Musikfest Berlin (3) - Lynch/BRSO/Rattle: Hindemith, Zemlinsky, and Mahler, 3 September 2024

Philharmonie

Hindemith: Rag Time (wohltemperiert)
Zemlinsky: Symphonische Gesänge, op.20
Mahler: Symphony no.6 in A minor

Lester Lynch (baritone)

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Simon Rattle (conductor)

Image copyright: Berliner Festspiele / Astrid Ackermann

In a concert of two unequal halves, the first, shorter part proved the better bet. Incisive accounts of Hindemith’s Rag Time and Zemlinsky’s Symphonische Gesänge sat unfortunately with a performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony that suggested Simon Rattle’s lengthy post-Birmingham spell, amply demonstrated in Berlin and London, of pulling music, Mahler’s included, around to no discernible end has some way to go in Munich too. One aspect of interest was of course simply to hear Rattle with his new orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony. There was some excellent playing to be heard. To my ears, though – it was not only the hall, since I have heard Rattle and the LSO sparkle at the Philharmonie – the Mahler sound proved strikingly similar to that from the Berlin Philharmonic during its last, somewhat truculent days with the conductor. This new partnership, enthusiastically acclaimed by many in the audience – as seems to be the case for any old Mahler performance, good, bad, or indifferent – seemed as yet a work-in-progress. 

Hindemith’s Bach-inspired Ragtime made its point without overstaying its welcome. As with much music of the 1920s, the ghost (even when alive) of Busoni hovered over harmony and orchestration. Hard-edged and not a little outrageous, it made for an apt prelude to Zemlinsky’s 1929 settings of texts from the collection Afrika singt. Lester Lynch made for an eloquent, sincere, often moving soloist, sympathetically accompanied by Rattle, in a work that, musically, seemed to take up where the composer’s Lyric Symphony left off, albeit sparer and darker. The first song’s opening woodwind lines, excellently performed by BRSO principals, were a case in point. The deep sadness of one of several Langston Hughes settings (in translation) set the tone for much to come in music whose invention proved thoroughly equal to the task, Zemlinsky’s brass writing (and the BRSO’s playing) in ‘Erkenntnis’ striking indeed. When dark, it was a multicoloured darkness, as in ‘Totes braunes Mädel’; when contrast came, as in the scherzo-like ‘Übler Bursche’ and the defiant menace of ‘Afrikanischer Tanz’, it registered as meet and right. The final ‘Arabeske’ offered Twenties’ Neue Sachlichkeit with a heart, solidarity with a fine intellect, crystallised in performances that exulted without naïveté. 

It was a brisk funeral march that opened the Mahler: nothing wrong with that, although in this symphony, few have matched and surely none will surpass the incendiary results of Pierre Boulez’s more measured opening, both on record and in concert. With Boulez, as with few others, the whole of Mahler’s tragedy is implicit, even inevitable in the first bars. With Rattle, there was certainly much, though the general ‘tone’ seemed odd: a ‘midsummer night’s Mahler’ perhaps. Rattle’s way with the chorale that connects the first and second subjects was truly a thing of wonder, turning mysteriously inward. The aftermath of the second, ‘Alma’ theme, lost all momentum, slowing to the point of exhaustion, although picking up for much of the development. Moreover, the hard-edged, Weill-like sonorities that had characterised performances before the interval, seemed increasingly out of place here. There was something else missing, though. Once I realised what it was, its fatal precedent the work as a whole could not be escaped: an unwillingness to let harmony in general and harmonic rhythm in particular ground, inform, and incite the music’s progress. What we heard was a series of unconnected passages, some more nightmarish than others, in a somewhat loud and overbearing stream of consciousness. This is a symphony and Mahler’s most Classically conceived symphony at that; lose that and you lose much of its point. 

There was an irony, then, to Rattle’s insistence on placing the ‘Andante’ second: a common pseudo-literalism nowadays, one that rarely if ever convinces. It benefited from excellent solo playing, horn and violin in particular. Quite a head of steam was whipped up at the close, arguably excessively so. What it all might mean, regardless of whether that can or should be put into words, eluded me. Despite its placing third, the scherzo fared better, at least to begin with. Its opening had a stronger sense of rhythm, harmonic rhythm included, and the orchestral playing displayed a broader range of colour. Alas, Rattle’s inclination to pull material around soon got the better of him; the deliberate became merely mannered. 

The finale had its moments, but it needs more than moments. It needs to be heard as a single, unbroken span, or will ultimately be little more than a waste of time. A nightmarish opening augured well, but Rattle failed to establish a fundamental pulse. Listlessness may have been the idea, but general ‘mood’ was no substitute for what was lacking. That might work, or fail to work less badly, for two or three minutes, but for thirty? The movement’s form and structure were simply not there; nor were those of the symphony as a whole. People visibly thrilled to the two hammer-blows and, to be fair, the first for a while seemed literally to have knocked the music into shape, but why was it there? In any case, the old listlessness soon reasserted itself and the second went for less. A pity.

Röschmann/VSO/Hahn - Schoenberg and Zemlinsky, 5 June 2024

Musikverein

Schoenberg: Erwartung, op.17
Zemlinsky: Die Seejungfrau

Dorothea Röschmann (soprano)

Vienna Symphony Orchestra

Patrick Hahn (conductor)

What is Schoenberg’s single greatest work? It is a silly question, at least as silly as asking the same of Mahler, of Webern, or of Boulez. Sometimes we ask ourselves silly questions, though; I suspect that Erwartung would come pretty close to the top of any aggregate list for Schoenbergians. Written over an extraordinarily short period of time – Schoenberg was often, though not always, like that – the monodrama comes from his Wunderjahr of 1909. However, it had to wait until 1924 for its first performance, in Prague on 6 June, conducted by the composer’s great friend, advocate, and brother-in-law (I think we can still count him as such, though Mathilde Schönberg had died the previous year) Alexander von Zemlinsky. This Musikverein performance, by Dorothea Röschmann, the Vienna Symphony, and Patrick Hahn, must surely therefore have been the last of its first century-in-performance, coming as it did on 5 June 2024. Aptly enough for so prophetic yet historically rooted a work, its successor the following evening would inaugurate a new performing century.

This, at any rate, made for a glorious finale that could also look forward, surely the equal of any performance I have heard and the superior of many, whether live or on record. In his 150^th year, Schoenberg’s place as the single most important – not necessarily ‘greatest’, whatever that may mean, though certainly a serious contender for that too – composer of the twentieth century is assured. It always was; that, however, has still not translated into broader acceptance from a frankly doltish public. (That his rejection is often, even usually, laced with antisemitism, unconscious as much as conscious, makes it worse; but let us leave that aside for now.) 

First and far from least, it was beautifully sung by Röschmann: beauty, song, and beauty of singing all being involved there. It was astonishingly accurate too, and not only in the vocal part, though one could have taken dictation from it had, somehow, one not been swept away by the experience. Hahn’s expert balancing of the lines – always a tricky, in another sense unsung, business in the music of the Second Viennese School – was such that one almost did not realise he was doing it. That was also, naturally, the accomplishment of the golden-toned VSO, here moreover sounding every bit as ‘Viennese’ as their Philharmonic cousins (to whom I am sure they are rightly fed up of being compared). Structure, moreover, was as at least clear as I can recall, Schoenberg’s scenic division of the work, the fourth and final scene far longer than the others, uncommonly apparent and dramatically meaningful, without making the performance seem anything but a convincing whole. Climaxes were, well, as climactic as one could hope, and then some; yet always something was shifting, conclusion or, as we might now say, ‘closure’, never on the horizon. 

Music arose from drama, and vice versa. Schoenberg never points in merely one direction; nor did he here. The whirlwind third scene in particular seemed but a stone’s throw, if that, from the later Schoenberg of, say, the almost-never-performed op.22 Four Orchestral Songs, yet there was always much of earlier writing too: for instance, the op.8 Six Orchestral Songs and, indeed, Gurrelieder. As we entered the final scene, Röschmann edged closer at times to Sprechgesang, yet only at times. Later, the opera – for let us never forget it is one – we seemed to come close to Wozzeck’s Marie, at least in the voice, for the orchestral writing rightly sounded very different. The chill of the strings following ‘Ich will das nicht … nein, ich will nicht …’ offered aftershock that was terrible, even terrifying, indeed, initiating certain intimations, so it seemed, of Pierrot lunaire. There was great tenderness too; how could one not sympathise with this protagonist? One truly felt, moreover, the transformation of the ‘Dämmerung’ to which she referred toward the end, in a musical breeze that testified to Schoenberg’s mastery of orchestration as well as masterly orchestral playing. And the musical upward spiral with which the score came to a close, if not closure, was just the thing: tantalisingly brief, yet saying all that could be said or played. 

What, then, is Zemlinsky’s single greatest work? I am not sure it is quite so silly a question; the Lyric Symphony would probably have no serious rival in any survey, though it might still beg the question, ‘why are you asking?’ One possible answer might be to help understand why other works by the composer have never quite lived up to its renown, though the operas again seem to be experiencing some of a revival. The symphonic poem – his only one – Die Seejungfrau is also faring better now, though its chequered genesis will probably always count against it. Zemlinsky withdrew the score after only three performances, and suppressed it. The unpublished score was divided, the first movement given to Zemlinsky’s friend Marie Pappenheim, also Schoenberg’s librettist for Erwartung. Zemlinsky retained the second and third movements, taking them with him when leaving Europe for the United States in 1938. Only in the early 1980s did scholars come to realise that the three movements belonged together. Die Seejungfrau was finally published, receiving its first ‘modern’ performance, conducted by one of those scholars, Peter Gülke, only in 1984. It may not be a masterpiece – it can, to be brutally honest, be a little repetitive at times and would, unsurprisingly, have benefited from revision – but it is still very well worth hearing, especially in a performance such as this.

Zemlinsky’s method of motivic transformation came very much to the fore, Hahn showing himself as accomplished a Zemlinskian as a Schoenbergian, building tension here, especially in the first movement, as expertly as he had in Erwartung. In some respects, the work came to resemble a wordless, voiceless opera. Its sepulchral (subaquatic) opening here had something in common with Strauss, without ever reducing itself to imitation or ‘likeness’; any similarities, throughout the score, were just that, no more. Perhaps the closest kinship – this has struck me before – was with Mahler’s Das klagende Lied. Maybe there is some influence there – its first performance came in 1901 – but it was actually the first, long unperformed part of Mahler’s score that more often came to mind, so let us banish any thought of derivation and celebrate commonality. Pacing and balance were equally impressive here, and how the orchestra shimmered, glowed, and glistened, as if the waters were first awaiting and then celebrating the arrival of the mermaid and her subjectivity. Opposing and complementary material were deftly shaped, again with a keen ear for drama, in the second movement. The twin return to darkness and progress to something approaching transfiguration of the third both offered an intriguing echo of Tannhäuser and built to a grand climax and further shadows of its own. For both Schoenberg and Zemlinsky, it was not a case of either/or.

Happy 150th Birthday to Alexander Zemlinsky

 

Please click here for past posts on the composer, ranging from an essay on Die Seejungfrau to a reflection on Writing German History that opens with the Lyric Symphony. (When you reach the bottom, you can continue by clicking 'Older posts').

Gansch/Martineau - Zemlinsky, Berg, and Mahler, 10 October 2021

Wigmore Hall

Zemlinsky: Walzer-Gesänge nach toskanischen Volksliedern, op.6
Berg: Sieben frühe Lieder
Mahler: Des Knaben Wunderhorn: ‘Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?’, ‘Das irdische Leben’, ‘Ablösung im Sommer’, ‘Scheiden und Meiden’, ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’, ‘Rheinlegendchen’, ‘Die himmlische Leben’

Christina Gansch (soprano)
Malcolm Martineau (piano)

Song in particular and vocal music more generally were of great importance to Zemlinsky, Berg, and Mahler. In Zemlinsky’s case, more than half of his songs were composed in a short period from 1898 to 1901, these Walzer-Gesänger (1898) after Tuscan folksongs (translated by Ferdinand Gregorovius) included. One falls, perhaps as much out of habit as conviction, upon the word ‘Brahmsian’, but are they really, the obvious Liebeslieder precedent notwithstanding? There are certainly elements that look so on the page; perhaps they would sound more so in certain performances. Here—only here—I felt at times a mismatch between vocal performance and material. Perhaps it was more a matter of warming up, of a larger scale of performance than might have been ideal. Christina Gansch was certainly communicative, though, not only in diction but also in meaning. Or perhaps it was my expectations that were at fault, since I responded more keenly to the darker (within bounds) ‘Ich gehe des Nachts’, not least to its piano writing as vividly conveyed by Malcolm Martineau. The sense of mystery and ultimate communion in ‘Blaues Sternlein’ hinted at more, at a world to come both for Zemlinsky and ‘Austrian’ music more generally. 

Until he took composition lessons with Schoenberg, Berg was above all a composer of Lieder. It is not quite true to say that he was exclusively so, though in 1910 Schoenberg told his publisher that, ‘extraordinarily gifted’ though Berg was when he came to him, ‘his imagination apparently could not work on anything but songs. Even the piano accompaniments to them were songlike. He was absolutely incapable of writing an instrumental movement or inventing an instrumental theme.’ We should be grateful indeed to Schoenberg for his instruction. What would Wozzeck, let alone the Three Orchestral Pieces, op.6, be without the instrumental forms in which Schoenberg had compelled Berg to write? Given the quality of the Seven Early Songs (1905-8)—written during Berg’s studies with Schoenberg, albeit first in harmony, counterpoint, and music theory, only from 1907 in composition—one can well understand why Berg might simply have wished to carry on in that vein, though here already the piano writing is quite different from that in his truly ‘early’ songs. 

Whatever one’s thoughts on the Zemlinsky songs—I was grateful above all for the opportunity to hear them—Berg immediately took us into a different world, darker, more complex, more alluring. The harmonies of ‘Nacht’, voice almost as crucial to their sounding as piano, form and shape the song itself. Whatever the truth of Schoenberg’s retrospective criticism, it cannot have been intended for this song. A message both Tristan-esque and Nietzschean in words and music both warned and enticed: ‘Trinke Seele! trinke Einsamkeit! O gib acht! gib acht!’ Gansch seemed liberated by the greater musical possibilities, each song conceived in collaboration with Martineau with remarkable attention to detail, out of which was formed a singular whole. ‘Die Nachtigall’ took shape and indeed flight from its immanent growth in expressive range, reaching an ecstatic vocal conclusion such as to have Martineau’s piano epilogue bathed in Bergian afterglow.  The little red fire (‘Feuerlein rot’) of ‘Im Zimmer’ fairly crackled before our ears, vocal and piano parts alike subtly suggestive of image and import. A richly voluptuous ‘Liebesode’ became breathless in more than one sense, serving aptly as prelude to ‘Sommertage’, whose ‘image after image comes to you and quite fills you’. 

A short break of a minute or two was just the thing to prepare for the different world again of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, its naïveté never without a suspicion of knowing, alienation its lot, its tragedy, but also its attraction. Gansch captured to a tee the humour of Mahler’s absurdist neo-Bachian melismata in ‘Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?’ Mahler should never, arguably can never, be read on one level. ‘Das irdische Leben’ was well characterised, its horror all the truer for the lack of hysteria. Kindertotenlieder already seemed close. A sardonic account of ‘Ablösung im Sommer’, the piano properly played straight, prepared the way for the ambiguities of ‘Scheiden und Meiden’ and a dream-like, hallucinatory ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’, its wan, deathly piano prelude as Mahlerian as any orchestra. After that, ‘Rheinlegendchen’ offered necessary relief prior to the epiphanic mysteries of ‘Das himmlische Leben’, heard far more frequently in its orchestral guise as final movement to the Fourth Symphony. Already in its opening stanza, the subtle range of Gansch’s vocal colours suggested nothing was quite so simple as it might seem. Childhood, after all, is always an adult idea. ‘Sankt Martha die Köchin muss sein!’ seemed as strange a revelation as ever, yet one could not but nod assent, both to the claim and to Mahler’s path to transcendence. For an encore, we heard ‘Hans und Grete’, again apparently simple, yet with much beneath the surface. Gansch’s closing smile, very much part of the performance, encapsulated what we had just heard.

Zemlinsky, Die Seejungfrau

Zemlinsky and Schoenberg, Prague, 1917
Image: Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna

‘I have always thought and still believe that he was a great composer. Maybe his time will come earlier than we think.’ Arnold Schoenberg was far from given to exaggerated claims for ‘greatness’, yet he could hardly have been more emphatic in the case of his friend, brother-in-law, mentor, advocate, interpreter, and, of course, fellow composer, Alexander Zemlinsky. Ten years later, in 1959, another, still more exacting modernist critic, Theodor Adorno, wrote in surprisingly glowing terms. Zemlinsky had ‘made more of the compromises characteristic of an eclectic than any other first-rate composer of his generation. Yet his eclecticism demonstrated genius in its truly seismographic sensitivity to the stimuli by which he allowed himself to be overwhelmed.’ We perhaps look more warily than Adorno or Schoenberg upon Romantic notions of genius, even as our concert halls, opera houses, and much popular discourse cling to them. Has Zemlinsky’s time come? Or is the question now beside the point?


In that Romantic vein, the Lyric Symphony remains Zemlinsky’s ‘masterpiece’: frequently performed, recorded, and esteemed. His operas are now staged more often, at least in Germany. In that same 1949 sketch, Schoenberg praised Zemlinsky the opera composer extravagantly, saying he knew not one ‘composer after Wagner who could satisfy the demands of the theatre with better musical substance than he. His ideas, his forms, his sonorities, and every turn of the music sprang directly from the action, from the scenery, and from the singers’ voices with a naturalness and distinction of supreme quality.’ What, then, of the invisible theatre of the symphonic poem, historically related to Wagnerian drama from Liszt onwards – as indeed in the œuvre of Richard Strauss? There are no voices, nor is there scenery. But what of ideas, forms, sonorities, and action? Die Seejungfrau (‘The Mermaid’) is Zemlinsky’s sole essay in the genre and now his most widely esteemed non-vocal work. 

Image: Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna

It was not always so. After only three performances, in Vienna, Berlin, and Prague, Zemlinsky withdrew the score. The first performance on 25 January 1905 was also noteworthy for the premiere of Schoenberg’s tone poem, Pelleas und Melisande, and for being the final concert of the Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler (‘Society of Creative Musicians’), founded by Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, and fellow conductor-composer Oskar Posa only the previous year. It had already performed Strauss’s Sinfonia domestica and the Vienna premiere of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Here each of the founding members conducted his own premiere, five songs for baritone and orchestra by Posa given between Zemlinsky and Schoenberg’s symphonic poems.


The audience did not react kindly to Pelleas, which had most likely been poorly performed (and conducted). Schoenberg would subsequently recall that ‘reviews were unusually violent and one of the critics suggested to put me in an asylum and keep music paper out of my reach’. That is what musical history has tended to remember. However, Zemlinsky’s piece, although misunderstood as merely ‘charming’, even in one review ‘heart-warming’, was received with greater enthusiasm. Such misunderstanding is nevertheless understandable, given that Zemlinsky’s aesthetic would always remain attached to an old-fashioned notion of ‘beauty’. In a 1902 letter to Schoenberg, he declared: ’A great artist who has everything required to express himself meaningfully, must observe the boundaries of the beautiful, even if he should stretch them further.’ To do so, he continued, would have a trained ear, ‘our era … yours and mine,’ hear mere ugliness. For him, Strauss crossed that line in Ein Heldenleben. Such would not be the path taken in the ‘symphonic poem, Das Meerfräulein, by [Hans Christian] Andersen,’ soon renamed Die Seejungfrau. 

Marie Pappenheim, oil painting by Schoenberg, 1909
 Image: Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna

It is uncertain why, following those three performances, Zemlinsky suppressed the work. He did not even mention it in a 1910 worklist he sent to Universal Edition. It appears he may have come to regret the persistence of elements of less-than-symphonic repetition, which he saw as more at home in the Viennese operettas he conducted to earn a living. The unpublished score was divided, the first movement given to Marie Pappenheim, a friend of Zemlinsky, now best known, alongside achievements as dermatologist and sexual liberationist, as Schoenberg’s librettist for Erwartung. Zemlinsky retained the second and third movements, taking them with him when he fled Europe for the United States in 1938. Only in the early 1980s did scholars come to realise that the three movements belonged together. Die Seejungfrau was finally published, receiving its first ‘modern’ performance, conducted by one of those scholars, Peter Gülke, in 1984.


In the letter to Schoenberg quoted above, Zemlinsky outlined his plan:

Part I a: At the foot of the sea (entire exposition) b: Mermaid in the human world, storm, the prince’s rescue.

Part II a: The mermaid’s longing; with the witch. b: The prince’s wedding and mermaid’s demise. Thus two parts, but four sections.

As work progressed – Zemlinsky wrote far more slowly than Schoenberg – the four sections remained, yet spread across a ‘fantasy in three movements for large orchestra’. The shift to three movements speaks of developing symphonic ambition; ‘symphonic poem’ is how Zemlinsky persistently referred to it in correspondence with Schoenberg. Even the narrative and pictorial ambition of the first movement, its storm included, are bound together by a Brahmsian mode of thematic working. ‘I had been a “Brahmsian” when I met Zemlinsky,’ Schoenberg recalled; ‘his love embraced both Brahms and Wagner and soon thereafter I became an equally confirmed addict.’


The scherzo has less in the way of narrative; it is more of a symphonic movement ‘after’ Andersen. Not for nothing do the waves of La Mer, Debussy’s three ‘symphonic sketches’, come to mind at its opening. The third movement too proceeds in notably symphonic fashion, earlier music revisited and transformed. It may ultimately offer a hymn to ‘man’s immortal soul’, yet far from dependent upon a programmatic idea, let alone a detailed narrative. We should not push such claims too far. Zemlinsky’s themes are motifs, associated with objects, ideas, emotions, as that ‘New German School’ of Wagner, Berlioz, Liszt, and even their successor Strauss would have understood. ‘Home’, ‘joy’, ‘despair,’ seabed, mermaid, ‘human world’, and many others speak of a conceptual dramaturgy extending beyond ‘absolute’ music, even if it eventually returns us to that realm. An age old problem of ‘programme music’ – do we need the ‘programme’ or not? – is resuscitated in a tale of neither fish nor fowl that, both in subject matter and in aesthetic controversy, redramatises and rephrases that very same problem.

Routledge translation, 1883

It is generally wise to beware reading autobiography explicitly into music. In this case, however, the romantic ardour Zemlinsky had felt prior to rejection by his pupil, Alma Schindler (subsequently Mahler) seems unavoidably related, at least in generalised fashion, to the work’s subject matter. Such would be the case more specifically in two operas, Der Traumgörge (‘Görge the Dreamer’) and Der Zwerg (‘The Dwarf’). The history and hysteria of the merwitch music, ‘bei der Meerhexe’, cut by Zemlinsky and only latterly restored in Antony Beaumont’s critical edition of the original version, tells its own bitter story. Dark brass writing at the opening proves unsurprisingly Wagnerian, although Strauss may be just as relevant. Disentangling the two hardly seems relevant. Haunting string chords, woodwind solos too, suggest Mahler’s early cantata, Das klagende Lied, which had finally received its first performance in Vienna, in 1901, albeit in heavily revised, truncated form. We might continue, isolating affinities with Till Eulenspiegel, Tod und Verklärung, and so on, yet what would be the point, without broader critical observation? Affinity is not necessarily influence; even when it turns out to be, there remains the question: ‘so what?’


Perhaps we come closer to appreciation of the work’s particular qualities when we recall that Zemlinsky, like Mahler and Strauss, yet unlike Schoenberg, was also a conductor of the first rank. The detail of his orchestral scores is noteworthy in itself and for its practicality, born of experience. That is not to say that he does not make strenuous demands; however, they are never absurd. (One might draw a comparison with, say, Liszt in his piano writing.) Beaumont identifies in this work the birth of an especially ‘singular aspect of Zemlinsky’s art,’ namely his ‘exploitation of the glissando,’ as opposed to Mahlerian portamento, ‘as an expressive device in its own right’. It could hardly have been signalled more emphatically, nor indeed originally, than in the scherzo: four unison trombones at fortissimo. Beaumont rightly acknowledges one contemporaneous usage: Schoenberg’s Pelleas, which requests muted trombones at ppp. Mere coincidence is unlikely. Who influenced whom? We shall probably never know – although Schoenberg’s greater speed at writing may just give him the edge of probability.


At any rate, as Adorno realised, Zemlinsky’s voice, impulse, and general priorities were more typical for ‘Vienna 1900’ than Schoenberg’s. Erik Levi has astutely described Zemlinsky as ‘very much a child of his time, a composer who enthusiastically absorbed a wide array of contemporary cultural influences, but whose distinctive voice only emerges after sustained exposure to his music.’ We stand in a better position to receive and learn from such exposure than previously; indeed, we have now for a little while. Zemlinsky’s time may have come upon us earlier than we knew.

(This essay was first published to accompany the Pentatone recording of Die Seejungfrau by the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and Marc Albrecht. See below.)

Boulez Ensemble/Guggeis - Bach, Hindemith, Haddad, and Stravinsky, 31 January 2020

Pierre Boulez Saal

Bach: Brandenburg Concerto no.1 in F major, BWV 1046

Hindemith: Kammermusik no.1 for twelve solo instruments, op.24 no.1

Saed Haddad: Sombre, for thirteen musicians (world premiere)

Stravinsky: Concerto in E-flat major for chamber orchestra, ‘Dumbarton Oaks’

Boulez Ensemble

Thomas Guggeis

My final concert as a European citizen; hereafter, to quote the text of Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony, I shall be ‘ein fremder im fremden Land’. All the more so, of course, when I return, to put it mildly, reluctantly to ein ganz fremdes Land, most likely never to escape it. The twin blows of defeat on 12 December and departure on 31 January have at least cured us of hope, perhaps the cruellest of tortures: coinciding, in typically savage irony, with Beethoven’s anniversary year. To have heard the Ninth Symphony next door, at the Staatsoper, on New Year’s Eve was an experience emotional enough; that, Fidelio, or anything else Beethovenian would probably have been too much. Instead, at the Pierre Boulez Saal, we heard music by the ever-rooted yet aesthetically cosmopolitan Bach and by three other composers who (have) found themselves in fremden Ländern. Hindemith and Stravinsky both spent periods of their lives in exile, while Jordanian-born composer Saed Haddad lives and works in Germany.

This was the first concert I had heard conducted by Thomas Guggeis. He impressed just as greatly as in his work in the opera house. Having the excellent Boulez Ensemble, drawn from members of the Staatskapelle Berlin and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, did no harm whatsoever, of course, but Guggeis’s preparation, understanding, and communication of that understanding proved equally important for another fine collaboration.

The First Brandenburg Concerto was a case in point, blessedly free of ‘period’ affectation, yet Bach as ensemble music – this is, after all, the Boulez Ensemble – rather than small- or, for that matter, large-scale orchestral music. The first movement offered somewhat odd balances at times, but I think that was in part owed to where I was seated, a little close to the horns. (Perhaps, at last, I had found a minor disadvantage to this performing space ‘in the round’.) At any rate, a bright, energetic, performance benefited from a sensible tempo that sought not to draw attention to itself but rather to permit Bach’s music to come to life – and succeeded. Dignified and well articulated, with a fine sense of chiaroscuro, the Adagio also benefited from Guggeis’s unobtrusive command of the longer line. Dialogue between Jiyoon Lee’s excellent violin piccolo solo and three similarly excellent oboes (Gregor Witt, Charlotte Schleiss, and Katharina Wichate) proved a fine centrepiece around which the immanent qualities of Bach’s score could happily shine through. There was similar yet different joy in counterpoint, harmony, and their combination in the third movement, likewise in the interplay between solo and ripieno writing, any balance problems now resolved. A courtly and characterful procession of dances brought the work to a close, reminding us that Bach’s idea of progression in a multi-movement work is often very different from ours. Sometimes that can cause problems for modern listeners or performers; here the question never arose. Musically directed virtuosity from oboes and horns (Samuel Seidenberg and Sebastian Posch) in ‘their’ Trio proved but one of many delights.

To hear one of Hindemith’s 1920s Kammermusik pieces immediately afterwards was instructive, perhaps above all because it suggested contrast rather than underlying affinity (at least to my ears). The first movement was frenetic and sardonic, knife-edge precision as expressive as it was impressive: quite the introduction. The second movement calmed down somewhat, if only comparatively. That calming permitted one to savour the estimable musical qualities, which are in truth at least as much harmonic as rhythmic and as anti-Bachian as they are Bachian. The opening clarinet-flute duet (Assaf Leibowitz and Silvia Careddu) sounded as if a slowed-down Twenties sequel to The Rite of Spring, the appearance of bassoon (Mor Biron) only rendering it more so. Here was an oasis of neoclassical calm; and yet it moved. It was tonal, yes, yet closer to something non-tonal in function than perhaps one might expect, at least at times. Such ambiguities were fruitfully explored under Guggeis’s wise direction. The unease of that movement seemed to be inherited by a finale of high tension, maintained and if anything increased until finally something had to give. Its dislocations disconcerted, indeed puzzled. Then all was over, siren and all.

Saed Haddad’s Sombre, commissioned by the Daniel Barenboim Stiftung, here received its world premiere. It seemed to me to speak throughout of an incisive grief, a grief that certainly spoke to me. Nimrod Ron’s opening tuba solo, dark yet not without implied hope, endured slings and arrows surrounding it, evolved into an ensemble danse macabre, subsiding, tuba handing over to bassoon, whose role as solo bass instrument would later be assumed by double bass, and so on. In between, harp, bass drum, and other percussion enlarged the reach of a dark ensemble that yet resisted something external, even deathly. At times, I was put in mind of the finale to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, though that may say more about me than the work. A viola lament, joined in duet by arabesquing oboe; bells of hope, sweetest yet cruellest of tortures; patterns of material that seemed ready to repeat yet never quite did; a related sense of having to pick oneself up, only to fail: perhaps it was not fanciful to hear this music as tragic. It was certainly an accomplished work afforded accomplished performances; I should be keen to hear more.

Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto rounded off the concert in fine fashion. The busy automation of its first movement seemed still more distant from Bach than Hindemith’s response. That discrepancy is surely where the music’s interest lies – and so it proved in performance too. A little more overt aggression might occasionally have been welcome; however, I can see and hear the case for a more Apolline approach, as in the composer’s earlier Octet. Here, the Rake rather than the Rite beckoned, the controlling mastery of Stravinsky as watchmaker, divine or otherwise, apparent and polemically so at that. Likewise in the central Allegretto, whose spareness usefully highlighted the passing of ideas in mid-statement between different instruments. If one wanted to hear where Stravinsky’s later interest in Webern had come from, here was a strongly suggestive possibility. Aggression was, doubtless justly, more overt in a finale which at times seemed to approach the wartime anger of the Symphony in Three Movements, as well as its sonorous delights. There were no easy answers to be gleaned through the mechanical swing. Art is no mere refuge, however fremd our current Länder.

Der Zwerg, Deutsche Oper, 12 April 2019

Deutsche Oper

DER ZWERG von Alexander von Zemlinsky, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Premiere am 24. März 2019, copyright: Monika Ritterhaus
The Dwarf: Mick Morris Mehnert and David Butt Philip

Donna Clara – Elena Tsallagova

Ghita – Emily Magee

The Dwarf – David Butt Philip, Mick Morris Mehnert

Don Estoban – Philipp Jekal

Maids – Flurina Stucki, Amber Fasquelle, Maiju Vaahtoluoto

Companions – Carolina Dawabe Valle, Margarita Greiner

Alma Schindler – Adelle Eslinger

Alexander von Zemlinsky – Evgeny Nikiforov

Tobias Kratzer (director)

Rainer Sellmaier (designs)

Stefan Woinke (lighting)

Sebastian Hanusa (dramaturgy)

Ladies of the Chorus of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus master: Jeremy Bines)

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Donald Runnicles (conductor)

Donna Clara (Elena Tsallagova) and her guests

‘I have always thought and still believe that he was a great composer. Maybe his time will come earlier than we think.’ Arnold Schoenberg was not always given to exaggerated enthusiasm for the music of his contemporaries; he could hardly, though, have been more emphatic in the case of his friend, brother-in-law, mentor, advocate, interpreter, and, of course, fellow composer, Alexander Zemlinsky.

I had told myself that I ought not to begin another piece on Zemlinsky with a reference to Schoenberg. In this case, however, the Deutsche Oper more or less made my decision for me, by prefacing this excellent new production of Zemlinsky’s one-act opera, Der Zwerg, with Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Film Scene, op.34. Zemlinsky’s one-act opera dates from 1919-21, Schoenberg’s from the close of the 20s. Much separates them: not least, though certainly not only, Schoenberg’s adoption of the dodecaphonic method. Yet they have common roots as well as kinship; the opening, additional scene to Tobias Kratzer’s staging makes that clear, despatching us – and Zemlinsky – back two decades, to a fashionable drawing room, in which the hapless, lovelorn Zemlinsky attempts to teach Mahler at the piano. Alma Mahler, that is, or rather Alma Schindler, whose rejection of Zemlinsky, depicted or rather imagined here, hit Zemlinsky hard. Alex finds Alma irresistible – many did – yet she finds him repellent, ridiculous; she pushes him away, mocks him. Kratzer makes clear that this is a way in, as much for the composer and work as for us: in no sense an explanation or reduction. I had worried that Schoenberg’s music might overshadow what came afterwards – and perhaps it did, ever so slightly – but no harm was done, and there was wit in the over-emphasis on the already prominent piano part as ‘learned’ and ‘performed’ by the figures at the piano. Anticipations of Schoenberg’s actual Piano Concerto, both from the Brahmsian and Wagnerian wings – gross oversimplification, I know – intrigued.

But back to Zemlinsky and Der Zwerg. We then move to the court of the Spanish Infanta: a theatre of cruelty, wonder, superficiality, and, of course, riches. It was difficult not to think a little of Salome here, not only on account of Oscar Wilde (whose short story this is). The dwarf given as the Infanta’s eighteenth-birthday present is not Zemlinsky – although Alma, with typical charity, would refer to him in her memoirs as a ‘horrible dwarf’ – but the trauma of his rejection feeds character and drama, as it had in works such as Eine florentinische Tragödie and Die Seejungfrau. Here, we see him in two different ways: as an actual ‘dwarf’, finely acted by Mick Morris Mehnert, and as he sees – and hears – himself, a musician (which he is, far from coincidentally), sung in parallel concert dress and increasingly acted by David Butt Philip. Singing is the dwarf’s act: without that, he would, as an ‘ugly’ person, be nothing. It enables him to be ‘merely’ ridiculous, in the eyes of the court. It is the crushing realisation that the child – no more than Salome is she capable of empathy, of love – does not, could not love him that has him confront his actual image, the singer at last seeing the dwarf in the mirror. Such is the central tragedy of recognition, of despair, of revulsion, of death.

Yet, as in Salome, we also sense the tragedy of the Infanta, Donna Clara. The ladies of the court egg her on; is there any way, in this stifling, stylish, ‘aestheticised’ atmosphere, that she could have become more human? (What chance, after all, did Alma have in her world of being taken seriously as a musician, as a woman, as a human being?) Images or potential images abound. For the arrival of the gift itself, sorry himself, mobile telephones are taken from the guests. How keen they would have been to relay their amusement to a wider amusement; they doubtless still will, long after the unfortunate object of their derision has been forgotten. So too do ideas of music and musicians, of art and artists. An orchestra is assembled, and quickly dissembled. Busts of artists – of men – surround the stage and even – rightly, we feel – are smashed, like some of those instruments. Is it perhaps too hopeful to install Zemlinsky’s bust centre-stage at the close, as is accomplished here? Yes – and no. That is surely the point. Zemlinsky’s time may or may not have come.

It certainly has done in terms of musical performance. Butt Philip, in surely the finest, most commanding performance I have yet heard from him, enticed and engaged. Elena Tsallagova captured to a tee the difficult balancing act in a direction that was somehow both the same and different, likewise as impressive in song as in demeanour. Emily Magee and Philipp Jekal both impressed as Ghita, the lady-in-waiting who must tell the Dwarf who he is – the Infanta lacks courage or even inclination – and Don Estoban, supposedly master of ceremonies, yet quite out of his depth. They helped us understand why, to appreciate failings that perhaps fell short of tragedy, but which certainly helped prepare the way for it. Smaller roles were all well taken, the chorus well prepared both vocally and on stage.

This was above all, though, an achievement for Donald Runnicles and the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper – pointing us, perhaps, to the truth that it is in the orchestra that Zemlinsky is most at home. It is easy to point to what he and his music are not – Schoenberg, Mahler, Strauss… – and many would doubtless have done so again on this occasion. Here, at least, the score never quite blooms as it might have done with those composers; and, to be fair, as it does in Zemlinsky’s own Lyric Symphony. But one heard the kinship with that score in particular, melodic and harmonic characteristics never to be reduced to ‘influence’, but of a nature that we may well recognise better when the composer’s time truly has come. Runnicles conducted as if this were a repertoire work, its harmonic structure and meaning as clear, its colours as specifically delineated and blended, as if he were conducting Wagner or Strauss (or Schoenberg, etc.) There was more here, one felt, than could possibly be discerned in a single hearing. The opera’s close in the ‘wrong’ key, Mahlerian ‘progressive’ tonality turned regressive, made its own tragic point. Zemlinsky and his opera were given a voice – if, but only if, we listen.

In 1959, another modernist critic, perhaps still more exacting than Schoenberg, Theodor Adorno, wrote of Zemlinsky in surprisingly glowing terms. He had ‘made more of the compromises characteristic of an eclectic than any other first-rate composer of his generation. Yet his eclecticism demonstrated genius in its truly seismographic sensitivity to the stimuli by which he allowed himself to be overwhelmed.’ We often look more warily than Adorno or Schoenberg upon Romantic notions of genius, even as our concert halls, opera houses, and much popular discourse cling to them. Once more: has Zemlinsky’s time come? What of Alma’s too? Will those questions ever be beside the point? Should they ever?

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.

Jaermann/Amaya Trio/Owen/Portugheis - Zemlinsky and Schoenberg, 5 March 2014

Hall One, Kings Place

Zemlinsky – Feiger Gedanken bängliches Schwanken, op.22 no.3; Volkslied, op.22 no.5; Das bucklige Männlein, op.22 no.6; Jetzt ist die Zeit, op.27 no.4; Die Verschmähte, op.27 no.5; Harlem Tänzerin, op.27 no.8

Schoenberg – Verklärte Nacht, op.4, arr. for piano trio by Eduard Steuermann
Schoenberg – Chamber Symphony no.1, op.9, version for two pianos

Marie Jaermann (soprano)

Amaya Piano Trio (Batia Murvitz (piano), Lea Tuuri (violin), Lauri Rantamoijanen (cello))

Charles Owen, Alberto Portugheis (pianos)

 

Zemlinsky benefited from a better selection of repertoire than he had received on the first evening of this two concert series, ‘Schoenberg – Master and Pupil’. He also benefited from a better performance of the pieces selected. The six songs performed, three from his op.22 set, and three from op.27, showed the mature composer rather than someone ineptly, if not uninterestingly, straining towards Brahms. The op.22 songs were written in 1934, and premiered in that year in Prague. We hear the composer offering a tonal richness partly born of Schoenberg, yet without following him into breathing the air of another planet, and with a relative concision, even toughness, characterising much of Zemlinsky’s later music, op.22 no.3, for instance, seemingly over in no time at all. Similarly for the op.27 songs, from three years later. Earlier preoccupations - the Wunderhorn setting, ‘Das bücklige Männlein’ inevitably puts us in mind of Der Zwerg – and later ones alike, for instance the Harlem renaissance in op.27 no.8, show themselves mutually accommodating rather than contradictory. It would be difficult to consider them works of genius – unlike, say, the Lyric Symphony – but they are accomplished songs, and that is how they came across in concert. Marie Jaermann offered cleanly sung, direct performances, not without occasional moments of shrillness, but giving a proper sense of the songs’ qualities. Alberto Portugheis’s rendition of the piano parts was uninspired, often heavy-handed and bludgeoning, but at least competent – which, sadly, was far more than could be said for his performance later on.

 

Eduard Steuermann’s arrangement of Verklärte Nacht for piano trio is a curiosity, though not an especially revealing one – unlike, say, the gorgeous transcriptions of Johann Strauss waltzes by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern (in almost every respect preferable to the originals!) There are passages in which the new instrumentation works well enough, but equally there are passages where it does not. The very opening, heard on the piano, sounds leaden, and there are too many instances where balances do not really work – partly, I think, a problem with performance, but not entirely so. What we heard from the Amaya Piano Trio was for the most part a decent enough performance, but somewhat short of inspired, which is probably what a transcription such as this really needs, if it is to come closer to convincing. Violinist Lea Tuuri’s intonation often left something to be desired; Batia Murvitz and Lauri Rantamoijanen proved more sensitive. There were, however, too many passages in which Schoenberg’s ebb and flow did not seem fully understood, or at least conveyed. This music needs to move like Tristan; here it often sounded four-square, sectional, the rests endured, counted through, rather than ‘played’.

 

One will generally learn something, hear something new, from transcriptions, even if they do not convince fully. It is certainly of interest to hear, if only occasionally, a work such as Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony in piano guise. I remember learning a great deal from hammering my way through a version for piano solo, as part of my preparations for conducting the piece years ago. Alas that was, at best, what Portugheis seemed to be doing here, a doubly frustrating situation since Charles Owen’s musicianship proved, insofar as one could tell, to be on another level entirely. Indeed, on the odd occasions when Portugheis fell silent, we suddenly, all too briefly, seemed to be in the realm of a real performance: tantalising, even beguiling. Then we returned to a realm of rehearsal speeds, fistfuls of wrong notes, general incomprehension. There seems little point in saying anything much on the performance as interpretation, but someone, at some point, really ought to have advised Portugheis against performing something of which he was clearly so utterly incapable. A long, drawn-out performance such as this would have been more likely to repel than to attract audiences to Schoenberg. In its way, it was as bizarre and as lacking in basic competence as Rick Jones's accompanying programme note, full of nonsense such as this: ‘The 19^th century had all but killed off the symphony.’ It read, at best, as if someone had been inhaling air from another planet entirely.

 

Manning/Bernstein/Portugheis, et al. - Zemlinsky, Dallapiccola, Nono, Gerhard, and Schoenberg, 4 March 2014

Hall One, Kings Place

Zemlinsky – Three Pieces, for cello and piano

Dallapiccola – Ciaccona, Intermezzo, and Adagio
Nono – ¿Donde estás, hermano?
Gerhard – Dances from Don Quixote
Schoenberg – Pierrot lunaire, op.21

Jane Manning (reciter)

Marie Jaermann, Seljan Nasibili (sopranos)
Katie Coventry (mezzo-soprano)
Anna Migalios (contralto)
Benjamin Baker (violin/viola)
Rohan de Saram (cello)
Susan Milan (flute/piccolo)
David Campbell (clarinets)
Julian Jacobson, Alberto Portugheis (piano)
Giora Bernstein (conductor)

 

With Schoenberg, I tend to take every opportunity I can – at least since my first visit to the Salzburg Festival, when understandably I chose to see Figaro over Boulez conducting Moses und Aron, though I have rued the loss ever since. Whether that be a matter of travelling to Leipzig to see the brilliant triple-bill of Schoenberg’s one-act operas, ‘Moderne Menschen’, or missing out on Leif Ove Andsnes playing Beethoven a couple of miles away at the Barbican, Schoenberg tends to exert a special call. Whether I should have been better off ignoring the call on this occasion remains unclear. Certainly if the standard of the first half of the concert had been repeated in the second, I should have been far better off staying at home. But then a good Pierrot lunaire more or less managed to save the day.

 

Jane Manning remains a force of nature, having given her first broadcast performance with Pierrot almost fifty years ago, in 1965. No one is ever likely to agree – even with his or her own thoughts, let alone anyone else’s – about how this work ‘should’ be performed. It is far better to allow that different performers bring different qualities to it on different occasions. If truth be told, Manning was probably wise to downplay the sung element in her recitation. The moments, relatively few, when she moved towards song suggested, not surprisingly, a voice that had known better days. And yet, her vast experience – not just of this, but of more than 350 (!) world premieres, a good number of which would have taken inspiration from Schoenberg in one way or another – shone through nevertheless. The words and their possibilities she clearly knew backwards. (Now there is an idea for another Pierrot-ensemble piece.) She knew, in a way composers such as Luigi Nono or Helmut Lachenmann would surely have appreciated, how to make the most of vowels, consonants, the journeys between them. Above all, she appreciated and communicated the strong element of cabaret. Manning’s was in every sense a performance, and all the better for it.

 

Not, of course, that the reciter is all there is to Pierrot, far from it. Giora Bernstein led a highly musical account from an excellent bunch of players. Perhaps balance was tilted a little too much away from the ensemble, but we have a host of other performances in which we can savour still more strongly what Stravinsky quite rightly considered an instrumental masterpiece. There were virtues aplenty, nevertheless. The passacaglia registered as such as strongly as I can recall, Night eventually obscuring in more than one sense. Dance rhythms made their Viennese impressions without exaggeration, the ‘Heimfahrt’ an especially fine example. Benjamin Baker’s violin and viola playing was perhaps particularly impressive, perfectly attuned to shifting mood and context, but the ensemble as a whole, including Julian Jacobson’s piano, such a relief after the first half, had no weak links.

 

As for that first half, well… Doubtless Alberto Portugheis’s heart was in the right place. The concert seems to have been his project; he was listed as ‘curator’. But sadly, it marked a triumph of ambition over even rudimentary technical ability; this was piano-playing that would have disgraced many an amateur performance, and may well have been the worst I have heard in a professional context. The opening Zemlinsky’s 1891 Three Pieces for cello and piano would most likely have done the composer no favours in a stronger account. Apparently rediscovered recently by Raphael Wallfisch – I am placing my trust in a programme note which, in many respects, proved otherwise highly fallible – they are at best apprentice works, straining towards, yet never coming remotely close to Brahms. Here, Portugheis and, much to my surprise, Rohan de Saram sounded as if they were sight-reading. There was little or no sense of musical collaboration; indeed, the players fell noticeably out of sync on more than one occasion. De Saram fared better in Dallapiccola’s Ciaccona, Intermezzo, and Adagio, though even when playing solo, it took him a while to get into his stride, the chaconne initially hesitant. At least, though, the performance offered some sense of the stature of the piece, its dodecaphonic lyricism and structural integrity a wonderful introduction to this appallingly neglected composer.

 

Nono’s ¿Donde estás, hermano? was provoked – the composer spoke of his need for such a ‘provocation’ to compose, to bear witness – by the ‘disappearances’ in Argentina. The music comes from Quando stanno morendo, Diario Polacco, no.2, but here without electronics. (Not that one would have known from the programme, which bathetically informed us that Nono had ‘strongly-held political views’.) The vocal quartet – Marie Jaermann, Seljan Nasibili, Katie Coventry, and Anna Migalios – seemed excellent. Alas, their performance was compromised by Portugheis’s insistence on conducting; they would surely have better off without. Plodding and without technique, Portugheis’s contribution was summed up by his score falling off the music stand towards the end. As for his solo rendition of Gerhard’s Don Quixote dances, the first opened quite strongly. At last, I thought, we might hear something from him equating to a real performance. I should not have tempted fate. Much of the rest sounded closer to a bumbling amateur’s initial read-through. From time to time, some sense of rhythm or pulse emerged, only roundly to be defeated.

 

Sadly, then, I was reminded of Boulez’s observation about the self-defeating nature of the occasional performances of music by the Second Viennese School in his youth. The technical standard had been so poor that they did more harm than good, an incitement to him to mount his own performances, leading to the foundation of the Domaine musical. If only, if only…