no.6 (cleverly chosen by Said as an encore). ‘Mécanique et très sec,’ is Boulez’s marking for the tenth, and that is how it sounded, offering the strongest of contrasts. Quiet scintillation characterised the eleventh, before the return of Messiaenesque tendencies, already accounced in the ‘hieratic’ seventh, in the imaginary (secret?) theatre of Boulez’s final Notation. I very much hope that Said will go on to essay Boulez’s other works for piano, the 2005 une page d’éphémeride included.

Edinburgh International Festival: Wolpe! Welche Farbe hat der Vogel? 29 August 2008

The Hub

Viviane De Muynck (actress)
Johan Bossers (piano)
Gunnar Brandt-Sigurdsson (tenor/vocalist)
Caroline Petrick (coach)
Herman Sorgeloos (visual concept)
Muziektheater Transparant

Described beforehand as a ‘staged concert’, I dare say that is as close as we are likely to get; perhaps it would simply be better to file Wolpe! under ‘unclassifiable’. It should also be filed under ‘excellent’. In this show, which Antwerp-based Muziektheater Transparant has been touring since its January Brussels premiere in the Beurrschouwburg, not only are we treated to fine performances of a number of Stefan Wolpe’s songs, mostly but not exclusively from the period 1929-33, and his later, American-period Battle Piece for piano (1943-7). We are also given a greater context for and further exploration of the composer’s political ideas, their relevance for his music and for us – at a time when socialist, let alone communist hopes often seem so utterly confounded. In addition, we are treated to an extremely enjoyable hour-and-a-half in the theatre. In the words of the economist, Siegfried Moos, set by Wolpe in the second stanza of Haben Sie Kummer, the song that opened the evening’s proceedings:

Besser als Kintopp, besser als Fusel,
Gibt das Theater sel’gen Dusel.
Mit wenig Moneten verzagen Sie nie!
Die Bühnenstars begeistern auch Sie!
Gerade für Sie sind doch unsere Gaben.
Auch Bildung können Sie bei uns haben!

(Better than the pictures, better than hooch,
The theatre gives you blessed dreams.
Never despair with your few pennies!
The stars of our stage will also inspire you!
Our gifts are especially for you.
You can receive an education with us too!)

Musiektheater Transparant thus follows firmly in the tradition of Die Truppe, the late-Weimar theatre collective in which Wolpe himself served as musical director. Proscribed upon the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Die Truppe satirised contemporary political and social problems, whilst propagandising for Marxist solutions. Musiektheater Transparant was less concerned directly to proselytise but instead aimed to make the audience think, to consider possibilities beyond the depressing, suppressive current orthodoxies; that is, the company successfully attempted to accomplish what all art should do.

‘Staged concert’ is not, on reflection, at all a bad description of Wolpe! It was certainly not a play. What we had was a little staging but no characters as such, and various numbers interspersed with varied commentary from the wonderful Viviane De Muynck. This could take the form of stores concerning Wolpe’s life and work, readings from utopians Plato and Thomas More, reflections upon the nature of propaganda and activism (and the difference between the two), and observations upon matters political and social. The warmth of De Muynck’s personality and her evident commitment to Wolpe shone through. I assume that some at least of the material was provided by ‘coach’, Caroline Petrick; some of the categories in the credits did not necessarily translate directly into English stage experience, but then this was above all a collective effort. Johan Bossers proved an equally committed pianist, both in the piano parts to the songs and in the technically fearsome Battle Piece. This latter we heard in three tranches, Wolpe’s style falling somewhere between Schoenberg and Prokofiev, with a trenchant commitment that is all his own, as is the insistence upon the vertical and spatial dimensions of music in addition to traditionally linear, goal-oriented (Beethovenian) form. (Wolpe’s pupils would include Morton Feldman and David Tudor.) Gunnar Brandt-Sigurdsson’s contribution was very fine: secure of line and in style, diction impeccable, and possessed of a winning and appropriate theatricality.

An especial highpoint musically was the Dadaist An Anna Blume, ‘for piano and musical clown’, based upon an initial twelve-note theme, developed with an integrity born both of rigour and of true freedom: perhaps a useful way to consider Wolpe’s art more generally. The Brecht setting, Ballade von der Osseger Witwen, in which we learned what would be done for the mourning widows of Osseg – nothing – was genuinely moving. And in Die Herren der Welt, we were left in no doubt as to the identity of the rulers of the world, the barbarous tenacity with which they would maintain their grip, and the anger we should and did feel concerning this. However, the greatest tribute to the performers must be that the true star of the evening was Stefan Wolpe himself. Let us hope that other companies, other musicians, other institutions will take note. On the basis of this evening, they really should.

A CD, comprising much of the music from this show and some other Lieder, has been issued (NEOS 10719). I bought a copy immediately after the performance, although I have yet to hear it. Working upon the assumption that it may give some indication of this inspiring event – sadly, minus Viviane De Muynck – I shall nevertheless chance my arm and heartily recommend it.