Musikfest Berlin (1) – Isabelle Faust and friends; MCO/Benjamin: Schoenberg and Benjamin, 12 September 2018

Kammermusiksaal

Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht, op.4

Benjamin: Into the Little Hill

Isabelle Faust, Anne Katharina Schreiber (violins)

Antoine Tamesit, Danusha Waskiewicz (violas)

Christian Poltéra, Jean-Guihen Queyras (cellos)

Susanna Andersson (soprano)

Krisztina Szabó (mezzo-soprano)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

George Benjamin (conductor)

Image: © Adam Janisch 

Schoenberg and Benjamin offered a fine welcome back from Berlin and its September Musikfest to a prodigal son – especially so since, only the previous day, I had both received the first proofs for my Schoenberg biography and heard an excellent paper from George Haggett on Benjamin’s Written on Skin at OBERTO’s annual conference. Truth be told, there was for me little in the way of obvious connection between the two works on offer, save for the question of narration, brought very much to the fore in Martin Crimp’s libretto for Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill, yet also surely apparent in Verklärte Nacht. Who is telling this story – and on what authority? Two very different genres, composers, ensembles, musical styles and languages nevertheless elicited two memorable performances, Into the Little Hill outstandingly so.

Schoenberg’s tone poem for string sextet – we should never forget that radicalism in itself, already seeking to reconcile and to renew Wagner and Brahms – opened, if not quite on the verge of audibility, then soft, mysterious enough to make us listen: pointing ahead to Webern, even to Nono. Christian Poltéra’s solo cello, soon joined by other ‘lower’ strings – can they really be lower when they make up four out of six? – proved febrile, indicative of human fragility, although certainly never fragile in a performative sense. Violins, especially Isabelle Faust, sometimes seemed more overtly keen to evoke elements of what may – or may not – be ‘period’ practice. Portamento was, at least initially, more in evidence from them, vibrato somewhat sparing. Led by Jean-Guihen Queyras and Antoine Tamesit, nocturnal blossoming thereby provoked proved a rare, even breathtaking treat. Not that any one of these musicians was ‘leading’ the music-making for more than a few bars: this is chamber music and so it sounded.

The violence of Benjamin’s opera was certainly prefigured at times in musico-narrative gestures in the Schoenberg’s performance, pizzicato anything but soothing. Narrative, moreover, was unquestionably to the fore, questioning whatever distinctions we might make between ‘musical’ and ‘poetic’ concerns. Twists and turns in individual lines aurally suggested those of a Jugendstil drawing, leaves, branches, lightness, and darkness of the forest, both material and metaphysical, emerging and transforming before our ears. Bar a patch of decidedly wayward intonation from Faust, the lack of smoothness was decidedly to be welcomed, each line seemingly re-thought, even re-composed according to the needs of the moment. The moment of change, of transformation was undeniable with Queyras’s cello solo. I felt a sense of transfiguration less: perhaps that was the point. In its particular materialism, not least in the vibrato-less moonlit silver of the close, this performance seemed to declare affinity with and distance from the orchestral tone poems of Strauss.

Schoenberg’s supposed antipode, Stravinsky was present, or so it sounded, in the opening of Into the Little Hill. Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Friends one might almost have called it. Moreover, soon it became clear that voices, even voices with words, might act instrumentally – take Krisztina Szabó’s use of consonants in ‘The Minister and the Crowd’ – as well as vice versa. All along, one heard both in work and performance a chiselled precision from Benjamin – who also conducted – that might, I suppose, be likened to Stravinsky (or Ravel, or many other composers), but which is without question the composer’s own. The precise choice of note, duration, timbre speaks for itself, whatever it might ‘mean’. An almost unbearably suspenseful scene between The Minister and The Stranger, the latter’s evil seduction both verbal (Susanna Andersson) and instrumental, made as powerful a dramatic, political point as if it had been staged.

The quiet tension of silence proved just as telling at that pivotal scene’s close, the shifty politician having sworn on his sleeping child: ‘unlike your god/unlike your word/unlike your smile/-[he] is innocent’. It was, though, the quiet tension of music, of musical processes, generated and generative, in the ensuing Interlude: it did what needed – what someone alleged was needed – to be done. ‘Why must the rats die, Mummy?’ The will of the people, in reality the satisfaction of the mob, would now be put into effect.

And so, in Part Two, the Minister re-elected, we could look or rather hear inside his head. There was an excellent, truly dramatic sense of a second ‘act’, of time having passed: Stravinskian sonorities once again reborn, fatally so. ‘And music?’ asked the Stranger upon his return. ‘All music – smiles the minister – is incidental.’ Is it really? The darkness of the eighth scene for ‘Mother(s) and Child(ren)’ was all too real, ghosts – burrowing children inside the Little Hill – in Benjamin’s machine likewise. ‘The deeper we burrow the brighter his music burns. Can’t you see? Can’t you see? Can’t you see?’

Salzburg Festival (2): Die Eroberung von Mexico, 10 August 2015

Cortez (Bo Skovhus) and Montezuma (Angela Denoke)
Images: Monika Rittershaus

Felsenreitschule

Montezuma – Angela Denoke

Cortez – Bo Skovhus
Soprano – Susanna Andersson
Contralto – Marie-Ange Todorovitch
First Speaker – Stephan Rehm
Second Speaker – Peter Pruchniewitz

Peter Konwitschny (director)

Johannes Leiacker (designs)
Manfred Voss (lighting)
fettFilm (video)
Peter Böhm, Florian Bogner (sound direction)
Bettina Bartz (dramaturgy)

Mixed Choir (on tape)

Movement Choir

ORF Symphony Orchestra, Vienna

Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

This was a magnificent evening in the theatre, to which my immediate reaction was to wish to see – and to hear – it all again. Partly, that was of course a matter of a rich work, experienced for the first time, in a rich staging, experienced for the first time, in rich performances, experienced for the first and last time. I am sure that I missed a great deal. I will do so in a staging of Parsifal, which I flatter myself I know reasonably well; how much more so will that be the case in a work hitherto unfamiliar? But I hope here to give a taste of my vivid theatrical experience of Wolfgang Rihm’s Die Eroberung von Mexico (The Conquest of Mexico).

 

 

Director Peter Konwitschny is at pains, in a programme interview, to dissociate the work from the merely ‘Mexican’. ‘We saw,’ he claims, ‘the sign warning us not to turn off into the dead-end marked “Mexico”’. Before that, we read Konwitschny: ‘It’s not about Europe/America or Mexico/Spain, but Man/Woman.’ Such might be the case for Konwitschny’s staging, though not, I think entirely, but I am less sure that it is the case for the Musiktheater (an interesting, not-quite-Wagnerism) itself. It is certainly not to be reduced to any one particular polarity, as the oft-repeated, Antonin Artaud-derived, ‘Neutral, Weiblich, Männlich’ (‘Masculine, Neuter, Feminine’ – not always, notably in that order) seems to remind us. And the space available for the mediating – or original? – ‘Neutral’ is not always clear, perhaps does not even survive, or at least survive in its initial form. Is it perhaps – and this might be a Wagnerism of sorts – in the orchestra? In Rihm’s own libretto, which, taking Artaud’s Le Théâtre du Séraphin as one of its building blocks, would thus both suggest and reject some form of verbal (perhaps even colonial?) supremacy?

 

With such an enterprise, it is, of course, difficult to know where to start, and I have probably stepped ahead of myself on one strand already. I shall attempt no clear division between work and staging, since such was not my experience – and indeed would not be possible on the basis of an initial encounter. (Frustrating, yet inevitable and indeed in some sense fruitful?) There is a perhaps predictable, yet already surprising, identification of Montezuma with the feminine – and not only in voice – and Cortez with the masculine. Rape occurs early on; does it not always? But before that, and returning at long last to my initial point concerning Mexico, we have had a long, introductory, introduction, or perhaps immersion, into the landscape. The first of three parts, ‘Die Vorzeichen’/’Omens’; ‘Bekenntnis’/’Confession’; ‘Die Umwälzungen’/’Upheavals’) has drummers surrounding the audience lead us in for a few minutes before the conductor has even arrived, and indeed before the audience has received the signal to sit and to be quiet. The drum melodies, Rihm writes, are ‘the melody “of a landscape that senses the approach of a thunderstorm”’. They do not – or at least, did not to me – feel ‘Orientalist’, or better ‘Occidentalist’; yet, at the same time, it is difficult, upon reflection, not to think that in some sense they must be, and, as the action unfolds, that they have, perhaps knowingly, been presented, even constructed as such. Oppositions, then, not entirely straightforward, continue to frame, to participate, to incite.

 

 

 

Rihm’s score, as often with this composer, covers a broad canvas in any number of respects. Yet, doubtless partly as a matter of the excellence of staging and all performances, though not only, I think, as a matter of that, it offers the composer at his integrative as well as his discursive best. Schoenbergian Sprechstimme – can we not but think of Moses at times? – vies or collaborates with choral writing and vocal amplification that bring to mind Nono and Lachenmann. Something far more Romantic, the ghost of Mahler perhaps, or of Strauss, swells up in the orchestral strings (fewer than one perhaps realises). Lyricism – whether vocal, or solo instrumental – that would surely have brought a smile to the face any of those composers has one melt, and at the same time has one suspect, has one question, not least in light of what we see and do not see on stage.

 

Konwitschny makes a strong case for his conception of male-female incomprehension. Not just in the violence, whether it be of Cortez towards Montezuma, of the movement choir (which, in a brilliant coup de théâtre, stands up and reveals itself as initially having been seated in the audience) towards the golden (yes, gold again brings us back to Moses and, of course, to the idea of the New World) female, danced portrayals of Malinche, ‘who speaks with her body’. The living room in which most of the action takes place – the rest surrounding that space – has at its centre Frida Kahlo’s The Wounded Deer: both image and knowledge of Kahlo’s relationship with Diego Rivera contribute to our understanding. In perhaps the most arresting image of all, still more so than the movement choir’s gang-rape of Malinche, Montezuma gives birth, we presume to Cortez’s child: the offspring is the offspring of Apple. fettFilm’s video images plunge us into a world of projected ‘apps’ and video games: Cortez’s war is virtual – remember those television images of Baghdad, and so many other victims of Western imperialism – but the virtual appears to be real and, of course is. Both sides suffer; both sides die, kill each other, and yet appear still to be in some sense alive. What is going on? What has gone on? The information age threatens to disclose all, yet leaves us all the more alienated. Montezuma’s transformation into a statue – here, a marrying, apparently pacified doll – does nothing to resolve, everything disquietingly to disturb, as does the further violence that ensues. And yet opera, the primæval and/or modern cry, reassert themselves at the end of each part, with verse from Octavio Paz, a striking, harrowing duet for Montezuma and Cortez at the very close. Or is it? Rihm’s libretto ends: ‘Ende (?) der Oper’. Images from the (Spanish/Mexican) past have fleetingly passed before our eyes: are they a clarification, or a ‘dead end’? Log in, to find out? Or should we turn away from our screens? Perhaps to listen?

 

 

Performances, as I suggested, were uniformly excellent. Angela Denoke and Bo Skovhus offered near-superhuman efforts as Montezuma and Cortez, range as impressive in dynamic terms as in pitch, in stage presence and conviction as in musical and verbal delivery. Cortez, backed up by speakers, never elicited sympathy, but suggested a broadening of our experience and understanding. Montezuma, shadowed by spectacular high soprano and deep contralto (Susanna Andersson and Marie-Ange Todorovitch) was anything but a sentimentally conceived victim. We did not – and surely should not – know what to do with him/her, and in some sense (s)he survived. I should probably add: in another sense, sadly, not at all. The contrast with the trendy banalities of Peter Sellars’s The Indian Queen, loudly proclaiming itself post-colonial, whilst all the time forgetting the ‘post’ bit, could hardly have been greater. This approached Wagnerian music drama, not on Wagner’s terms, but not opposed to them either. And, as with Wagner, the orchestra was perhaps most crucial of all. There could certainly no be gainsaying the outstanding contribution made by the ORF Symphony Orchestra, Vienna, wisely, viscerally, reflectively directed by Ingo Metzmacher. Yes, this work needs to be seen – and heard – again.

 

 

 

BCMG/Benjamin - Into the Little Hill, with works by Antonioni and Sawer, 6 April 2013

Wigmore Hall

Francesco Antonioni – Ballata (2008)

David Sawer – Rumpelstiltskin Suite (2011, world premiere)
George Benjamin – Into the Little Hill (2006)

Susanna Andersson (soprano)
Hilary Summers (contralto)
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
George Benjamin (conductor)

 

This concert was the final event in the Wigmore Hall’s George Benjamin Day. A morning concert, which I had been unable to attend, had offered various chamber works, from Carolin Widmann (violin), Adam Walker (flute), and Marino Formenti (piano). There had also been a pre-concert interview between Benjamin and Wigmore Hall director, John Gilhooly, the interview reminding one just what a difficult business composition is, especially for someone so self-critical and exquisite in craftsmanship as Benjamin.

 

Francesco Antonioni’s Ballata was a Birmingham Contemporary Music Group commission,  first performed in 2009. Its material is derived from  a lullaby, sung by an unidentified female singer, recorded in the 1950s by the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, and a fourteenth-century ballade, Ecco la primavera – might we dare hope for that at long last? – by Francesco Landini. Written for strings (three violins, two violas, two cellos, and one double bass), it inevitably elicits sonorities that put one in mind of otherwise quite dissimilar pieces for string ensemble or orchestra. That the odd chord-spacing reminded me of, say, Strauss’s Metamorphosen or Honegger’s Second Symphony probably has no further relevance than that. One was perhaps a little closer to the mark in hearing hints of post-Ligeti swarming, albeit with a post-Romantic sensibility that remained at least as strong. Certainly a lyrical impulse, unsurprising given the inspiration, persistently manifested itself. There were some beautiful ‘frozen’ or, perhaps better, ‘freezing’ moments too. Sections were sharply characterised without sounding ‘sectional’. The BCMG musicians appeared to give a fine account under Benjamin; commitment was certainly palpable.

 

David Sawer’s Rumpelstiltskin Suite, co-commissioned by the BCMG and the Wigmore Hall, received its world premiere. I was struck by the balletic quality to much of this often very pictorial music. Prokofiev’s sense of fantasy never seemed far away, likewise Stravinsky in various respects: sonority (at times Symphonies of Wind Instruments, despite the mixed nature of the ensemble), rhythms, and a sense of music theatre that inescapably brought impressions of The Soldier’s Tale. There was woodwind rejoicing, mixed with foreboding, during the section I assume to have been depicting the wedding of the miller’s daughter to the king and her coronation; there was spinning from the strings and harp. And it was difficult not to hear some sort of homage to The Rite of Spring in ‘Rumpelstiltskin’s Last Dance’. It was colourful, full of character; an excellent choice, I should imagine, to introduced children to ‘contemporary music’.

 

Benjamin’s masterly chamber opera, Into the Litte Hill, followed the interval, Susanna Anderson and Hilary Summers the soloists. It is extraordinary, though gratifying, to think that, although it was only first performed in 2006, this wonderful opera has already, quite rightly, attained ‘classic’ status. Martin Crimp’s libretto helps, offering the conjunction of a timeless morality of politicians and broken promises, with the opportunity for particular resonances at particular times, as well of course as being finely judged in the potential it allows for music. ‘All music – smiles the minister – is incidental.’ To which the man, Benjamin, and we, reply that nothing could be further from the truth. ‘This is our home. Our home is under the earth./With the angel under the earth./And the deeper we burrow the brighter his music burns.’ This country may be less obsessed with Jimmy Savile than it was a few months ago, but issues concerning child abduction and paedophilia insinuate themselves nevertheless.

 

Hearing Into the Little Hill again, so soon after the Royal Opera’s performances of Written on Skin, one appreciates that the path is not straightforwardly linear from the former to the latter. Some of the sounds, and indeed the ideas, are arguably more dramatically rebarbative than anything in the Pelléas-soaked world of Benjamin’s – and Crimp’s – second opera. For me, the furious crowd interventions, voiced though they may be by two singers alone, evoke the viciousness of the turba choruses in Bach’s Passions. ‘Kill them they bite/kill them they steal/kill them they take bread take rice...’ The rats in our present-day climate could be ‘benefit claimants’ at the mercy of the mob. Benjamin’s score is, as one would expect, beautifully crafted in its entirety, always revealing more, the short Interlude between the fourth and fifth scenes, for instance, offering a disturbingly exquisite hesitant journey somewhere between pointillism and arabesque. The hieratic quality at the beginning of Part Two perhaps brought echoes – at least in this listener’s head, on this occasion – of Messiaen and Boulez. And the sense of a breakdown of musical mechanisms at the end sounded both utterly characteristic of Benjamin and evocative of earlier examples from Prokofiev (the close of the Fifth Symphony) to Knussen. Once again the BCMG did the music proud, as did Benjamin’s own focused direction. Andersson proved an intrepid, seemingly fearless soprano, as beautiful of voice as precise of pitch. High notes thereby registered with full expressive attention rather than mere technical achievement. Summers’s extraordinary contralto remains quite unlike any other voice I have heard. It sometimes seems to possess an almost primæval, ‘untrained’ quality, musicianship worn lightly, and offered not only excellently judged contrast with the soprano but also winning alchemy with Karen Jones’s bass flute. A masterpiece confirmed, then, and given a new lease of performing life.