Petrushka and L’Enfant et les sortilèges, Komische Oper, 2 March 2017

Komische Oper, Berlin

Images: Iko Freese | drama-berlin.de

Petrushka – Tiago Alexandre Neta Fonseca

Ptitschka – Pauliina Räsänen
Patap – Slava Volkov
 

L’Enfant – Nadja Mchantaf

Le Feu, La Princesse, Le Rossignol –Talya Lieberman
Maman, La Tasse Chinoise, La Libellule – Exgi Kutlu
Une Pastourelle, La Chauve-Souris – Elizabeth Holmes
La Chatte, L’Ecureuil – Maria Fiselier
L’Horloge comtoise, Le Chat – Denis Milo
La Bergère, La Chouette – Mirka Wagner
Le Fauteuil, L’Arbre – Carsten Sabrowski
Le Petit Vielliard, La Théière, La Rainette – Ivan Turšić
Un Pâtre – Katarzyna Włodarczyk
 

Suzanne Andrade and Esme Appleton (directors)

Paul Barritt (animations)
1927, Pia Leong (set designs)
1927, Katrin Kath (costumes)
Diego Leetz (lighting)
Ulrich Lenz (dramaturgy)

Vocalconsort Berlin (chorus master: Andrew Crooks)

Children’s Choir (chorus mistress: Dagmar Fiebach) and Orchestra of the Komische Oper

Markus Poschner (conductor)

1927’s Magic Flute has been well-nigh universally lauded, both at the Komische Oper and subsequently on tour. I say ‘well-nigh’, since I felt more ambivalent, applauding some aspects of the reworking, whilst lamenting a lack of seriousness at its heart: for me a perennial problem with many stagings of that work. Maybe I was not in a very good mood, or maybe the combination of æsthetic and work was just not for me; maybe I missed the point. Or perhaps I was right: who knows? I am not terribly easy to please when it comes to Mozart. At any rate, I am delighted to welcome its successor, a double-bill of Petrushka and L’Enfant et les sortilèges.

 

Petrushka is 1927’s first completely non-verbal work, and, of the three I have seen, I think it comes off best of all. (A counter-argument might be that I know less of ballet than I do of opera, but I should like to think that I know a little about Stravinsky, at least.) Here we see it via the offices, once again, of Paul Barritt’s animation – and with three humanised puppets: Petrushka as ‘awkward clown’, alongside a ‘sensitive acrobat’, Ptitschka, and an ‘unrefined but good-natured muscle-man,’ Patap. The animations are a period-influenced, but not period-restricted, delight: from a little later than the writing of the work, as the company’s name, ‘1927’, might suggest. Russian constructivism and the world of silent films more generally loom large. Colours, aptly, are gloriously bright (even if the curmudgeon in me might have wished for the original score rather than the more ‘practical’ 1947 revision), yet monochrome plays its part too. We tumble headlong – not unlike Petrushka himself, a little later – into the world of the fairground. ‘Roll up, roll up,’ the Russian speech-bubble (thank goodness for the Komische Oper’s multi-lingual titles) beckons us; it really felt to me as though we were making an individual and collective decision to attend the show within a show.  

That show is beautifully presented, not only showing but dramatising a keen sense of the thin line between comedy and tragedy. Puppet shows have always done that brilliantly, or at least the best ones have, so why should not a multi-media reimagining of the format, a work about puppetry? Petrushka is the latter anyway, of course, and here the figure of the puppeteer looms large – not visually, although his (I think we can presume ‘his’) actions certainly do. The heartlessness with which Petrushka is toyed with – which yet endears him to Ptitschka, and indeed also elicits sympathy from Patap, following his necessary moments of self-display – moves us, as does the excellence of the onstage performers, seemingly effortlessly moving between the worlds of stage and film. The sad clown, for Barritt close to Buster Keaton, and dressed as such, is not for nothing one of our culture’s perennially recurring figures. He lacks the grace of Ptitschka, the physique of Patap, but he is human, he feels sadness even when, particularly when, he amuses us. The manipulator of his emotions – the puppeteer, that is – does not entirely succeed in manipulating ours.

 

As for the other manipulator, the composer who so notoriously declared music’s inability to express anything other than itself, his score in performance exuded colourful rigour, its opening nicely, intriguingly deliberate, as if the forces were limbering up yet undoubtedly in control. Like what we saw, what we heard sounded audibly ‘Russian’ in origin and spirit, but with some degree of distance from time to time as well: not unlike Stravinsky, one might say. A few minor frayed edges aside – one can readily forget what a difficult piece this is – the orchestra under Markus Poschner did it proud, reminding us that recreation is not simply a matter of a new production; it happens, or should happen, every time we play and hear Petrushka.

In a programme interview, Suzanne Andrade likens the figure of the puppeteer in Petrushka to that of the Mother in L’Enfant et les sortilèges. It makes for a good connecting motif: meaningful rather than merely neat. It also helps make the ‘moral’ of Colette’s story – I think Ravel remains more circumspect; does he not always? – both more explicit and open to question. (Perhaps it criticises itself anyway; I am genuinely not sure. If so, that tendency is stronger here.) Andrade says that she and her collaborators had originally intended the boy (sung by a woman, let us never forget) to be like ‘one of those upper-class boys from Great Britain … they are naughty and learn nothing from the experience, because the societal status quo is such that they need not learn anything.’ If those overgrown schoolboys (and their aspirant hangers-on) have ‘had enough of experts’, we, not least those of us recently pushed into exile, have had more than enough of their running amok with our lives and futures; it is therefore something of a relief to experience contrition and forgiveness, before asking ourselves: ‘but whose, and on what authority?’ Who is the Mother, whether personally or more broadly, and what does she intend to be the outcome of those trials through which she means to get her own way?

 

The visual inspiration here comes from comics and films involving naughty little boys. Andrade names Dennis the Menace and the American film series, Our Gang (which began in the 1920s). Again, the transitions between animation and staging are deftly, wittily presented. (They also help with doubling or tripling of parts: one need not always see the singer in costume.) If I did not feel that as much was added to my thoughts about the work as in Petrushka, beyond that intellectual and dramaturgical question of overarching agency, perhaps I am showing myself a little more resistant, as I suggested, in opera than ballet (if, indeed we consider Stravinsky’s work primarily as such). Perhaps I also missed the nostalgia evident in Ravel’s sophisticated conception of childhood: no child could or would ever think of its ‘hood’ like that. One might counter that the score is there to do that anyway.

 

The Komische Oper’s welcome change of language policy – are you listening, ENO? – meant that we did not have to hear Ravel in German. If not everything was delivered with the most assured sense of what we have come to accept as French style, it rarely, or never is, even with Francophone singers. Moreover, one could hear every word – which is not always the case with such singers. Nadja Mchantaf made for a splendidly tomboyish boy – if that makes any sense. As hapless and as clumsy as Petrushka, he will at least have another chance. (Those privileged boys always do.) Orchestra and conductor seemed – or perhaps this was just my imagination, given the context – to play the score as if informed by some Stravinskian elements, rhythm perhaps playing a more prominent role than harmony at times, although such hierarchies will always be a matter of degree. In keeping with what we saw, there was much in bright, primary colours, and an evident delight in the mastery of that ‘Swiss watchmaker’, as Stravinsky called him. The rest of the cast proved very much more than the sum of its parts. If I do not relist the singers, it is not out of disrespect, but at least in part to emphasise, as so often in this house, the nature of the achievement of the company in an emphatic sense.

The Winter's Tale, English National Opera, 27 February 2017 (world premiere)

Coliseum

Hermione (Sophie Bevan), Mamillius (Zach Roberts), Leontes (Iain Paterson)
Images: Johan Persson

Leontes – Iain Paterson

Hermione – Sophie Bevan
Perdita – Samantha Price
Polixenes – Leigh Melrose
Florizel, Court Official – Anthony Gregory
Paulina – Susan Bickley
Antigonus/Shepherd – Neal Davies
Camillo – Timothy Robinson
Mamillius – Zach Roberts
Two Guards – Geraint Hylton, Michael Burke
Servant – Paul Napier-Burrows
 

Rory Kinnear (director)

Vicki Mortimer (set designs)
Moritz Junge (costumes)
Jon Clark (lighting)
Imogen Knight (movement)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: James Henshaw)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

New work is the lifeblood of any opera company, any orchestra, any theatre, any artistic institution worth its salt. We all love what Pierre Boulez called the Museum; perhaps we love it too much. That is not going to change. There is, though, nothing unhealthier than a reverence for the past – or rather for a ‘traditionalist’ recreation of a past that never was – which excludes enthusiasm for the present. We shall make mistakes in the present; no sane person would ever deny that. Whilst there is every reason to try to minimise them, we should never do so with over-zealous caution. We certainly should not replace them with n^th revivals of some hideous – or even non-hideous – ‘revival’ of La traviata. Apart from being wrong in itself, it would kill so many of the achievements of the present and future it is our duty to nurture.

ENO Chorus

One such is Ryan Wigglesworth’s new opera, The Winter’s Tale, here receiving its world premiere. How will it fare in the future? Who knows? That is not our concern. What I can say is that it emerged on its first night as a highly accomplished operatic debut, given splendid advocacy from all concerned with its production and performance. A more detailed analysis, of whatever variety, must await proper study of the score (for which, many thanks to ENO and Schott!) Wigglesworth paces the action very well, though, and his own adaptation of Shakespeare for the libretto works equally well. Indeed, I find its focus upon the action – something mentioned by director Rory Kinnear in a programme article, suggesting a strong, deep collaboration, of which there is evidence in abundance – especially well suited to a reworking of the tale as opera. Having recently examined a fine doctoral thesis on modern Shakespearean opera and Tippett’s The Knot Garden, I hope that this new instalment will, in the best sense, extend and even challenge some of its discussion, as any new contribution should. One of the potential problems of Shakespearean opera, as well as the oft-mentioned inherent musicality of the words as they stand, seems to me (as I had actually been discussing with a friend the previous evening) the complexity of the plot or, better, the number of sub-plots. There is, for instance, no Autolycus; we can probably all live, for one evening at least, without his snapping up of unconsidered trifles. Here, the narrative assumes an almost Attic tragic inevitability – there is some of that in the play, of course, but it is, fascinatingly, one of several competing tendencies there – which has long, with good reason, been thought conducive to successful opera. (Cue Straussian cries of ‘Agamemnon’ in your head.)

 

It is difficult and, I am sure, undesirable, to try to separate Kinnear’s staging, or indeed the cast’s performances from that. (Is not such unity of dramatic purpose what opera is supposed to be about? Yes, we can deconstruct it and often should, but deconstruction implies construction in the first place. And yes, it is perfectly possible for different aspects to be saying or doing different things at the same time, but again, usually in the service of a greater whole, however fragmented it might be in (modernistic) practice.) For instance, whereas the jealousy of Leontes can sometimes seem unmotivated, or at least abrupt, here the tyrannical tendencies of the king and their close alliance to his suspicions are reinforced scenically, musically, and performatively. Iain Paterson’s portrayal of his changing moods (redemptive transformation in the third of the three acts included) was imbued with the confidence suggested by a role he might have been singing all his life. Sophie Bevan’s not entirely dissimilar journey, from the lightness of a woman undeniably attracted to Polinexes, through savagely wronged consort, to miraculously transfigured voice as statue come-to-life at the close, brought emotional weight and dramatic credibility to Hermione. Polinexes, in the excellent hands and voice of Leigh Melrose, offered another, equally crucial tragic strand. Binding these strands together, nascent yet also fully formed in the first act, is Kinnear’s production – not only his first of opera, but his first in the theatre at all – provides a crucial politico-military setting (Moritz Junge’s costumes here crucial too), statues already representative of power, might, and all manner of repression; it also provides space for these characters to work out their fates.

 

Florizel (Anthony Gregory), Perdita
(Samantha Price)

Wigglesworth’s score – his conducting too, no doubt – binds this dramatic opening still more closely together. Structurally, it made excellent sense even on a first hearing (as I said, detail will have to come later, once I have studied the score); there are none of the formal deficiencies that so bedevil, say, much of Britten’s excessively lauded writing (The Turn of the Screw perennially excepted). What Britten could do – indeed seemingly could not fail to do – was set English words; so can Wigglesworth, albeit without the preciousness. Vocal lines move between arioso and, for instance, in the case of almost Hans Sachs-like depression for Leontes, something approaching a more traditional aria. But much of the real action is in the orchestra. Here, I think we hear Wigglesworth’s finest achievement: he knows what the orchestra can, even should, do in opera – and does it. Interludes play a dramatic role, just as they might in exalted predecessors such as Wagner or Debussy; they do not merely fill time. Harmonies and harmonic rhythm sound as integral parts of the drama, not merely ‘expressive’ thereof. Glistening instrumental strands prove illustrative, characterful, yet also musically (and musico-dramatically) generative. If I thought occasionally of a line from Henze here, or Tippett there, and so on, that was no more than a matter of coincidence, of me finding my aural feet, as it were; the use to which phrases were put in the larger scheme of things seemed entirely Wigglesworth’s, indeed the work’s, own.

 

Moreover, the contrast between the closed, seemingly inward-gazing intensity of the musical language of the first act and the pastoral joy, soon occluded by the intrusion of Polinexes (I thought, however inappropriately, of a post-Janáčekian sound world threatened, even conquered, by grinding, post-Bergian musical processes), was apparent for all to hear. So too was the different world again, a world yet seemingly born of dialectical synthesis and/or progression, of the third act. Ghosts from the past seemed to appear musically, transfigured, with a magic whose benign quality needed to be proved rather than merely asserted.  Crucial to that outcome, far from unambiguous, were excellent performances from Anthony Gregory’s youthful, hopeful Florizel, Samantha Price’s heartfelt Perdita, and a commanding assumption of the role of Paulina by Susan Bickley: again, a focus for unity that needed to be won, not merely assumed. With excellent performances from the rest of the cast, the orchestra, and, anything but least, the outstanding ENO Chorus – its threatening presence during the Queen’s trial redolent, perhaps, of a Mussorgskian operatic tradition, although never hidebound by it – The Winter’s Tale received a baptism of which all should be proud indeed.

 

Levit - Beethoven, 26 February 2017

Wigmore Hall

Piano Sonata no.16 in G major, op.31 no.1

Piano Sonata no.15 in D major, op.28, ‘Pastoral’
Piano Sonata no.13 in E-flat major, op.27 no.1, ‘Quasi una fantasia’
Piano Sonata no.14 in C-sharp minor, op.27 no.2, ‘Moonlight’

Igor Levit (piano)

Six down: two to go. Alas, I am unlikely to be able to hear the final two programmes in Igor Levit’s Beethoven series, but there were on this occasion perhaps a few intimations of the late(r) sonatas I shall miss (nos 27-32). Not that there was any one generic aesthetic applied to the works: the richness of their variety was celebrated, each sonata clearly considered in its own right.

 

From the op.31 set, we heard the first, in G major. Levit immediately showed himself to be a fine communicator of contrast, humorous and otherwise. Its first movement was fast, insistent, even obsessive. Work and performance made me smile; they also made me nervous. Oscillation between major and minor registered full of potentiality. Both the fury and the concision of the development were fully apparent, with the recapitulation seemingly as full of something new as something old. Beethoven’s games in the coda were properly relished. Humour remained to the fore in the slow movement, its almost absurdly ornate neo-Classicism speaking for itself. That certainly did not preclude subtlety; the ability to surprise arose seemingly naturally, however problematic that idea, from command of line. In the finale, intimations of a later Romanticism and indeed a later modernity still had no need to be underlined; they spoke nevertheless, as playful as Beethoven’s reckoning with his own inheritance.

 

The Pastoral Sonata is a more overtly seraphic, indeed sublime work, and so it sounded. What a wealth of music, in the strongest sense, there was to be heard in sequences, in repeated scales. Always werden, never sein: the essence of Romanticism. Beethoven’s radicalism sounded most pronounced in the first movement’s development, peering forward to the fractures of his late self. The moment of return brought due consolation. The sublimity of insistency in the onward trudge of the ensuing march quite rightly sounded close to Schubert, without ever sounding quite ‘like’ his music. Line again was key, but so was variegation. The whimsical central section sounded as if from a different world – or did it? At any rate, the return of the march material seemed transfigured by the experience. An urgent, even impetuous scherzo – its trio too – was over in the twinkling of an eye, drawing comfort in the opening bars of the finale. Whilst that comfort was certainly not illusory, there were battles yet to be fought and won. That victory proved both hard-won and elegant.

 

In the second half, we heard the two op.27 sonatas. I am not sure how much sense, even as metaphor, it makes to speak of a velvety touch, yet that was how the opening of the first movement registered to me – in tandem with irreproachable clarity. Holy ground was never confused with false piety. The shock of the contrasting material was communicated with authentic Beethovenian brusqueness. A scherzo that balanced fury and humour glanced back to Haydn without any sacrifice to the impression that it might have been written yesterday. Nobility of utterance in the developing variation of the Adagio con espressione section was unmistakeable: Beethoven and his interpreter reached for the stars, and came very close indeed to them. This certainly sounded as one of those intimations of the late master, as did the transition to the finale, whose fantastical brilliance relished both Beethoven’s humour and his prodigality of invention. Once again, we were reminded that this was a pupil of Haydn.

 

The hushed anticipation to the very opening of the Moonlight Sonata – it may be a silly nickname, but it is probably not worth contesting it – seemed somehow to condense an entire symphonic introduction into the simplest of choral progressions and piano figurations. Again, it developed – and reminded us of what an extraordinary, indeed astoundingly original piece of music this is, quite unlike anything else. The dignity with which the first movement unfolded was quite spellbinding. Imbued with a proper sense of nostalgia, although certainly not sentimentality, the Allegretto suggested Mozart slightly overgrown, its trio very much in the line of the explorations we had heard earlier in the Pastoral. There was nothing backward looking there – save perhaps for a fond glance back to the chromatic sliding of the Jupiter Symphony’s Minuet. The finale proved startling, as it must, its excitement visceral, yes, but above all musical. Structure and detail combined to create not only form but meaning.

Pollini - Chopin and Debussy, 21 February 2017

Royal Festival Hall

Chopin – Two  Nocturnes, Op.27; Ballade no.3 in A-flat major, op.47; Ballade no.4 in F minor, op.52; Berceuse in D-flat major, op.57; Scherzo no.1 in B minor, op.20
Debussy – Préludes, Book II

Maurizio Pollini (piano)

It was to hear Maurizio Pollini play Chopin that I paid my first visit to the Royal Festival Hall. Then, I was one of the students on stage, benefiting from the £5 tickets available to do so. It seemed fitting, therefore, that my last visit for some time at least should be for the same. (This time next week, I should be in the air to Berlin, where I shall be based for the rest of 2017, taking a much needed break from an increasingly vicious, racist country.) On the present occasion, I treated myself – well, used up my remaining credit vouchers – to a ticket in the Stalls.

 

Swings and roundabouts, perhaps, in that respect; I could see less well, yet perhaps hear better. More importantly, Pollini’s artistry, whilst now in some ways very different in its nature, or rather in its surface nature, remains undimmed. It is as intelligent, as probing, as radical as ever: if anything, still more so. The nonsense one used to hear about Pollini – ‘technically perfect, but where is the emotion?’ as if the two were somehow diametrically opposed – has now been replaced by a bizarre insistence, mostly from the very same people, that the occasional technical slip invalidates everything else he does. Clearly they have other reasons – often political: you will often find a reference to his socialism – for what they say. People are perfectly at liberty to like or to dislike Pollini’s playing; let them be honest, however, about why.

 

The pair of Nocturnes, op.27, with which Pollini opened the recital – I once heard one of his detractors claim, bizarrely, ‘no one wants to hear two Nocturnes in a row’ – emerged more strongly as a pair than I can previously recall. That is not to say that their differences were ignored, far from it, but that an almost Lisztian transformative impulse, mixed – looking ahead – with a quasi-‘impressionist’ sense of watery depths, somehow both clear and impenetrable, bound and freed what might never have been ‘intended’ to be bound in the first place. For everything one hears about Chopin’s inspiration in Bellini, what struck me here, not for the first time, was that what is of far greater interest in Chopin is how he differs, how he transforms a stiff melodic model and renders it endlessly flexible, of endless harmonic fascination. Pollini’s emphasis upon a particular note, especially in the C-sharp minor Nocturne, had not only the piece, but seemingly the entire harmonic universe, spinning upon its axis. Generalisations about structure seemed quite beside the point; form – a more dynamic conception, perhaps, than structure – was recreated before our ears, Chopin’s lines playing out with simultaneous spontaneity and inevitability.

 

The two Ballades followed another interesting tonal progression: no accident that, I am sure. Where we had gone from tonic minor to major, now we went from major to relative minor. The recreative – formal, one might say, in the sense outlined above – was powerful throughout, seemingly taking in, just as in one of the pianist’s traversals of the twenty-four Preludes, that entire tonal universe, yet never bureaucratically, always, to use a properly Romantic word, ‘poetically’. The motivic working seemed as tightly knit, endlessly generative, as that of, say, Schoenberg. It is quite different, of course, but that does not make it any sense inferior. A lovely, almost Venetian account of the Berceuse, which yet more than hinted at turbulence beneath as well as upon the surface, led to a B minor Scherzo that seemed to strive, and indeed to achieve, veritably Lisztian heights and depths. This, as ever with Chopin, was a Scherzo that did not jest, and yet a kinship of spirit, as opposed to method, with Beethoven more than once suggested itself.

 

I had only heard Pollini play the first book of Debussy Préludes in concert before (whether complete or in a selection). His way with the second was quite different from my memories, indeed quite different from anything I might have expected. Although the twelve pieces seemed quite ‘naturally’ – what artifice, even feux thereof, there will always be in that – to form a whole, there was no evident attempt to make them do so, no particular æsthetic, whether ‘modernist’, ‘impressionist’, or anything else. Connections again suggested themselves; perhaps I was just in that sort of mood. We started with a post-Lisztian Debussy, the Liszt of old age, not only Nuages gris but harsher, darker, more Mephistophelian tendencies leading us through Brouillards, with very open-ended non-conclusion, into Feuilles mortes. (Come to think of that, is that not a rather Lisztian title and idea?) Rhythms proved suggestive – not only pictorially, indeed not even especially pictorially, but of musical process, musical possibility. We can all hear the habenera without having it underlined; Debussy is not Bizet, nor indeed Ravel. (I do wish, though, that Pollini had played some of the latter’s music. Imagine a Gaspard or a Miroirs!) Likewise the cakewalk. ‘God save the King’ was less deconstructed, as one might have expected, than permitted to decompose – and re-compose. And there was – I am afraid I cannot for the life of me remember where – a strong suggestion of Mahlerian, even Schoenbergian waltzing somewhere else, such as I cannot recall ever having heard before.  Se vuol ballare, Signor Pollini? Les tierces alternées proved as true a study in its nominated interval as I can recall, Webern but a stone’s throw away, if that. And it was to Liszt, to nineteenth-century pyrotechnics, that we returned in those closing Feux d’artifice.

 

As ever with Pollini, there was at least as much to enjoy, and to think about, in the encores. Typically generous, he gave us La cathédrale engloutie, hieratic yet subtle, and two more Chopin pieces, the C-sharp minor Scherzo and the G minor Ballade, both burrowing deep beneath the surface, harmonic rhythm very much their guiding principle. Se vuol ballare…? I could have danced all night.

Aimard/Philharmonia/Salonen - Stravinsky, Ligeti, and Ravel, 19 February 2017

Royal Festival Hall

Stravinsky – Funeral Song, op.5 (UK premiere)

Ligeti – Piano Concerto
Ravel – Daphnis et Chloé

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

Rodolfus Choir

Philharmonia Voices

Philharmonia Orchestra

Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)

 

It is not every day, every decade, perhaps every lifetime, that one attends a Stravinsky premiere. Stravinsky wrote this orchestral work in 1908 as an elegy for Rimsky-Korsakov and it received its very first performance on 17 January (Old Style) 1909 in a concert dedicated to his teacher’s memory at the St Petersburg Conservatory. The score disappeared, along with many of the composer’s effects, during the Revolution. Nevertheless, Stravinsky, reckoning it his best work prior to The Firebird, remained hopeful. ‘The orchestral parts must have been preserved in one of the St Petersburg orchestral libraries;’ he would recall. ‘I wish someone in Leningrad would look for the parts, for I would be curious myself to see what I was composing just before The Firebird.’ The uncatalogued parts were finally discovered at the Conservatory in September 2015, after which Natalia Braginskaja assembled and edited a full score. It then received its second performance, again in St Petersburg, by Mariinsky forces, on 2 December 2016. Here, in a change to the advertised programme, it received from the Philharmonia and Esa-Pekka Salonen its national premiere. Much as I may have regretted the loss of Ligeti’s Clocks and Clouds from the programme – I have never had opportunity to hear it in concert – I could hardly lament this opportunity; nor do I lament it in retrospect, following this estimable performance.

Stravinsky, unable to remember the detail of the score, nevertheless retained a strong conception of its overall idea: ‘I can remember the idea at the root of its conception, which was that all the solo instruments of the orchestra filed past the tomb of the master in succession, each laying down its melody as its wreath against a deep background of tremolo murmurings simulating the vibrations of bass voices singing in chorus.’ Put like that – I only read his description after the performance – it sounds, whether by accident or design, a somewhat Berliozian conception. And I think, rather as I wrote about last week’s Rihm Gruß-Moment 2 premiere (in memory of Boulez), there is something of that invisible, ‘New German’, stage to what happens here. Liszt and Wagner, as well, of course, as Rimsky himself, seem other points of potential reference, as do other early Stravinsky works such as The Firebird and, still earlier, his op.1, the E-flat major Symphony.

That sense of individual instrumental visitation was strong, naturally – a flute solo in particular made me think of the Wagner of Siegfried – but so also was a sense of the whole. If there were undoubted tendencies towards the sectional, they were few, and almost certainly a matter of work rather than performance. The aforementioned Symphony has them too, as of course, more ‘naturally’, do the ballets; at what stage in Stravinsky’s career, I wondered, did such ‘breaks’ become polemical, a compositional strategy, rather than a slight, ‘un-symphonic’ weakness? Does his cellular method in, say, The Rite of Spring, actually arise in part from a lack of inclination to Austro-German symphonism? It was neo-Wagnerian Fate that seemed to rule the roost in the closing bars; surely this overwhelming weight of influence, partly via Rimsky, partly direct, was a factor in the composer’s later anti-Wagnerism?

Many thanks, I should add, to Boosey & Hawkes, for permitting me to see a copy of the score in Dr Braginskaja’s new edition. Salonen seemed, unsurprisingly, greatly moved by the experience, clutching his score with evident devotion as he – and it – received deservedly warm applause. For a list of other premieres, click here.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard joined Salonen and a vastly reduced orchestra – more of a modern ‘ensemble’ really, and a highly virtuosic one at that – for Ligeti’s Piano Concerto. I do not know what it has been in the air this year so far: barely past mid-February, and I have already heard Le grand macabre, the Violin Concerto, the first String Quartet, and now this. Long, however, may it continue! Rhythmic exactitude characterised the opening, as it must, but it was never for its own sake, always expressive. Stravinsky – later Stravinsky, of course – and the Central African pygmies in whose music Ligeti took such an interest, were possible points of reference, but this music unquestionably spoke for itself. Salonen’s conducting of such an array of metrical lines was as impressive as Aimard’s furious pianistic despatch of others. I learned much by simply watching, although still more, of course, by listening.

Lento e deserto is Ligeti’s marking for the second movement, and ‘deserto’ it immediately sounded. Piccolo and double bass, eventually joined by bassoon, created not only a unique soundworld, but, more importantly, a unique emotional world. It sounded, felt like ‘night music’ after Bartók, but the ‘after’ was just as important as the ‘Bartók’. It was quite mesmerising to hear, to experience how other instruments sounded both like and unlike ‘themselves’, without much in the way of extended techniques as traditionally understood. Bartók also seemed to make a ghostly appearance in some of the piano melody and harmony, the contrasting orchestral eruptions packing a punch such as he would surely have approved of. Aimard’s mastery of such brutally difficult writing was in itself not the least of the many wonders of this movement. An enigmatic ocarina added further to the sense of almost other-worldly desolation.

The third and fourth movements sounded particularly strongly connected, the latter very much a response to the former – which entails difference, of course, as well as affinity, much of it or rather of them! If the third movement opened both in febrile and mellifluous fashion, suggesting perhaps a reimagining of Debussy (partly Aimard’s doing?), then a kinship with Messiaen later suggested itself (again, surely, born in part of Aimard’s immersion in that composer’s music). Percussionists and violin (Zsolt-Tihámer Visontay) proved at times soloists, and/or chamber companions, in their own right. The complexity of invention in the fifth and final movement had me think at times of Elliott Carter, and yet what we heard could not merely be ‘likened’ to anything else. This was a spellbinding performance, almost as exhausting as it was to play, yet surely every bit as rewarding too. Let us hope that there will be more Ligeti to come from Salonen and his orchestra in the not too distant future. Now where might I hear the Cello Concerto and the Double Concerto?

After two such intrinsically extraordinary performances, Daphnis et Chloé might well have come across as a bit of an anti-climax. Not a bit of it. Balance and atmosphere were revealed throughout as two sides to the same coin. I was struck by how ‘French’ the Philharmonia sounded, not least in its string tone; this was an unquestionably Ravelian eroticism we heard. Salonen traced the score’s contours lovingly, knowingly; here there no corners to be perceived, however tricky that must have been to engineer. One could visualise – the dramatic directions in the score were shown as surtitles – but equally one could hear this ‘choreographic symphony’ without doing so. Dance, nevertheless, lay at its heart. If laughter were as vividly pictorial as anything in a Strauss tone poem, it was, as in Strauss, never permitted to distract from the musical argument. The eery stillness when an ‘unnatural light’ suffused the landscape was quite something indeed; one really began to hear what Stravinsky so admired in this score.

Pan’s apparition proved awesome in the proper sense, seemingly leading to intimations of The Rite of Spring in the second part, which took upon itself something of the character of a symphonic scherzo – until, as with Ligeti, it became something else entirely. Character, like everything else, was never static. Here, one felt, was a musical development quite different from anything in Beethoven, yet no less impressive. The warmth of the sunrise in the third part, followed by such a glorious full orchestral sound, would have been worth the price of admission alone, leading to a climax that both left nothing and yet also everything to the imagination. The fantastical twists and turns that followed would surely again have appealed greatly to Stravinsky, engendering the excitement and indubitable conclusion of the bacchanal. There was something utterly un-Christian, perhaps even anti-Christian, to what we heard – and perhaps saw in the theatre of our imagination. And yet, quite unlike Stravinsky, say, there was nothing remotely polemical to it. This was Ravel.

This concert was recorded by BBC Radio 3 for broadcast on Friday 24 February and will be available thirty days hence on iPlayer.

Ligeti Quartet - 'Melodicles’: Ligeti, Mason, Harrison, Diabété, Bartók, 17 February 2017

Hall Two, Kings Place
 

Ligeti – String Quartet no.1, ‘Métamorphoses nocturnes’

Christian Mason – Tuvan Songbook
Lou Harrison – String Quartet Set: ‘Estampie’
Fodé Lassana Diabaté (arr. Jacob Garchik) – Sunjata’s Time: ‘Nana Triban’
Bartók – String Quartet no.5, Sz.102

Mandhira de Saram, Patrick Dawkins (violins)

Richard Jones (viola)

Val Welbanks (cello)

 

‘Melodicles’, the title given to this concert as a whole, was a concept of Lou Harrison’s, referring to short motifs, inverted or reversed – perhaps one of the few signs in his music of his study with Schoenberg – to create musical modes. It is Harrison’s centenary this year, so it was especially good to have the Ligeti Quartet play some of his music. (I am not sure I have ever been to a concert in which he was featured before.) I wish I could have been more enthusiastic about this ‘Estampie’ dance from his 1978-9 String Quartet Set. Its simplicity has something to be said for it, I am sure, but I was glad that it did not go on any longer, beginning to tire of its single line melody, shared between first violin and viola, accompanied – for once, very much the right word – by busier, melody-less rhythm on the second violin and percussive use of the cello (knocking on its case, and so on). It was clearly very well played, though, and not at all unpleasant to hear; I was grateful for the opportunity.

 

On either side of the Harrison piece, which one might think of as imagined folk music, came two other folkish pieces. Christian Mason’s 2016 Tuvan Songbook is a transcription (and, to a certain extent, it seems, recomposition) of four traditional Tuvan songs. Two incorporated actual singing – although I was somewhat disappointed that it was not of the throaty variety one might have expected. The sharp rhythmic profile of the first, ‘Dyngylday’, strong on syncopation, augured very well, but I did not find its promise consistently realised. In the fourth, ‘Exir-Kara’ (‘Black Eagle’), it was intriguing to hear singing anticipated by some string extended techniques. Having said that, I found more to capture and retain my attention in the encore, Mason’s Mongolian-inspired Racing Horses, which seemed to me more a composition in its own right.

Perhaps I had just not been on the right wavelength, or in the right mood, for I felt similarly about ‘Nana Triban’, transcribed and arranged for string quartet by Jacob Garchik, from the Malian balafon player, Lassana Diabaté’s 2016 Sunjata’s Time (a Kronos Quartet commission). Cellist Val Wellbanks had the tune, the rest the accompaniment. It was pleasant enough, but I could not help wondering how much had been lost in transcription.

 

On either side of those works – as if the programming itself were conceived as a Bartókian arch – were works by Ligeti and Bartók. Ligeti’s First Quartet revealed itself as a typical mixture of, or dialectic between, ‘process’ and ‘expression’. Its many short sections are highly contrasted indeed – and so they sounded here in performance. Violent, Bartókian outbursts were especially well handled, as was the bizarre waltzing section – and its humour. Subsiding into nothingness at the close was again very well achieved, so much so that the audience seemed unaware that the piece had ended.

 

Bartók’s Fifth Quartet is, by any standards, a towering masterpiece. Itself in the arch form I observed in the programme as a whole, it received an estimable performance (albeit not always helped by the less than ideal acoustic of Kings Place’s Hall Two). The first movement showed a true sense of musical obsessiveness, and not a little wildness, which yet never degenerated into lack of discipline. Night music and Bulgarian meter were in general vividly portrayed in the inner movements. In the finale, Beethovenian purpose, perhaps even method in the motivic working, was unquestionably apparent: inspiration in the very best sense.

Kopatchinskaja/BPO/Rattle - Rihm, Ligeti, and Mahler, 12 February 2017

Philharmonie, Berlin

Rihm – Gruß-Moment 2 – in memoriam Pierre Boulez

Ligeti – Violin Concerto
Mahler – Symphony no.4 in G major


Camilla Tilling (soprano)
Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin)
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Simon Rattle (conductor)

It had been two years, almost to the day, since I had last heard the Berlin Philharmonic (in the flesh, anyway). Then it had been Mahler (with Lachenmann) in London; now it was Mahler (with Rihm and Ligeti) in Berlin. The contemporary (more or less) works fared splendidly on both occasions; Mahler, I think, fared much better on this, the interventionism that has latterly characterised Simon Rattle’s work with that composer less distracting, more convincing. The orchestra, of course, remains a great one, now as fearless in new music as its fabled earlier self was in Beethoven and Brahms.

Wolfgang Rihm’s Gruß-Moment 2 was not quite receiving its premiere: that had taken place on the first of these three performances. It is nevertheless emphatically a new work, albeit performed with a confidence that might suggest otherwise. Rihm’s piece – allegedly five minutes long, but significantly longer – is one of twelve commissioned by the Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker from different composers, apparently given carte blanche as to how they approached their ‘album leaf’ compositions. It also follows Gruß-Moment 1, written for the Lucerne Festival, for Pierre Boulez’s ninetieth birthday in 2015; now, of course, we live in the shadow of Boulez’s death, and the piece is dedicated to his memory.

 

Rihm has written for what looks like an average-sized orchestra: neither Bach’s, nor Gurrelieder’s. There are interesting omissions, though: clarinets, bassoons (not contra-bassoon, however), and trumpets. On the other hand, there are four players apiece for flutes, horns, and percussion. It is with an English horn solo that the lament or tombeau begins, perhaps inevitably putting us in mind of Tristan und Isolde. (Whether I liked it or not, I could not help but find intervallic and rhythmic correspondences and differences with Wagner’s Shepherd Song.) Four horns follow on: as so often with Rihm, forging further links with German Romanticism, albeit more obliquely here than sometimes. Was that even a hint of Bruckner in the string unison lines to come? Oboe and trombone duetting, still more English horn and trombone duetting, put me a little in mind of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch, but that was probably just me; for one can play the game of correspondences all one likes, of course, and it is in many ways just a way of finding one’s bearing. It was only really with the sounding of the quartet of flutes and percussion together that my ears found something that might possibly remind me of Boulez, and then not overtly. Such, however, is not necessarily the point of a tribute. If this were a tombeau, it was not gloomy, some post-expressionist Angst prior to the close notwithstanding, but then why should it be? Perhaps this was more akin to an ode from Berlioz, Gluck, even Stravsinky; perhaps not. It intrigued, nevertheless, nowhere more so than in the soft, yet Fafner-like timpani of the closing bars: ‘dolce, quasi cantando’.

 

‘György Ligeti’s violin concerto is perhaps the most exciting violin concerto since Beethoven. It’s the concerto I most enjoy playing.’ Would that more violinists thought like Patricia Kopatchinskaja, whatever that might imply about some of those far from negligible concertos in between. (I shall except Schoenberg’s, since it is surely the most criminally neglected of all.) This was, it seems, the third time the Berlin Philharmonic had played the work, previous outings having come from Tamsin Little, also with Rattle, in 2003, and from Renaud Capuçon and David Robertson seven years later. There will doubtless always be a little personal eccentricity from Kopatchinskaja, but I cannot believe that her decision to play barefoot would have troubled anyone. If it did, so much the worse for him or her. (Our intrepid soloist even managed to persuade the leader, Daniel Stabrawa, to shed one of his shoes, when he joined her for a splendid encore performance of Ligeti’s very early (1950) Balad si joc.)

 

The solo opening suggested that this might be Ligeti very much in ‘process music’ mode. What especially intrigued about how both work and performance developed was that that was sort of true, but far from entirely so. That, one might say, is where music comes in. Kopatchinskaja’s solo line gradually distinguished itself more and more from the many other solo lines in this first movement Praeludium, taking on an almost ‘traditional’ virtuosic tinge, at least in the manner of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale (squared). Kopatchinskaja’s duetting with tuned percussion proved one of the multiple delights here. In the second movement, I initially reflected how viola-like her tone sounded – until the viola soloist entered. A sensibility that was far from un-Romantic grew, until the moment of typical Ligetian madness when a quartet of woodwind players, Pied-Piper-like, took up their ocarinas. If the chorale section inevitably brought Berg to mind, what greater inspiration could there be?

 

The high, fantastical writing with which the Intermezzo opens had me think of Prokofiev, although, of course, it went very much its own way. Such was the intensity of the climax that it felt as though the music were over all too quickly. The slow, inevitable, riveting progress of the Passacaglia brought, as the movement came to its climax, further thoughts of Berg. This was almost incredibly committed playing from all concerned. Prokofiev sounded as if he were unwinding in the final movement, soon characterised by the reinstatement of a virtuosity it is difficult not to think of in some sense as ‘Hungarian’. Rattle left the stage, deadpan, for Kopatchinskaja to play her own cadenza: great fun, both gesturally and musically. There was a sense of trying to goad him and the orchestra to come back, eventually successful when the conductor reappeared from the percussion to bring the concerto to a close.

 

The second half was devoted to the Mahler symphony. Its first movement cannot escape from a certain sense of molding, so perhaps sets itself up better for Rattle’s approach than some of the composer’s more (apparently, deceptively) simple inspirations. It certainly did not drag – unlike, say, the well-nigh unbearable performance I heard from Vladimir Jurowski last year. Rattle ensured that the score was treated affectionately yet not too much so, and at times, with a little yet not too much brusqueness. Stabrawa’s violin solo – and not just that – sounded sweetly sardonic, or should that be sardonically sweet? Mediaeval, or rather pseudo-mediaeval, pictorialism was appealing throughout, coexisting happily with Mahler’s idiosyncratic neo-Classicism. I was not sure what it all ‘meant’, but I am not sure that I should have been sure: that is not really the point, or at least need not be.

 

I was delighted to hear some vinegar in the second movement scordatura playing. Often, that ends up sounding ‘just’ dissonant, rather than making something (though never too much) out of the different tuning. Ligeti, I thought, would have approved. Counterpoint was admirably clear: one could really hear a multitude of lines, almost as if St Anthony of Padua were preaching to a shoal of particularly wayward, individualistic fish. However illusory, there remained a sense of essential simplicity to the slow movement, which sounded very much as if it grew out of Mahler’s four-part string writing: an expanded string quartet, almost. The sound was perhaps sweeter than one often hears, but not unreasonably so, and in any case often tended towards silver too. Not that the darker side was neglected, far from it, but the movement proved commendably un-hysterical. Thematic foreshadowings of the finale were nicely brought out, and that movement grew as ‘naturally’ as I have ever heard out of its predecessor, without a break, yet not rushed. Camilla Tilling offered one of the most interpretatively interesting accounts of the text I have heard. There was a greater range of vocal colour than one often hears, very much at the service of the words. Stylistically, she drew out, or so it seemed, the music’s kinship with the world of Hänsel und Gretel, whilst Rattle’s keen ear for instrumental detail enriched rather than overwhelming. Rarely have I heard so touching a performance of the final stanza, nor a more lingering, loving farewell from the harp. Mahler’s progressive tonality had indeed opened up a new, heavenly world.

 

Widmann/Uchida - Brahms, Berg, Widmann, Schubert, and Schumann, 9 February 2017

Wigmore Hall

 

Brahms – Clarinet Sonata no.1 in F minor, op.120 no.1

Berg – Four Pieces for clarinet and piano, op.5

Jörg Widmann – Fantasie, for solo clarinet

Schubert – Impromptu in C minor, D 899/1

Widmann – Sonatina facile (UK premiere)

Schumann – Fantasiestücke, op.73

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

 

A wonderful concert! If I had my doubts about the substance of the new Sonatina facile for piano solo, by Jörg Widmann, it was entertaining enough, and received a bravura performance from Mitsuko Uchida. A tribute to Mozart’s C major Piano Sonata, KV 545, with identical movement markings, ‘Allegro’, ‘Andante’, and ‘Rondo’, it starts off in deconstructive fashion not dissimilar to Schnittke’s (K)ein Sommernachtstraum. Harmonies in the opening ‘Allegro’ at times sound not unlike Henze; I thought of his own Mozart piano tribute, Cherubino. The nineteenth century looms large too, throughout the piece: ‘nineteenth century Mozart’, Beethoven (op.13?), Chopin, et al. As with his Con brio Concert Overture, there is much that teases: is this quotation or allusion? Does it matter? Whatever it is, though, it is certainly not facile in the sense applied to Mozart’s work.

 

Otherwise, there was much to intrigue, to enjoy, even to confound. The starkness of much of Uchida’s piano playing in the first movement of the Brahms F minor Sonata guarded against any conventional notion of autumnal mellowness. (I love that variety of Brahms as much as the next listener, perhaps more, but it is not the only way.) Widmann’s clarinet playing seemed to look even towards Birtwistle, certainly towards Berg and Schoenberg. A sense of exhaustion and the impetus dialectically derived from it brought Mendelssohn to mind at one point, so this was not simply Brahms from a twentieth- or indeed twenty-first century standpoint. Intervals – and then how does one not think of Webern – did a good deal of the work, just as they should. I liked the uneasy, even sometimes effortful lyricism of the second movement. The opening, neo-Mozartian – definitely not Mozartian without the ‘neo’ – grace of the Allegretto grazioso was soon undercut. Darkness was far from confined to the central section. The finale was more volatile than one generally hears, and all the better for it.

 

Berg’s Four Pieces followed naturally – or better, with seeming inevitability. From the very first piece, the similarity not only in motivic working but also in expressivity was apparent: not always, of course, but often. There was certainly nothing Brahmsian about those piano bell chimes, magical and menacing at once. Kinship with Schoenberg’s op.19 (especially the second of those pieces) was especially apparent in Uchida’s performance of the second piece, tendencies intensified in the fourth, whilst Widmann’s – the clarinet’s – scampering wit in the third evoked Pierrot lunaire. That intensification in the fourth and final piece brought homes just what variety there is to be experienced in unity, and vice versa. ‘Cataclysmic’ would not be an exaggerated description of the piano climax as heard here. And then, quite, lyrical witness…

 

Widmann’s solo Fantasie proved quite the tour de force. A multiphonic drone-like opening, out of which Don Juan-like ascending phrases issue forth, lodged itself long in the memory. All manner of extended techniques, and more ‘traditional’ ones – jazzy glissandi, for instance – contributed to a compelling narrative. Contours were traced by Widmann as performer, insofar as one can distinguish the two, with high drama and a sovereign command of musical line.

 

The C minor Impromptu with which the second half opened began, perhaps echoing the Brahms, in stark fashion, yet would ultimately prove far from unyielding. Nevertheless, such was the granite-like implacability of Uchida’s performance, that I thought more of a conductor such as Otto Klemperer than of pianists. For all the grandeur, though, there was great intimacy too: such were revealed to be two sides of the same coin. Schubert sounded contemporary, if anything rather more so than the Widmann of the Sonatina facile.

 

Schumann’s Fantasiestücke opened as if with a reminiscence of an earlier Brahms than the one we had heard here. Melody, harmony, even developmental method evoked kinship. By the same token, there was something fresher here, redolent of a stroll through German Romantic woods. The second piece was fantastical – as the title would suggest! – in the best Schumann tradition. There was nothing ‘late’ here, save perhaps for our perception. Sunny, yet not without shadow, the third exhibited more than a hint of neo-Classicism, suggesting connections with Widmann’s own work. The Andante from Mendelssohn’s early clarinet sonata in E-flat major offered longing without exaggeration; connections with much of what we had heard earlier were inescapable, but were never forced upon us.