Musikfest Berlin (4) – Gerhaher/BPO/Petrenko: Xenakis, Illés, Hartmann, and Kurtág, 14 September 2023

Philharmonie

Xenakis: Jonchaies
Márton Illés: Lég-szín-tér (world premiere)
Hartmann: Gesangsszene
Kurtág: Stele

Christian Gerhaher (baritone)
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

Now this is what I call a programme. To have Xenakis and Kurtág on the same programme from the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko was extraordinary enough, yet together with a new piece from Márton Illés and Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s final work, the latter involving Christian Gerhaher as soloist, this would surely have been the envy of any hall and audience in the world; it certainly should have been.

Iannis Xenakis’s Jonchaies, premiered in 1977 by the Orchestre National de France and Michel Tabachnik, may have been receiving its first performance by the Berlin Philharmonic, but it was a performance of security, commitment, and understanding belying any local novelty. The upward string sweep, not the last arresting string opening of the evening, sounded as if an aural concrete sculpture, turned by a giant butterknife. Loneliness and excitement in the landscape painted – I may as well continue this excess of metaphors – evoked not so much another world as a world in another solar system, even galaxy. As percussion joined, this seemed to be a Rite of Spring without spring, and perhaps even without a rite. Whatever it was, it mesmerised, complex yet above stark and elemental. Wind entered almost imperceptibly, yet one knew when they were fully there. This was a performance that grabbed one by the throat and never let one go, to make Stravinsky and even the sirens of Varèse, here trumped by Berlin trombones in woolly mammoth mode, appear well-nigh fainthearted by comparison.    

Illes’s Lég-szín-tér, roughly a scene, setting or colour space for air, is the latest in a series of such ‘scenes’, this instalment commissioned by the Stiftung Berlin Philharmoniker and financed by the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung. In three short movements, it displayed an almost classical command of form. Not that there was anything formulaic or indeed backward-looking to it, but rather it sounded as natural and at home in itself, and indeed as concise, as a Haydn symphony (which might have made a splendid alternative bedfellow). In any case, the swarming string opening to this marked it out as a nice pairing with the Xenakis, though the strings were far more quickly joined by the rest of the orchestra in a first movement that was at times almost pretty, or at least delicate—though perhaps anything would be when compared with Xenakis. Accordion (Teodoro Anzellotti) here and elsewhere made its presence felt too. Indeed, at times, the string section almost sounded as if it were a giant version of that instrument. If there were something of the scherzo to that movement, that impression was still stronger in the second, which occasionally in texture, rhythm, and harmony suggested an affinity – I do not think it was more than that – to Messiaen. Throughout, the orchestra and Petrenko traced its contours as expertly as if it were a repertoire piece. The third movement opened with more string music, led by Amihai Grosz on slithering solo viola, from whom the lead was taken and dispersed. This was a movement of very different character, coming across as a necessary response to the first two, the pace of harmonic change considerably slower. Its understated, witty sign-off too was not the least virtue in a work and performance that again, albeit in different ways from Xenakis, never failed to hold one’s attention. 

Hartmann’s Gesangsszene was for me just as much a revelation. I suspect some readers will know it; I have the impression it is, or at one point may have been, more often heard in German- than English-speaking halls. If so, that is a great pity, for this setting of words from Jean Giraudoux’s Sodom et Gomorrha (in German translation) is unquestionably the real thing: powerfully moving, a fitting, if sadly incomplete, culmination to a career of honour as well as great compositional craft. I am not sure it is not the finest thing I have heard from Hartmann, though I have probably heard far too little in total. Certainly, it is difficult to imagine superior performances than those heard from Gerhaher, the BPO, and Petrenko, ideally paced and voiced. A lengthy introductory orchestral section opened with a flute solo of great quality (both as writing and in Sébastian Jacot’s supremely involving performance). One might call it Schoenbergian or post-Schoenbergian, I suppose, yet it never sounded ‘like’ anything other than itself. The orchestral writing that developed again might have put me in mind of Berg, a veritable labyrinth, yet always clear of purpose, but it did not. Here was captivating drama without a stage and, indeed, to start with, without even a voice. When Gerhaher entered, recitative-like, my immediate thought, apart from following his crystal-clear diction and pitching, was that we really ought to hear him soon in Busoni’s Doktor Faust. That moment is approaching, if someone will offer it; it came as little surprise to learn the piece was written for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. This is a different kind of warning, though, one for the atomic age, with a different, still more immediate sense of the apocalypse, and that shone through—as surely it did for Hartmann at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Death unquestionably hangs over proceedings, yet there is no self-pity, but rather dignity, the dignity of a lifetime of resistance. When Gerhaher came to speak the final words, their setting prevented by Hartmann’s death, it was a tribute to what we had heard that they seemed very much part of the same musical performance. If only our ‘leaders’ would learn; if only they would even listen. 

György Kurtág’s Stele was an earlier BPO commission, from the Claudio Abbado years (1994, when the composer was in residence), and it has been conducted by at least two others here in the meantime, Simon Rattle and Bernard Haitink, prior to this outing under Petrenko. Rattle once likened it to ‘a gravestone on which the entire history of European music is written’, and so it sounded here, a fitting aesthetic pendant to Hartmann, and just as moving in its way. In three short movements, like the Illés piece, its opening reference to the third (arguably to any) Beethoven’s Leonore Overture was as unmistakeable as it was properly enigmatic. There is memorialisation here, to be sure, yet to what end? The path taken is certainly different, not un-Webern-like. The agitation of the second movement fairly terrified, like a Mahlerian nightmare fashioned by the ghost of Webern and quite without the vistas of a better world with which Mahler might have cruelly consoled and disappointed us. Perhaps Beckett, bearing in mind Kurtág’s past and future, is present already, another ghost at the feast. For an almost dizzying array of paths opened up, without prejudice to the sole direction taken. Webern, if anything, seemed still stronger a presence in the third and final movement, without the slightest hint of imitation. Here the mode, as it were, was that of the Funeral March, though the sense of Klangfarbenmelodie sounded, if anything, more Schoenbergian. It was as simple as it was complex, returning us in a way to Xenakis, and vice versa. And how the rests, the silences, told, as musical as any sound.

Tally of performances attended, 2022

I had a curtailed season this year, on account of illness: last night and tonight should have been my final concerts of the year. No one needed my bronchial insights, I am sure.

As ever, calculation offers a blunt instrument, showing a little more than what has interested me—I cannot go to a performance if it does not take place—but how much more is open to debate; for by the same token, I am unlikely to go out of my way to attend performances of music that does not interest me. Likewise, as in previous years, I have counted one appearance in a programme only, so a Mahler symphony counts for the same as a Schubert song. Anything else becomes too complicated. Operas are both staged and in concert, and include anything treated as an opera in that performance, e.g. Handel’s Theodora and Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire at the Royal Opera House. The apparent oddity of Kurt Weill having one concert and one opera, yet one overall, is owed to The Seven Deadly Sins having been part of an all-Weill programme. 

I added a couple of events I recalled having attended but not reviewed (an all-Mozart concert and Opera North’s concert Parsifal). Lovely to see Xenakis at three concerts, even if they were all on the same day, forming part of a Southbank Centre centenary tribute. It would be lovelier still to see him on three next year, but somehow I doubt it. Wagner tends to do well in years when I visit Bayreuth; had I actually attended the six performances there I had intended, rather than having to cancel two, he would have emerged first overall. As it was, Mozart just pipped him to the post.

 

Concerts

7 Mozart
6 Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann
5 Liszt
4 Messiaen, Strauss, Wagner
3 Bartók, Busoni, Janáček, Mahler, Schubert, Xenakis
2 Chopin, Debussy, Dvořák, Elgar, Pavel Haas, Haydn, Ravel, Scarlatti, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams
1 John Adams, Julian Anderson, CPE Bach, JS Bach, Sally Beamish, Berio, Birtwistle, Arthur Bliss, Silvie Bodorova, Lili Boulanger, Boulez, Britten, Byrd, Francisco Coll, Louis Couperin, Tansy Davies, František Domažlický, Hanns Eisler, Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Fauré, Morton Feldman, Franck, Goehr, Dieter Gogg, Helen Grime, Reynaldo Hahn, Handel, WH Harris, Henry VIII, Fred Hersch, Hindemith, John Ireland, Ives, Joel Järventausta, Zoltán Jeney, Gideon Klein, Hans Krása, Oliver Leith, Scott McLaughlin, Mendelssohn, Tristan Murail, Parry, Poulenc, Juta Pranulytė, Rameau, Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Roslavets, Hans Rott, Erwin Schulhoff, Scriabin, Jack Sheen, Valentin Silvestrov, Antonio Soler, Turnage, Viktor Ullmann, Galina Ustvolskaya, Varèse, Aleksandr Vustin, George Walker, Jennifer Walshe, Walton, Webern, Weill, Judith Weir, Wolf

Operas

7 Wagner
5 Mozart, Puccini
3 Britten, Janáček
2 Monteverdi, Purcell, Strauss, Stravinsky
1 Bartók, Berg, Bizet, Blow, Laura Bowler, Tom Coult, Delius, Clemens von Franckenstein, Handel, Kurtág, Rimsky-Korsakov, Saint-Saëns, Schoenberg, Ethel Smyth, Tchaikovsky, Viktor Ullmann, Freya Waley-Cohen, Weill 

Overall

12 Mozart
11 Wagner
6 Beethoven, Brahms, Janáček, Schumann, Strauss
5 Liszt, Puccini
4 Bartók, Britten, Messiaen, Stravinsky
3 Busoni, Mahler, Schoenberg, Schubert, Xenakis
2 Chopin, Debussy, Dvořák, Elgar, Pavel Haas, Handel, Haydn, Monteverdi, Purcell, Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov, Scarlatti, Vaughan Williams
1 John Adams, Julian Anderson, CPE Bach, JS Bach, Sally Beamish, Berg, Berio, Birtwistle, Bizet, Arthur Bliss, Blow, Silvie Bodorova, Lili Boulanger, Boulez, Laura Bowler, Byrd, Francisco Coll, Tom Coult, Louis Couperin, Tansy Davies, Delius, František Domažlický, Hanns Eisler, Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Clemens von Franckenstein, Fauré, Morton Feldman, Franck, Goehr, Dieter Gogg, Helen Grime, Reynaldo Hahn, WH Harris, Henry VIII, Fred Hersch, Hindemith, John Ireland, Ives, Joel Järventausta, Zoltán Jeney, Gideon Klein, Hans Krása, Kurtág, Oliver Leith, Scott McLaughlin, Mendelssohn, Tristan Murail, Parry, Poulenc, Juta Pranulytė, Rameau, Nikolai Roslavets, Hans Rott, Saint-Saëns, Erwin Schulhoff, Scriabin, Jack Sheen, Valentin Silvestrov, Ethel Smyth, Antonio Soler, Tchaikovsky, Turnage, Galina Ustvolskaya, Varèse, Aleksandr Vustin, Freya Waley-Cohen, George Walker, Jennifer Walshe, Walton, Webern, Weill, Judith Weir, Wolf

Southbank Centre - Xenakis at 100, 8 October 2022

Queen Elizabeth Hall

O-Mega; Palimpsest; Echange; Thalleïn for ensemble

Concret PH; Kottos; Rebonds A, Rebonds B

Psappha; Ikhoor; Tetras; Mikka and Mikka ‘S’; Pléïades

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

Philip Howard (piano)

Tim Gill (cello)

Oliver Lowe, Colin Currie (percussion)

London Sinfonietta

Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)

JACK Quartet

Colin Currie Group

Iannis Xenakis’s music does not age. It is an ahistorical cliché to say so, likewise to say how stark, elemental, uncompromising, visceral, mysterious, unique, and so on it is. Those descriptions retain their force, whilst remaining open to exception and to broader questioning. But they came to many listeners’ mind, judging by the general conversation at the Queen Elizabeth Hall throughout this Xenakis Day, seeming to lodge themselves in a sort of collective consciousness through which works and performances could be heard. I did not, alas, hear all of the day’s events, but I attended the two principal concerts in the hall itself, hearing also three of the works on offer in the foyer in between. It was, I think, enough—although the way the closing Pléïades left one aurally bludgeoned was less on account of the astounding performances from the Colin Corrie Group of six percussionists than the unsuitability of the hall: a pity, one necessarily felt, whilst recognising that the Southbank Centre had done what it could.

The first works I heard were four from the London Sinfonietta and Geoffrey Paterson, in performances like everything here that seemed quite beyond reproach. (If you are going to play Xenakis, you tend to do it well.) O-Mega, for percussion and ensemble, made for a splendid opener; after that, his final work, we could only go back, at least temporally. Oliver Lowe’s opening bongo tattoo, a call to something, it seemed, met with implacable wind response, a hieratic ritual initiated in a theatre of music that might always have been, except it had not. Moving from 1997 to 1979, Palimpsest, for eleven instruments, offered piano (and other) scales reinvented before our ears, its lines unmistakeably architectural, even engineered—to borrow a little too readily from the composer’s other callings. Sawmill strings, wind fractals in which one could see as well as hear the geometry, virtuoso drumming and so much more: this was not easy listening, nor was it supposed to be. It was quite a journey to final, mesmerising piano-and-drum-led climax.

Échange, for bass clarinet (Mark van de Wiel) and ensemble, was similarly yet entirely differently primal. Again, it sounded unmistakeably that ‘this was how it must be’, in a world of violence (like our own) quite unconcealed. How can we continue so blithely, it seemed to ask, in a world imperilled by nuclear attack? Xenakis must have asked the same thing, or so we fancied. And yet, life in all its physicality, all its mental wonder, continued. The bass clarinet, somewhere between priest and Pierrot, bade new sounds emerge at will, though that will was again sometimes no mean effort. The ensemble could, though, and did respond. The startling weirdness of an E-flat major chord could hardly have sounded more alien: a signal, it seemed, from yet another planet.

Thalleïn, the Sinfonietta’s first commission (1984) from Xenakis, was as implacable as anything yet heard, perhaps still more so. Siren-like—ambulance, not temptress—its opening had us browbeaten, and thereby strangely receptive to proliferating subtleties to come, even to the point of finding them inviting. Masses of sound continued to confront us to exhilarating effect. Ascending and descending scales led both ways, so it seemed, to hell, their mockery a deeply serious business. Piccolo pierced our consciousness, at times painfully, like a moment of alarm on an intensive care unit screen. There was blood-letting aplenty, the final string swarms, punctuated by percussion, as far as ever from consolation. 

Concret PH, like most, possibly all, musique concrete actually did seem to have aged—though even that is dependent on our knowing the unknowable Rankean ‘how it really was’, and how can we? Even if we had been there, in the 1958 Expo Philips Pavilion Xenakis as Le Corbusier’s assistant designed, memory would play its tricks. There is no ‘authenticity’; there never was; and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool or a charlatan. How admirably full of integrity Xenakis and his fellow avant-gardists seem contrasted with those snake-oil-salesmen to come. No, you cannot hear the St Matthew Passion as if you had never heard Xenakis; more to the point, why would you wish to? Or is that just to invest my own fantasy of postwar ‘inauthenticity’ as super- or supra-authenticity? There was, at any rate, room for fantasy here, if one closed one’s eyes and listened. Here was another world: inaccessible, perhaps, like that of Bach’s Leipzig, yet an idea not without its own seduction. 

Tim Gill’s performance of Kottos for cello really deserved the main hall, as did Lowe’s Rebonds A and Rebonds B. They were mightily fine accounts, though, wherever one heard them, the first’s evocation of the horrible hundred-armed creature, progeny of Uranus and Gaia, a song both fragile and stark: deeply rooted, if hardly in the conventional harmonic sense. Or perhaps it was, for I felt the implication at least of a harmonic language, even if I could never know it, even if it were in fact unknowable. There was whimsy in the asides, even as the ‘creature’ gained strength. And the music reached something akin to ecstasy, doubtless more effortful than that of Messiaen, yet no less genuine for that. The state of frenzy reached was a liberation of sorts, not least amidst the hell of our current existence. Both Rebonds pieces, A in particular, invoked—even if we knew not what (that inscrutability again). One was drawn in, less hypnotised than converted, in powerfully cumulative, remarkably different experiences of control and abandon. 

In the evening, Colin Currie’s Psappha seemed almost designed to cement our growing sense of structure as fundamental in an emphatic, again quasi-engineered sense to Xenakis’s work. The extraordinary musicianship on show never threatened to take on a life of its own; structure remained paramount. There seemed no other way. And the silences: they might almost have been from Bruckner. Here, again, was a summoning both archaic and not. Pléïades, here ordered ‘Metaux’, ‘Claviers’, ‘Peaux’, ‘Mélanges’, suffered, as I said, from an ear-splitting quality that made it, for me at least, too difficult to take, the sixxens too rarely emerging, to quote Xenakis, as ‘clouds, nebulas, and galaxies of the fragmented dust of beats’. Even here, though, ‘the idea of periodicity, repetition, duplication, faithful, pseudo-faithful,’ and above all ‘unfaithful copy’ shone through. ‘Claviers’ came closer to polyphony, its ripples even a little Boulezian, though I am not sure either composer would have approved of the comparison. Its patterns emerged as if on multiple screens before our ears. Drummed hypnosis in ‘Peaux’ prepared the way for less a synthesis or recapitulation than a gigantic rehearing, even rewriting when all instruments united in ‘Mélanges’. It was ear-splitting, again, at times, but in quite an aural landscape, at times almost dreamed.

Rhythm, its problems and opportunities, had haunted much of the string music in between, especially Ikhoor for string trio and Tetras for string quartet, both given by the JACK Quartet. Vivid, fiercely directed narratives marked out both, as did superhuman unanimity of purpose. Tetras seemed somehow both stranger and familiar, the strangeness heightened by sounds I might have sworn had emerged from electronics, did I not know otherwise. Voices, of whatever sort, bore witness, as if from Luigi Nono’s long-estranged cousin. Two works for violin solo, Mikka and Mikka ‘S’, were given by the quartet member absent for the trio, Austin Wulliman. Measured swarming, control in dilemma, line tracked as if in a real-time graph: throughout one ‘felt’ the mathematics, or imagined one did. As in every performance here, there was a rightness that left one knowing, like this music or not, it deserved as well as demanded to be heard.

Musikfest Berlin (5) – Faust/BPO/Eötvös: Eötvös, Xenakis, and Varèse. 8 September 2019

Philharmonie

Eötvös: Violin Concerto no.3, ‘Alhambra’ (2018)

Xenakis: Shaar (1983)

Varèse: Amériques (performing version of the 1922 manuscript, by Chou Wen-chung)

Isabelle Faust (violin)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Peter Eötvös (conductor)

Hot on the heels of two Peter Eötvös ensemble works at the Kammermusiksaal, many in the audience made their way to the larger hall of the Philharmonie proper, for the second German performance of his Third Violin Concerto, ‘Alhambra’, the local premiere having taken place the night before. Opening, as it closes, with solo violin (Isabelle Faust), it is perhaps surprisingly evocative of the colours and music of southern Spain. This is a walk around the Alhambra’s gardens with antecedents, suggested if never explicit, in Falla, Ravel, and Debussy, as well, perhaps, as Mussorgsky’s promenading. Eötvös employs the orchestra sparingly, hints of a Szymanowskian tapestry or something harder-edged, even Stravinskian, in the air, yet never quite determining the climate. Other solo strings come to the fore: violins, double bass, and mandolin; but so do woodwind and brass, clarinettist Andreas Ottensamer’s arabesquing especially noteworthy. Bells are both suggested and heard, the latter thereby well prepared as music rather than effect. There is something, perhaps inevitably, of Berg to certain, more innig passages, but also to repeated chains of intervals. Ciphers of ‘Alhambra’, ‘Isabelle’, and ‘Faust’ are, apparently concealed, but I should need to listen again, and/or to consult the score, to have them revealed to me. That, on the basis of this performance, I should happily undertake. (I should also like to know, if anyone can oblige, what Faust’s encore was.)

Xenakis’s Shaar, for string orchestra, made a truly elemental impression, its opening lines as striking as any unison in Bruckner, the feelings of awe engendered, maintained, and transformed actually not so very different as some might expect from those inspired by the latter composer. Not that the music really has anything in common, of course; it is what it is, proudly, starkly so – and so it sounded in this Berlin Philharmonic performance under Eötvös, its granitic drama, both earthly and unearthly, inviting comparison with a Hebraic past summoned in the title. Clusters, swarms, ritual; imbued with an implacable sense of rightness, yet never predictable: work and performance alike brooked no dissent. The BPO had never played the work before; it should do so again soon. More Xenakis everywhere, please!

There was likewise no doubting the distinction of the Berliners’ performance of Varèse’s Amériques, Eötvös doing much to highlight the work’s musical interest, not least its debts – some might put it more strongly than that, especially in this first version – to Stravinsky, and to The Rite of Spring in particular. Innovation with timbre notwithstanding, I wish I found the work itself more convincing. Leaving aside its frankly irritating whistles and sirens, the form of what Eötvös ably delineated as a twentieth-century tone poem continues to elude me. The sheer volume and exuberance of Amériques remain quite a thing, of course, but it does go on a bit. Perhaps its placing after the iron discipline of Xenakis was the problem.

London Sinfonietta/de Ridder - Haas, Xenakis, Levi, and Vivier, 27 February 2015

Purcell Room

Georg Friedrich Haas – Open Spaces (United Kingdom premiere)

Xenakis – Aroura

Mica Levi – Greezy (world premiere, London Sinfonietta commission)

Claude Vivier – Zipangu

London Sinfonietta

André de Ridder (conductor)

 

This was the first of two London Sinfonietta concerts, collectively called ‘Spectrum of Sound’. The second would take place the following evening, presenting works by Scelsi, Ligeti, Murail, and Haas; I only managed to catch the first. It was, I suppose, encouraging that it sold out – except for those who failed to secure tickets! – but I was a little surprised that it took place in the Purcell Room rather than the next-door Queen Elizabeth Hall, which would have enabled a larger audience to hear an interesting programme.

 

Georg Friedrich Haas seems popular at the moment – at least in certain new music circles. The London Sinfonietta gave a wonderful performance not so long ago of his in vain. This later, 2007 work, written in memory of James Tenney, was the only one to add to the evening’s basic string ensemble. In addition to six violins, two violas, two cellos, and two double basses (all strings ‘retuned’, that is, along microtonal lines), we heard also the excellent work of two stereophonic percussionists. The swarming sounds to be heard throughout the string ensemble at times put me in mind of Ligeti, although I am not sure whether that were ‘influence’ as such, nor whether it would matter if it were. There was revealed, as in in vain, a fine sense of instrumental drama, not least in a great, almost orchestral crescendo. Interest – dramatic in its way – also lies in the ‘shadowing’ of one half of the strings (that is, three violins, one each of viola, cello, and double bass) by the other half, each tuned a sixth of a tone lower. (The composer’s helpful note made this clear.) Open strings, not quite as one might expect them to sound, perhaps resound all the more overtly, or rather might seem to do so, in the new context.

Xenakis’s presence on concert programmes remains all too rare. This most uncompromising of composers never fails to make the strongest of impressions, at least in a remotely competent performance. Here, as throughout, the London Sinfonietta under André de Ridder certainly offered more than that, allowing one to trust in its guidance – always a crucial matter in new music (and I think we can still call a Xenakis piece from 1971 that). ‘Aroura, Homer’s earth,’ to quote the composer, ‘precedes Antikhthon, and represents the sound textures of the earth (the word is from the same root as “area” or “arena” in the Romance languages). The first impression the eyes receives of the earth is of textures, e.g., fields, words, or bare soil; similarly, the first impression the ear receives of sound is of textures.’ As ever with Xenakis, ‘elemental’ very much seemed the apt word for such impressions, however clichéd it might have become. One heard kinship in the swarming, but difference too in the variety of interplay, continuation, and imitation between instruments. Lines interlocked but also seemed to continue determinedly according to their own (would-be scientific?) necessity. There was drama too, perhaps more ‘conventionally’ framed than one might have expected – or perhaps that was a matter of the narrative coherence the conductor and ensemble imparted to their performance. Glissandi, for instance, could considered as a group be considered to generate form, necessarily heard through time – and ‘felt’, as it were, through time, too, given the undeniably visceral nature of Xenakis’s music.   

Following the interval, we heard the world premiere of Mica Levi’s Greezy, the title, according to the composer, denoting ‘a word used to describe a character who shows no remorse, who will do something bad without worrying about the consequences. It’s a kind of “hard core” description of strength through lack of compassion and fearlessness’. The work’s processional quality – Levi herself spoke of it as dirge-like – seems preoccupied with slowing, not just slowness, of time. A pair of cellos seems almost to step back in time, evoking to this listener’s ears resonances of Purcellian viols. The performance as a whole benefited from a splendidly rich string sound from the London Sinfonietta. Perhaps one of the work’s most immediately notable features is a wide oscillating vibrato, to which de Ridder drew attention, inspired, it seems, by the sound of electronic synthesisers.

Claude Vivier’s Zipangu shares with Greezy an opening concerned with what we might consider to be ‘repeated notes’, but which in context had a rather different effect, soon sonically modulating, from that which they might have had in broadly Classical repertoire. Simon Blendis’s virtuosic violin solo, superlatively played, initiated – or at least seemed to initiate, though it was not quite the first instance of such writing – responses from other instrumentalists, within what Vivier considered to be ‘the frame of a single melody’. (Zipangu, by the way, is a name given to Japan at the time of Marco Polo.) Differentiated bowing techniques contribute to the sonic tapestry, through which structure seems both to emerge and to be mediated. A ‘Spectrum of Sound’, then, was certainly what we heard.

 

This concert will be broadcast on Hear and Now, BBC Radio 3, on Saturday 11 April, 10 p.m.

'The Arditti Quartet: 40 Years Young’ – Rihm, Hosokawa, Ferneyhough, Birtwistle, Dusapin, and Xenakis, 26 April 2014

Milton Court Concert Hall

Rihm – Fetzen I & II (1999-2001 and 2002)

Toshio Hosokawa – Silent Flowers (1998)

Ferneyhough – String Quartet no.3 (1987)

Birtwistle – Hoquetus Irvinius (2014, world premiere)

Dusapin – String Quartet no.5 (2004-5)

Xenakis – Tetras (1983)

Irvine Arditti, Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)

Ralf Ehlers (viola)

Lucas Fels (cello) 

A celebration in style for the Arditti Quartet: no fewer than three concerts throughout the day. I had hoped to attend all three, but in the event had to settle for just the evening concert, which boasted one of three world premieres, the others having been the third quartets of James Clarke and Hilda Paredes (Bitácora capilar). I also missed hearing works by Jonathan Harvey, Carter, Kurtág, Lachenmann, Hèctor Parra, Georg Friedrich Haas, and Ligeti. Still, what I heard offered a Birtwistle premiere, and works by Wolfgang Rihm, Tosho Hosokawa, Brian Ferneyhough, Pascal Dusapin, and Xenakis, so there remained plenty to fascinate to thrill, and yes, to beguile. A quartet which, since its first concert in 1974, has performed and recorded hundreds of new works, many of them Arditti commissions, has an extraordinary amount to celebrate looking back, of which this could only be a tiny fraction, but also still to anticipate, hence the premieres. The concert I heard was typically excellent, no fewer than six works granted advocacy as impressive as conceivable, indeed arguably more impressive than conceivable.

 

Rihm’s Fetzen (‘Scraps’) offered a wonderful ‘overture’, in many ways more individual than much of the composer’s music I have heard. The first is almost a mini-concerto, the first violin’s part more than first among equals; it put me in mind of Berg’s Concerto more than once, and indeed, much of the language of both seems recognisably post-Schoenbergian, the ‘Peripeteia’ of op.16 also coming to mind (despite the obvious differences in colour!) Repeated blows of demarcation bring the short movement to a close. Following a strikingly frenetic second violin opening, the second piece has the material taken up by the other instruments of the quartet; ‘mechanism’ at times seems somewhat Stravinskian, certainly quite a contrast with Fetzen I. The closing chorale, anything but triumphant, provides a fragile, even ghostly conclusion, the players’ hush not the least of this performance’s qualities.

 

Hosokawa’s Silent Flowers proved more abrasive than lazy Orientalist readings of its title might have suggested; this is certainly not Takemitsu. There is – and in performance was – a very strong sense of progression, of, as it were, the lives of these organisms unfolding. Kinship with Webern and Nono became increasingly apparent, though the work is – perhaps unsurprisingly – more expansive than the music of the former. The role of silences as well as quiet playing is particularly noticeable: one was, as with Nono and indeed Webern, made to listen. In the composer’s words, ‘Sounds also come from and return to silence.’

 

Ferneyhough’s third quartet concluded the first half. The expressivity, again not un-Schoenbergian of its febrile opening would persist throughout, making one listen again, albeit in a very different way. In a truer sense than the debased ‘neo-Romantic’ has sadly come to mean, and as remarked upon by Ralf Ehlers, this work, like Ferneyhough’s œuvre more generally, could readily be understood to stand as an idealistic heir to German Romanticism. There was irrationality, yes, but it was irrationality that was anything but ‘arbitrary’; Ehlers spoke of exactitude in notation that was yet akin to ‘notated rubato’. As with Schoenberg, something akin to the ‘Idea’ was the thing. Solo passages – for instance, the second violin at the opening of the second movement, the scintillating viola at its close – were as ‘expressive’ in their communication as the complex, yet never unduly complex, whole. Yes, as the composer put it, ‘the second movement explodes into an iridescent flood of irate images.’

Birtwistle’s Hoquetus Irvineus, dedicated to ‘Irvine and his lovely boys’, proved a winning pièce d’occasion with which to open the second half. The syncopations of hocket and something not so very far from post-Stravinskian swing offered an experience that both drew one in as a listener and was also, quite simply, good fun. Grinding of typical Birtwistle mechanisms propelled the music along, leaving one satisfied yet wanting more.

 

‘Ah yes, said Carnier, lente, lente, and circumspection, with deviations to right and left and sudden reversals of course.’ With those words from Beckett’s Mercier et Carnier, Dusapin begins the score of his fifth quartet. That ‘lente’ is certainly characteristic, though this is not a slowness that tires. The opening, high-lying first violin lyricism, accompanied by pizzicato from the others, certainly offered time to enjoy the view, whatever that may be, in properly Beckett-like fashion uncertain as to the destination, which may not even have existed. Quiet yet incessant chatter – late inheritance of Xenakis’s swarms? – offers quite another experience, prior to the relative resolution of the close.

 

Finally, Xenakis’s Tetras. From first violin to second violin to the quartet as a whole, the ‘uncompromising’ – perhaps a cliché by now, but surely apt in this case – opening proved characteristic of work and performance as a whole. The combination of novelty and familiarity to scales and arpeggios suggest a parallel, maybe alien world: more so, arguably, than the frankly extra-terrestrial ambitions of Stockhausen. One passage sounded as if it might have been musique concrète; I had to check that I was indeed listening to a string quartet. This final performance offered the commanding virtuosity of what, for this ensemble, has become a repertory piece. Silence at the close had no need to be enforced; it was the only possible reaction.

 

Philharmonia/Benjamin, 21 October 2008

Royal Festival Hall

Xenakis – Pithoprakta
Benjamin – Sudden Time
Ligeti – Atmosphères
Messiaen – Chronochromie

Philharmonia Orchestra
George Benjamin (conductor)

This was in many respects a fine concert. It had an intelligent programme, based upon the idea of ‘Sensations in Time’, presenting ‘four different views of time passing’. Four excellent composers, connected but with highly individual modernist voices, were featured. The Philharmonia Orchestra played under the baton of one of them, George Benjamin, himself the favourite pupil of another, Olivier Messiaen. Moreover, the performances were technically precise – no mean feat in such technically challenging repertoire – and displayed an impressively wide variety of orchestral colour.

Xenakis’s Pithoprakta (‘actions though probabilities’) is written for forty-six strings, two trombones (used only once but with great impact), xylophone, and woodblock. The sound-world is startlingly original, although the Bartók of the Music for strings, percussion, and celesta actually sprang to my mind. One can imagine – and I did on this occasion – the glissandi in the score and performance as flickerings upon a radar screen or as figures of fractal geometry. There is also a sense of the natural world, intentionally or otherwise, of the swarming of bees. I even fancied that in the sweepings of the strings I heard a recollection of Messiaen’s beloved ondes martenot. Punctuating these sounds were the interventions from the regular sounding of the woodblock: implacable and somehow both disturbing and reassuring. The musicians of the Philharmonia could hardly be faulted in their execution of the score, directed by Benjamin with precision and understanding. And yet, I missed the last ounce – and perhaps the last few ounces – of aggression, of that raw power that complements Xenakis’s intellectual achievement. One may differ from Boulez’s fastidious judgement that Xenakis had a fantastic brain but absolutely no ear, but one wishes to hear the quality that led a fellow Messiaen pupil to speak thus.

Many would find the sound-world of Benjamin’s Sudden Time more ingratiating. There is certainly more of a sense of landscape, perhaps both temporal and visual. A French heritage, especially that of Debussy, is apparent, especially in the sonorous woodwind – here performed with aplomb – and in the work’s harmony. A duet between harp and English horn was especially haunting in this performance, reminiscent of or perhaps even prefiguring the antique evocations of Birtwistle. The whole orchestra was on fine form but particular mention should also go to leader Maya Iwabuchi, the muted trumpets, and guest principal viola, Jane Atkins, with whose closing solo time finally becomes passed – or past. Benjamin’s ‘sense of elasticity, of stretching, warping, and coming back together,’ born of a dream in which a split-second thunderclap sounded stretched out to a minute or longer, was powerfully conveyed by the composer and his musicians. So was the line from Wallace Stevens’s Martial Cadenza, from which Benjamin acquired the work’s title: ‘It was like sudden time in a world without time.’

Ligeti’s Atmosphères received a splendid performance, wanting nothing in the mystery that is almost its trademark. There was an almost organ-like quality to the brass close to the beginning. Piccolos were properly piercing and the double-basses thundered as they should. Under the once-again swarming surface, the constantly moving and changing harmonic structures made their presence felt. Although Ligeti said that he had not known of Xenakis’s precedent, it was an excellent idea to perform this 1961 classic of note clusters and polyrhythms with Pithoprakta from five years earlier.

In Chronochromie, Messiaen explores the relationship between sound and colour, making this a most apt work with which to conclude, if not quite to climax. There was much to commend in this performance. Messiaen’s voice was as unmistakeable from the outset as that of his birds. The tuned percussionists who provided such a riot of birdsong were truly outstanding. Benjamin imparted an unerring sense of harmonic direction and the distinction to which Messiaen himself referred, between implacable rigour (modes of duration) and freedom (birdsong) was readily apparent. I thought the violins a little lacking in vibrancy when playing en masse, but they truly came into their own in the exhilarating if fatiguing Epode: free counterpoint of eighteen independent (bird) voices, connecting with the Xenakis and Ligeti works. The coda came, as it should, as a relief, after such mania, disorder, or ‘freedom’, however one wishes to understand it.

What, then, was the source of my nagging doubts? I do not think it was a matter of Messiaen fatigue at this stage in the anniversary year. (His piece, though the longest, was only one of four.) I think ultimately it lay in Benjamin’s direction and certainly not in the Philharmonia’s execution. Chronochromie in particular lacked the final sense of awe, that quality again of raw power, of Messiaen’s music being ‘about’ something other than itself. It was almost prettified. Perhaps the same could be said about Pithoprakta. I am all for new music – although none of this is actually so new anymore – being treated in classical fashion, just as classical music can profitably be treated as new. Yet the sense of trail-blazing discovery – and the music featured in this programme is surely as trail-blazing as music comes – was somewhat blunted. There was a commendable attention to detail throughout. Detail, however, should heighten the impact of the greater picture; this was not always the case here. An audition on returning home of Boulez’s superlative Cleveland recording of Chronochromie reassured me that precision and expression are far from antithetical in such repertoire. For all the nonsense that is spoken of Boulez’s alleged ‘objectivity’ – itself by now almost a meaningless word in such a context – that Messiaen pupil imparted a greater sense of the subject, of conflict, of drama.