LSO
St Luke’s and Barbican Hall
Purcell, arr. Benjamin –
Fantasia 7 (1995)
Benjamin – Flight (1978-9)
Viola,
Viola (1997)
Shadowlines (2001)
Bach, arr. Benjamin – Canon and Fugue from ‘The Art of Fugue’
(2007)
Members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra
George King (piano)
George Benjamin (conductor)
Written
on Skin (2009-12)
The Protector – Christopher
Purves
Agnès – Barbara Hannigan
Angel 1/The Boy – Tim Mead
Angel 2/Marie – Victoria
Simmonds
Angel 3/John – Robert Murray
Benjamin Davis (director of
semi-staged performance)
Mahler Chamber Orchestra
George Benjamin (conductor)
George Benjamin’s Written on Skin could hardly have had
superior reception. Wherever it has gone, it has triumphed. Bizarrely, an
American opera house intendant, smarting at the acclaim accorded an opera that
did not offer his favoured brand of neo-tonal pandering (Jennifer Higdon?!),
lamented that Benjamin’s brilliant score was not something one would ‘sit down and play [a recording of] … at dinner’. All I
can say to that is that Mr Gockley must host strange dinner parties – ‘honoured
guests, meet your hostess, the lovely Lulu’ – and his preferred way of
experiencing opera, eccentric for anyone, would seem in itself to disqualify
him from running an opera house. That, however, was not remotely consonant
with the success witnessed on either side of the Atlantic, indeed on either
side of the Channel.
I was a little suspicious first
time around. Are not masterpieces supposed to fail before an initially
uncomprehending public, incite a riot, or at least receive an insufficient
performance? No, of course not, although such mythologies can be fun, not least
in enabling us to feel superior to our predecessors. Surely, though, there must
have been something wrong when critical and audience unanimity is so striking.
(Yes, there will always be the odd exception, but who cares?) Nevertheless,
when I saw the work at the end of its Covent Garden run, I had no option but to
join the adoring throng. Happily, this Mahler Chamber Orchestra performance,
again under the baton of the composer, confirmed me in my judgement that Written on Skin is an unalloyed
masterpiece, although in some ways I find its predecessor, Into the Little Hill, the more provocative work and certainly a
masterpiece too. I see no point in simply repeating a description of what has
already become a repertory work; what I wrote in 2013 may, however be read here
for those unfamiliar or in need of a reminder. (I was surprised, myself, about
how much I had forgotten!) However, I shall make some remarks about what struck
me on this particular occasion, and of course upon the performances themselves.
It seems almost obligatory for
a serious new opera to reflect in some way upon the nature of opera; or is it
that it is almost obligatory for a serious opera audience to do so? You see,
the questions begin already. (Or is it that I am unhealthily obsessed with the
operas of Richard Strauss…?) Here, at any rate, what struck me, perhaps still
more so in what was close to a concert performance – not meant as disrespect to
Benjamin Davis’s able direction – was how much the opera’s status is entwined
with that of the Boy’s book, ‘written on skin’. That illuminates – in more than
one sense – our experience of the work’s progress as drama and the complexity,
somehow nevertheless simple, of the relationship between mediæval setting and
contemporary reception. Martin Crimp’s libretto, of course, points the way in
that respect, introducing anachronisms as well as well-nigh ritually
identifying narration. Said the critic.
Had this been Birtwistle, say,
there would surely have been a parallel, indeed questioning, ritual in the
music. Despite the toing and froing of the Angels, I do not really hear that
here. Benjamin’s way is different; I have no wish to ascribe ‘influence’ here;
but in its length – perfect for but a few masterpieces by the likes of
Monteverdi, Mozart, Wagner, and a very few others – and in the assuredness of its narrative, I was put more in mind of
Berg and Janáček. The division into three parts is perhaps a minor indication
of that. The astounding musical climaxes of each part are perhaps more akin to
the great operas of Janáček, although Wozzeck
is surely not so very far away in some intangible, maybe even tangible, sense.
The score presents other points of reference, always refracted, and did, I
think, in performance too. Benjamin wrote the opera with the particular sound
of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in mind. Here it’s relatively small numbers, at
least when it came to strings, were utterly belied by their sound, especially
at those climaxes, but also in cushioning the voices and speaking, almost
Wagner-like, as our Greek Chorus. Although famously a Messiaen pupil –
sometimes one is tempted to ask: who was not? – it is not so often that I have
heard Messiaen in Benjamin; here, in certain chords, even progressions, I
fancied that I did (just, actually as I did in one of the works in the earlier
concert, on which more below). Boulez, perhaps inevitably, came to mind too:
again certain matters of kinship rather than influence, I think: the exquisite
alchemy of melody, harmony, and timbre, for instance, with roots in earlier
music surely renewing their musico-dramatic vows, poignantly reminding us that
Boulez himself never wrote the opera he always planned, and which we always longed
for. There is, I think, no parallel for the use to which Benjamin puts some of
the most ear-catching instrumental solos: bass viol, glass harmonica, and so
on. They may be used elsewhere, but there is nothing evidently Mozartian about,
say, the latter. Nor need there be. This is confident writing in skin from a
composer entirely bien dans sa peau.
There was nothing, needless to
say, to beware of in Benjamin’s conducting of the score. His quiet authority
seemed to speak almost unmediated, although that is of course ever an illusion
of performance. Likewise, the playing of the MCO, reaching the end of a
European tour with the conductor-composer, seemed almost beyond praise. Three
of the original, Aix-en-Provence cast returned (Barbara Hannigan, Christopher
Purves, and Victoria Simmonds). It might on some occasion be reassuring to find
something adversely to criticise in a performance by Hannigan. Now was not,
however, the occasion to do so. Her musico-dramatic portrayal of Agnès judged
to perfection, almost as if emerging from the divided (at one point, Paul
Griffiths’s note tells us, fifteen-part) MCO strings themselves, the character’s
journey to selfhood, erotic fulfilment, and ultimately (necessary) tragedy. If
it were Hannigan’s voice that ultimately continued to resonate once we had left
the hall, the dangerous allure of Tim Mead’s counter-tenor came close. The
complete identification of Purves with the role of Protector seemed, if
anything, to bring still more dramatic daring than at Covent Garden. He could
edge towards speech were he wished, without one ever suspecting that to be a
musical failing. His eyes said it all; except his voice said more. Simmonds and
Robert Murray brought subtlety and dramatic energy, as well as musical
security, to their ‘lesser’ roles, still crucial – as, indeed, was every part
of this outstanding performance.
Earlier in the day, a few
minutes’ walk away at LSO St Luke’s, we had heard ‘Lunchtime with George’, a
splendid survey of some of the composer’s chamber works from members of the MCO
and, in the case of the piano piece, Shadowlines,
George King. First was Benjamin’s arrangement of a Purcell Fantasia (Jaan
Bossier (clarinet), Sonja Starke (violin), Maximilian Hornung (cello), Alphonse
Cemin (celesta)). In one of his wonderfully engaging introductory conversations
with Sara Mohr-Pietsch, Benjamin described Purcell’s early viol consort works
as some of the greatest music ever written on this island. Indeed they are –
and would that we heard them as often as their stature demands, or even a
little more often. Already an old, verging upon archaic, genre when Purcell
wrote them, they seem almost made to encourage such dialogue between past and
present, and were indeed written, alongside arrangements by Oliver Knussen and
Colin Matthews, as part of an Aldeburgh anniversary tribute to the English Orpheus.
The second half in that concert was to be Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time; Benjamin switched Messiaen’s piano for
celesta, imparting an unearthly feeling to the music which, in retrospect,
might fancifully be heard as prefiguring that angelic glass harmonic in Written in Skin. Slow, steady progress
of the first part and alternation with the quicker sections exchanged echt-Purcellian melancholy for something
approaching high spirits, yet the suspicion of loss remained. Glassy,
vibrato-less stringed instruments gained in vibrating allure, yet the journey
was never one-way; this is thoughtful ‘authenticity’ rather than the fatwa of a
period ayatollah. I thought at one point of Berio, although the sound and the sensibility
are different. Music mediates, brings us together, perhaps especially when our
way of listening – Pulcinella,
anyone? – is called into question and enhanced.
Júlia Gállego was the solo
flautist for one of Benjamin’s earliest-published pieces, Flight. Gállego worked with the composer seemingly as one, to convey,
as well as melodic, Messiaenic profusion, a sense of harmonic ‘depth’, almost
programmatically so, given the inspiration of ‘the sight of birds soaring and
dipping over the peaks of the Swiss Alps’. Form was dynamically revealed;
attack was endlessly varied. There was, ultimately, a splendid sense of
numinous mystery: here, indeed, was a pupil of Messiaen.
Viola,
Viola was written, at the
invitation of Toru Takemitsu, for Yuri Bashmet and Nobuko Imai to perform at
the 1997 opening of the Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall. If it managed to fill
that hall, then it would scarcely have problems at St Luke’s. Nor did it under
the violists’ worthy successors, Anna Puig Torné and Béatrice Muthelet.
Confounding expectations seemed to me a theme, intentional or otherwise, of
work and performance. Not only is this, as it were, an orchestral work for but
two instrumentalists, but everything seems unpredictable, whilst making perfect
sense after it has happened. (I have doubtless read too much Hegel to be
thinking of him here, but such is the way of his dialectic, or indeed of
theories of evolution.) Moments of éclat – Boulez on my mind here! – registered
powerfully, unexpected yet anything but arbitrary. Harmonics, sometimes in
tandem, sometimes not, could be understood at least in this sense to perform a
similar role. Implied harmonies were again conveyed in masterly fashion, both
as work and performance. (Apologies for any sexism there, but ‘mistressly’
really does not work!) Moments of Bartók seemed to echo, now strident, now
tinged once again with Purcellian melancholy. Sometimes, if I closed my eyes, I
could have sworn there were more than two players, whether ‘ancient’ consort or
‘modern’ quartet. A Mussorgskian bell, but no pealing? Maybe it was that I had
recently heard Boris.
Stravinskian games: almost certainly.
King’s performance of Shadowlines sounded to me equally
authoritative. Benjamin’s compositional games, whatever he might have wished,
perhaps came even more to the fore in the work’s canonical progress. We heard
its six sections as a continuous whole, to be sure, but also very much with
their own character. The first piece, marked ‘Cantabile’, proved the gentle curtain-raiser
of the composer’s own description. I thought of a Boulez Notation, at least some of its harmonies. The hand-crossing of the
second movement, ‘Wild’ with almost berceuse-like rocking beneath was captured
as well as I imagine the work’s dedicatee, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, having done.
Duetting in the ‘Scherzando’ movement – Benjamin suggested duetting bassoons –
eventually broadened into a veritable chorus, putting me in mind, despite the
modern piano, of the timbral possibilities of some nineteenth-century
instruments. It was the fifth of the six movements that occupied the greatest
time, and here it received a volcanic, perhaps again post-Messieanic
performance, climax superbly judged. In the end, paradoxically or maybe dialectically,
the composer’s stated wish that, as in the first movement of Webern’s Symphony, we lose perception of the
canon was fulfilled partly in the mediated infidelity of our experience. Vertical
and horizontal elements would dissolve and find themselves reinstated; or so I
imagined. The epilogue truly sounded as such; I thought of Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales.
Finally, Benjamin’s arrangement
of the Canon in Hypodiapason and Contrapunctus VII from the Art of Fugue (Paco Varoch (flute),
Stefán Jón Bernhardsson, Manuel Moya (horns), Jagdisch Mistry, Timothy Summers,
Michiel Commandeur (violins), Delphine Tissot, Joel Hunter (violas), Martin Leo
Schmidt (cello)). It was composed at Boulez’s request for a concert in which
his own music would alternate with arrangements of Bach. (What a wonderful
idea!) Benjamin’s piece takes the unique (I do not know whether it is
empirically, but please humour me!) instrumentation of Mémoriale. In this, the only work requiring a conductor, Benjamin
took the Canon fast, yet it never seemed remotely hurried; rather, it sounded juste. Counterpoint was ‘revealed’ in
every sense, again presaging the evening’s opera. The fugue offered a change of
pace and, so it seemed, of perspective, in an almost Birtwistle-like sense.
(Again, I think that was just my own fancy, but so be it.) The composer’s
desire to suggest an organ here was mesmerisingly fulfilled: here a sixteen-foot
bourdon, there the strange alchemy – that word again – of a horn and viola
duet, a miracle of ‘registration’. It made me think that it would be a very good
thing, were Benjamin to write for the King of Instruments itself. Fastidious
expressivity came close to Boulez; Bachian reinvention suggested the music of
the spheres. This was a concert so engrossing that it too might have been
written on skin.
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