London Sinfonietta/Kemp - Boulez and Cage, 9 March 2025

Purcell Room

Cage: Six Melodies
Boulez: Improvisé—pour le Dr. K
Cage: Credo in US
Boulez: Dérive 1
Boulez: Domaines
Cage: Variations I

Francesca Amewudah-Rivers (actor)

Michael McCarthy (director)

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

Sarah Nicolls (prepared piano)

London Sinfonietta

Thomas Kemp (conductor)

Images: Monika S Jakubowska

This London Sinfonietta concert, ‘innovative’ in the best rather than the debased, trivial way, framed performances of works by Pierre Boulez and John Cage with engaging readings from their correspondence by Francesca Amewudah-Rivers and short filmed contributions. It made for an enthralling and enjoyable evening at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room, precisely because the level of performance was so high, ‘additions’, though they were far more than that, genuinely complementing rather than substituting for musical excellence. It was a delight, moreover, to see a sold-out venue, once again giving the lie to claims that no one is interested in hearing this music. Many of us have a deep thirst for it; the only reason we do not go more often is a lack of opportunities to do so. Many do not, just as many do not like all manner of things, whether Mozart, Beethoven, the Beatles, or anything else; there is no reason to be dishonest and substitute one’s own preferences and interests for the voice of the world-spirit. And there is every reason to welcome an all-too-rare opportunity to hear, rather than simply talk about, this music, especially in so illuminating a juxtaposition, which offered great musical contrasts as well as points of mutual historical fascination. 

The first reading came not from the correspondence as such, although it is included in the Cambridge University Press Nattiez-Samuels edition as its first item. It was instead taken from Boulez’s 1949 spoken introduction – both manuscript and a rough draft are part of the Paul Sacher Stiftung – to the performance he helped organise of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, given at Suzanne Tézanas’s Paris salon. A brief filmed excerpt was juxtaposed with a live excerpt from Boulez’s own Second Piano Sonata of the previous year. Different worlds indeed, though the excerpted correspondence that followed suggested genuine interest in mutual exploration too, Boulez’s apology for sometimes writing in French – ‘my [English] grammar is still too shaky’ (3/11/12 January 1950) – typical of a humility for which he is still too infrequently credited. 

Cage’s Six Melodies for violin and keyboard (piano) from this same year were given a delightful performance by Clio Gould and Elizabeth Burley, the rhythmic progression Boulez admired strongly yet far from didactically to the fore. Initially un-, even anti-‘violinistic’, the music seemed to grow both as music and as violin music, the third and fourth pieces in particular splendidly ‘fiddling’. It felt like a gateway to the meditative sensibility as well as to the chance operations that would increasingly characterise Cage’s music in the years to follow. Boulez’s 2005 revision of his 1969 tribute for the eightieth birthday of Aldred A. Kalmus of Universal Edition, Improvisé—pour le Dr. K, opened with typical piano éclat. A very strong initial sense of Schoenberg – and he is there somewhere – faded slightly when I realised: ‘of course: like the other Kalmus pieces, this was written for the Pierrot ensemble’. Flute trills and their generative tendency seemed prophetic of later explorations, not least … explosante-fixe …, though its progress was very different. It was over in a flash, as ever leaving one wishing for more. 

A clip from the film Works of Calder, also from 1950, followed, including Cage’s music: ‘the first time I have felt the music to be necessary to a film’ (Boulez, 30 December 1950). Although Cage’s Credo in US was written earlier (1942) it seemed here to pre-empt the composer’s growing interest in chance operations through its use of radio music. Rhythm and sounds of percussion were truly infectious, leading up, so it seemed, to those Sonatas and Interludes. Boulez’s Dérive 1 (1984) offered more contrast than complement, though was no less welcome for that; it seemed to take up the baton from his earlier piece, the SACHER reference’s generative quality seductively palpable. Febrile, ever-transforming, a feast of Messiaenic colour, it spoke of and through Debussy rather than Cage’s Satie, and in its woodwind arabesques, similarly proclaimed a Stravinskian inheritance thoroughly internalised and transformed. 

Mark van de Wiel’s performance of the solo version of Domaines (1961-8) proved a stunning tour de force. Whatever Boulez’s intention, the element of choice and mobility, the clarinettist selecting the order in which the pages, each on a different stand, are played, brings an inescapable element of what soon would be called music theatre to proceedings, the performer’s one-man show extended to two, counting his instrument. Apart from – though who could it be apart from? – van de Wiel’s equally outstanding virtuosity and musical understanding, one of Boulez’s triumphant reinstatements of the performer, what truly stood out was an almost Wagnerian unendliche Melodie. One felt vividly as well as merely heard the procedures at work in all parameters, attack included, in the longest of constructed lines.   

Is Cage’s layering of transparencies in Variations I (1958) – to be performed by any number of performers on any instruments and any number thereof – more radical? Perhaps. Less ’Western’? Perhaps. Less ‘musical’? Perhaps. Given the presentation, it is hardly unreasonable to have felt led to ask such questions. Again, though, it was the contrast brought by something no less triumphantly ‘itself’ that was truly the thing. It brought with it a breath of the fresh air many felt Cage had imparted to Darmstadt.

Così fan tutte, Opera Holland Park, 8 June 2012

Holland Park

Fiordiligi – Elizabeth Llewellyn

Dorabella – Julia Riley

Ferrando – Andrew Staples

Guglielmo – Dawid Kimberg

Despina – Joana Sears

Alfonso – Nicholas Garrett

Harry Fehr (director)
Alex Eales (designs)
Colin Grenfell (lighting)

Opera Holland Park Chorus
City of London Sinfonia

Thomas Kemp (conductor)

Are my expectations too high when it comes to Mozart’s operas in general, and to Così fan tutte in general? Probably. Should they be? Certainly. For the problem remains, as I have doubtless said far too many times before, Mozart’s music, and not just his operas, requires but one thing: perfection. It is the most unsparing music of all, with nowhere, but nowhere, to hide. Every note must be considered and sounded both in itself and in connection to every other. Place a wrong or even slightly excessive accent upon a single note and the fault will be glaringly magnified; misjudge a tempo, which is not to say that there is only one ‘correct’ tempo, and the entire apple-cart will be upset. However, conduct Così fan tutte like Sir Colin Davis – or rather, as Sir Colin Davis – and it is an experience that will remain with an audience for the rest of its life, opening doors one had never expected to be there in the first place.

Yes, the comparison is odious, but Thomas Kemp is no Colin Davis. I have heard worse, most obviously from the aggressively ‘authenticke’ brigade; Kemp did not seem actively to be trying to make Mozart’s music sound unpleasant. Nevertheless, on this evidence, he is not a conductor who could claim any particular or even general sympathy with Mozart. The opening bars of the Overture were taken far too fast; thereafter, far too many numbers never hit upon the just tempo. (It is worth repeating at this point that I do not for a moment think there is one ‘correct’ tempo; the trick is to make whatever is chosen sound right, to perform with conviction, sympathy, understanding, and of course, a sense of connection to a greater whole.) ‘Smanie implacibilie’ was breathless in quite the wrong way. Other sections of the score dragged, not so much because they were slow – I doubt that anything was as ravishingly, heart-stoppingly lingering as Davis would so often nowadays present it – but because the tempo seemed arbitrary, applied from without, with little connection to anything else, above all with little or no sense of harmonic motion.

The City of London Sinfonia played decently, though the strings could tend somewhat towards the anonymous. (At least they lacked the acerbic nature of a ‘period’ orchestra.) For the most part, as so often in Mozart, it was the woodwind section that most delighted; there was some fine work indeed here from a number of principals. The kettledrums, however, were often bizarrely prominent, not helped by the employment of hard sticks. Karl Böhm would have rolled in his grave.

Had they been supported by a more sympathetic conductor, the cast of young singers would doubtless have appeared in a stronger light. As it was, there was nothing really to which one could object, but there remained a sense that things might have been better. (Perhaps that will dissipate during the run; first nights are rarely the best time to catch singers in particular.)  Elizabeth Llewellyn, whom I admired greatly last year at Holland Park as the Countess, delivered what was probably the strongest performance overall, as Fiordiligi. The beauty of her tone-production could not be gainsaid, though her diction was sometimes, for instance in ‘Per pietà’, occluded. Julia Riley’s Dorabella sometimes lacked focus, though when that was achieved, showed considerable promise. Hers was a forthright portrayal, doubtless in part so as to achieve greater contrast with Fiordiligi, but was it sometimes excessively so? There second act duet between the two veered dangerously close to crudity on Dorabella’s part. Andrew Staples’s tone is very much of the ‘English tenor’ variety. I was not always convinced that this served Ferrando so well, but it is a very difficult role to get right; in other cases, often one ends up thinking the music sounds too close to Puccini. ‘Un’ aura amoroso’ was beautifully sung, though there were times elsewhere when greater presence might have been achieved. Dawid Kimberg’s Guglielmo was blustering, swaggering even, able to call upon considerable vocal reserves. Joana Seara offered a lively Despina, though her tuning sometimes went a little awry. Nicholas Garrett, 2010’s Don Giovanni, presented an intelligent portrayal of Don Alfonso.

What of the production? It was, for the most part, difficult to say anything much about it at all. I do not doubt that it would have pleased self-proclaimed ‘traditionalists’, since the costumes were all impeccably, almost aggressively, ‘period’ – if hardly Neapolitan. Of course, Così  is in no sense whatsoever ‘about’ eighteenth-century Naples, but the logic of the literalist position is that it must be. It was difficult to detect in Harry Fehr's production any idea of what Così might be about, any attempt to probe beneath its painfully beautiful surfaces, or even to celebrate the pain upon the surface. We had a ‘period’ set, ‘period’ costumes, and that was really just about it. There was a nod to directorial cliché in placing an audience on stage, supposedly ‘reacting’ to the events witnessed, but have we not seen that sort of thing far too many times before? Such framing can be interesting, even refreshing: I think, for instance, of Nicholas Hytner’s production of Handel’s Serse for ENO. However, if the intention were to highlight the artificiality of the drama – the artificiality is absolutely necessary to permit Mozart’s agonising psychological explorations – then it failed to come across; it appeared instead rather more as an attempt to generate stage ‘business’ in the absence of any other ideas. That is, until, part way through the second act, Fehr suddenly decided to add a few more, which jarred hopelessly given the uninvolving nature of what we had seen hitherto. Ferrando was laughed at by members of the ‘audience’: it might have been movingly cruel, yet here simply came across as an intrusion upon the music. Fiordiligi took off her dress, put on a soldier’s uniform – a very odd, quasi-literalist interpretation of her attempt to persuade herself to find her (erstwhile) lover – and then had that taken off by Ferrando. (No need to worry: there was plenty beneath the dress and the uniform.) Such ‘action’ merely came across as a realisation, too late in the day, that nothing much had happened. This is, of course, an extremely difficult opera to direct, yet Fehr barely seemed to have tried.