Salzburg Festival (3) - Le Balcon/Pascal: Nono, Boulez, and Stockhausen, 19 August 2025

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Nono: A Pierre. Dell’azzurro silenzio, inquietum
Boulez: sur Incises
Stockhausen: Klavierstück XIV – ‘Geburtstag-Formel’
Boulez: …explosante-fixe…

Julie Brunet-Jailly (flute)

Alphonse Cemin (piano)

Augustin Muller (IRCAM electronics)

Sylvain Cadars (IRCAM sound diffusion)

Le Balcon

Maxime Pascal (conductor)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

Pierre Boulez’s broader musical-cultural legacy lies everywhere, both in what he achieved and what, sadly, he did not. Quite rightly, in this centenary year we are taking time to focus more specifically on his musical works. From his 1960 Salzburg debut (Stockhausen, Webern, and Boulez, in the presence of Herbert von Karajan), the Festival has long experienced and participated in both—and especially from 1992, at the invitation of Gerard Mortier and Hans Landesmann. I shall rue till my dying day having passed up the opportunity to hear his Moses und Aron, on my first, student visit. It was inevitable, given the choice of one opera, that I would opt for Mozart, yet nevertheless… Here, in any case, the Festival’s centenary tribute will focus on both strands, or rather on three or more, the third being the presence and influence even in non-presence of electronics both in his music and in that broader legacy, exemplified by IRCAM and represented here by Augustin Muller and Sylvain Cadars. 

The mini-series ‘A Pierre’ opened with this concert, which in turn opened in pleasing symmetry with Luigi Nono’s sixtieth birthday tribute for his colleague, A Pierre. Dell Azzurro silenzio, inquietum, for contrabass flute, contrabass clarinet, and live electronics. One instrument entered, then the other: were they playing together or separately? Had they merged? One asked that even before the advent of electronics, or was it? Differences were almost, yet never quite, imperceptible, a message dell-ascolto from the somewhat non-Boulezian world of Prometeo. One was drawn in to listen, in harmony, in polyphony, ever transforming, ever deeper. I could have sworn at one point I heard voices – as in vocal music – and perhaps, in a way, I did. The role of electronics was ‘for’ Pierre, at least, as the Venetian waves lapped and almost Mahlerian vistas opened up before our ears. 

It is an obvious point, but I do not think it had quite registered with me, at least experientially, quite how much difference the performing space would make to a performance of sur Incises. My ears, doubtless my eyes, associate it above all with Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, where I have heard Daniel Barenboim conduct it more than once (including the hall’s opening concert) with his own created Boulez Ensemble. In a more conventional smallish hall, not in the round, lines seemed more obviously to lead from the conductor—and, in a sense, seated not far behind Maxime Pascal, from the ensemble too—with clear consequences for experience of many aspects of the work ‘itself’. Whether it was that, or the performances of Le Balcon and Pascal—it may have been both—that made the opening section sound quite so Debussyan, I am not sure. It came as a subsequent shock to my ears to hear quite so many floating roots, if you will, in Scriabin in the writing for pianos of the following section. Perhaps it was simply me; never underestimate the role of your own preoccupations or chance connections. However strictly organised, listening as well as composition and performance will break free. When rhythm took its place as first among equals, Stravinsky came most forcefully to mind and, a little more surprisingly, Prokofiev, although then I remember hearing Boulez express admiration for the piano writing in the composer’s concertos. These where ghosts, though, rather than definite influences, and soon one felt—at least I did—fully immersed, albeit actively immersed as, I flattered myself, a participant, enticed and welcomed by performers and work alike. What also struck me was the liminal passages in which not only classic parameters but time and music seemed stretched, even bent: Debussy again, perhaps, even Chopin. Resonance, in more than one sense, played its part too. Waves of a different kind were felt, not only heard, sound and music moving through space as well as time, as Gurnemanz might (not) have put it. 

Following some much needed fresh air, we returned to the hall (the same hall that hosted Boulez’s 1960 debut) for Stockhausen’s contribution to that same 1985 Baden-Baden birthday tribute: Klavierstück XIV, later to be heard as part of the composer’s Montag (for various reasons, a work Boulez was unlikely ever to have conducted). My heart went out to Alphonse Cemin when, just before he was about to begin, a lengthy telephonic intervention rang out. Such was its length that, at least for the audience, it became quite amusing. Was it Karlheinz himself, attempting to dial in from Sirius? When Cemin, a worthy successor to Pierre-Laurent Aimard, gave his fine performance, we were immediately in a different world from anything heard in the first half, though the whimsy of that introduction perhaps persisted a little in his verbal contributions. Here, unquestionably, was a miniature drama, though not only that, and in its ‘birthday formula’ mode, an intriguing set-up for Boulez’s own …explosante-fixe…, founded as it is on what has reasonably been considered a compositional ‘kit’. It was also music unquestionably ‘for’ the piano and to be enjoyed as such by performer and listeners alike in something not so very distant from what we know as music theatre. 

And so, to …explosante-fixe…, which I had not heard live for a little while: the last time, I think, ten years ago for Boulez’s 90^th anniversary, at the Proms. Julie Brunet-Jailly was joined by fellow, ‘shadow’ flautists and other members of Le Balcon in the fullest ensemble of the evening, as well of course as our friends from IRCAM and Pascal. It worked very differently, perhaps better, in the space than sur Incises; or maybe it was more that my ears had adjusted. The immediacy, even straightforward volume, nonetheless took a little getting used to, though only a little. The alchemy of sound in space proved quite magical, even seductive, as if presaging Boulez’s own, later Szymanowskian enchantment. Here was not only a labyrinth, but something between riot and delirium within a labyrinth that was always transforming before our ears: itself somewhere between Pli and pli and the orchestral Notations, which, I suppose, is where the work lies in Boulez’s œuvre. The bending of time I had felt in sur Incises continued, here in a world of very different, dazzling, (quasi-)orchestral fantasy that it was difficult not to think almost classically ‘French’. (Perhaps the presence of French performers contributed to that.) Dimming the lights for passages of ‘pure’ electronics was a theatrical touch, yet a winning one: in highlighting the organ pipes at the back of the stage, it almost suggested a role for that instrument, though alas not. I certainly heard things I could not recall from previous encounters: unexpected guests from The Rite of Spring, the sage’s procession turned post-Sixties psychedelic (or was that Messiaenic)? There was a sense, I fancied, of an almost Bachian mirroring and inversion in the electronics: not necessarily literally, but a quality felt or imagined. Other aspects comfortably, yet never too comfortably returned: those trills and tremolos, for instance. And I realised, only at the close, one thing that made this a relatively unusual soundworld for Boulez ensemble music. Obvious when you think about it: no percussion. So long as we continue to listen, we shall never cease to learn—even the most basic of things.

 

Horton - Schumann, Stockhausen, and Chopin, 17 June 2025

Wigmore Hall

Schumann: Piano Sonata no.1 in F-sharp minor, op.11
Stockhausen: Klavierstück VII
Chopin: Nocturne in C-sharp minor, op.27 no.1; Nocturne in D-flat major, op.27 no.2; Mazurka in A minor, op.59 no.1; Mazurka in A-flat major, op.59 no.2; Mazurka in F-sharp minor, op.59 no.3; Piano Sonata no.3 in B minor, op.58

Tim Horton (piano) 

Dedicated to the memory of Alfred Brendel, whose death had been announced earlier that day, this latest instalment in Tim Horton’s Wigmore Hall Chopin series offered a programme which Brendel might not have given but of which he would surely have approved. It opened with Schumann’s early F-sharp minor sonata, described in Jim Samson’s excellent programme note as ‘immensely challenging’. Indeed, seems the appropriate response: certainly for the pianist but also, I think, for the listener—or at least this one. Know and love much of Schumann’s piano music as I do, this work I struggle with. Often one needs to wait for such music to knock on the door, which it has yet to do for me. Horton, though, gave a commanding account, properly ‘orchestral’, though unquestionably written for the instrument to hand. The strange ‘Introduzione’ to the first movement, turbulent yet controlled, was given with a sort of tragic dignity that already spoke of affinity with Chopin, as did more ruminative passages later on. Schumann’s unusual conception of sonata form here was given its due: communicated rather than ‘explained’. The ‘Aria’ came initially as Eusebian relief, soon complicated to an almost Brahmsian degree: all over far too quickly, leaving one longing for more. Infectious energy characterised the scherzo, duly balanced by its trio, prior to quasi-Beethovenian struggle in a finale whose range of colour could not help but impress. the ascent to final climax finely prepared and achieved. 

I suspect I may have been in a minority in the audience in finding Stockhausen’s Klavierstück VII less challenging; yet perhaps not, given Horton’s vividly communicative, comprehending performance. It captured both what (as with almost any piece) is ‘of its time’ and what has enabled it to endure as key work in the piano literature. Attack, duration, all parameters were inextricably connected in a ravishing poetic vision of piano resonance and overtones. One could not help but listen in a different, moment-oriented way; one likewise could not help but be rewarded for doing so. 

The second half was given over to Chopin. The pair of op.27 Nocturnes complemented each other beautifully, independence of hands explored in different ways in both. Both were finely shaped, evidently conceived in single, long, ever-varying breaths. Telling rubato made its point without distracting. Both sounded as miniature tone poems: surely what they are. The three op.59 Mazurkas worked equally well as a set and as individual pieces, a fine lilt to the first ushering them on their way. What rhythmic and harmonic subtleties there are here, and what subtle yet unmistakeable pride, which latter quality also helped usher in the Third Piano Sonata. The first movement’s originality may be less startling than that of its counterpart in the Second Sonata, but it was nonetheless palpable in a performance that unfolded with all the time in the world: certainly not slow, yet equally neither hurried nor harried. Will-o’-the-wisp fluttering of the scherzo, turned on its head in the trio, prepared us more in contrast than kinship for the darkness that born in harmony and harmonic rhythm for the slow movement. The fantasia-like quality Horton brought to the finale both surprised and crowned, in a sense presaging similar qualities in the encore, the F-sharp major Nocturne, op.15 no.2, whose tonality also connected us to the close of the Schumann sonata. I look forward to the continuation of this fascinating series.

 

Aimard et al.: Stockhausen, 1 and 2 June 2019

Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room

Klaverstücke I-XI; Kontakte

Stimmung

Für kommende Zeiten

Zyklus; Mantra

Pierre-Laurent Aimard

Tamara Stefanovich (pianos)

Dirk Rothbrust (percussion)

Marco Stroppa (sound diffusion)

London Voices:

Laura Forbes L’Estrange (sopranos)

Clara Sanabras (mezzo-soprano)

Richard Eteson, Ben Parry (tenors)

Nicholas Garrett (bass)

Ian Dearden (sound projection)

Apartment House:

Simon Limbrick (percussion)

Philip Thomas (piano)
Kerry Yong (piano, keyboard)

Rhodri Davies (harp)

Anton Lukoszevieze (cello)

As Amsterdam celebrated ‘Aus Licht’, not quite the complete Licht premiere we still await, but a generous tasting from all seven operas, those of us unable to attend had to content ourselves with a Stockhausen weekend in London instead. It was certainly an intense couple of days, rewarding too, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard at its heart, just as he had been of the Stockhausen performances at last year’s Musikfest Berlin (three of them reviewed here and here).

I have purposely not re-read what I wrote then, though I shall have a look after posting. The enormity of Aimard’s achievement in the first eleven Klavierstücke, followed here by Kontakte (in a different programme in Berlin), was not diminished by a second hearing, quite the contrary. Indeed, a fundamental theme to everything heard here, in many ways a more diverse offering than in Berlin, was the crucial role played by performance in Stockhausen. Aimard’s ordering remained III, IV, II, I, V, VIII, VII, VI, XI, IX, X. Some people, I know, would have preferred the first four to have been played I-IV, but for me, the order of chronological writing worked well too. The third took its leave from Stockhausen and Webern, but starker, more northern (less Austrian?) Hard on its heels, the fourth initially yielded, almost as if a second subject, but quickly went on its own way: in the same line, yet different. Aimard’s gleaming Yamaha sound seemed ideal for the fusion of musical meaning and serial requirements that lies at the heart of the composer’s art – and thus at the performer’s too; for here was no doubting Aimard’s internalisation of this music, just as there would not be for Beethoven or Messiaen. The second piece sang and struggled, detail of duration and thus of meaning at its heart; the first proved frenetic, especially when not overtly so, in its post-Schoenbergian build-up. Time, then, for a little pause.

There was an intriguingly Boulezian éclat to the opening of the fifth piece, though its development – I think we can call it that, at a pinch – proved once again more overtly Germanic. Much the same might be said of its later chordal progress. The scale was, of course, quite different here from the shorter, earlier pieces; it was made not only to feel so, but necessarily so. An intensely dramatic eighth piece seemed, at least in retrospect, to prepare the way for the artistry with which, in the seventh, repeated pitch was ‘repeated’, or perhaps better, reinstated. (Such was how it felt, anyway.) It was as if this was the moment Stockhausen truly began to itch for the stage, even if it were that of a late Wagnerian ‘invisible theatre’. Aimard’s mastery of resonance already looked forward, fascinatingly, to the second and third concerts of what one would generally, quite rightly, think of as a very different Stockhausen. Then came the sixth, to which, again in retrospect, everything seemed to have been working towards. It sounded generative in a fashion both ‘traditional’ and anything but. How its silences told! How everything else did too, in all its combinations of parameters and their relationships. Monumental was the word for it.

There was opening éclat to the eleventh piece too. By now, there was little way one could not but listen to every note and its relationship to every other – or rather, at least think and feel that was what one was doing. Such was the way Stockhausen and Aimard had led us in. Were those strainings towards electronic sound? Perhaps it was fancy, but is that not too part of musical composition, performance, and listening? Likewise in the ninth piece, albeit in more chordal terms – yet still in terms of something greater. What was ‘old’, what was ‘new’? One asked, even if one could not answer. Finally, we heard the gloved scherzando of Klavierstück X, pyrotechnics and poetry as one: a Feux d’artifice for the atomic age. It was terrifying, thrilling, anything other than consoling. Sheer variety of sound, of voices, of music was very much the thing. And if the final phrase were not quite throwaway Haydn, nor was it quite not that.

For Kontakte, following an interval, Aimard returned (!) with Dirk Rothbrust (percussion) and Marco Stroppa (sound diffusion). Here, virtuosity was returned with interest: à 3, as it were. Theatre was more overt, in every sense, spatial performance and hearing to the fore from the outset. Precision, however, was every bit as crucial, as awe-inspiringly realised, as in the solo piano works. It was interesting to reflect, historically, on how twentieth-century percussion may have paved the way for electronics; such seemed to be part of the ‘moment’ here, at least. At one point, I almost fancied I heard helicopters about to take flight. Structure and its dynamic realisation in time, form, proved dizzyingly circular, yet not quite. This was music-making at its most open, in at least one sense.

Immediately afterwards, we moved from the Queen Elizabeth Hall to the Purcell Room for Stimmung. How one responds to a performance is perhaps an unusually personal thing. I, however, found this London Voices rendition especially involving, the drama heightened, verbal acuity to the fore. There was ritual, yes, but of an approachable kind, perhaps more akin to what we experience in general concert life, less ‘other’. Overtones did their work, but so did words (whatever one thinks of them). There were pros and cons to hearing this after the piano works and Kontakte; for me, on this occasion, the former outweighed the latter.

Likewise, after a good few hours’ break, for the following day’s Für kommende Zeiten. Here, the intuitive music that is not improvisation, the verbal scores that seem both to require reading and performance in just as emphatic a way as the Klavierstücke yet also not to do so, will perhaps always remain a mystery, at least to those of us listening rather than performing. The splendid performers of Apartment House, however, took us on a journey as fascinating, at many times as unexpected, as those to which many of us are more accustomed. We did not hear all seventeen pieces, but seven over about an hour and a quarter, ‘Intervall’, for piano duo (the only piece in which precise instrumentation is specified) proving quite the curtain-raiser, as our blindfolded pianists, Philip Thomas and Kerry Yong, acclimatised and gained their sight, in the process seemingly enabling our hearing to become listening. ‘Verlängerung’, ‘Zugvogel’, ‘Vorahnung’, ‘Japan’, ‘Anhalt’, ‘Spektren’, and ‘Schwingung’ followed. It is doubtless the height of Orientalism to say there were hints of an Orient that seemed to go beyond Orientalism, but such was our illusion.

For the final concert, we returned to the Queen Elizabeth Hall for Zyklus and Mantra. Rothbrust treated us to a mesmerising performance of the former, centre stage in every sense. Relationships again manifested themselves not only as points of interest but as the binding material of the music – if not just as in Beethoven, then in a way one might relate to his music, should one wish. Barriers between tuned and untuned percussion seemed to fall by the way. Here was a new orchestra: no gamelan, but Stockhausen’s own, Rothbrust’s own too. Such was the variegation of timbre and its implications, one could imagine never wanting to hear anything else. This was a cycle that was both just that and so much more.

Aimard returned for Mantra, with Stroppa and Tamara Stefanovich. I found myself making comparisons with Boulez’s second book of Structures, which I had heard – and seen – Aimard and Stefanovich perform in this same hall in 2011. Not that the works have very much in common; it was as much a visual-dramatic way in, and very soon more a contrast than a comparison. Two pianos, two pianists, then, played with bells, became bells and their masters. What was the relationship between acoustic and electronic, between work and performance, between instrument(s) and their performers? Such questions, such contests and collaborations, were part of the drama, but so too was an almost conventional battle royal heard at one point, Stockhausen’s often overlooked (German) sense of humour certainly given a fair hearing in this case. His music proved as obstinate as Beethoven and as strange to us as – well, life on Sirius. Aimard and Stefanovich afforded us as strong a sense of the whole as they might have done in Bach or Brahms; within that framework, there were in equal measure to be heard, felt, even thought, great subtlety and starkness. There was ritual, of course, but again not of an especially esoteric kind. There was no doubting either the composer’s voice or that of his performers. The sense of aftershock following the pianists’ howling proved almost Mahlerian. What did it mean? Who knows? Perhaps the question is as irrelevant as Stravinsky would have us believe, or as the ritual of later Stockhausen works such as Inori might suggest. The ensuing two-piano-plus toccata proved at least as mesmerising as Zyklus; and likewise changed the face of all that came thereafter. Form manifested itself in work, performance, and listening – even if, sometimes especially if, one could not put a name to it. There are, after all, many such mysteries in our world and beyond.

Performances of the Year, 2018

Anniversaries too often prove a lazy way to programme. Sometimes, though, especially in the case of composers in need of rediscovery, they afford excellent opportunities. Such has been in the case of Karlheinz Stockhausen, latterly overlooked in favour of other post-war avant gardists. His ninetieth birthday has brought forth a number of outstanding performances. (One excellent thing about Stockhausen’s music in performance is the consistently high quality of performance. Either you can do it well, it seems, or you do not do it at all.) A standing rebuke to those who would fashionably claim that the later Stockhausen, the Stockhausen of the Licht operas, had gone off the boil – usually one discovers that they do not even know the later music – was provided by Paris’s Opéra Comique and Le Balcon, in an unforgettable staging of Donnerstag. Two concerts in particular from this year’s Musikfest Berlin had the composer from Sirius shine almost as brightly as his star itself: Mantra from Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich, and a truly once-in-a-lifetime – I hope I am wrong – performance from Aimard of the first eleven Klaverstücke.

Another anniversary composer, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, in this case celebrating his hundredth birthday, featured in an altogether magnificent concert from Håkan Hardenberger, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, and John Storgårds in Vienna, Gunther Schuller and Dvořak the other composers. Debussy may be less in need of special exposure, but the centenary of his death brought a good number of excellent performances, from which I shall choose first a January concert from the LSO and François-Xavier Roth, Jeux in as comprehending an account as that is never something to be taken for granted. Debussy, Zimmermann, and Roth came together in a concert at least its equal with the Berlin Philharmonic. Debussy’s Images interspersed with works by Ligeti: no gimmick, genuine illumination.

Returning to opera, the Festival d’Aix en Provence offered a splendid staging, broadly what one might call ‘modern conventional’, yet excellent of its kind, of Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel. Katie Mitchell had gone one further the previous night, with a long overdue feminist reassessment of Ariadne auf Naxos, also notable for a superlative performance of the title role from Lise Davidsen. Over to Salzburg and Hans Neuenfels showed that he very much still has ‘it’ in his new production of The Queen of Spades, Mariss Jansons and the Vienna Philharmonic in the pit, a fine cast to boot. Indeed, this proved a vintage year for Salzburg opera – an appalling Magic Flute notwithstanding – with excellent new stagings of Henze (The Bassarids, Krzysztof Warlikowski) and Monteverdi (L’incoronazione di Poppea, Jan Lauwers). Mozart's operas are perhaps the most difficult of all to bring off. Even to consider including one here speaks volumes: volumes should certainly be spoken of a magical Così fan tutte from Opera Holland Park this summer.

Earlier in the year, the Royal Opera House’s world premiere performances of George Benjamin’s Lessons in Love and Violence revealed another towering operatic masterpiece from the composer. Fashionable voices said otherwise; they are no more to be heeded than in Stockhausen’s case. The Royal Opera’s new From the House of the Dead (Warlikowski again, in a long awaited house premiere) also shone, not least on account of Mark Wigglesworth’s typically first-rate conducting. Frank Castorf’s Munich production of the same work may ultimately have eclipsed it – it would have eclipsed most things – but what a year it was in which to see both. Daniel Barenboim conducted Tristan und Isolde in a new, truly thought-provoking production – sad to say, much misunderstood – by Dmitri Tcherniakov. Also at the Berlin Staatsoper, now rightly returned to its home on Unter den Linden, came a further Neuenfels hit: Salome that announced to all the world in neon lights: ‘Wilde is Coming’.

I always look out for Schoenberg performances. This year, the Dresden Semperoper offered perhaps the finest staging I have yet seen of Moses und Aron, directed by Calixto Bieito. What a joy, moreover, to hear the great Staatskapelle Dresden in such music! Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Philharmonia in Gurrelieder sent shivers down the spine and brought (many) tears to the eyes: another outstanding performance from a consistently excellent team.

The Wigmore Hall is reliably the best concert venue in London, arguably the greatest chamber music venue in the world. Highlights included a wonderful evening of string quartet music by Schubert, Webern, and Haydn from the Hagen Quartet, and more than one evening of Bach from Mahan Esfahani. From the latter, I shall somewhat arbitrarily choose this concert in June. Esfahani’s survey of the complete Bach harpsichord works continues next year. Igor Levit’s concert for Frederic Rzewski’s eightieth birthday, including a Rzewski premiere, cannot fail to be included in any such survey. Pavel Kolesnikov’s wonderfully imaginative – and coherent! – programme of piano works from Louis Couperin to Lachenmann also lingers long in the mind. So too do a recital of Haydn from the Jerusalem Quartet and an evening of Fauré, Brahms, and Schumann from Stéphane Degout and Simon Lepper

Other instrumental and chamber highlights included hearing the Alban Berg Ensemble Wien (drawn from the Vienna Philharmonic) at the inaugural BERGfrühling festival by Carinthia’s Lake Ossiach. From that, I shall opt for a concert of Debussy, Webern, and Mozart. Quite a year then: onwards and upwards…

Donnerstag, Opéra Comique, 17 November 2018

 Salle Favart

Image: Vincent Pontet

Michael (tenor) – Damien Bigourdan, Safir Behloul

Michael (trumpet) – Henri Deléger

Michael (dancer) – Emmanuelle Grach

Eva (soprano) – Léa Trommenschlager, Elise Chauvin

Eva (basset horn) – Iris Zerdoud

Eva (dancer) – Suzanne Meyer

Luzifer (bass) – Damien Pass

Luzifer (trombone) – Mathieu Adam

Luzifer (dancer) – Jamil Attar

Michael’s accompanist (piano) – Alphonse Cemin

Swallow Clowns (clarinets) – Alice Caubit, Ghislain Roffat

Two Youths (saxophones) – Eléonore Brundell

Old Woman – Bernadette Le Saché

Messanger – Antoine Amariutei

Nurses – Maxime Morel, Alphonse Cemin

Doctor – Simon Guidicelli

Child Michael – Ilion Thierrée

Luzifer bass (Damien Pass), Michael tenor (Damien Bigourdan)
Image: Stéfan Brion

What a year it has been for Karlheinz Stockhausen. The ninety-year-old composer from Sirius seems in this, the year of his ninetieth birthday celebrations, to be as strongly with us as ever. Berlin’s annual Musikfest did him proud with four concerts, three of which I was privileged to attend. (See here and here for reviews.) The Paris-based orchestra Le Balcon has, under the direction of Maxime Pascal, launched a series of his complete Licht operas, starting here with the French premiere of Donnerstag in a co-production between the Opéra Comique, Le Balcon, and the Opéra national de Bordeaux. It is planned to reach its conclusion in 2024. On the evidence of this performance – and indeed of Benjamin Lazar’s production – it will, from beginning to end, prove an absolute must for anyone with a remotely serious interest in opera.

Image: Vincent Pontet

Donnerstag may come fourth in the seven days of creation – and thus be expected take that place in a full ‘cycle’, if we must use the confusing, circular term. It was written first, though (give or take a single scene from Dienstag) and to my mind benefits – at the very least, is done no harm – from being placed first like this. At the opening of the treatment of Licht in his book on Stockhausen’s music, Robin Maconie writes: ‘As the first completed opera of LICHT, the day in which, drawing on his own life experiences, the composer lays out his philosophical agenda for the entire week, Donnerstag aus LICHT is at once the most personal in its declarations and the most troubling and controversial in its ethical and spiritual implications. In as much as the opera has a theme, the theme is Kindheit: education, upbringing, self-determination, and spiritual growth.’ Much of that came through strongly – in both musical and dramatic fashion. Indeed, as one would expect in so post-Wagnerian a work, the distinction made no sense. What certainly made an impression – ‘sense’ will be in the eyes and ears of the beholders, the listeners – was the overriding idea, modernist (?) fragmentary tendencies notwithstanding, of self-formation, of a Bildung that is, has been, and, doubtless ever shall be both classical and anything but.

Alphonse Cemin (Nurse), Eva soprano (Léa Trommenschlager), Maxime Morel (Nurse),  Luzifer bass (Damien Pass) 

Image: Meng Phu

There was, perhaps, something necessarily didactic to the first act. (I think one may, even should, accept a degree of essentialism when it comes to Stockhausen. Can one really fail to do so in the German tradition of which he is unquestionably part?) So it felt, at any rate, to me. Following our call to observance in a very particular version of ‘Donnerstags-Gruss’, heard throughout the house but faintly, impinging upon our consciousness, almost switching us or our receptivity on, the first act proceeded almost as if it were a director’s metatheatrical intervention, drawing upon the composer’s biography to elucidate. Except, of course, and with every respect to Lazar’s fine work, the director in that sense remained Stockhausen himself. We were free to draw whatever lessons we wished – none, I suppose, should we not have wished to do so – from Michael’s experience and education, his navigation of boundaries between his father’s (militaristic yet also theatrical) example and his mother’s (musical, carnal, and also theatrical).

Iris Zerdoud (Mondeva), Damien Bigorudan (Michael)
Image: Stéfan Brion

Michael’s coming of age, the loss of his mother and brother, was Stockhausen’s but not his: it was, in Orphic tradition, that of music too. In Wagner’s tradition, moreover, it was that of art as opposed to different arts: the Gesamtkunstwerk, if you will, a term often more suited to Wagner’s successors (and indeed to his predecessors’ Romantic aspirations) than to his own dramas and theories. Gesture in the traditional form of dance – as opposed to the broader Wagnerian transformation into staging and/or production – played here and elsewhere not only a crucial role but a role that questions and unifies, just as does singing, just as does instrumental performance. We see, hear, think of, even dream the relationships between these outstanding performers of different types. (Or are they different? Is that but our fragmented fantasy?) When Mondeva, whatever her relationship to mother Eva, showed her talons, sounded her basset horn, yielded to the young Siegfried (sorry, Michael), the hallowed German Romantic forest or memories thereof came back to life – albeit here subtly, without a hint of bad nineteenth- or twentieth-century to them. No wonder, then, he proceeded to pass his exams with flying colours. A musician had been dreamed, formed, made incarnate.

Maxime Morel (tuba), Henri Deléger (trumpet)
Image: Stéfan Brion

The instrumental fantasy of the second act, ‘Michaels Reise um die Erde’, as much perhaps a concerto for orchestra as for solo trumpeter (here the outstanding Henri Deléger), offered in many ways the greatest of contrasts. Having been ‘educated’, were we now to ‘enjoy’ – to tour the world, our worlds, other worlds (dramatic, galactic, etc.)? Yes, but not only yes. For the strange rhymes, the peculiar memories and remembrances, of the first act had formed us. There is nothing random, nothing arbitrary to Stockhausen – no more here in Licht than in any work of so-called ‘total serialism’. The composer’s formulae were doing their work, guiding us, in a total(itarian) way serving very much to remind us of his lineage. Michael’s instrumental companions, antagonists, interlocutors, guided yet liberated by Pascal, by Lazar, and – you have guessed it – by Stockhausen, played games with themselves, with us, dreamed of themselves, of others, most likely of us.

Eva (soprano) Léa Trommenschlager (act I), 

Eva (dancer) Suzanne Meyer, 

Eva (soprano) Elise Chauvin (act III), 

Michael (trumpet) Henri Deléger, 

Michael (dancer) Emmanuelle Grach 

Image: Meng Phu

For this, whether one likes it or no, is a world of mysticism: a mysticism prepared and finally explicit in the third act, in a ‘return’ that, like all returns, is as much concerned with what is new as with what is old. (‘Sonate, que veux-me tu?’ That, among many other things.) Choirs as celestial as those in Bach, theology as heretical as in Wagner and as unanswerable as in Messiaen (and Bach!), musical virtuosity, theatrical accomplishment: those and so much more, inviting yet rejecting such easy comparisons, recreated a world we both knew and did not. And, of course, they (re-)invited in our constant companion(s), Luzifer – again, of song, of instrument (trombone), of dance. There was victory, but at what cost? There were rejoicing and certainty – again, at what cost? This was the very stuff of drama as much as of ritual, of fantasy as much as of truth, of heroic dissent as much as harmonious union. Stockhausen was reborn both our eyes and ears.

I have, I confess, grown a little impatient with armchair listeners continuing to peddle the hackneyed line that the Stockhausen of Licht onwards demonstrated a sad, megalomaniacal decline, whilst acknowledging when pressed that they have never actually attended a performance of the Licht operas. There may be good reason for their not having done so; it does not, however, follow that such critics can possibly in a position to dismiss the works. No more than any other opera – rather less than many in the so-called ‘repertoire’ – should any of these works be considered as a ‘purely musical’ work. It may or may not be revealing simply to listen, simply to read the score. To give these extraordinary works a proper chance, though, one must engage theatrically with them. In turn, we need (excellent) performances and stagings to do so. For that, and for much else, we should be grateful indeed to the Opéra Comique and this intrepid band of artists. No one there will forget this, nor them, in a hurry.

Luzifer dancer (Jamil Attar), Luzifer trombone (Mathieu Adam),
Michael trumpet (Henri Deléger), Michael dancer (Emmanuelle Grach)
Image: Meng Phu

Such was not the least of the messages one might have taken, at the close, from the boy Michael learning from his mature selves and the rest of the heavenly cosmos, what the past, present, and future might entail. Enlightenment, Licht as well as Bildung, was seen as well as heard before our eyes, ears, and much else. I have concentrated here far more on the totality, on the overall ‘effect’, rather than on individual contributions; I hope that will not be taken amiss, as a failure to acknowledge their generally outstanding quality. Such was the collegial commitment of all concerned – the audience included, if the wild enthusiasm of its final reception were anything to go by. I have no doubt that it was. Stockhausen, ultimately, tends no more to provoke doubts than Bach. He is what he is – and this was what it was, something quite out of the ordinary. As we retreated into the Place Boieldieu for an 'invisible' musical farewell that spoke or rather sang as much of Gabrieli as new galaxies, that was something we simply, or not so simply, knew. Not entirely unlike the composer into whose cult we had been (re)admitted.

Musikfest Berlin (4) and (5) - Aimard et al.: Stockhausen, 15 and 17 September 2018

Grosser Sendesaal des rbb and Kammermusiksaal

Telemusik (1966)
Refrain (1959)
Zyklus (1959)
Kontakte (1958-60)

Mantra (1970)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano, celesta)

Dirk Rothbrust (percussion)

Benjamin Kobler (piano)

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)

Marco Stroppa (electronics)

 

For two further concerts of music by Stockhausen we moved to the splendid Westend concert hall in Hans Poelzig’s Haus des Rundfunks for a varied programme of electronic and ensemble music, before returning to the Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal for Mantra. (Alas, I had to hurry back to London for a meeting and thus missed the final event, a performance of Inori.)

The purely electronic Telemusik opened the first concert. If I say that it sounds more than ever a work of its time, I do not mean that in a disparaging sense; it does not only sound as such. But there is something engagingly remote – just as there will be for Mozart – as well as close to us in hearing such a work; it is now, as indeed one might say of any of these works, a classic. The lights went off. A projected sun appeared above the stage. Who knows which? Our own, under which the languages and cultures of the world make hay before the end of days? Sirius? Some other? A generic light, even? We seemed to hear its rays, their light, their refraction, even perhaps reflection (in whatever sense you care). Songs of the world, of some other world, were heard, sung, chanted, reinvented. A world of music(s) was ours and yet was not; it was now of the past, almost as if we had visited it, as Stockhausen once had visited us. And with that, we made our own synthesis – even in, perhaps particularly in a work without visible ‘performance’. Make of that what you will; that, perhaps, is the point.

Refrain, for three performers (Benjamin Kobler on piano, Pierre-Laurent Aimard on celesta, and Dirk Rothbrust on percussion), came next. If Telemusik offered ritual of a sort both old and new, so too did this. I could not help but wonder whether Boulez had occasionally had it in mind as a precursor to his orchestral Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna. It was mesmerising to watch as well as to listen to; the distinction seemed perhaps unusually false. Serialist theatre, in which freedom and organisation were revealed as two sides of the same coin, revealed silence also to be as crucial as it would be to Bruckner (that despite the giggles of two audience members next to me). Those strange cries of – to? – another world seemed already to look forward to Mantra and the Inori I was fated not to hear.

What an array of instruments one sees and hears in Zyklus, for solo percussionist. I say that not simply, or even principally, in terms of quantity; anyone, given a budget, can offer a large number of instruments. But here the arrangement, the interrelationship, the unity in diversity and vice versa again suggested a form of serialist music theatre for all the senses. Rothbrust’s virtuosity was astounding, but it rightly never came across as mere virtuosity; this was a performance, an act of formal revelation. Variety of attack and reverberation struck as the work of a piano writ large: again, surely implications or at least parallels for later works by both Stockhausen and Boulez. Bells seemed to recall in context both previous works on the programme. Aimard and Kobler both crept into the hall to listen, their collegiality richly rewarded indeed.

After the interval, Aimard, Rothbrust, and Marco Stroppa (electronics) gave us another fine performance: this time of Kontakte. A spatial element always seems to bring out something very special in Stockhausen – and so it was here. So too does theatre, of whatever kind, the piece initiated by Aimard’s rising to sound – not necessarily in the way the innocent eye and ear might expect – the gong: a moment and sound with clear implications for what was to come. Electronic sounds enhanced, responded, developed, just as any other chamber music response, if we may call it that, would. Rothbrust and Stroppa reminded us that percussion and electronics the growth sections of twentieth-century music, perhaps not only Western art music. If anything, they – and Stockhausen – helped here to revive the fortunes of the piano. Not, of course, that an artists such as Aimard needs any such help, nor is his part restricted to the piano. His part at times seemed to take off where the clusters of the tenth Klavierstück had left off. What virtuosity there was to be heard here, both solo and ensemble: this was, as so often with Stockhausen, music both as we knew it and as we did not.

Transformation – to be traced back, if we wish, through Schoenberg and Liszt to Bach – was very much a key to that work’s unendliche Melodie, to borrow not entirely inappropriately from Wagner. So too it was for Mantra, at the Kammermusiksaal, in which Aimard and Stroppa were joined by Tamara Stefanovich. Stockhausen was quite clear that the unfolding of this work was not to be understood as variation form, whatever it might seem to have in common with such writing – and performance. For there is no variation as such, although there is much expansion and contraction: perhaps not unlike another star or how we see, feel, and think about it. So it was here, a fine, crucial line trod with care, understanding, and the keenest sense of drama. That drama here, as elsewhere, was architectonic, just as the architecture was dramatic. It was at times absurd: absurd in its seriousness and absurd in its child-like absurdity. These were players, these were outstanding performances in which we knew we were in the safest as well as the most thrilling of hands. We could therefore surrender to the telling of a story just as much as to the progression of a ritual. The more we listened, the more we watched too, the more we heard and experienced. Form – its importance can hardly be exaggerated here, both in itself and for so much later music – was once again revealed in and through performance. One marvelled in what Stockhausen elicited, what he re-invented, but above all in what he said, in what he sang. A staccato sounded, perhaps even signified as if it had never done so before, so too a tremolo, so even did an arpeggio. If Schoenberg had felt the air of another planet, perhaps this was indeed the sound of something that lay yet further beyond.

Musikfest Berlin (2) - Aimard: Stockhausen, 13 September 2018

Kammermusiksaal

Images: © Adam Janisch 

Stockhausen: Klavierstücke III, IV, II, I, V, VIII, VII, VI, XI, IX, X

Pierre Laurent-Aimard (piano)

I have no doubt that memories of hearing Pierre–Laurent Aimard play the first eleven Stockhausen Klavierstücke will remain with me forever: like hearing Maurizio Pollini in Chopin or Daniel Barenboim in Beethoven. Not so much a performance of the year as of a lifetime, this recital proved just as all-encompassing and arguably still more necessary. Certainly no one present would have been left doubting or denying, in what would have been his ninetieth-birthday-year, Stockhausen’s demand to be heard alongside those and other past masters.

First came the first four, in the order III, IV, II, and I: almost, but not quite the order of composition (III, II, IV, I). The third is not only the shortest of the Klavierstücke but the shortest of all Stockhausen’s compositions. We hear – chez Aimard, we certainly heard – not only Webern enthroned but Webern instrumentalised: the Webern of that celebrated ‘productive misunderstanding’, conscious or otherwise, of what we still just about cling to as an idea of ‘Darmstadt’ or ‘the post-war avant garde’. What I heard immediately was a tone, a general approach to performance I recognised from having Aimard’s Art of Fugue ten years ago. Then I mused that he had, to my fascination if not always to my (irrelevant) liking, been playing Bach through the ears of Darmstadt; this seemed to confirm that. (I should now very much like to hear his Art of Fugue again.)

The fourth Klaverstück sounded both similarly and as a response. Already my ears – and, I am sure, the ears of the audience more generally – were adjusting, hearing by virtue of Aimard’s outstanding performance the relationship between all musical parameters not only set before us but dramatised. This Stockhausen was an heir to many, but was without doubt a Teutonic heir to the Messiaen of the second of the Quatre études de rhythme, ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’: that extraordinary, in many ways quite atypical (for the composer), first essay in ‘total serialism’. Any lingering Romantic doubts would instantly have been silenced. Can, for instance, dynamic contrast be ‘expressive’ if it is non-negotiable? Of course: all we need do is listen. Stockhausen’s music revealed itself – or rather, was revealed by Aimard – as sonorous architecture in time just as much as Beethoven’s.

Building of voices in the second Klavierstück seemed again to have some points of correspondence with a Bach fugue: only superficially, though, for this was no one other than Stockhausen. And yet, the sense of variables as heard in ‘traditional’, earlier music continued to grow in Aimard’s performance of the first: interacting, converging, just as they would in Bach or Beethoven, alongside a ‘new’ understanding of them, perhaps long since forgotten, as musical ‘parameters’. Its emphatic final note, sustained, reverberating seemed to ask: is this a climax, a reconciliation, something new? Perhaps more important, it also seemed to ask whether such questions, such Romantic remnants retained any meaning.

Number five came fifth. In Aimard’s hands, it opened as if a ‘Jimbo’s Lullaby’ for the fifties, albeit with none of Debussy’s equally challenging vagueness. Such precise, magical variation in reverberation was not the least ‘expressive’ device to be heard here. Intervallic listening – a remnant of Webern? – will perhaps always throw up some oddities; a leaning upward minor sixth suddenly suggested to me the opening of Tristan. But that is hardly an issue unique to this music; and, in any case, why not? Furthermore, one is not listening to such intervals in isolation. Context is crucial, however ‘context’ may be considered. The eighth proved jaw-droppingly different in character, the contrast between what I heard as metre and its bending suggestive of a reinvention of rubato, both ironic and utterly sincere, unquestionably hard-won.

The seventh sounded with particular force as a response to other music: both heard here and elsewhere, perhaps even Boulez’s Second Sonata. The opening repetitions of C-sharp, always with different resonance, offered somehow a focus on something both comprehensible and incomprehensible. (Is that not the case with any music worth our time?) No one listening to Aimard’s performance could doubt the constructivism at work here that seemed somehow to blossom into something strangely akin to a reinvention of the sonata principle. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, I started to hear intimations of Liszt. The first half closed with the sixth Klavierstück, which struck, at least to my ears, a note of defiant struggle, both traditional, even Romantic, and not. By now, the piano was sounding more and more as an instrument reinvented, our very experiences and ideas of sound and listening having been transformed. Somewhere, perhaps, in this aural penumbra were the seeds of Stockhausen’s more overt later mysticism. And yet, this remained music as generative, as dialectical as Beethoven. Intensity of work and performance alike had become close to unbearable; time, then, for a drink.

The second half opened with the eleventh Klavierstück. Rightly or wrongly, I very much felt here that typical ‘after the interval’ reinvigoration. These things matter, however much Stockhausen may (justly) have disdained our traditional concert-going practices. It was certainly not a negative thing: pitches, intervals sounded renewed in themselves rather than hermeneutically. Did the hoary Romantic idea of ‘absolute music’ have life in it yet? There were flashes of a not un-Boulezian frenzy and fury to be heard, though the architecture could hardly have been more different. I started to think of material, even poetic contrasts between swirling, serial constellations in the sky and something more traditionally, even harmonically grounded. Rotation was the thing here, I think, although I could not explain why. Poetic control, a related idea, was the one that came to me in the ninth. It was evocative – but surely of ‘itself’. What a sense of drama it nevertheless possessed. Not the first but certainly the most grievous of the evening’s telephonic interventions blighted a good few of the closing seconds.

For the tenth and final piece, Aimard put on his fingerless gloves. He and Stockhausen taught us once again, even more thoroughly than before, to re-listen – even before the truly shocking physical, musical drama of those celebrated cluster glissandos. It was not so much difficult to credit that there were only two hands – two arms, really – playing as difficult not to credit that there were not twenty. Two ears certainly seemed insufficient to listen with; alas, that was all I had. Radical hardly seemed the word; again, it was all I had. Something quite extraordinary happened during the piece’s course: through the swirling cauldron contents of cluster reverberation, a world was put (back) together. Order out of chaos? Once again, this music, these performances reached back to Bach and beyond, and forward to Stockhausen’s own Licht dramas. As I said, the performance of a lifetime.