Maltman/Johnson - Schwanengesang, 20 April 2010

Wigmore Hall

Schubert - Schwanengsang, D 957

Christopher Maltman (baritone)
Graham Johnson (piano)

Some of Schubert’s strangest music may be found in his final collection of songs, Schwanengesang. It is an unsettling collection and it unsettled here, though perhaps not to the extent that last November’s quite outstanding performance of Die schöne Müllerin from the same artists, Christopher Maltman and Graham Johnson. That cycle and Winterreise possess an intrinsic unity, narrative and otherwise, that was never intended for the songs in the present collection, but there can be opportunity, in imparting a unity of one’s own – as, essentially, Schubert’s publisher, Tobias Haslinger did in the first place. Maltman and Johnson had no intention of shirking that possibility, the ‘cycle’, never light in the first place, darkening considerably through the Heine settings. There were a few technical blemishes. Maltman’s intonation sometimes wandered, especially in the higher register; though this did not bother me unduly, it might have done some. And Johnson on occasion could sound a little effortful, as if Schubert’s piano writing did not come so easily to him as once it had, though one should not exaggerate. On the whole, however, this proved an excellent performance.

One was certainly drawn in from the very opening, the piano sounding the murmuring brooklet (‘Rauschendes Bächlein’), to be followed by the baritone, this water, as so often in Schubert, suggesting far more than just a natural phenomenon. The change of mood in the third stanza of this opening Rellstab setting, Liebesbotschaft, was subtle yet palpable, telling of ‘her’, whoever she may be, lost in her dreams. In Kriegers Ahnung, the agitated insistence of the piano part came across clearly, if, as I suggested above, a little less readily than once it might have done: still, there is nothing ‘easy’ about Schubert in any case. Maltman brought to the final stanza an almost Wagnerian climax – many a battle still calls – before subsiding into desolation. The expectancy of the following song, Frühlings-Sehnsucht was thus all the more poignant, and all the more ready to be dashed, especially as the protagonist’s Romantic ardour increased. Much the same could be said of Ständchen, an unsettling serenade if ever there were one, all the more so for its relative containment. Thus, when Maltman really let rip in the second stanza of Aufenthalt – his tears as waves – the sentiment was overwhelming. Johnson always proved adept at teasing meaning from Schubert’s modulations, nowhere more so than in the interludes to the final song from this group, Abschied.

And so, on to Heine. ‘Ich unglücksel’ger Atlas!’ we heard (‘I, unfortunate Atlas!’) Unfortunate, indeed wretched, he sounded, though, quite rightly, richly so: Maltman’s is a beautiful voice. The contrast between major and minor was telling in the first stanza of Ihr Bild and, still more revealing, almost eradicated in its final stanza, as the lover tells of having lost ‘her’. Only Mozart is quite so heartbreaking when he smiles through tears. I used the word ‘unsettling’ earlier: it is apt too for the strange harmonies of Die Stadt, which here sounded close to, arguably beyond, the world of the late piano sonatas. It was an excellent idea to move without pause into the beauty of loneliness instantiated in Am Meer. I could not help but think that the bitterness with which the final poison of tears is recounted might well, for the composer, refer to Schubert’s ‘other’ poison(s) too. And then, Der Doppelgänger, that terrible, unbearable song, almost, but not quite a scena: just to watch Maltman, let alone hear him, one would have known what sort of ghostly confrontation this was. The touching sincerity of Die Taubenpost could not but sound strained after that. Two encores, Herbst and Der Winterabend, both beautifully, limpidly performed, continued, but unsurprisingly could not quite achieve, the dissipation of such tension.

This performance, like those of Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, has been recorded for the Wigmore Hall Live in-house record label.

Oper Leipzig's new season, 2010-11

The renaissance of Oper Leipzig under its new director of productions, Peter Konwitschny, seems set to continue. The season 2010-11 will witness no fewer than seven new productions. Fifty years to the day since the opening of the Leipzig Opera House on 9 October 1960, the same work, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, by Leipzig’s greatest son, will mark the anniversary in a new production from Jochen Biganzoli, and conducted by Axel Kober. Konwitschny continues his Gluck cycle with Iphigénie en Aulide, conducted by Paulo Carignani, and brings two other new productions to Leipzig: Così fan tutte and Elektra. General Music Director, Ulf Schirmer will conduct the latter, as well as concert performances of Die Walküre. Other new productions are of Hänsel und Gretel, conducted by Schirmer again (director: Birgit Eckenweber), the first ever stage production of Deutsches Miserere by Bertolt Brecht and Paul Dessau, from director Dietrich Hilsdorf, and the first European performance of the children’s opera, Die arabische Prinzessin, with music from the short-lived Juan Crisostómo de Arriaga. Revivals to note are another Konwitschny production, Eugene Onegin, Willy Decker’s Tristan und Isolde, conducted by Kober, Parsifal, under Schirmer’s baton, and La Rondine. The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra plays for all performances.

A full schedule may be found by clicking here.

Varèse 360° (2) and (3) - London Sinfonietta/National Youth Orchestra/Atherton/Daniel, 18 April 2010

Queen Elizabeth Hall and Royal Festival Hall

Varèse – Hyperprism, for wind and percussion
Un grand sommeil noir, for voice and piano
Octandre
Offrandes, for soprano and chamber orchestra
Poème électronique
Intégrales, for wind and percussion

London Sinfonietta
David Atherton (conductor)
Cathie Boyd (staging, director, video, lighting)
Elizabeth Atherton (soprano)
Sound Intermedia
Pippa Nissen (video)
Zerlina Hughes (lighting)
Dan Ayling (stage manager)

***********
Varèse-Chou Wen-Chung – Tuning Up
Varèse – Arcana
Nocturnal, for soprano, male chorus, and small orchestra
Amériques

Elizabeth Watts (soprano)
Laudibus
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain
Paul Daniel (conductor)
Same production team as previous concert

**********

These two Sunday concerts completed the Southbank Centre’s presentation of the complete Varèse, initiated with a London Sinfonietta concert two nights previously. The Sinfonietta under David Atherton played for the first, again in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, after which we walked across to the Royal Festival Hall, to hear the National Youth Orchestra.

Hyperprism opened the Sinfonietta concert, immediately impressing upon us the urban nature of Varèse’s musical landscapes. Brash and virile, it also had its sleazier moments, in which I fancied I could hear a kinship with another Busoni pupil, Kurt Weill. Un grand sommeil seems to be the only surviving work from Varèse’s pre-1921 period, the others having been destroyed in a warehouse fire: myth-making for a year zero that is almost too good to be true, and yet appears to be just that. It was fascinating to hear this Debussyan Verlaine setting from Elizabeth Atherton and John Constable. The former’s diction was outstanding, though she was a little too tremulous in her delivery. For the first time in the series, we heard a stringed instrument, a double bass, in Octandre. The sinuous woodwind opening, especially Gareth Hulse’s oboe solo, contrasted strongly, as it should, with subsequent jaggedness. As so often with Varèse, one heard echoes of Stravinsky: here the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Offrandes, the first of Varèse’s American works, followed. Here, we heard a few more strings (two violins, viola, cello, double bass, and harp), softening the general tone a little, and providing a very tentative bridge with tradition. Elizabeth Atherton seemed more at home in this highly dramatic performance, in which trumpeter Alistair Mackie also shone in his solo work.

One cannot really say anything about a ‘performance’ of the still extraordinary Poème électronique. The last time I had heard it was in a Sinfonietta concert at Kings Place, in which Le Corbusier’s original film was shown. Here the images were more abstract, arguably permitting one to concentrate more closely upon the music, though the former experience was probably the more interesting. At any rate, this sonic tragedy, initiated by tolling bells and culminating in electronic storm-winds, had lost none of its raw, elemental power. Finally came Intégrales: Varèse surely wrote nothing more masterly than this. The performance again brought out Stravinskian antecedents, the Rite of Spring in particular, through the sharp, insistent repetition of rhythmic cells. Oboe solos once again stood out as particularly exquisite, but it was perhaps above all the hieratic nature of the work that shone through, the chorales presaging a sharply materialist version, if that can be imagined, of Messiaen.

And so to the Festival Hall, to hear the NYO under Paul Daniel. Or not under Paul Daniel, in the opening Tuning Up, Varèse’s witty parody of the opening procedure of a typical orchestral concert. I especially enjoyed the quotation from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, but most captivating was the sense of an event coming into life. I am yet to be convinced that the full orchestra – and the NYO was more than full! – presents the best of Varèse, but Arcana is surely the best of orchestral Varèse. What one heard – and indeed saw – most of all was the sheer enthusiasm with which these young musicians, none older than eighteen, approach and execute their task. It is testament to their achievement that no thought of ‘difficulty’ entered the mind: Varèse was above all enjoyable. Once again echoes of the Rite were heard in what sounded like a veritable concerto for orchestra. And at last one heard soaring strings given their head.

The second half opened with Varèse’s last work, Nocturnal. Elizabeth Watts and the vocal group Laudibus gave a committed performance, replete with histrionics of crucifixion. I cannot claim to understand a work I find frankly bizarre – whoever would have linked Varèse and Anaïs Nin?! – but one cannot gainsay its dramatic effect. We then heard the British premiere of the original, 1921 version of Amériques, including offstage brass and music excised from the composer’s final, slightly more practical, version. The sheer extravagance of the orchestration was relished by Daniel and the orchestra, though I think more is probably ultimately less here: interesting but not necessarily to be preferred – unlike, say, Petrushka or The Firebird. Fantastical, optimistic, sprawling, full of incident, this was clearly the America of Varèse’s dreams, even if they were never to be fulfilled. There was also, however, or at least I fancied so, a more Gallic edge to some of the music that would be excised, indicating a soul in transition. It was, then, all the more fitting that, for an encore, we should hear the work which, when Varèse heard it in Turin, convinced him to become a composer: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. And after the complete Varèse, it was perhaps a relief to hear a Debussy performance that was warm, almost Romantic, rather than stridently modernist. The true radicalism of this first piece of twentieth-century music will, in any case, always tell. I suspect that this will not be the last time we shall hear the excellent flautist Joshua Batty so sensitively voice its tones.

Varèse 360° (1) - London Sinfonietta/Atherton, 16 April 2010

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Varèse – Ionisation, for thirteen percussionists
Varèse – Density 21.5, for solo flute
Varèse-Chou Wen-chung – Dance for Burgess, fragment for chamber orchestra
Varèse – Ecuatorial, for bass and ensemble
Varèse-Chou Wen-chung – Etude pour Espace
Varèse – Déserts, for wind, piano, percussion, and tape

London Sinfonietta
David Atherton (conductor)
Cathie Boyd (staging, director, video, lighting)
Sir John Tomlinson (bass)
EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble
Jonathan Golove, Natasha Farny (cello theremin)
Sound Intermedia
Pippa Nissen (video)
Zerlina Hughes (lighting)
Dan Ayling (stage manager)

The complete Varèse in three weekend concerts was a brave undertaking, the fruition of a long-held ambition of Gillian Moore, the Southbank Centre’s Head of Contemporary Culture, richly rewarded in a queue for returns outside the Queen Elizabeth Hall. I admit that I was surprised, though delighted, and wondered how many of the audience were drawn in by the multi-media presentation. For me, that aspect was the least interesting, much of it barely going beyond something one might see on a computer screen-saver, though it often had the merit of changing form in a fashion that delineated structure, doubtless a useful ‘visual score’ element for some. Still, it did no harm, and seemed to elicit appreciation from many.

Ionisation – could one ask for a more ‘twentieth-century’ title? – sounds barely less radical than it must have done seventy years ago. It received from the percussionists of the London Sinfonietta, under David Atherton, a performance of great impetus, fierce in its uncompromising radicalism, like a miniature Rite of Spring on speed – in more than one sense. As with so much Varèse, this is in many respects an utterly urban landscape: music for Le Corbusier, if you will. And yet, an African primitivism also shone through. Density 21.5 also bares its scientific inspiration in its title, in this case the density of platinum: the work was written for a new platinum instrument, made for flautist George Barrère. This evening’s flautist – Michael Cox, I think – gave an unusually, yet refreshingly, muscular account, which could yet hark back to Debussy when necessary. Dance for Burgess is an occasional work, written, believe it or now, for Burgess Meredith’s musical comedy, Happy as Larry, whose run lasted all of a single night. The Sinfonietta presented a raucous, almost Ivesian fragment, with gleaming, hard-edged brass: a typical Varese sound, with more than a nod, as Malcolm Macdonald’s excellent programme notes suggested, to Cubism.

The first half culminated in the extraordinary Ecuatorial, which might here have been subtitled ‘John Tomlinson sings Varèse’: perhaps only surprising to those who think of this searching artist simply as a Wagnerian. Birtwistle, Henze, and many others would tell us otherwise. Tomlinson provided a proper tension between raging reminiscent of a bass Gurrelieder Waldemar, if you can imagine such a thing, and something still more elemental, more sage: the Rite again? There is, and I do not mean this in a negative sense, something nonsensical to a modern, Western listener about this Mayan incantation. And there are, of course, many unexpected sounds from the orchestra, not least, in such a setting, the organ, here played by Iain Farrington. It is interesting that, in its – unconscious? – homage to the Doktor Faust of Varèse’s teacher, Busoni, the instrument actually elicits more surprise than the two theremin cellos.

A certain mediævalism, perhaps an almost inevitable consequence of choral writing, announced itself in the Etude pour Espace, ‘orchestrated and arranged for spatialised live concert performance’ by one of Varèse’s pupils, Chou Wen-chung. The EXAUDI vocal ensemble acquitted itself very well, both chorally and soloistically, the work emerging majestic, triumphant, like coronation music for the twentieth century – and beyond. Again, Varèse showed us that uncompromising need not equal ‘difficult’, and indeed ‘difficulty’ is often as much a product of listeners’ prejudice as anything else. Déserts presents quite another landscape, and here the video images seemed well judged in presenting suggestions of a nuclear age world. The performance was implacable, both immediate and, from its muted brass, distanced. Woodwind are equally crucial, of course, likewise the tape interpolations that so shocked the 1954 audience at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. The block writing – tape and instruments are never heard together – coincided with visual variation, but I cannot imagine that anyone would have failed to register the change aurally. One could hear the deserts, whether urban or extra-terrestrial, of the title far better than they might ever be seen.

Razumovsky Ensemble - Beethoven and Brahms, 13 April 2010

Wigmore Hall

Beethoven – Piano Trio in B-flat major, op.97, ‘Archduke’
Brahms – Piano Quartet no.1 in G minor, op.25

Boris Brovtsyn (violin)
Yuri Zhislin (viola)
Oleg Kagan (violoncello)
Ronan O’Hora (piano)

Chamber music on the grand scale here, with Beethoven’s Archduke Trio and the first of Brahms’s piano quartets, but did the performances match up? In many ways, they too were projected on such a scale, notably through a recognisable, refreshingly ‘Russian’ string tone, reminiscent of many recordings we know so well. The piano playing of Ronan O’Hora, though, proved somewhat reticent, not quite from the same mould. This ensured that his instrument did not emerge excessively dominant, especially in the Brahms work, with its notorious problems of balance, but greater heroism might have proved a better fit. What undoubtedly shone through both performances, however, was a welcome clarity of texture.

The Archduke opened in perhaps surprisingly soloistic fashion, at least from the string players, violinist Boris Brovtsyn and cellist Oleg Kagan, founder and sustainer of the Razumovsky Ensemble. This Beethoven was lyrical through and through, though with structure clearly demarcated. The blend between piano and pizzicato was especially pleasing. There was a nice spring to the rhythms in the scherzo, without loss to the lyrical impulse. The trio’s chromaticism emerged, properly, as both continuation and contrast: not an easy trick to pull off. However, it was with the reprise of the scherzo that the interpretation veered towards the sectional. Underlining of thematic material was a little laboured: by now, we should know it well enough. The slow movement proceeded with dignity, though the piano part often veered towards the matter of fact, with the strings more overtly ‘emotional’. There was a good sense of progress throughout the variations; overall, however, the mood was perhaps a little too relaxed. Lyricism should not equate, especially in Beethoven, to lack of tension. The finale once again witnessed melody to the fore, but the sectional quality of some of what had gone before was equally apparent.



Brahms’s G minor Piano Quartet opened promisingly, with an instantly ‘Brahmsian’ sound. The arrival of violist Yuri Zhislin certainly aided richness of texture, but also seemed in general to galvanise the performance. That Brahms’s lines sang so freely as they did is testament to the hard-won clarity achieved, without sacrifice to tonal refulgence, at least from the strings. Occasional lapses in intonation registered but one should not exaggerate. The second movement is an intermezzo, not a scherzo, but it retains aspects of the latter, and so it did in this performance, albeit with ghostly shadows also making their presence felt. Often on the cusp of daylight, without ever quite striding forth, this was most convincing. It was a pity, then, that the major-mode trio lacked focus. When its material recurred, following the scherzo’s reprise, it was too throwaway: it needs greater poise, more magic. The Andante con moto was more con moto than Andante; it needs greater room to breathe, emerging somewhat straitjacketed. There was, however, some gorgeous string playing, considered on its own terms, and there was a splendid martial swing to some of the later music, straining towards the symphonic. The Hungarian finale impressed with the unanimity of its opening and continued to impress when the strings led. In pizzicato passages and on other occasions when the piano should have been more prominent, there was not quite the same sense of direction, with the consequence that the movement again gave a somewhat sectional impression

Le nozze di Figaro, Komische Oper, 6 April 2010

Images: Monika Rittershaus

(sung in German, as Die Hochzeit des Figaro: translation by Bettina Bartz and Werner Hintze)

Count Almaviva – Tom Erik Lie
Countess Almaviva – Ina Kringelborn
Susanna – Christina Landshamer
Figaro – Tilmann Rönnebeck
Cherubino – Olivia Vermeulen
Marcellina – Christiane Oertel
Basilio – Thomas Ebenstein
Don Curzio – Peter Renz
Bartolo – Hans-Peter Scheidegger
Antonio – Hans-Martin Nau
Barbarina – Julia Giebel
Two Young Girls – Saskia Krispin, Mechthild Sauer

Barrie Kosky (director)
Jasmina Hadžiahmetović (revival director)
Klaus Grünberg (designs)
Marianna Häntzsche, Birgit Wünschmann (costumes)
Franck Evin (lighting)
Werner Hintze (dramaturgy)

Choral Soloists of the Komische Oper, Berlin (chorus master: Robert Heimann)
Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin
Patrick Lange (conductor)

Comedy clearly means different things to different people, and, to be fair, it can unquestionably mean different things in different contexts. I was, however, quite unprepared for Barrie Kosky’s reduction of Mozart’s and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s – not to mention Beaumarchais’s - sophisticated comedy into an incoherent farce centring, bizarrely and apparently arbitrarily, around a middle-class Jewish wedding. Having greatly admired Kosky’s Abu Ghraib production of Iphigénie en Tauride for the Komische Oper, I was intrigued as to what political point might be made here. None at all, it seemed – and, indeed, it was difficult to find any point whatsoever being made. Moreover, where Kosky’s sensitivity towards Gluck’s score had been noteworthy, it was difficult to find any sense even of respect towards Mozart’s, since more than once, it found itself interrupted by directorial imposition, whether from the Count’s extraordinarily loud mobile telephone, a weird, Klezmer-like accordion interpolation during the third act dances, or, perhaps worst of all, Bartolo’s rendition of My Way in the middle of the fourth act.

I eventually gave up trying to discern any coherence to this Carry on Figaro. Insofar as it matters, various people – it is not at all clear why they were living together in the same house – seemed to be gathered for a wedding. Many extras kept appearing out of highly contrived – and not in Da Ponte’s sense – stage openings and engaging in slapstick activities. Sometimes the libretto, in German translation, was tampered with. Marcellina’s cry of ‘Mazel tov!’ was not the first and certainly not the last instance. At other times, the more-or-less original text was rendered nonsensical: what on earth did it mean to speak of the Count’s embassy to London, Cherubino’s commission, or the old days in Seville? It seemed very odd that the Countess should sleep in a closet, by which I mean a place for storing clothes, rather than anything more interesting, though the brief interlude of lesbian dancing during the third act female chorus might have led somewhere – alas, it did not. The truly bizarre transformation of Basilio into something beyond Sascha Baren Cohen’s Brüno, replete with tight cycling shorts and a desperate tendency to try to hump every male leg that moved, amused some, but for this reviewer seemed merely to regress beyond the days of the late Kenneth Williams. As for the strange scent of apples sent out through the theatre at the beginning of the fourth act, I cannot begin to attempt to explain. Where were the social tensions, whether of Mozart’s declining society of orders, or any other time? There was no fruitful tension, or even just tension, between work and staging, so far as I could tell, just a lack of connection. Doubtless this is all terribly anti-post-modernist of me, but here I stand…

It is, then, a relief to relate that the musical side of things was much superior. Figaro in German is always going to sound odd to me; I listen to it for Furtwängler’s sake, but that is generally the only reason to do so. And the German language is no more suited to Mozart’s lines here than English is. German does not lend itself to such quicksilver delivery, especially during recitatives, a necessary qualification not always realised in performance. It was thus a relief to hear Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio in Italian; presumably the idea was that Cherubino had written the song in a foreign language. Quite why, who knows? The particular elegance and sentiment of slower arias does not translate well either.

Nevertheless, as I said, the general level of musical performance impressed. Patrick Lange encouraged a full, decidedly non-authenticke sound from the orchestra, which played with verve and with tenderness. There were occasions when tempi were on the fast side, but few conductors nowadays, Sir Colin Davis excepted, are likely to satisfy entirely in that respect. There was a commendable flexibility to Lange’s approach, which stood light-years from today’s merely fashionable. I was a little puzzled by the fortepianist, Pawel Poplawski’s Meistersinger interpolations, and a little more puzzled that no one else appeared to notice.
Given that the singers’ energies were perforce often directed to the business of stage action, there was much to admire vocally too. Tilmann Rönnebeck, himself a substitute Figaro, was ailing, but did a more than manful job in the title role. Hoarse by the fourth act, he had managed to hold a little in reserve for his final lines, and could certainly act. Christina Landshamer was a lively, sweet-toned Susanna, without a trace of the irritating quality that can sometimes attach itself to portrayals of the character. Tom Erik Lie had the masculinity of voice required by the Count, but his consort, Ina Kringelborn, did not quite attain the requisite grace and nobility. She was not, of course, helped by a production that presented her merely as an annoyed, pampered wife, whose ultimate forgiveness was childlishly undercut by a final finger-wagging. (That moment of forgiveness should be divine in its nature; here, theology was replaced by the sitcom.) Christiane Oertel and Hans-Peter Scheidegger’s Marcellina and Bartolo emerged as more central characters than is generally the case: well-sung and, in Oertel’s case, convincingly sassy. Thomas Ebenstein certainly threw his all into Kosky’s outlandish conception of the Almavivas’ music-master. Clearly a talented singing actor, it would be good to hear him again (see here) in a more conventional portrayal.

Perhaps it indicates a lack of a sense of humour that I do not find lots of coat hangers falling down or someone manically waving around a vacuum cleaner intrinsically hilarious; perhaps it renders me ‘elitist’ that I look for something more in The Marriage of Figaro. But there it is. It seemed to me a great waste of considerable musical talent. At least the production was not inflicted on the more fragile Così fan tutte.

Berlin Festtage (5) - Tristan und Isolde, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 5 April 2010

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Tristan – Peter Seiffert
King Marke – René Pape
Isolde – Waltraud Meier
Kurwenal – Roman Trekel
Melot – Reiner Goldberg
Brangäne – Ekaterina Gubanova
Shepherd/Young Sailor – Florian Hoffmann
Steersman – Arttu Kataja

Harry Kupfer (director)
Hans Schavernoch (designs)
Buki Schiff (costumes)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

To direct Tristan und Isolde must be one of the most difficult tasks in the operatic world, though not of course so difficult as to perform it. Wagner, notoriously yet surely correctly, fretted about its power, writing to Mathilde Wesendonck, ‘I fear the opera will be banned – unless the whole thing is parodied in a bad performance –: only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, – I cannot imagine it otherwise.’ If a ‘perfectly good’ performance in the strictest sense remained elusive – has anyone other than Furtwängler accomplished that? – this was, in terms of staging and performance, probably the best overall that I have seen and heard. No one in my theatrical experience has matched the conducting of Bernard Haitink at Covent Garden, and he too was blessed by a good, albeit generally uncomprehended production, that of the late Herbert Wernicke, but the startling, indeed staggering, vocal inadequacy of the Tristans conductor and audience had to suffer could not, alas, be entirely overlooked. Moreover, of the three Tristans in the theatre I have heard conducted by Daniel Barenboim, this was surely the best, above all in as searing a first act as I have ever heard, reminiscent of Karl Böhm at Bayreuth.

But let us return first to the matter of directing Tristan. The difficulty seems largely to centre upon the necessity to do very little, not something that comes easily to many directors. And by saying ‘do very little,’ I do not suggest reliance upon a superficial, empty minimalism, for, at the same time, something must be done. A concert performance could certainly work, up to a point, and would be vastly preferable to most of what is put before us, but staging nevertheless makes all the difference. Perhaps it is because, in Tristan, Wagner came closest to the Attic tragedy he so revered, that straightforwardness seems the only viable course here. (A production with masks might be an ‘idea’ with potential.) There is no point in suggesting that Tristan is ‘about’ anything other than what it is about, which might sound tautological and probably is, but it is certainly the case that some productions, profoundly unfaithful to a work, can succeed in turning it into something else. This does not seem to be the case with Tristan.

It needs, then, an intelligent director with the humility to recognise these difficult truths. In this resurrection of Harry Kupfer’s 2000 production, its thirty-second performance, the drama found just that. (About the intervening production, which I saw twice here at the Linden opera house, the less said the better, or at least the more deferred until another occasion the better. Covent Garden’s recent mishap with Christof Loy was considerably worse.) Kupfer is not a director averse to ‘intervention’, but here he shows an awareness of when not to intervene. To transform Wagner’s metaphysics into bourgeois drama might tempt some – though I cannot imagine why – but Kupfer and his team (Hans Schavernoch and Buki Schiff) avoid that trap. Non-specificity seems to suit this particular myth best, and that is what we saw here. The work is no more ‘about’ Cornwall than it is ‘about’ whatever directorial conceit one often must suffer. Nor is it in a straightforward sense ‘about’ the time at which Wagner wrote it, though considered references as opposed to wholesale relocation will probably do no harm. So we have a mix of the timeless and vaguely nineteenth-century costume, neither fetishised, both at the service of the drama. And likewise we have as the centrepiece of each act a fallen angel, with a Victorian touch of ‘bad nineteenth-century,’ such as Thomas Mann would surely have appreciated, but more importantly, a revolving space for the true, inner action, and an ever-present reminder of the fallen human condition. If Schopenhauer had understood, he would have approved.

Barenboim’s musical direction was equally fine. I have already mentioned the outstanding first act, heard as if in one breath, and with a dramatic surge such as one might fear one would never hear again. The following two acts were perhaps not quite pitched at the same level, but nor did they fall far short. And the playing of the Staatskapelle Berlin, whose praises I have often had cause to sing, was simply magnificent. The depth and tone of the strings were such that one could have mistaken them for Bayreuth of a certain vintage: no Philharmonic-style internationalisation here. The woodwind solos – not just that bass clarinet – were, aided by Barenboim’s balancing, dramatically telling and radically prophetic of Wagner’s successors, from Debussy to Schoenberg and beyond. One of Barenboim’s strengths in Wagner has been his awareness of a certain degree of ‘French’ style that can work here, whilst remaining fundamentally true to Furtwänglerian inspiration. This orchestra truly sounded as if it were representing the Schopenhauerian Will and the Greek chorus, twin poles of Wagner’s orchestral æsthetics.

It may come as no surprise to hear that Waltraud Meier turned in a superlative performance as Isolde, but it still must be said. She lives the role like no one else alive and perhaps offers a more rounded, nuanced portrayal than many of her revered predecessors. Commanding the attention through vocal and stage presence, she was so much more suited to this production than to that in Paris. And, crucially, the production permitted her dignity, assumed as to the manor, or rather to the crown, born. My accompanying friend, whom I had doubtless bored to tears by previous raving, now understood why I had tested her patience so. René Pape must likewise surely be today’s Marke of choice. It is a role in which many succeed, as grateful as that of Tristan is not. But to ally dignity and forbearance with quite such beauty of tone is a rare gift indeed. Roman Trekel had a surprisingly shaky start as Kurwenal, sounding tired, but this was soon overcome by a searching, moving account. Amongst the smaller roles, Florian Hoffmann proved as sweet a toned Shepherd as I can recall, marrying to that vocal allure a deeply considered account of the words. And then, there is the role that is anything but ‘small’. Peter Seiffert attempted the impossible and came off with credit. So many singers are so unequal to the task that one steels oneself the moment a Tristan comes on stage, but Seiffert had the stamina and, by and large, the technical resources. It was a somewhat generalised portrayal, but within its own parameters it worked. What was odd, though, was the number of verbal lapses, when Seiffert sang words that perhaps rhymed with what they should have been or bore some other similarity. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – I cannot recall precise examples, but there was too much violence to verbal meaning for comfort, let alone for Wagner’s ‘perfectly good’ performance. Yet, in many other respects, the present performance came close. What a wonderful conclusion to the Staatsoper’s 2010 Festtage!

Berlin Festtage (4) - Hommage à Pierre Boulez: Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Boulez and Barenboim, 4 April 2010

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Boulez – Messagesquisse, for violoncello solo and six violoncelli
Anthèmes 2, for violin solo and live electronics
Le Marteau sans maître

Hilary Summers (contralto)
Michael Barenboim (violin)
Hassan Moataz El Molla (violoncello)
Andrew Gerzso (IRCAM computer music designer)
Arshia Cont (IRCAM computer production)
Frédéric Prin (IRCAM sound engineer)
Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez (conductors)

It was not quite Pierre Boulez’s 85th birthday, which had fallen on 26 March, but this all-Boulez concert at the Linden opera house, bilingually entitled Hommage à Pierre Boulez zum 85. Geburtstag, marked the climax of the Berlin celebrations for this anniversary. Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra were led by Daniel Barenboim in the opening Messagesquisse and the composer himself in Anthèmes 2 and Le marteau sans maître.

The young Egyptian cellist, Hassan Moataz El Molla, was the excellent soloist in Messagesequisse, joined by six colleagues: Sary Khalifeh, Alberto Martos Lozano, Noa Chorin, Jana Semaan, Linor Katz, and Nassib Ahmadieh. Although there is no electronic element, the use of six other cellos provides a spatial element. These instruments are less an ‘orchestra’, at least in the typical concerto sense, than agents that further, develop, deepen, amplify the solo line. Sometimes akin to a penumbra, sometimes providers of kinetic energy, they present a commentary upon and broadening of the serial processes at work, which, typically for Boulez, provide unity even if they cannot necessarily be heard in themselves. (Here, actually, one can, hear them, at least at times.) Careful shading is crucial – and so it was in this performance. Boulez’s tribute to Paul Sacher, written in 1976 for that great musical patron, became a fitting opening tribute to the composer himself.

Anthèmes 2, which I had heard from Carolin Widmann in Salzburg last year, was now bravely essayed by Michael Barenboim. As pointed out in the excellent programme notes by Yuri Isabella Kato, Boulez’s titles for both the former and present work are portmanteau neologisms, derived from messages and esquisses in the one case, and thèmes and the English ‘anthems’ in the latter. This performance, though hardly without virtuosity – how could it be? – seemed perhaps less overtly so than Widmann’s, live electronics, expertly provided by the IRCAM team under the composer’s supervision, very much to the fore, with speakers placed around the relatively small house. Boulez’s sound world could now be truly transformed, technological developments enabling the electronic developments of which he had long hoped. There was to this performance a fine sense of the open-endedness, the lack of closure, which for Boulez has always been a crucial aspect of serial procedure. It was telling and appropriate, then, that the electronic sound should fade after that of the violinist.

After the interval came what perhaps remains the composer’s most celebrated work, Le Marteau sans maître. Hilary Summers, who sings the contralto part in Boulez’s most recent recording, was joined by Guy Eshed on flute, violist Ori Kam, Caroline Delume on guitar, percussionist Tomer Yariv, and Pedro Manuel Torréjon Gonzáles and Adi Morag on vibraphone and xylorimba respectively. It is by now unavoidable, and indeed quite right, that Le Marteau sans maître has become a ‘classic’, but that did not prevent a sense of rediscovery, doubtless aided by the youthful enthusiasm of the instrumentalists. What an opportunity for them – and how well taken! Allusions, subtle but to this listener unmistakeable, to Pierrot lunaire were to be heard even in the first movement: the lineage is not straightforward but certainly exists. The precision of rhythmic underpinning ensured that warmth and fantasy could be developed above. Voices were both distinctive and complementary, sometimes even merging, as in the flute and viola’s near-marriage at the end of L’Artisanat furieux and the increasing ‘instrumental’ quality of the contralto’s contribution to the final movement, the double, Bel édifice et les pressentiments. Summers’s diction was exemplary throughout, and her almost simple - never simplistic! - directness was something refreshingly different from the qualities other singers have brought to the work, every bit as compelling. Each instrumentalist had an opportunity to shine. Particular instances I noticed were the fine viola playing of Ori Kam in the fourth movement, the stereo pointillism of tuned percussion in Bourreaux de solitude, and, in the penultimate movement, the third commentaire on that poem, the counterpoint of underpinning percussion, tuned and untuned, with the ravishing beauty of the punctuated arabesques of Guy Eshed’s flute solo, already looking forward to …explosante-fixe…. The seventh movement had proved Webernesque in its concision and expressive quality, whilst the final double was perhaps the most seductive of all, once again in Eshed’s solo, but also in the mesmerising closing bars. It is a tribute to the performers that one could only wonder at why many listeners initially found this music so ‘difficult’.

Berlin Festtage (3): Barenboim/Staatskapelle Berlin/Boulez - Webern, Schoenberg, Boulez, and Berg, 3 April 2010

Philharmonie, Berlin

Webern – Passacaglia, op.1
Schoenberg – Piano Concerto, op.42
Boulez – Improvisations sur Mallarmé, no.2
Berg – Three Orchestral Pieces, op.6

Christine Schäfer (soprano)
Daniel Barenboim (piano)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Pierre Boulez (conductor)

It was a little disappointing to arrive at the Philharmonie to meet with a change of programme: two of Boulez’s Improvisations sur Mallarmé having been replaced by Webern’s Passcaglia, with a subsequent re-ordering. Not that hearing Boulez conduct Webern is a disappointing prospect, but to hear more of Pli selon pli would have been more welcome still, especially with Christine Schäfer on hand. At any rate, Boulez and the Staatskapelle delivered a first-rate account of Webern’s opus one. The opening soft pizzicato chords were perfectly audible – and meaningful. It was interesting to note that the opening was slower than Boulez has often taken the work, indicative of a greater flexibility that he now seems willing to employ. Mahlerian sounds have always been present in his Webern, but this was perhaps even more the case on the present occasion. It was, moreover, remarkable quite how Viennese in tone he made the Berlin strings sound, and the Staatskapelle’s woodwind soloists proved equally ravishing. This was a splendid opening, then, to the concert.

To have Daniel Barenboim as concerto soloist, with another conductor, is now a relatively uncommon occurrence, but Barenboim’s partnership with Boulez dates back to the early 1960s. They have performed the Schoenberg concerto together a number of times; the experience told. From the very opening, there was a strong melodic profile to the piano, taken up by the orchestra, as if this were Brahms chamber music. (Is Boulez finally overcoming his dislike of Brahms?) Key to the performance’s success was a keen rhythmic spring throughout. Barenboim’s voicing ensured that the particular characteristics of Schoenberg’s piano writing, for instance octaves and his favoured harmonies, shone through, likewise the composer’s weighting of chords. Soloists from the orchestra gratefully took their opportunities to shine during the Adagio, as Boulez span the music’s sinuous lines to moving effect. It perhaps goes without saying, but should not, that conductor and pianist provided coherence of line and harmonic progression throughout the performance. There was a true sense of narrative, even if that could not be translated into words. Barenboim’s beauty of touch provided much to savour too. Schoenberg emerged, then, as once again saying ‘yes’ under trying circumstances; victory was not easy and was therefore all the sweeter when it came.

The remaining Boulez Improvisation was the second, ‘Une dentelle s’abolit’ (‘A lace abolishes itself’). He seems to relish the multivalent meanings of Mallarmé’s text just as much as conductor as he did as composer. Time emerged both suspended and in motion, whilst those ravishing sonorities were certainly given their due by the excellent Staatskapelle players. Instrumental lines sparked off one another, whilst Schäfer spun her line above. It was luxuriant yet sharp, making one wish for more.

Finally came the Berg Op.6 pieces, to which Boulez brought a lifetime of experience. And a great deal now of Mahlerian experience, too, immediately apparent in the opening of the Präludium: a sense of following on from the Ninth Symphony as music emerges from nothingness. Again, it probably goes without saying, though should not, that Boulez’s distinction between Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme was revealing throughout, likewise his weighting and placement of Berg’s climaxes. Especially during this first movement, I heard a number of telling premonitions of Wozzeck. Viennese rhythms and sonorities were once more to the fore in Reigen, but accompanied by a looseness of mooring, a sense of frightening fantasy. The solos resembled appearances by operatic characters; indeed, Lulu did not sound distant. But Wozzeck returned, its final interlude palpably close, in the conclusion. Once again, Mahlerian points were made in the final Marsch, not least that unleashing of the forces of Hell so reminiscent of the Sixth Symphony. There were occasions, though, when the rhythmic and orchestral detail of Boulez’s reading seemed to contribute to a holding of fire. The pay-off was not quite what it might have been: my sole, if important, cavil concerning a fine performance.

Berlin Festtage (2): Eugene Onegin - Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 2 April 2010

Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin

Larina – Katharina Kammerloher
Tatiana – Anna Samuil
Olga – Maria Gortsevskaya
Filipievna – Margarita Nekrasova
Eugene Onegin – Artur Rucinski
Lensky – Rolando Villazón
Prince Gremin – René Pape
Triquet – Stephan Rügamer
Saretzki – James Homann
Captain – Rosen Krastev

Achim Freyer (director, designs, lighting)
Tilman Hecker (assistant director)
Lena Lukjanova and Amanda Freyer (costumes)

Freyer Ensemble
Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

I had hoped that I might see the light concerning Achim Freyer’s production of Eugene Onegin, which I first saw a year-and-a-half ago here in Berlin. Alas not, and I did not even have the element of surprise from the first viewing. In terms of the production, I really do not have anything much to add to my earlier review, which may be read here. In brief, Freyer has decided not only to jettison nineteenth-century Russia – on that, I am pretty neutral, and am happy to judge by results – but to turn everyone in the cast, most of whom are ‘extras’, into a joyless clown. Or rather, he has adopted his usual practice of doing this, irrespective of the work in question. Everything is meaningless would seem to be the refrain, which might be a point to make, but no discernible effort – again, I tried… - to connect this with Eugene Onegin. One could do the same thing to any work, with similar results. I felt no Brechtian alienation, merely boredom, the first time around; the same was the case here, allied with an impulse to scream, to hit someone, to do something, anything to break the tedium. Chairs are still twirled in slow motion and are sometimes suspended in mid-air. I am none the wiser why this should be done, but again it provides some desperately needed variation.

It seems to me that if one has no sympathy with a work, one might be better advised to stay away from it. If one finds it unconvincing, as I assume Freyer must do Onegin, then perhaps it might be better to find something that does convince. I can see why some people might not respond to this opera, though it actually seems to me reasonably straightforward if one accepts what Tchaikovsky accomplished in spite of his apparent intention, in making the friendship between Onegin and Lensky the central focus, with Tatiana as a voice for the composer’s frustrated desires. It does not, however, seem to me anything like so bad a work that one would wish to do this to it. (For what it is worth, I do not think it a bad work at all.) One can perversely admire the intricate direction of each clown’s movements, but what on earth have they to do with Eugene Onegin?

On the first occasion, the performance compensated. Indeed, I wrote at the time: ‘Rarely can Eugene Onegin have been conducted better than it was here under Daniel Barenboim. He conceived the work in one span, yet with impeccable attention to the needs of the moment.’ Sadly, this evening did not witness Barenboim on form, especially during the first ‘half’ (the interval came following the fourth scene). That first part seemed interminable. I do not know how long it took in ‘real’ terms but it seemed both extremely slow, for the most part, and generally listless. There were occasions when the music came into focus and there were a few when the conductor simply drove the music too hard, but these were certainly in the minority. The Staatskapelle Berlin played beautifully throughout, not least its gleaming strings. And there was much greater focus to the second, shorter ‘half’, the duel scene especially well judged: flexible but never arbitrary. The Polonaise, however, was once again excessively driven: it might have been Solti in the pit!



Alongside the orchestral playing, the singing was probably the only thing to impress, though, as one might expect, it varied. Smaller roles tended to be taken very well. Margarita Nekrasova truly brought a sense of Mother Russia to proceedings as the nurse, Filiepevna. René Pape was predictably excellent as Prince Gremin: despite his costume, sonorous of tone and noble of bearing. And Stephan Rügamer made the most of the Frenchman, Triquet. Anna Samuil emerged creditably as Tatiana, increasingly moving within the confines of the production, though she could sometimes prove a little anonymous. Artur Rucinski was also a good Onegin. Sometimes he sounded a little stretched, but again, he was hardly assisted by the production, and revealed as time went on a handsome, intelligently inflected baritone. Maria Gortsevskaya made little vocal impression, however, as Olga, though she was called upon to do a great deal of ‘clowning’. Then there was Rolando Villazón’s Lensky. Likewise called upon to be on stage and acting for most of the time, even after his death, he clearly threw everything into his performance. There were unfortunate moments, for instance during the fourth scene, when almost an entire phrase was alarmingly out of tune. But there was a winning sincerity to so much of his performance that one wanted to forget that the sound of his voice is not especially suited to Tchaikovsky. Rather to my surprise, the chorus often sounded out of sorts, and was a little too often out of sync with the orchestra, but its members were required to do so much irrelevant miming on stage that one could forgive a great deal.

Berlin Festtage (1): Maurizio Pollini - Chopin, Debussy, and Boulez

Philharmonie, Berlin

Chopin – Preludes, op.28 (complete)
Debussy – Préludes, Book I (selection)
Boulez – Piano sonata no.2

Maurizio Pollini (piano)

What a difference both programming context and the audience make! A month ago, I had heard Maurizio Pollini perform the Chopin Preludes in London, at the Royal Festival Hall, as part of an all-Chopin recital. That had been a fine performance by any standards, but this one seemed to benefit from the forward-looking context to Pollini’s modernist Chopin – and certainly benefited from a quieter audience (not difficult, given the outrageous level of coughing in London).

Where the overriding concern of the London concert, insofar as one could discern through the audience participation, appeared to have been to present the twenty-four Chopin preludes as a tonal cycle, there now seemed to be a more perfect balance with the impulse to characterise individual preludes. Tonal unity was certainly present; it seemed, however, more of a springboard for further exploration, perhaps with the Debussy and Boulez works to come in mind. It reminded me that Boulez, whom one might expect to have favoured the late, atonal works of Liszt, once remarked that he found the middle-period works of that composer, like many piano works by Chopin and Schumann, most important, since they had so expanded the horizons of the instrument. Chopin, Debussy, and Boulez certainly all did in the works – and performances – heard this evening. After a relatively neutral C major opening, its relative minor successor took on the form of a mysterious processional, suggestive if necessarily ambiguous in narrative terms. The next piece, the G major prelude already suggested the technical and poetic experimentation of Debussy, as the penultimate F major piece would also do, likewise the almost but not quite abstract aquatic sense of the F-sharp major prelude, in which Ravel and Boulez might also be heard to beckon. Simple dignity in the E minor prelude highlighted the subtlety of Chopin’s left-hand harmonic shifts. A kinship with Liszt’s pianistic outpouring announced itself in a number of pieces, for instance the preludes in F-sharp minor and its diabolically virtuosic – certainly in this performance – counterpart in B minor. (What it might be to hear Pollini perform Liszt’s Transcendental Studies!) And filigree delicacy of fingerwork was to be heard in abundance in the trio of numbers nine to eleven. The blackness, and not just in terms of the notes on the keyboard, of the E-flat minor prelude coruscated, providing the perfect setting for contrast with its successor, the ‘Raindrop’, which emerged here as the focus of the entire cycle. Peerless voicing, the beauty of Chopin’s cantilena, and the grandeur of the climax were equally impressive. And anyone who says Pollini cannot do charm should have heard the almost Mendelssohnian A-flat prelude. A rare slip in the opening of the F minor prelude reminded one that, thankfully, the pianist is not quite infallible; otherwise, his virtuosity in this piece truly scorched. The C minor prelude shone: implacable yet tender. And finally, we heard Polish defiance in the D minor conclusion, the pianist’s command of line so complete that one barely noticed.

Pollini had originally been advertised to perform Debussy’s Etudes, but he elected instead to play an equally appropriate selection from the first book of Préludes. Those who have called him cold should have heard these performances – though coughing unhelpfully intervened – for as full a realisation of Debussy’s poetic imagination as one might conceive. A new yet related sound-world announced itself from the outset of Voiles, likewise the instrument with hammers the composer so desired. Perfection of fingerwork in Le vent dans la plaine never sounded merely efficient. Its successor, Les sons et les parfums dans l’air du soir demonstrated that Pollini can sound sultry too, whilst still permitting is to hear every note. Subtle insistence of the ‘Scotch snap’ permeated the melody and structure of Des pas sur la neige, whilst Lisztian inheritance stood very much to the fore in Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest. La cathédrale engloutie was a wonderful choice for the conclusion: dignity, grandeur, and a delight in harmony and sonority in perfect counterpoise.

This was the first, but will not be the last, of the Berlin Festtage to celebrate Boulez’s eighty-fifth birthday. It is astonishing to think that the second sonata, a landmark in new music, is now more than sixty years old, but so it is. Here we heard a performance upon an instrument that alternated between hammerless Debussy and violent presentiments of Le Marteau sans maître, the ultimate hammered work (which will be heard on Easter Sunday). The opening brought instant éclat, reminding one of Messiaen’s description of his young pupil as like a lion flayed alive. There was something in the first two movements both of the rhetoric of the earlier, brief Notations, but also of the serial expansionism that the pianist conveyed to perfection. In the second, Webernesque pointillism blossomed into something considerably more expansive, though its roots remained discernible. (Look no further than Pollini for an unbeatable performance of the Austrian composer’s Variations.) Poetry could be heard just as much as in Chopin and Debussy, with this slow movement proving a focal point equivalent to the ‘Raindrop’ Prelude in the first half. And then, the appearance of a malignant sprite – post-Liszt? post-Ravel? better just to say Boulez – provided the impetus for this movement’s further deconstruction of Beethovenian sonata form, a process continued in what one might consider the ‘scherzo’, characterised by pyrotechnics aplenty, albeit pyrotechnics with an almost Bakunin-like ‘creative destruction’ in mind. One heard in the opening of the final movement, as elsewhere, Debussy vying with Beethoven in the Boulezian penumbra. Here truly was an attempt to forge a new language, a new structure unfolding before our ears. Is this work becoming a classic? It probably already has, but no more than its antagonist, the Hammerklavier sonata, will it ever solely be that; the challenges for performer and listener will always be great, likewise the rewards. I recalled my head spinning from the first time I ever heard this work, on Pollini’s ‘classic’ recording; that can still happen, and did here. The detail of response was remarkable, but perhaps most memorable of all was that stillness, eerily reminiscent of the Alpine air breathed in the slow movement of Beethoven’s op.106, remade and re-breathed in the coda.

The composer was present and clearly delighted. Eventually, prodded by Daniel Barenboim, also in the audience, he went to the stage to greet Pollini and to acknowledge the applause. A standing ovation for both musicians was inevitable yet deserved.

Music and Politics in the Real World? Jerusalem Quartet - Mozart and Ravel, 29 March 2010

Wigmore Hall

Mozart – String Quartet no.21 in D major, KV 575
Ravel – String Quartet in F major

Alexander Pavlovsky and Sergei Bresler (violins)
Amihai Grosz (viola)
Kyril Zlotnikov (violoncello)

I have never been to a musical performance like this, and hope that I shall never do so again. That could be the prelude to a savage attack; rest assured that it is not. It could be the prelude to a performance so unbearable in its intensity that, like Wagner’s fears for a great performance of Tristan, it would be injurious to one’s sanity. This, however, has nothing directly to do with the performance, excellent and – in the circumstances – almost incredible, but rather with events that unfolded in the concert hall. I do not wish to sensationalise; at the same time, I think it would be disingenuous not to deal with some at least of the issues that arose, not least since it would be a wholly inaccurate account of my experience, were I to put them to one side.

Arriving in the nick of time for the concert, I registered a couple of policeman outside the Wigmore Hall, along with someone who seemed to be handing out leaflets. Insofar as I gave the matter thought at all, I vaguely wondered whether this might be a Palestinian issue, but was in too much of a rush to consider matters further. The hall was packed: not always typical of a BBC lunchtime recital but, by the same token, not necessarily atypical either. Having greatly enjoyed the evening recital from these players (plus Lawrence Power) of Mozart and Debussy a couple of night before, I was very keen to hear the present programme. The Mozart D major quartet, KV 575, opened with many of the virtues heard in the previous programme’s Mozart works, albeit with a recognition of the greater profundity of the present work vis-à-vis the early quartet on Saturday. (Then we had also heard the G minor quintet, quite a different matter.) This was a fully mature conversation, all the more so given the imperative handed to the composer to write a prominent cello part. The commissioner, the King in Prussia – not of Prussia, as is often mistakenly claimed – was himself a cellist and had also engaged the services of the celebrated Jean-Pierre Duport as director of chamber music (hence Mozart’s Duport Variations). The consequence is, as Anthony Burton pointed out in his programme notes, that Mozart made ‘everybody in turn a soloist,’ heightening the contrapuntal interplay that was in any case characteristic of his late style. That was something clearly relished by all of the Jerusalem Quartet’s players; it would be invidious to single out any of them, though I cannot resist putting a special mention the way of violist, Amihai Grosz. (Not for nothing was this Mozart’s favoured instrument as a quartet player himself.) The tempo seemed just right, likewise phrasing and the timing and weighting of climaxes.

On to the Andante. The sweetness of first violinist Alexander Pavlovsky’s tone struck me immediately, but almost as quickly did the players’ perfect counterpoise between harmony and counterpoint: absolutely fundamental to Mozart, yet so abominably difficult to achieve. (And the pay off is that it sounds ‘right’, rather than impressive in the virtuoso sense.) This is not a movement I should expect to terrify, but then it did – or rather something quite horrifying occurred during the performance. A woman rose to her feet and made a noise. For a split second, I was unsure what it was; then I realised that she was singing – in a reasonably imitation of a trained voice. ‘Jerusalem’ was the first word, followed by ‘is occupied’. She proceeded to shout out denunciations of Israel, ‘an apartheid state’, the attack on Gaza, the use of phosphorous, and so forth, seeming to implicate the quartet, though it was not clear how. I did not note down everything word for word, so should prefer not to guess or to misrepresent. Bewilderment turned into commotion and the players had to stop. Members of the Wigmore staff came to her row in the stalls and led her out of the hall. After a certain hiatus, the performance resumed where it had left off. Some bars later, a further interruption occurred from elsewhere in the hall: a man, I think, this time, though I am not entirely sure of my recollection. To say that it was unnerving was an understatement; I can hardly imagine what it must have been like for the players. And what else might be in store? Might there be something more than heckling? The players, this time having left the stage, eventually returned and resumed the movement, making their way to the end. By this time, of course, many in the audience, myself included, must have necessarily had other thoughts in their minds. What issues did this raise, especially in the allegedly most ‘pure’ of Classical forms, the string quartet? Although I shall talk a little about this later, I thought it better at least to mention it here, since this was perforce very much part of my experience as a member of the audience. By this stage, however, the disruption of the work’s aura was complete; fear and anger were increasingly palpable.

The minuet was taken at a fastish tempo but without sounding hard-driven: again, a necessary but devilishly difficult task for Mozart performers. It was perhaps a little faster than I might have expected, given the general nature of the performance and my experience of the quartet’s general approach; I wondered whether this might be an attempt to make up time, given what had happened in the previous movement. In the circumstances, the players’ attentiveness to each other and general stylishness seemed little short of miraculous. The audience, one could sense, remained on edge; I certainly was. It was likewise remarkable how full of grace and genuine give-and-take the trio proved. But we made it to the finale, though no one knew whether the interruptions – I am trying to employ ‘neutral’ language, whatever the nature of my own feelings – had ceased. I should have noticed the fullness of sound in any case, I think, but given the circumstances, it resounded all the more, perfect to support that precarious balance or dialectic between harmony and counterpoint. The movement perhaps sounded a bit precipitate, but one could well understand why. I myself was willing the players to make it to the end before another intervention. It was not to be…

… This time proved, if anything, nastier. The music having stopped again, some members of the audience began to shout at the protestor: hardly unreasonable, though one man in particular seemed a little too eager for a fight, calling out personal abuse. One frustrated audience member, seated in front of the present protestor, turned and initiated some sort of physical contact, which was broken up when the protestor was led out. A man from a few rows behind shouted out, condemning the responding audience member’s behaviour. It was unclear whether the man now calling out were another member of the organised – I realise I am making an assumption here, but it can hardly have been spontaneous – group, or whether he were sympathetic and simply venting his opposition to such behaviour. My suspicion, and it is only that, is that the latter was the case. Eventually, Amihai Grosz spoke, attempting to address accusations – apparently levelled in the leaflets being dispersed outside – that the quartet was somehow supported by the Israeli government. He said that it was not, which was good enough for me, and referred to the fact that every Israeli citizen must perform military service. (There are conscientious objectors, of course, but let us leave that on one side.) At any rate, they were only musicians. (I shall come back to that.) The players were clearly uncertain as to whether to carry on, or as to whether they would be permitted to do so. It was a relief to have the hall's front of house manager now walk to the front and ask whether we wished the quartet to resume. There was no equivocation in the response, so the players did as they were asked. I do not know whether the broadcast, which had presumably made this an attractive, high-profile proposition for protestors, had ceased by then. An announcement that the only remaining audience was in the hall might have helped. Music won through, though, as the performance proceeded to its end. Applause was warm, to put it mildly. Some, myself included, stood.

Then Ravel. The cool, calm, collected nature of the opening seemed all the more remarkable on this occasion. Beautifully stylish, the performance pulsated with life, especially in the inner parts. This, someone such as Daniel Barenboim would doubtless argue, is what music can do. I differ from Barenboim concerning his understandable divorce of music from politics, but enough of that for now. Those, though, were thoughts that I could not banish from my mind, however much I wished to concentrate on ‘the music’. Something that sounded like anger – the relationship between music and the emotions, let alone their personification, is complex – understandably made itself sound, or at least I heard it, followed by a relative calm that could not quite be placid.

Interruption again… When the music resumed, Ravel’s apparent serenity was anything but. On this occasion, the unanimity of pizzicato in the second movement’s opening bars was all the more thrilling. Was that anger again one heard soon after? The Lent section was full of tension not necessarily in the music – or, again, this was how I heard it. Relief on completing the movement without extra-musical incident compensated somewhat. Shimmering background was the setting for a profound melancholy to the lyricism of the slow movement’s opening. Climaxes were rapt: surprisingly Romantic, but not inappropriately. I admit, though, that I found it impossible properly to concentrate. Perhaps one had to have to, as the players did. Again, this movement proved free of disruption, but I cannot have been the only one to fear that something was being kept in reserve for the finale. The disciplined violence of its opening bars would have told anyway, but certainly did now, likewise its searing lyricism. The courageous – in my view – players of the Jerusalem Quartet made it to the end. Once again many of us stood to applaud them.

I do not believe in art for art’s sake, in principle or phenomenologically. To attempt to remove art from the political sphere, or politics from art, goes against everything I hold dear. What, then, should one think about what happened? There is probably no one thing one should think – which may be the most important thing to remember. The protestors would doubtless claim that the disruption caused was as nothing compared to the events in Gaza. It is difficult to disagree. But is that the point? And were they on sure ground with respect to these musicians? So far as I could discern afterwards, the protestors’ grievance seemed initially to have been derived from a dubious website. Barenboim’s personal heroism is of course quite something, but should one expect such heroism from everyone, especially, dare I suggest, from musicians who do not have the luxury of being Daniel Barenboim? And what should one think if, for instance, one knew that performers supported something one found abhorrent? Is it not a good idea to rejoice in music’s capacity to heal? Or is that an illusory æstheticism? Again, there are probably no singular answers – and a lack of plurality is again a major part of the problem. My thoughts led me to that enigmatic shout of ‘Deutschland über alles, Herr Schuricht!’ at the 1939 performance of Das Lied von der Erde in Amsterdam under Carl Schuricht. Was that woman protesting? Was she a supporter or was she voicing sarcasm? How can one fail to feel horrified, whatever the response? The reader may discover for himself; the performance was recorded. These are all difficult questions, which is not to say that one should not attempt to answer them. However, one should guard against definitive answers, not out of some misguided desire for ‘moderation’, but because there is nothing more totalitarian than a simplistic response. The Jerusalem Quartet players acquitted themselves magnificently. I admired them before as musicians; I admire them now as men.

Extraordinary scenes at the Wigmore Hall

My review will follow as soon as possible, but in the meantime, notification of the events at today's BBC lunchtime recital at the Wigmore Hall. The Jerusalem Quartet's performance was continually disrupted my allegedly pro-Palestinian/anti-Zionist protestors, who stood up to stand/shout/otherwise heckle from positions within the audience. Details and some thoughts to follow...

Jerusalem Quartet/Power - Mozart and Debussy, 27 March 2010

Wigmore Hall

Mozart – String Quartet no.4 in C major, KV 157
Debussy – String Quartet in G minor, op.10
Mozart – String Quintet no.4 in G minor, KV 516

Alexander Pavlovsky and Sergei Bresler (violins)
Amihai Grosz, Lawrence Power (violas)
Kyril Zlotnikov (violoncello)

A surprising mini-renaissance for the early Mozart string quartets: the Zehetmair Quartet gave an excellent performance of the third just a week and a half before; now came an equally fine fourth from the Jerusalem Quartet. Even Hans Keller, who dismissed the early quartets as ‘on the whole, … quite abominable,’ conceded that the C major quartet was a ‘masterly miniature’. So it sounded here, fully on the scale of the oft-underestimated Salzburg symphonies. True Mozartians would know neither to make unduly extravagant claims for the early works, nor to deny the astonishing achievements to be discovered within; only Mozartian nouveaux riches would be so vulgar as to dismiss this work because it is not the Dissonance Quartet. The Jerusalem Quartet did not condescend: KV 157 emerged as far more than the overture its opening bars might initially, winningly suggest. Fundamental to the emergence of something more was the performance, each player listening attentively and responding to his peers: in short, exemplary quartet-playing. I wondered a little about the extent of the ritenuto at the end of the exposition second time around. Was this a little more than the music could take? In any case, if a fault this were, it was a fault that granted the work stature. The slow movement was never rushed, but nor did it drag, and, like the rest of the quartet, it emerged teeming with life, every line counting for something. The Presto finale fizzed, with more than a hint of the opera house, albeit without exceeding its Milanese scale. Most important, the Jerusalem players had discovered the secret of playing fast without sounding hard-driven: all too rare an accomplishment today.

Debussy’s sole quartet followed. Its relatively early date of writing can cause difficulties; those seeking to discover the overtly – or should that, in this composer’s case, read covertly? – impressionistic Debussy should seek elsewhere. Yet, despite Franckian and Russian antecedents, this could only really be Debussy. Not least of the Jerusalem Quartet’s achievements was therefore to place the work in its stylistic context. Tchaikovsky and Borodin were readily apparent influences, without overpowering that sensibility which can only justly be described as Gallic. Implications of the Franckian cyclical inheritance, whatever Debussy may later have said about ‘one of the more notable Flemish composers,’ were seen, or rather heard, through, especially the recurrence and transformation of the opening motto theme. Intimations of the interludes to Pelléas et Mélisande were present without being hammered home: like that work itself, quiet, though not always, in their intensity. The fleetness of the quintuple-time second movement was as noteworthy as the poise of its slow successor: as Debussy requests, Andantino doucement expressif. One could see as well as hear how Sergei Bresler on second violin altered his tone to echo and indeed to develop the veiled opening statement of Amihai Grosz’s viola. Here and elsewhere, a particular joy was to be had from those sections in which Kyril Zlotnikov’s cello led proceedings, the music reverberating from the bottom up. Rameau would have approved…

After the interval, the acknowledged masterpiece: Mozart’s G minor quintet, in which the players were joined by the excellent Lawrence Power as second violist. A natural, properly Mozartian flow was established from the opening bar of the opening Allegro. Mozart’s G minor daemon and its chromatic implications were voiced, but not to the exclusion of the good-natured lyricism of the second subject. A little more possession might have worked, but there is more room for more than one interpretative stance here, and the pay off would come in the recapitulation’s reiteration of the tonic minor, followed by the understated tragedy of the coda. It was a relief not to endure the dreadful exhibitionism that disfigures so much contemporary Mozart performance, likewise in the ensuing minuet and trio, taken at a relatively expansive tempo, and all the better for it in revealing the composer’s ravishing harmonies. The extra viola could truly be relished here. Again, I wondered whether a touch more vehemence might have added something, but this was greatly preferable to overstatement. It was a heaven-sent mercy to hear the slow movement at a tempo that again allowed the music to breathe: how close to Beethoven we stand here! The players furnished dignity and poise, emotion emerging rather than being externally and thus ineffectively applied. Schubert hovered in the introduction to the finale, and then release: a release, however, not infused with haste, but permitting detail to have its motivic place. From Alexander Pavlovksy’s sweet-toned but never sentimental first violin downwards, this Mozart struck a fine balance between urbanity and emotion, the latter present, but never obscuring the work’s structure.

Das Rheingold, Opéra national de Paris, 25 March 2010

Images: Opéra national de Paris/Charles Duprat

Wotan – Falk Struckmann
Donner – Samuel Youn
Froh – Marcel Reijans
Loge – Kim Begley
Alberich – Peter Sidhom
Mime – Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke
Fasolt – Iain Paterson
Fafner – Günther Groissböck
Fricka – Sophie Koch
Freia - Ann Petersen
Erda – Qiu Lin Zhang
Woglinde – Caroline Stein
Wellgunde – Daniela Sindram
Flosshilde – Nicole Piccolomini

Günter Krämer (director)
Jürgen Bäckmann (designs)
Falk Bauer (costumes)
Diego Leetz (lighting)
Otto Pichler (choreography)

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Philippe Jordan (conductor)

The beginning of a new Ring will always be an event but is perhaps even more so in Paris. The Paris Opéra itself has not presented a complete cycle since 1957, reaching only as far as Die Walküre under Solti in 1976 – and even then, the company was still exclusively ensconced at the Palais Garnier, as opposed to its present day split between the old theatre and François Mitterand’s Opéra Bastille. There have been more recent performances of the tetralogy, however, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and the Châtelet. The city so important to understanding Wagner, the city for which he notoriously prescribed a ‘fire cure’ and which punished him more than handsomely with the Tannhäuser debacle, has never been short of Wagnerians and has equally never been short of opponents. There is, of course, nothing more Parisian than an artistic ‘controversy’ (consider the Querelle des bouffons) or ‘case’: was Nietzsche more décadent than he knew? Perhaps surprisingly, that arch-controversialist Gérard Mortier never, during his reign at the Bastille rose to this ultimate challenge pour épater les bourgeois, but the new directorate of Nicolas Jöel and Philippe Jordan, the latter already a Wagner conductor of considerable experience, has. Das Rheingold and Die Walküre are presented this season; Siegfried and Götterdämmerung are scheduled for next.


I had felt somewhat nonplussed by earlier work I had seen from director Günter Krämer. At the 2002 Salzburg Festival, I was grateful enough for the chance to hear Strauss’s ‘cheerful mythology’, Die Liebe der Danae, still more so from the Staatskapelle Dresden and Fabio Luisi, but the production seemed to do little other than to present each act at a different stage of the work’s history: the 1944 dress rehearsal, the ‘true’ premiere of 1952, and the revival fifty years hence. Tristan, which I saw in Vienna in 2008, I found still less revealing: unobjectionable, but nothing more. By contrast, this Rheingold is really rather good: red in tooth and claw, as befits the least ambiguously socialist of all Wagner’s stage works. The staging is recognisably post-Chéreau – what could it mean to attempt to be pre-Chéreau? – and certainly shares ideas with other productions, but I see no harm in that. It generally works as a synthesis, and some of the greatest artists and thinkers have had abilities at least as much synthetic as ‘original’: for instance, Marx, who looms large here. (The programme misleads in straightforwardly describing Wagner (p.86) as ‘lecteur de Marx’. He may well have been; indeed, I should wager that he was. However, short of new documentary evidence coming to light, we cannot say for certain.) And Wagner as a thinker was certainly synthetic in tendency, if not always in achievement, nowhere more interesting than in the contradictions this might present.

Though we have seen the Rhinemaidens as ladies of the night before, the direction on stage makes this credible theatrically as well as a good idea. (I am trying not to shudder excessively at memories of the embarrassing pole-dancing experiment from Phyllida Lloyd for the English National Opera.) Alberich is a dwarf too, for those who treasure stage directions – and he certainly should be a misfit in a trivial world where one is judged solely on appearances. Krämer recognises that there is no golden age for Wagner: the composer, often even in this work a Schopenhauerian avant la lettre, presents an almost Hobbesian initial state of nature and a Fall that is anything but a felix culpa. That the post-lapsarian world is still worse than its predecessor does not detract from the latter’s amorality. Diego Leetz’s lighting works well in suggesting a Rhine of sorts. This first scene, then, seems to me a model of what Warren Darcy has called a ‘tragedy in miniature’.

I was disappointed at the abruptness of the scene shift that followed: at odds with one of the supreme examples of Wagner’s ‘most delicate and profound’ art of transition, that of Alberich’s ring into Wotan’s Valhalla. We see the site for the latter, though not of course the completed version, too early. What is being built is, with perhaps unduly heavy-handed reference to the Third Reich, GERMANIA, whose capital – in more than one sense – construction, grandiose as the drama’s conclusion, we witness as the evening progresses. Portrayal of the gods is imaginative. Their idealistic physique – muscles for the men, breasts for the women – is clearly constructed, in that they wear these, and one is intended to see that they are not ‘natural’. This certainly fits with Feuerbach’s conception, so important to Wagner, of religion alienating human qualities onto a projected godhead and thereby impoverishing life on earth. The appendages are lost when Freia and her golden apples are captured, and put back on upon her return to the fold. It is not quite clear to me, however, why Wotan does not suffer this fate. Loge, as so often, steals the show. Initially more than a little camp, the outsider, brilliantly portrayed by Kim Begley, soon throws caution to the wind as a fully-fledged drag artiste.

Nibelheim comes across well, especially its centrepiece golden globe hoard and the equally striking pendulum-like cutting mechanism that swings throughout. The wonder and tawdriness of the magic trick are presented in Alberich’s Tarnhelm transformations: we know that he is hiding behind the ball; yet we see and hear that others believe something else. Moreover, we witness the brute power wielded over the Nibelungs, since these are cowering characters on stage. Wotan’s wresting of the ring from the dwarf, one of the truly terrible moments in the cycle, most certainly is here: the violent, bloody loss of the finger realistic and prescient as Alberich’s curse itself. Then there are the giants. Initially they appear with socialist propaganda followed – this a coup de théâtre – by a threatening band of angry proletarians, who burst into the audience, dispensing red sheets, inscribed with Fasolt’s fundamental denunciation of Wotan: ‘Was du bist, bist du nur durch Verträge.’ (‘What you are, you are through contracts alone.) Not a bad agitprop slogan, and in a nice touch, Fricka peruses what seems to be a fuller prospectus of the workers’ programme. The subsequent portrayal of Fafner chills. A construction union boss, we see in the fourth scene that he is more inhuman than the gods, savagely wielding and employing his whip when duly strengthened by possession of the ring. (I could not help but think of the leaders of UNITE, drawing salaries not so very far off the executives they excoriate.) Also memorable, with attendant change of pace, is Erda’s scene, in which, clad as a Victorian matriarch, she slowly traverses the stage as she delivers her warning: simple but effective. She watches beforehand, which perhaps serves no particular purpose but, by the same token, does no especial harm.

Begley was perhaps the star performer, sardonic and with a perfect sense of timing, but the cast in general impressed. Peter Sidhom does not possess the largest of voices for Alberich, but he cleverly used what he has. Iain Paterson and Günther Groissböck clearly differentiated between Fafner and Fasolt, the vocal and scenic realisation properly increasing as the drama progressed. Qiu Lin Zhang suffered from bad intonation at her entry as Erda, but recovered with nobility. Falk Struckmann was variable as Wotan, always attentive to the words but sometimes a little underwhelming vocally, apparently pushing him to be a bit too much of an ‘actor’ on stage. Sophie Koch had something of the sphinx’s enigmatic quality to the god’s attractively sung and played consort: more interesting than something too overtly shrew-like. Marcel Reijans displayed an attractive lyric tenor as Froh. The Rhinemaidens were of somewhat uneven quality, at least in vocal terms.

Underpinning this all, however, was the first-rate orchestral contribution. The orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris sounded surprisingly – welcomely – ‘German’ in tone, doubtless in partial consequence of Philippe Jordan’s experience in German houses, not least the Berlin Staatsoper. The blend was impressive, sometimes reminiscent of Karajan’s favoured Wagner sound. This rendered the novelty – in historical terms – of Wagner’s brass writing telling, but subtly so. The only real disappointment was the feebleness of the anvils. For Jordan’s command of the work’s vast structure one could certainly forgive that. He certainly has the measure of the work’s ebb and flow, of the orchestra’s role as Greek chorus; I have heard him do nothing finer. Indeed, all told, this was the best Rheingold I have attended since Haitink’s tenure at the Royal Opera. Die Walküre is eagerly anticipated.

Birtwistle 75th birthday concert (including a Carter premiere) - Nash Ensemble and friends, 24 March 2010

Wigmore Hall

Birtwistle – Five Distances for Five Instruments, for wind quintet (1992)
Birtwistle – New work for oboe quartet (premiere of work-in-progress in its present state)
Birtwistle – The Woman and the Hare, for soprano, reciter, and ensemble (Nash commission) (1999)
Birtwistle – Duets for Storab, for two flutes (1983)
Carter – Poems of Louis Zukofsky, for soprano and clarinet (British premiere) (2009)
Birtwistle – Trageodia (1965)

Claire Booth (soprano)
Julia Watson (reciter)
Philippa Davies (flute)
Ian Clarke (flute)
Gareth Hulse (oboe)
Richard Hosford (clarinet)
Ursula Leveaux (bassoon)
Marianne Thorsen (violin)
David Alberman (violin)
Lawrence Power (viola)
Paul Watkins (violoncello)
Ian Brown (celesta)
Hugh Webb (harp)
Chris Brannick (percussion)
Lionel Friend (conductor)

Britain’s greatest composer since Purcell and America’s greatest composer to date: not a bad line-up for a concert – although, quite reasonably, the birthday boy had the lion’s share of the programme devoted to him. On first sight, it might be a sobering thought to realise that Harrison Birtwistle has reached seventy-five, but given that Elliott Carter’s contribution is a work written during his second century, there is no reason that it should be. At any rate, we were treated to a wide-ranging selection of chamber and vocal works, excellently performed by long-time champions and commissioners, the Nash Ensemble, and three guests: soprano Claire Booth, actress Julia Watson, and conductor Lionel Friend.

Five Distances, for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn, made for an invigorating start to the concert. The work was performed, as Birtwistle prefers, with the performers standing. The spatial implications, including the dramatic, of the semi-circle in which the players stand, ‘as far apart as is practically possible,’ were fully realised in the space of the Wigmore Hall. Extremity, proximity, and grouping have often been preoccupations of new music, sometimes harking back to early music, as Birtwistle himself has done from time to time, though certainly not with the slightest intention of neo-something-ism, let alone pastiche. Stravinskian antecedents are also clear, perhaps above all the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, though, by the same token, this does not sound ‘like’ or ‘inspired by’ Stravinsky. A composer does not stand in tradition, Birtwistle believes, but has tradition within him. Birtwistle’s instrumental palette provides an expressive kaleidoscope, as did the Nash players, who equally ensured that the music sounded lyrical through and through. (I cannot think of a Birtwistle work that is not, though this of course remains dependent upon high standards of performance.) As arresting as anything else in the performance was Richard Hosford’s final clarinet note, fading into nothingness.

The new work for oboe quartet – it is not clear whether it is to be called an oboe quartet – is a work-in-progress. Heinz Holliger premiered the first movement and will give the first performance of the completed work. In the meantime, Birtwistle has composed two further movements. That now temporarily placed second will most likely be shifted to become an introductory movement, whilst the finale will remain final when the fourth movement is composed. I was especially taken with the sharp rhythmic, almost Bartókian profile of the outer movements; perhaps chamber strings provide an inevitable reminder of that composer’s quartets here. A highly striking section of the first movement sets stabbing violin and cello pizzicati against sinuous lyricism from violin and oboe, proving contagious to the other instruments. Bartók again comes to mind in some of the solo violin writing: the Rhapsodies for violin and piano in particular. The short movement in between at the moment provides an interlude to explore further implications of some of the material, though it will be interesting to hear how its function is transformed by introductory placing. Moments of melancholy stillness provide winning contrast with sharp rhythms during the finale. Performance was committed throughout.

Concluding the first half was one of Birtwistle’s David Harsent settings, The Woman and the Hare: a Nash Ensemble commission. Claire Booth and Julia Watson sang and recited respectively, reproducing for the composer something of the Baroque distinction between aria and recitative. Song is the music of the recitation. More than once, I was put in mind of the sound-world of Gawain and perhaps even the early music-theatre piece, Down by the Greenwood Side. Ultimately apparent is a typically Orphic triumph, that of music. Once again, there could be no gainsaying the commitment of all performers, who imparted a sharp dramatic edge, which in turn provided for necessary reflection.

Duets for Storab were initially conceived as teaching pieces for two flutes, though the musical demands – quite different from typical virtuosity, as the composer has remarked – have tended to militate against successful performance from children. The combination of two flutes has something primæval to it; we are, after all, concerned with the most ancient instrument of all. Despite the Hebridean provenance of the title, there remains something inescapably English to Birtwistle’s landscape. There is, moreover, and certainly was in performance, a haunting sense of play from a mythological past. Anti-organic constructivism can be fun.

Before concluding with another highly constructivist Birtwistle score, the performers gave the British premiere of Carter’s Poems of Louis Zukofsky, for soprano and clarinet. I dare not comment on the words, given the programme’s stern warning: ‘All Louis Zukofsky material Copyright Paul Zukofsky; the material may not be reproduced, quoted, or used in any manner whatsoever without the explicit and specific permission of the copyright holder. A fee will be charged.’ The poet’s son, Paul, may be an eminent violinist, but he does not come across in this context as a friend of art. Any comments on Carter’s response will therefore have to be non-specific with regard to word setting. Booth clearly relished the contrast with The Woman and the Hare; now she could act truly as a reciter of sung verse. I was very taken with the second song, Alba, a Carter lullaby: sweet indeed. Its successor, Finally a Valentine – I hope I may at least give the title – had for me slight echoes of Webern, albeit utterly transformed into typical late Carter musical language. (The instrumentation is doubtless a contributor towards the Webern connection, if connection there be.) A little later on, The Rains proved coruscatingly brilliant in composition and performance. Daisy evinces the composer’s delight in the sheer sound of words and its implications. The exultance of the final song’s climax belonged to Zukofsky père, Carter, Booth, and Hosford. Some things, let us give thanks, cannot be copyrighted, or indeed reproduced.

Finally, the early Birtwistle masterpiece, Tragoedia, ‘a study in symmetry followed by significant asymmetry,’ as Stephen Pruslin put it in his programme notes. And that asymmetry is perhaps already a sign of Birtwistle’s signature re-examination of narrative from varying perspectives. Construction and constructivism in his hands resist the schematic – just as in great serial music. The soundscape is very different here, though of course there are things in common. But the Mediterranean calls, albeit the savage world of archaic Greece. Stravinsky again rears his head, as echoes of The Rite of Spring resound – again, fully assimilated. The harp acts as mediator between string quartet and wind quintet, the opposing groups of the Nash Ensemble making splendid work of their dramatic encounter, for here there is truly a sense of a crucible where the master musico-dramatist comes into being, instrumental work though this may be. Lionel Friend directed proceedings with dramatic purpose. There is no false reverence for tragedy: something rawer, more elemental is being enacted. Which could serve as comment upon so much of what was to come…