Lemieux/OPRF/Petrenko - Takemitsu, Chausson, and Zemlinsky, 4 May 2018

Grande Salle Pierre Boulez, Philharmonie, Paris

Takemitsu: Toward the Sea III

Chausson: Poème de l’amour et de la mer, op.19

Zemlinsky: Die Seejungfrau

Michel Rousseau (alto flute)

Nicolas Tulliez (harp)

Marie-Nicole Lemieux (contralto)

Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France

Vasily Petrenko (conductor)

Paris’s now not-quite-so-new Philharmonie remains a thing of wonder. The approach through the Parc de la Villette is a visual feast, especially on a sunny evening such as I was afforded. Lighting works magic after sunset too. If the public areas outside the hall still seem oddly provisional – presumably they are – the hall itself, now named the Grande Salle Pierre Boulez after the conscience of new music, remains also an acoustical wonder, a feast for the ears. I could not help but think, not least after a recent visit to the Barbican, how desperately London needs something similar – or, dare we hope, better. From May in Paris to May in Downing Street remains, alas, a distance of intergalactic proportions.

Although I had enjoyed my first visit, in October 2015, this concert proved the more consistently illuminating musical experience. For one thing, I am not sure that I had heard any of the three works in concert before. Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea III, for alto flute and harp, made for an excellent opening piece: the sort of programming touch, mixing solo, chamber, ensemble, and larger forces, of which Boulez would have approved. Flute and harp could hardly be a more Gallic combination, yet Takemitsu’s music is rarely quite what it initially seems. This, then, was a garden of delights, not least the opening movement, ‘The Night’, but not all gardens, not all Japanese gardens, are the same. Such music tends to reward concentrated, enlightened listening – what music worth its salt does not?! – such as was enabled both by these fine performances, from Michel Rousseau and Nicolas Tulliez, and the fine acoustic. There was a sense of inheritance from Debussy and Ravel, without in any sense being limited thereby. Shifting of roles between the two instruments came to the fore in the second movement, ‘Moby Dick’, played with twin flexibility and purpose: both necessary when finding one’s way around a labyrinth, however esmall. The closing ‘Cape Cod’ followed, so it seemed, consequentially, without one ever necessarily being able to explain quite how. Silences proved pregnant, as telling as the notes. There was no playing to the gallery here; neither music nor hall required it.

We remained with the sea throughout the evening, Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer our next port of call. Like each of the three pieces heard this evening, Chausson’s work is, surely not coincidentally, in three parts, a ravishing orchestral interlude between the two verse settings: ‘La Fleur des eaux’ and ‘La Mort de l’amour’. Many in the audience were, understandably, disappointed by the withdrawal of Anna Caterina Antonacci from the concert. There was, however, little to regret in the performance we heard from Marie-Nicole Lemieux. Indeed, her rich yet agile contralto offered its own distinctive rewards, which one would have been a fool to spurn. (How often, in any case, does one have the opportunity to hear a ‘true’ contralto?) Her way with the words was impressed just as much as the richly upholstered tone on the low notes.

Rousseau and Tulliez were now joined by their colleagues from the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Vasily Petrenko. I was struck – perhaps as an Englishman I would be – by the opening phrase and its seeming affinity to Elgar. Tristan-esque harmonies made their mark, of course, so did the Klingsor-like, fin-de-siècle world of the ‘sauvage’ we both heard and embraced. Chamber music, as in Wagner, proved to be much of the story too, Petrenko acting as much as enabler as director, without shirking his responsibilities in the latter role where necessary. Greater urgency in the third section marked out a fresh start: related, yes, but also perhaps redolent of Nietzsche, in The Gay Science: ‘At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’. Wagnerism knows no boundaries; nor should it.

Image: Arnold Schönberg Center - Wien

Zemlinsky would surely have nodded assent to that, whether as composer or conductor. Petrenko’s reading of Die Seejungfrau (‘The Little Mermaid’), after Hans Christian Andersen, at least equalled any recorded performance I have heard – with the inestimable advantage, of course, of ‘liveness’. When I hear it I cannot help but think of Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, not least since both works received their premieres in the same concert, the final, January 1905 outing for the short-lived Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler (‘Society of Creative Musicians’). Neither is an easy work to bring off, yet Petrenko seemed to me very much to have the measure of Zemlinsky’s ‘fantasy in three movements for large orchestra’, especially its very own motivic integrity: not entirely unlike Schoenberg’s, yet certainly not merely to be assimilated to it.

Through that joint inheritance from Brahms and Wagner, the three movements seemed quite naturally, even organically – however loaded those terms may be – to emerge. Would it have mattered if it had been called a symphony? Perhaps not. But it was better called, and performed as, something else. The narrative was very much its own, perhaps not entirely unlike another, more celebrated maritime symphonic poem, by a composer hovering at the edges of the programme: Debussy. The waves of La Mer certainly came involuntarily to my mind at the opening of the second of the work’s three movements. Thinking of the symphonic or tone poem as a genre, work and performance sounded not un-Straussian at some points, yet never – quite rightly, I think – displayed Strauss’s cynical and/or materialist delight in phantasmagoria for its own sake. Zemlinsky, for better or worse, was simply too nice a man and composer for that. He withdrew the work, for whatever reason, after that Musikverein performance. Schoenberg, as ever, bore the violent brunt of the reaction. ‘Reviews were unusually violent,’ he would recall: ‘one of the critics suggested to put me in an asylum and keep music paper out of my reach’. Zemlinsky, however, deserved far more than indifference – as Schoenberg and this evening’s excellent performers knew well.

Members of the BPO - Takemitsu, Strauss, Prokofiev, and Bruch, 18 December 2017

Pierre Boulez Saal

Takemitsu: Le son calligraphié I-III

Strauss: Metamorphosen, in version for string septet by Rudolf Leopold

Prokofiev Sonata for Two Violins in C major, op.56

Bruch: Octet in B-flat major, op. posth.

Daishin Kashimoto, Noah Bendix-Balgley, Luiz Felipe Coelho, Christophe Horak (violins)

Amihai Grosz, Naoko Shimizu (violas)

Ludwig Quandt, Bruno Delepelaire (cellos)

Matthew McDonald (double bass)

It is doubtless in the nature of such varied programmes, in which the emphasis seems to lie upon variety in itself rather than on a unifying theme, that some works will appeal to any one listener more than others. In that respect, I should count myself fortunate that only – doubtless predictably – Max Bruch’s musically anonymous late string octet that failed to intrigue me. (If, as a Bruch fanatic, should such a thing exist, you prefer: I failed to be intrigued by it.) The date of composition, although it apparently is based upon earlier materials, beggars belief: 1920. It is not so much that it was written eight years after Pierrot lunaire, as that it sounds rather like a talented, yet uninspired attempt to imitate the young, and I mean very young, Mendelssohn. Not that the eight players – all of those listed above, save for Matthew McDonald on double bass – in any sense failed it. Quite the contrary: I cannot imagine it receiving a more committed, enlightened performance, determined to make the most of its craftsmanship, without attempting to turn it into something it is not. The spirit and cultivation of the playing were, from the opening of the first of its three movements, undeniable: far more thrilling than the material itself. It was surely to that, quite rightly, that the audience so warmly responded. There were darker moments (relatively speaking) too, especially in the central Adagio-Andante con molto di moto. And if even these players could not quite convince one that the generic character and/or form of a finale were transformed into something more than that, they did their very best. No one should begrudge such pieces an occasional outing – and who knows? Maybe others heard something in the piece I did not.

Written for the same forces, Tōru Takemitsu’s three early Son calligraphié works (1958-60), proved more fascinating, at least to me. If their miniature status and their spare directness of utterance perhaps inevitably brought to mind Webern and – from the future – Kurtág, the harmonic language, especially in so warm, yet never over-egged a performance proved more suggestive of Berg. It might seem contradictory, and perhaps it is, to speak of spare directness and then to mention languor, but there seemed to be plenty of space, however considered, for that too, timbres often suggestive of a more Gallic sensibility. The wholeness of the players’ conception, combined with attention to (Japanese?) ‘calligraphic’ detail, might have had one think these pieces repertoire works. There seemed to me, at least on a first hearing, no good reason why they should not be.

Strauss’s Metamorphosen is, unquestionably, although not necessarily in this form, the version for string septet by Rudolf Leopold, made following rediscovery of Strauss’s short score and first performed in 1994. The players turned around so as to face in the opposite direction for this, following in the footsteps of many musicians, Daniel Barenboim included, eager to play the hall, even its audience, as a living instrument rather than a mere space for performance. Not for nothing is the Pierre Boulez Saal’s motto ‘music for the thinking ear’. Seven strings will never sound the same as twenty-three. Nor should they attempt to; for, if that were the aim, why not use twenty-three? Here there is, almost by definition, a greater sense of chamber music, but it was a greater sense in performance too, the players seemingly relishing the opportunity to play with the difference, although never to be different merely for the sake of it. What I noticed earlier on was an apparently slower tempo than often one hears. (I say apparently, since it sounded to be as much a matter of holding back harmonically, and have no idea whether it was in terms of accursed metronome beats.) Such was not how it was to be all along, though, for lighter, even relatively brighter passages seemed to gain momentum, both in terms of tempo and harmonic rhythm. (Are the two in fact distinct?) This was a Metamorphosen which, perhaps unusually, had more of late Strauss’s typical Mozartian sonata form balance and dynamism, vis-à-vis dark Wagnerism. It was not, however, a case of one against the other, but of dramatic conflict. Likewise, the balance and generative conflict between harmony and counterpoint sounded almost as if born of a Mozart quintet, rendering transitional passages – yes, I know the whole work is essentially transitional… – especially interesting. The cultivated gravity of return led to a soft-spoken sense of approaching yet never reaching suspension. And yes, the Eroica moment spoke as eloquently as ever, in its new yet old setting: a metaphor perhaps for the performance as a whole.

Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins, played by concertmasters Daishin Kashimoto and Noah Bendix-Balgley, fared wonderfully well, in a performance as dramatic, even aspirantly balletic, as it was razor-sharp of intonation. The bitter-sweet post-Romantic intertwining and separation of instruments in the first movement proved a masterclass, performative as well as compositional, in two-part writing. Bartókian fury, soon transmuted into something else, which in turn was soon transformed, and so on, characterised a powerfully yet never pedantically developmental second movement. Sweetly, songfully enigmatic, the simple, side-slipping pleasures of the third movement delighted. What I thought of as the sincere tricksterism of the finale did so too, in its very different way. It offered both a sense of uniting the work’s strands and yet also questioning them. Strauss was far from the only composer of this period to don compositional mask upon mask.

Berlin Festtage (4) – Mutter/Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim - Takemitsu, Beethoven, Debussy, and Berg, 11 April 2017

Philharmonie

Takemitsu: Nostalghia: In Memory of Andrei Tarkovsky, for violin and string orchestra

Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D major, op,61

Debussy: La Mer

Berg: Three Orchestral Pieces, op.6

Anne Sophie-Mutter (violin)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

 

A concert very much of two halves, but which half would be which? Sad to say, it was the longer ‘half’, with Anne-Sophie Mutter, which proved frustrating (although not, it would seem, to an often poorly behaved audience: telephones, quadrophonic coughing, chattering, dropping things, etc., etc.) As it was, a truly outstanding performance of La Mer – was it perhaps the best I have heard? – and an excellent account of Berg’s Op.6 Pieces had me wishing that perhaps the Beethoven Violin Concerto had been omitted from a strangely programmed concert.

 

Takemitsu’s Nostalghia opened the concert, and fared considerably better than the Beethoven. The composer’s move ever closer towards (more or less) conventional tonality was to be heard here, yet not entirely unalloyed: post-Messiaen the harmonies might have been, but there were hints of Berg too. Moreover, Mutter’s playing, consciously or otherwise, seemed designed to pick up the intervallic aspects of Takemitsu’s construction, even constructivism, and their implications. The contrast between her tone – for once, ‘glamorous’ does seem the mot juste – and that of the small band of orchestral strings was telling rather than distracting. She and Daniel Barenboim shaped the work’s contours well; attention to detail was equally impressive. The ‘tender and elegiac mood’ of which Takemitsu spoke was evoked, but not at the expense of a ‘merely’ atmospheric account, no more welcome here than in Debussy.

 

That distinction of string tone was also present in the Beethoven Concerto, but it began to take on the characteristic of mannerism, especially when Mutter’s playing with intonation – I say ‘playing with’, since it seemed deliberate – began to grate. Perhaps more disturbing were her sometimes extreme rubato and tempo variation. Barenboim is renowned as a master in post-Furtwänglerian Beethoven, which we might have had chance to hear in another performance; here, too much sounded like a bad parody of Mengelberg. The first movement in particular was listless, at times seeming interminable, even when the tempo was far from ‘objectively’ slow. The magnificence of the moment of orchestral return showed us what we were missing. Interestingly, somewhat perplexingly, Mutter’s account of the cadenza (Kreisler’s, I think) was far stronger in direction, and indeed in expressive range too. Applause at the close of the movement was as unwelcome as it was predictable, although it was probably preferable to another extended bout of bronchial display. The slow movement was better: broad, with undeniable intimacy for much of its course. Characterful solo voices from the Staatskapelle Berlin – the bassoon in particular caught my ear – were a delight. A reverie, with sterner moments, then, whose spell was broken by a vigorous, even dashing account of the finale. If only the first movement had borrowed a little of that vigour! Now the orchestra really played out and Barenboim seemed far more in control.

 

Once past the bizarrely bronchial sunrise, impressively handled so far as one could tell, Barenboim’s La Mer achieved perhaps the most truly symphonic stature I have heard. It is certainly not the only way to perform this work, but it was mightly impressive. The great sweep of the first movement, and indeed beyond, was enhanced by equally fine attention to detail. The climax rightly grew out of and yet also transformed what had gone before. There was no lingering, rendering its impact all the greater. ‘Jeux de vagues’ emerged as a glittering orchestral scherzo, with all the dynamism of (if a different dynamism from) a scherzo by Mahler or Brahms. Cellos drove, or so it seemed, the harmony as well as the rhythm. The ‘Dialague du vent et de la mer’ opened as ominously as any symphonic finale (that to Berg’s Pieces included, if we may include them). Its dark malevolence looked back to Parsifal but forward too. During the course of a struggle that was avowedly musical rather than pictorial, quintessentially Debussyan magic and mystery sounded reborn.

 

Sonic mystery of a different kind enabled the very components of Western music to emerge in the opening of Berg’s ‘Präludium’: an exaggeration, perhaps, but there was a real sense, even, in theological terms, a real presence, of the instantiation of harmony, melody, rhythm in that creation. (I often think of this opening as a counterpart to Haydn’s ‘Representation of Chaos’. Here it stood, or so it seemed, midway between Haydn and Varèse.) The strangeness of this music remained undimmed; it was no orchestral showpiece that we heard. ‘Reigen’ danced as it must, but it was the evolution of that dance and its subsequent development that registered especially strongly. Fragments of old Vienna were remembered, misremembered, invented; they filed past us in a ballroom that disintegrated before our ears. Line here proved as crucial as in La Mer, or indeed as in Barenboim’s Wagner. A similar thing might be said of the ‘Marsch’, save for its necessary dissimilarity and contrast. The insanity and downright barbarism of the huge orchestra and its music was celebrated, then distilled and dissolved, reinstating the unspoken presence of Mahler, even prior to the hammer blows. Berg claimed that Mahler’s modernity over Wagner was in part a matter of saying, with Nietzsche, yes rather than no. Here, Berg seemed to say yes, no, maybe, all manner of things. If there was not quite the clarity that Pierre Boulez, with no sacrifice to its emotional range, used to bring to performances of this music, Barenboim and his orchestra offered interesting new perspectives of their own. This is music we hear far too infrequently; there really is no excuse.

 

Esfahani - Couperin, J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, G.A. Benda, Takemitsu, 15 July 2014

 

Wigmore Hall

Couperin – Quatrième livre de pièces de clavecin: 26^th ordre

Bach – The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I: Preludes and Fugues in D minor, BWV 851; C-sharp minor, BWV 849; B major, BWV 868

Toccata in F-sharp minor, BWV 910

C.P.E. Bach – Sonata in B-flat major, Wq. 48 no.2

Georg Anton Benda – Sonata no.4 in F major

Takemitsu – Rain Dreaming

C.P.E. Bach – Sonata in F-sharp minor, Wq. 52 no.4

Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord)

 

This was a splendid recital, my only (minor) reservations reserved for a couple of the pieces, certainly not for Mahan Esfahani’s performances of them. No such reservations were felt, naturally, for a first half of works by Couperin, J.S. and C.P.E. Bach. The 26^th ordre from Couperin’s Fourth Book was no warm-up, Esfahani showing himself immediately at ease, with a lilting rubato that emerged from within the music – and, to a certain extent, the instrument too – rather than being applied to it. This first piece, ‘La Convalescente’, and the subsequent movements were all well characterised, without the slightest danger of falling into the all-too-precious caricatures which bedevil so much present-day Baroque performance. The expressivity of spread chords was a case in point; so was the sense of dramatic, even declamatory, unfolding, reminding us that we were not necessarily worlds away from the Classical drama of Corneille and Racine. The Gavotte and ‘La Sophie’ were guided by a propulsive, yet never restrictive, sense of rhythm; whatever the tempo, there was space to breath. ‘L’Epineuse’ seemed to afford a glimpse of the vocal Couperin, perhaps even of what an opera from his pen might have been, not that that precluded harmonic, developmental ‘involvement’ which was very much of the keyboard world. The final piece, ‘La Pantomime’, benefited from a harmonic grounding that took one back to a time when musicians just happened to be harpsichordists, rather than having invented an aggressive, ‘Early Music’, alleged revanchism; more than once, I thought of George Malcolm.

 

Three Preludes and Fugues from Book One of the 48 followed. The D minor Prelude was very much a ‘prelude’ to what was to come, a fugue that danced without didacticism. A deeper, darker hue characterised the C-sharp minor Prelude, though it was yet recognisably of the same ilk. The stile antico opening to its fugue looked bark to a golden age of polyphony, not in a dreary quasi-archaeological sense, but as sustenance and, crucially, as inspiration. It was expressive and developmental, in keeping with, but not restricted by, the ‘Baroque’ period to which Bach stands in a far more complicated relationship than many care to realise. This was the Bach who inspired Mozart. A bright contrast of tonality and general mood came with the B major Prelude and Fugue, played with good humour, even a sense of fun. The F-sharp minor Toccata was rightly more exuberant, less innig, drawing upon earlier keyboard masters and their sense of Affekt and rhetoric. In a flexible account, the proximity to Bach’s early organ works was announced, the whole unfolding with great dramatic flair.

 

C.P.E. Bach offered a very different voice, already hinting at some of the keyboard music of Haydn and even Mozart, though the rhetoric is undeniably personal. In the B-flat Sonata, composer and performer offered a kaleidoscope of expression utterly distinct from Haydn’s thematic single-mindedness. Registration was perhaps especially telling during the slow movement, in which we heard an almost operatic dialogue at times. The finale was refreshingly bright and high-spirited. We returned to Emanuel Bach at the end. The opening flourish of the F-sharp minor Sonata was extrovert yet controlled: very German! Wrenching of mood was almost violent; ‘strangeness’ was neither smoothed out nor unduly exaggerated. The slow movement exhibited great metrical freedom, following an almost stream-of-consciousness approach: as, after all, does the score. Twists and turns, both melodic and harmonic, were savoured. The finale offered a nice contrast, emerging almost as an extended fantasia: part-way on the road to Mozart? Its conclusion came properly as a surprise.

 

Between the two C.P.E. Bach sonatas came a sonata by Georg Anton Benda and Takemitsu’s Rain Dreaming. I am not sure that I can quite share Esfahani’s enthusiasm for Benda, at least on the basis of this piece, but there could be little doubt that he proved an able advocate. Benda offered a more overtly ‘Classical’ voice, though not without audible connection to the world of Emanuel Bach. The first movement of the sonata benefited from an excellent performative balance between stateliness and exuberance, but I missed a real sense of development. Perhaps, as Esfahani suggested in his note, that is an æsthetic choice on the composer’s part; perhaps, but is it a good choice? The slow movement was, however, nicely contrasted, and more consistent as a compositional whole, whilst the finale’s byways charmed rather than perplexed.

 

As in the case of other works I have heard by Takemitsu, I was not entirely convinced of the substance of Rain Dreaming. Nevertheless, in this context, and whilst it may be a stretch to call the piece toccata-like, or imbued with a Neue Empfindsamkeit, there did seem to be a post-C.P.E. Bach or even post-Benda quality to the writing: testimony to canny programming. It was attractive enough as contrast, if hardly Ligeti, let alone Bach. Messiaenesque figuration was for me the most intriguing feature. A first encore of the Rameau Gavotte which Klemperer orchestrated whetted the appetite for Esfahani’s forthcoming release later this year of the composer’s complete keyboard works.