Lessons in Love and Violence, Royal Opera, 15 May 2018

Royal Opera House

King – Stéphane Degout

Gaveston, Stranger – Gyula Orendt

Isabel – Barbara Hannigan

Mortimer – Peter Hoare

Boy, Young King – Samuel Boden

Girl – Ocean Barrington-Cook

Witness 1, Singer 1, Woman 1 – Jennifer France

Witness 2, Singer 2, Woman 2 – Krisztina Szabó

Witness 3, Madman – Andri Björn Róbertsson

Katie Mitchell (director)

Vicki Mortimer (designs)

James Farncombe (lighting)

Joseph Alford (movement, associate director)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

George Benjamin (conductor)

Girl (Ocean Barrington-Cook), Isabel (Barbara Hannigan), King (Stéphane Degout), Boy (Samuel Boden)
Images: © ROH 2018/Stephen Cummiskey

 

If Harrison Birtwistle remains acknowledged as England’s greatest musical dramatist since Purcell, then Lessons in Love and Violence may well come to be seen as the work with which George Benjamin mounted his challenge. There is no reason, of course, why such matters should be adversarial, and such is hardly Benjamin’s style, whatever the grisly subject matter of his third opera. He is more someone to knock on the door, enter and delight us with what he brings to the party, without any need to elbow anyone aside. Let us instead rejoice in the creation of another masterpiece, darker and perhaps deeper still than Written on Skin. (Not, of course, that we should forget Benjamin’s first opera either: the wonderful Into the Little Hill.)

As you will doubtless know by now, Benjamin has been reunited with Martin Crimp for this, Crimp’s third libretto, and Katie Mitchell, who directed the excellent first staging of Written on Skin, and who has also worked with Crimp on his other theatrical works, has rejoined the team too. This seems, almost a priori, to have given rise to a degree of ennui in certain quarters. (I have tried to avoid hearing what others have thought about the work, but have not been entirely successful.) One objection seems to have been ‘more of the same’, more or less. I can only presume that the same people would have regretted Mozart’s decision to ‘pursue a collaboration’ with Lorenzo da Ponte after Don Giovanni, perhaps even after Figaro. After all, one often hears the most ridiculous nonsense spoken of Così fan tutte. But there is no reason to be defensive here; I only mention the matter since, for better or worse, it is being spoken of already. Upon leaving the theatre, I hastily typed an ‘instant reaction’ tweet, even, for once, remembering to use the ‘hashtag’: ‘#ROHLessons is a towering masterpiece, its intellectual brilliance and sensual wonders matched, at the very least, by its emotionally overwhelming dramatic path. Drained and satisfied as if by Wozzeck or Katya Kabanova; or, the work that increasingly came to mind, Boris Godunov.’ I have no argument with that almost a day later, and shall try to explain why.

Are such comparisons less odious than ridiculous? Perhaps. Not entirely, though, since I think this is how we often approach new works, not least in so repertory-bound a genre as opera, perhaps especially with a house and company such as the Royal Opera (House). They are far from exact and the tragic trajectory is not the same; here, in the story of Edward II, it is nicely doubled at the end. Essentially we see (and hear) here Edward’s (never, I think named as such) inability to say no to his lover, Gaveston, resulting in the banishment of the clever, unscrupulous politician, Mortimer, who returns, having manipulated the people to his end, to restore himself in something equivalent to a queen’s coup, ridding the court and realm first of Gaveston and then of the king. But the young king, again not named as Edward III, having watched, with his sister, everything unfold, including that violence which is often yet not always subtly hinted at or stylised, turns upon the usurpers and truly becomes king himself.

Boy, Girl, Isabel

Tragedy or restoration? That rightly does not quite seem to be the question, just as that bald outline omits the mess of motivations that characterises this horrible, political world. Much is hinted at, there for one to join the dots, but much is portrayed too. The audience member is, rightly or wrongly, treated as an intelligent human being, a participant, not a consumer of Verdi or other tedious kitsch. It is certainly not so straightforward as portraying a situation in which no one is sympathetic. Rather, as in ‘real life’ – and what, alas, could be more real than our present, not so different high or low ‘political’ life? – motivations are complex, contradictory, and, between characters at least, irreconcilable. Such is surely not the least of the lessons of love and violence that unfold – whether one does not believe in love, as Mortimer, or in violence, as the younger young king does not, yet must. Mortimer, after all, schools him, too, perhaps better than he intended. Likewise, Isabel seems – perhaps is – wronged at the start; we can understand why she, a mother and a wife as well as a queen, acts as she does. Yet she is far from white to start with; in her aestheticism – her love of music and her chilling dissolution of a pearl in acid, a pearl that would have given houses to petitioning subjects – she actually seems a good, or rather deadly, match to her husband, as well as a potential rival to Gaveston. There is horror, too, in her children turning upon her, however deserved that turnaround might be.

But we must return to music, so beloved of these unpleasant people, yet puritanically or sadistically prohibited by the Young King. (Or so he claims: we never quite know the truth of many claims, for who is narrating? We almost seem to know better in the play within a play, that of David and Jonathan, in which Isabel almost literally begins to call the shots, and in the non-musical reprise of such ‘entertainment’ which is threatened, and yet which turns out to be ‘real’, a tortured Mortimer about to be shot dead by the Young King’s sister.) Yes, we must, that too lengthy parenthesis notwithstanding. For it is music that seems – apparently or otherwise – to structure the words and the drama, or perhaps to re-structure them. It is music that creates them, in many ways, regardless of empirical priority. It also creates, and is created by, the situation: its colour, its tensions, its possibilities. ‘It’, whatever it may be, is always, ultimately, about the music; for when the music stops, so does the opera. Perhaps that has always been Isabel’s fear: the fall of the curtain. Mitchell certainly seems to hint at that, but so do Benjamin and Crimp – and, of course, the outstanding cast and orchestra.

Madman (Andri Björn Róbertsson) restrained, Queen, Girl, Boy, Mortimer (Peter Hoare)

Benjamin’s ability to create a sound world has always been one of his hallmarks; in that sense I could not help but think of Janáček and Mussorgsky, both in general and in particular, as mentioned above. Yet, as with those composers, it is certainly not a matter of simply providing atmosphere, a setting, although that certainly is created. Just as Vicki Mortimer’s plush, power-dressing – dressing itself becomes, in true royal fashion, almost a ritual in itself – claustrophobic designs, both for sets and costumes, provide a framework, both to contain and to be broken by the action, so do timbres, often in combination, and harmonies, likewise. There is almost infinite variegation within. The old problem, almost yet not quite Schoenbergian, of reconciling musical antimonies between freedom and determinism, gains new clothes – aural and visual. And the inevitability of the action, at least viewed from the close, of what has happened, takes upon itself an almost Bergian thrust, not least through the characters of and connections between particular scenes. The orchestra follows Benjamin, whether as composer or conductor; or rather, it leads the action with all the confidence and, more to the point, understanding it might once have shown Bernard Haitink in Wagner. And, as with Wagner, still more so with the Debussy of Pelléas, so much action, so much of the truest, wordless action, occurs in the interludes, the transformations between scenes. It is perhaps in those, as in Pelléas, that the stature of Benjamin as a musical dramatist is most immediately manifest.

Or does it? Does the orchestra lead? Do not the singers? Yes, they do too. There is much leadership: too much in the plot, just enough in performance. For song, or at least singing, is crucial to this opera; it is certainly not to be defined as a ravishing, horrifying symphonic poem with voices, although it is perhaps partly that. Benjamin and his co-creators and co-performers refuse the either-or that many of us, seeking for a way in to account for our reactions, would seek to foist upon him. There is drama in melisma: what could be more traditionally operatic than that? There is drama in the entwining and the opposition of melisma? Again, what could take us back more closely to that first zenith of the genre, to Monteverdi? Perhaps the encounter between Isabel and Gaveston, in which she verbally bids him come closer to her, that she might also come closer to the King (who remains distant on stage), is most instructive of all here, for it expresses and creates a musico-dramatic situation more complex than, and still more deadly than, the duet of two baritones so full of sensual delight between the king himself and his lover. Both, and other duets and ensembles, are necessary of course, in the structuring of the drama, just as in the still sorely misunderstood Così. Post-Mozartian Harmoniemusik occasionally seemed to make that point, at least to me; likewise the haunting death rattle avant la lettre emanating from harps and cimbalom, as the Stranger took the King’s life in his cell. The King thought this stranger was Gaveston; so did we, even though he told us he was not, and Gaveston was dead. One could hardly fail to think of the careful, meaningful symmetries of Lulu.

Isabel and Mortimer

And, as with Mozart, although whether through design or through the sheer excellence of these artists on stage, one had the sense that the roles had been written with them in mind. They were, of course, for Mozart, but here, who knows? We are not so much concerned with process, as with each artist having inhabited his or her role. Stéphane Degout’s velvet tones cloaked the impetuous, arbitrary deeds of a weak tyrant, who was also a wronged and wronging man. One made no distinction between role and performance; he simply was the King. So too, and increasingly so, as her role came into focus, was Barbara Hannigan, as his consort. That she played so well in the initial background speaks just as well of her as the display of that extraordinary ability we all know and love – think, for instance, of her Ligeti – to encompass so many modes of vocal delivery within a single line that remains spun from the same silk. Gyula Orendt’s seductive, nasty, manipulative way with Gaveston mirrored and contested the politician’s path of Peter Hoare’s clever, calculating, just as (in)human Mortimer. Not the least of the evening’s performances was the coming of age through politico-emotional stunting of Samuel Boden’s Boy and Young King. Dressed like a boy, he acted unerringly like one too: almost a Prince William, whilst Diana was still around, or shortly after. Ably assisted by his sister, Ocean Barrington-Cook (a mute role), the crown was, again if only in retrospect, his for the taking – once he had learned his deathly lessons. Smaller roles were all very well taken, by Jennifer France, Krisztina Szabó, and Andri Björn Róbertsson: suggestive of a greater number of voices and faces than was actually present, drawn, as it were, as if from an imaginary chorus.

Isabel, King, Gaveston (Gyula Orendt)

For, as in Boris, we observed and felt the people’s grief, feared equally for what we knew to be their largely hopeless future. As the Third Witness had accused the Queen, in a shocking intrusion, orchestrated by Mortimer, into her chamber, the poor had no choice, unlike the decadent rich, to sleep three to a bed. The miracle here was that fury, both external and internal to the drama of princes and nobles, manifested itself through three single voices, an orchestra, and, not least, an endlessly inventive, supportive, and questioning production. Mitchell too did the work the necessary honour of treating it as a mature drama, as she had in Written in Skin; this was not something to be introduced, hesitantly, but to be directed with the critical modernity she would bring to any other work. This may be a quiet operatic manifesto; such, as discussed, is Benjamin’s way. It may even be a manifesto without intention to be a manifesto. Perhaps that makes it all the more convincing, all the more accomplished.

BERGfrühling (4) and (5) – Dvořák, Berg, Schumann, and Schubert, 12 May 2018

St George’s Parish Church, Sternberg, and Alban Berg Saal, Carinthian Music Academy, Ossiach

Dvořák: String Quintet no.2 in G major, op.77, for string quartet and double bass

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

Schumann: Piano Quartet in E-flat major, op.47

Schubert: Octet in F major, D 803

Alban Berg Ensemble Wien (Sylvia Careddu (flute), Alexander Neubauer (clarinet), Ariane Haering (piano), Sebastian Gürtler, Régis Bringolf (violins), Subin Lee (viola), Florian Berner (cello)), Rya Yoshimura (bassoon), Peter Dorfmayr (horn), Ivan Kitanović (double bass)

This year’s BERGfrühling closed in style with two final-day concerts: one at the lovely little Parish Church of St George, Sternberg/Strmec (in this part of Carinthia, one is very close indeed to Slovenia), the other back at Ossiach Abbey, now the home of the Carinthian Music Academy. At the former, we heard Dvořák’s Quintet, op.77, the little church full to the rafters. I found a place up in the organ loft, from where I could look – and listen – down to an equally lovely performance. I was struck immediately by the richness and sheer physicality of the string tone, the first movement, like its successors, proceeding at a well chosen tempo, with a fine sense of motivic cohesion and harmonic impetus. It thus perhaps sounded closer to Beethoven than one often hears, and was certainly none the worse for that. Not that ‘Bohemian’ lyricism was lost, far from it. Indeed, ‘local’ dance rhythms and melodies were transmuted into something more universal, nowhere more so than in the scherzo. Darker undertones were given their due, especially by the viola and cello. The melancholy lyricism of the third movement was permitted to speak, even to be savoured, without indulgence. An intangibly – sometimes tangibly too! – integrative finale again relied on motivic cohesion, or rather on its communication to round things off in duly good-natured style. Then it was out of the church for a little tasting of local produce.

Back in Ossiach, Berg, Schumann, and Schubert concluded the festival. I do not think I have heard a better performance of the Four Pieces for clarinet and piano, op.5 than this, from Alexander Neubauer and Ariane Haering, both musicians clearly in their element. The first piece exuded Schoenbergian lyricism, horizontally and vertically: paradoxically perhaps – or not – given its tendency to aphorism. (Schoenberg could write aphoristically too, of course. When he and Berg do, it is striking how little they sound like Webern!) Weighting and tone quality sounded just right, an integral part of the work’s performance. A more fragmentary Busoni – the Busoni of, say, the Sarabande and Cortège – came to mind in the second piece, its line as long, or so it seemed, as those of the Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet heard the previous day, yet endlessly variegated too. The third piece, ‘Sehr rasch’ was sardonic, yet lightly rather than aggressively so: a Mahler movement telescoped, not unlike Webern perhaps in conception, and yet still very different in practice. It was a very different radicalism we heard in the final piece, imbued with an unmistakeably Bergian nostalgia, and yet related nevertheless, almost mystically, to Wozzeck too. Violent and serene, there were dialectics aplenty here.

Schumann’s Piano Quartet seemed to take leave from late Beethoven, prior to release in the exposition proper. If hardly carefree, it nevertheless spoke of joy in its post-Mozartian lot. (Given the key, E-flat major, one can hardly fail to think of certain Mozart works in that same key: KV 482, 493, etc.) Not that we were ever in any doubt that this was Schumann, of course, especially when it came to the piano writing – and performance, but there is perhaps something more Classical, not least in its very particular tension between major and minor, than in much of his music. Beethoven inevitably came to mind in the scherzo, but Mendelssohn too, for its opening proved truly featherlight, whilst lacking nothing in harmonic grounding. Its fantastical paths spoke unmistakeably, though, of a darker, more troubled woodland. Over in the twinkling of any eye, it prepared us for the necessary contrast of the Andante cantabile, ardent lyricism to the fore. A few intonational lapses could readily be overlooked for chamber music with such a heart. The final fizzed as post-Mozartian Sekt: necessary release. There were darker passages too, of course, a battle still to be won, yet we knew that it would be.

Additional woodwind caught one’s ear from the off in Schubert’s Octet. Here, aptly for so welcoming a festival, we found ourselves in the world of superior Hausmusik. The first movement offered space and dynamism. For all that one can and should delight in this music, it needs direction, which it certainly received. Likewise the Adagio never dragged, whilst remaining very much an Adagio in character. There was darkness at its heart, but light too. The scherzo gloried in its evocation of rusticity (not the same thing as rusticity itself!) Like the first trio in the previous day’s Mozart Clarinet Quintet, the trio both relaxed and intensified, Florian Berner’s cello a guiding presence here in its counterpoint. The theme and variations developed with purpose, a rebuke to those – there are still many – who underestimate classical variation form (perhaps excepting the Diabelli Variations). All musicians shone individually, yet, more important still, as an ensemble. There was more post-Mozartian delight, but also pathos and tumult in the minor mode. The strange minuet proved melancholic without exaggeration, preparing the way for the extraordinary introduction to the finale, imbued with foreboding, close to Beethoven, yet never quite to be identified with him. The main body of the movement emerged as if a storm had passed, with the colours one might thereby expect. There were reminders, yes, of what had passed, yet, as with Schumann, it was clear where we were heading. And once we had reached that destination, what was more fitting than to round off with a little Johann Strauss, the Kaiser-Walzer, as arranged by Schoenberg? A delightful end to a delightful festival.

BERGfrühling (3) – Haydn, Berg, and Brahms, 11 May 2018

Alban Berg Saal, Carinthian Music Academy, Ossiach, 11.5.2018 (MB)

Haydn, arr. Johann Peter Salomon: Symphony no.104, in D major, ‘London’

Berg: Lyric Suite

Brahms: Piano Quintet in F minor, op.34

Alban Berg Ensemble Wien (Sylvia Careddu (flute), Alexander Neubauer (clarinet), Ariane Haering (piano), Sebastian Gürtler, Régis Bringolf (violins), Subin Lee (viola), Florian Berner (cello))

Ivan Kitanović (double bass)

We think that we know a broader range of music than ever before, or at least that we can. Everything is there, often at the mere click of a mouse. Perhaps we do. Or perhaps not. So many nineteenth-century households knew Haydn’s, Mozart’s, Beethoven’s symphonies, and many more works, through playing them in piano duet versions. Other domestic chamber arrangements existed too, even at the time of first performance. Johann Peter Salomon’s chamber versions, often highly flexible regarding instrumentation, are a case in point. And Salomon knew the London Symphonies; he had, after all, commissioned them, and brought Haydn to London for that purpose. Indeed, those symphonies have sometimes also been called Haydn’s Salomon Symphonies. The twelfth and final of that set, and the last one of all, remains, of course, his singular London Symphony; it was that which we heard this evening, in Salomon’s arrangement, here for flute, piano, string quartet, and double bass.

Such arrangements tend to be more rewarding for players than for listeners, but it remains fascinating to hear them from time to time, not only as documents of taste, but also, often, for what they permit us to hear in the musical argument itself – if only because we are compelled, or at least invited, to listen differently. The first movement’s introduction proved broad, yet broad as chamber rather than symphonic music: just right, in many ways. The Allegro I perhaps found less convincing as a whole, although it grew on me. It seemed that Salomon allocated a little too much to the piano: fun for the pianist, no doubt, but did it quite work for the listener? Nevertheless, the players understood and communicated its formal dynamism, offering a fine sense of arrival at the close of the development. The Andante walked quickly, which made sense in a chamber version, and was far from inflexible. There was an almost – I stress ‘almost’ – Beethovenian vehemence in the central section, without abandoning its Baroque roots. The minuet again worked well, taken almost as a scherzo. However, I found the finale, especially its drone bass – perhaps surprisingly, given the presence of a double bass – lent itself less well to these particular forces. There were a few intonational slips too.

Berg’s Lyric Suite is, of course, ‘the real thing’, and what a thing it proved here, in work and in performance. We began in the thick of it: in medias res, if you prefer. Unfailingly alert and generative, the first movement set the scene for the explicit – in more than one sense – drama to come. Its successor seemed to partake in the erotic worlds of both Wozzeck and Lulu, whilst remaining quite rightly itself. What especially struck me was the fine command of what Wagner termed the melos of the work: its line or thread. Whispering, scurrying confidences, almost on the cusp of Ligeti, characterised the third movement, whose closeness also to Tristan und Isolde was never in doubt. The rich, mahogany sound of the quartet, married to the delirium of Berg’s argument, intensified that sense of Tristan in the Adagio appassionato. ‘Du bist mein Eigen’ is the celebrated Zemlinsky quotation. Quite. Afterglow lingered, yet not too long for us to regret its passing, greater tension then reignited, leading us necessarily into the motive-led vehemence of the fifth movement: at least as intense, differently so. The final movement sounded just as marked: Largo desolato. Eroticism, Tristan in particular, remained. And then, it subsided, but into what?

Brahms’s F minor Piano Quintet followed. There was much to admire here, much to get our teeth into, and again there was much to be gleaned from the programming, hearing it after both Haydn and Berg. In the first movement, there seemed to me more than a little of Schumann’s Florestan and Eusebius too. Was there a little too much? Did the argument threaten to break down? I was genuinely unsure, and unquestionably benefited from being compelled to listen: to find out, as it were. Brahms is difficult, and should never sound otherwise. That difficulty, to the point of collapse, however manifested itself more clearly, problematically in the rhythmic contradictions of the second movement. The scherzo, no more a joke than in Chopin, proved more successful, at least to my ears – and mind’s ears. Its fury rightly hung over the trio too. The finale offered, again, something of both worlds. Its introduction seemed to pick up where late Beethoven had left off, the Allegro non troppo offering a degree of relief, yet with a keen sense that there remained a long way to go. I enjoyed the danger, the sense of losing oneself, but did it quite add up? Should it have done? Ultimately, did Brahms not need something a little more integrative? I was made to ask such questions, though: no bad thing at all.

BERGfrühling (2) – Debussy, Webern, and Mozart, 11 May 2018

Alban Berg Saal, Carinthian Music Academy, Ossiach

Debussy, arr. Michael Webster: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, for flute, clarinet, and piano

Webern: String Quartet (1905)

Mozart: Clarinet Quintet in A major, KV 581

Alban Berg Ensemble Wien (Sylvia Careddu (flute), Alexander Neubauer (clarinet), Ariane Haering (piano), Sebastian Gürtler, Régis Bringolf (violins), Subin Lee (viola), Florian Berner (cello)) 

Continuing to echo, rather to imitate, Schoenberg’s Society for Private Performances, BERGfrühling’s second concert opened not with Benno Sachs’s arrangement of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, but with a version for flute, clarinet, and piano by Michael Webster. It worked very well, I thought, for which much of the credit must of course go to the performers: Sylvia Careddu, Alexander Neubauer, and Ariane Haering. The opening solo goes to the flute, of course; Careddu played it in wonderfully free fashion, as if new, as if without bar lines. She was answered by Neubauer, equally impressive, opening up a fascinating flute-clarinet duet – usually statement and response, but sometimes together – with piano ‘accompaniment’. I am not sure that I did not prefer it to the Sachs ensemble version – or perhaps it was the excellence of the performance.

London buses famously take their time and then appear in twos. Such has certainly been my experience with Webern’s 1905 String Quartet, one of the many works discovered by Hans Moldenhauer after the composer’s death. I heard it for what I think was the first time ‘live’ only this January, from the Hagen Quartet at London’s Wigmore Hall. If anything, I think this performance from members of the Alban Berg Ensemble, resident here at BERGfrühling, was better still. It certainly had me think and think again about this extraordinary early work. (Which, one might well ask, of Webern’s works is not extraordinary? The over-performed Im Sommerwind, perhaps, but that has undeniable charms too.) The first of the single-movement-work’s three sections opened perhaps not unlike it had with the Hagens: still, and yet it moved. Warm yet febrile – an almost unavoidable word with much Webern – this performance had nothing generically ‘late Romantic’ to it. This may not be the Webern of his op.28 Quartet, but it is undeniably Webern.

The players shaped the music’s progress as if it were a repertoire work, which it undoubtedly should be, and perhaps is for them, without taking anything for granted. Schoenbergian tendencies were clear without being overwhelming, thereby mirroring and interpreting the work itself. Then came sweet, yet not too sweet, serenity, which also yet moved. Schoenbergian development soon had the better of that serenity, both in work and performance, furthering a sense of something at least approaching transfiguration (Verklärung). Such was enabled, it seemed to me at least, by a performance that was spacious not in the sense of being slow, but in the sense of an inviting clarity that permitted us to take in the music and its implications: to travel, as it were, with the players, interpreters ourselves. The return to stillness at the close was in essence not a return at all, for this, quite rightly, proved a very different, quite wondrous stillness, finely won.

The Hagen Quartet, joined by Jörg Widmann, had also given us Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in that Wigmore concert. One can never hear that work too often, of course, at least when performed with the distinction it not only deserves but requires. Musical performance is not a competition; at least it should not be. If I give the Alban Berg Ensemble the edge in Webern and the Hagens the edge in Mozart, the important thing is that both offered much – and indeed offered quite different performances. The first movement, not inappropriately for a festival of this name, perhaps evoked spring rather than autumn; there was certainly no hint of sepia, Romantic or otherwise. Perhaps that was partly a matter of our hearing Mozart through Webern, more through programming than performance as such, yet none the less welcome for that – not unlike Christoph von Dohnányi’s revelatory Cleveland recordings pairing the two composers. Developing variation did not, after all, start with Brahms. Neubauer’s liquid tone did not preclude the most alert of musical responses. Indeed, the two incited the other, nowhere more so than in a development section which, with true grit and vehemence, truly developed, before subsiding into a recapitulation in which the old became new.

Serenity, this time more or less unbesmirched, characterised the slow movement. That is not to say that it was without incident, far from it, but that its own developing variation was heard in an almost Wagnerian unendliche Melodie. (The two, as Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern would all show, have far more in common than ‘Brahmsian’ and ‘Wagnerian’ partisans would ever have admitted, or indeed appreciated.) A tone of hushed awe quite rightly drew us in. The minuet flowed swiftly, as if in a single breath. Its first trio relaxed, yet intensified; here, the players seemed to say, is the truly ‘learned’ music. The second trio tellingly mediated between both tendencies. If the finale can readily be taken too insouciantly, we were here reminded that this is serious music, long before the turn to the minor mode. Not that this was unsmiling, but it was perhaps champagne rather than prosecco. Given the location, it was perhaps inevitable that I should think of a mountain lake when we came to the Adagio variation. This was, however, a Lake Ossiach situated in a greater Carinthian landscape, and thus all the more beautiful for it. Before, that is, Mozart-as-not-quite-Papageno rounded things off.

BERGfrühling (1) – Schubert, Weber, and Berg, 10 May 2018

Alban Berg Saal, Carinthian Music Academy, Ossiach

Schubert: Quintet in A major, D 667, ‘Trout’

Weber: Trio for flute, cello, and piano in G minor, op.63

Berg, arr. Martyn Harry: Fragments from ‘Wozzeck’ (world premiere)

Alban Berg Ensemble Wien (Sylvia Careddu (flute), Alexander Neubauer (clarinet)

Ariane Haering (piano), Sebastian Gürtler, Régis Bringolf (violins), Subin Lee (viola), Florian Berner (cello))

Ivan Kitanović (double bass)

The Vienna-based Alban Berg Ensemble is hosting its first BERGfrühling (Berg Spring) festival, in Ossiach, home to the Carinthian Music Academy, close to the Berg family estate, aptly enough called the Berghof, where the young Alban would spend his summer holidays. Four out of the five concerts will take place in the CMA’s Alban Berg Saal, a splendid new hall with an excellent acoustic, three with a work by Berg on the programme, the other with a piece by his fellow Schoenberg pupil, Webern; the fifth, a performance of a Dvořák’s G major String Quintet, op.77, will be heard in the parish church of St Georg, in nearby Sternberg. (Whether referring to mountains or composers, the word ‘Berg’ is rarely far away here.)

It was with, Schubert, one of the most indispensable forerunners of the Second Viennese School, that the festival opened, members of the ensemble joined by double bass player Ivan Kitanović for the Trout Quintet. The resonance of that bright A major chord, piano arpeggio included, seemed to announce both ensemble and acoustic in one: as it should be. A cultivated yet clear sound characterised a first movement full of tension, yet never aggressively so, the second group relaxed in the best sense, permitting a further increase of tension to propel us into the serious business of development. Modulations retained, or better revealed, their magic. Harmonic tension built and then exhausted itself, not unlike Mendelssohn, the onset of the recapitulation almost yet not quite imperceptible. A poised, almost chaste Andante sounded in almost neo-Classical style (vis-à-vis Mozart, that is, rather than anything Stravinskian!) It made me listen – and think. And yet, was it not too late for chastity? Such was subtly hinted at too, especially as the movement progressed. A propulsive reading of the scherzo, not without Beethovenian affinities – elective or otherwise – was counterbalanced by a somewhat neutral trio, but perhaps that was the point.

Having seen the wondrous Ossiacher See only that afternoon – the Abbey, now the Academy, stands by the lake – it was especially lovely to welcome the freshwater fish of the fourth movement theme and variations, here characterful, without overstatement. Well seasoned, one might say. There was plenty of time and space left to build, preparing for true vehemence in the minore fourth variation. I loved cellist Florian Berner’s shaping of his melody in the fifth: aristocratic, without aloofness. The final variation took us to the coffee house: where better a place to round off proceedings? The finale seemed, almost likewise, to hint at Brahms, whilst rightly remaining very much of its own time. Our tragedy, as well as its, may well be to be too late for Mozart; yet, as Brahms would counsel, there are sometimes worse things than lateness.

Weber’s trio for flute, cello, and piano, op.63 is an engaging, if sometimes perplexing, oddity. The first movement proved more fantasia- than sonata-like, likewise the finale. It was often not entirely clear what the material was doing where it was, nor how their tonal structure might operate. And yet, even there, there were hints of something darker, more Freischütz-like. The second movement scherzo benefited from nicely sprung rhythms and a pleasing semi-rusticity for its ‘trio’ material. Those two tendencies are more bound together in a single dance – and here, the music certainly danced. A beautifully posed ‘Schäfers Klage’ (‘Shepherd’s Lament’) was the highpoint, subtle in its navigation between Classical and Romantic tendencies – as one must be in Weber, or Schubert for that matter. It is a truly fascinating movement, all the more so in so illuminating a performance as this.

For the final work, we turned to Berg: to the world premiere of Martyn Harry’s arrangement for the ensemble of the composer’s own Fragments from ‘Wozzeck’, echoing the celebrated performances of Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances. The opening sounded on a knife-edge, between something frozen and molten lava: not unlike Bartók, perhaps. A labyrinth opened up before our ears, making us listen and listen anew, to find our way around something we thought we knew, yet perhaps did not after all. Indeed, for the first two fragments at least, I listened in more ‘abstract’ fashion, less heedful of the plot. Clarinet echoes from Berg’s op.5 Four Pieces led us, via Pierrot lunaire, so it seemed, into a whirling martial vortex: even here, the Captain seemed more an ‘instrumental character’ than reminiscence of a stage performance. The flute sang too, duetting, engaging with other instruments, bringing the ensemble to life – or perhaps to death.

In the second fragment, the viola came to the front: literally, Subin Lee acting as our instrumental Marie. Eloquent, even desperate, she (Marie, the viola, the violist?) remained splendidly collegiate; this was always true chamber music. In some ways, the music’s context within Berg’s instrumental œuvre came to seem clearer, or at least newly, even differently, emphasised. Curiously – in the best sense – enigmatic, it was very much the centre-piece to an aural triptych. Marie confounded us again, or perhaps Berg did, or Harry: surely, in practice as well as in theory, all three did. The drowning music with which the final fragment opens sounded properly hallucinatory, lulling, drawing us in as society draws in future Wozzecks. The ‘D-minor-ness’ of what followed somehow sounded underlined, its richness not quite that of nineteenth-century chamber music: perhaps, rather, of that music remembered, as both cage and liberation for Berg. Alexander Neubauer’s clarinet deputised for the children’s song to follow: childlike or childish? Certainly sardonic. The halt to which the music came chilled, as ever.

Lemieux/OPRF/Petrenko - Takemitsu, Chausson, and Zemlinsky, 4 May 2018

Grande Salle Pierre Boulez, Philharmonie, Paris

Takemitsu: Toward the Sea III

Chausson: Poème de l’amour et de la mer, op.19

Zemlinsky: Die Seejungfrau

Michel Rousseau (alto flute)

Nicolas Tulliez (harp)

Marie-Nicole Lemieux (contralto)

Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France

Vasily Petrenko (conductor)

Paris’s now not-quite-so-new Philharmonie remains a thing of wonder. The approach through the Parc de la Villette is a visual feast, especially on a sunny evening such as I was afforded. Lighting works magic after sunset too. If the public areas outside the hall still seem oddly provisional – presumably they are – the hall itself, now named the Grande Salle Pierre Boulez after the conscience of new music, remains also an acoustical wonder, a feast for the ears. I could not help but think, not least after a recent visit to the Barbican, how desperately London needs something similar – or, dare we hope, better. From May in Paris to May in Downing Street remains, alas, a distance of intergalactic proportions.

Although I had enjoyed my first visit, in October 2015, this concert proved the more consistently illuminating musical experience. For one thing, I am not sure that I had heard any of the three works in concert before. Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea III, for alto flute and harp, made for an excellent opening piece: the sort of programming touch, mixing solo, chamber, ensemble, and larger forces, of which Boulez would have approved. Flute and harp could hardly be a more Gallic combination, yet Takemitsu’s music is rarely quite what it initially seems. This, then, was a garden of delights, not least the opening movement, ‘The Night’, but not all gardens, not all Japanese gardens, are the same. Such music tends to reward concentrated, enlightened listening – what music worth its salt does not?! – such as was enabled both by these fine performances, from Michel Rousseau and Nicolas Tulliez, and the fine acoustic. There was a sense of inheritance from Debussy and Ravel, without in any sense being limited thereby. Shifting of roles between the two instruments came to the fore in the second movement, ‘Moby Dick’, played with twin flexibility and purpose: both necessary when finding one’s way around a labyrinth, however esmall. The closing ‘Cape Cod’ followed, so it seemed, consequentially, without one ever necessarily being able to explain quite how. Silences proved pregnant, as telling as the notes. There was no playing to the gallery here; neither music nor hall required it.

We remained with the sea throughout the evening, Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer our next port of call. Like each of the three pieces heard this evening, Chausson’s work is, surely not coincidentally, in three parts, a ravishing orchestral interlude between the two verse settings: ‘La Fleur des eaux’ and ‘La Mort de l’amour’. Many in the audience were, understandably, disappointed by the withdrawal of Anna Caterina Antonacci from the concert. There was, however, little to regret in the performance we heard from Marie-Nicole Lemieux. Indeed, her rich yet agile contralto offered its own distinctive rewards, which one would have been a fool to spurn. (How often, in any case, does one have the opportunity to hear a ‘true’ contralto?) Her way with the words was impressed just as much as the richly upholstered tone on the low notes.

Rousseau and Tulliez were now joined by their colleagues from the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Vasily Petrenko. I was struck – perhaps as an Englishman I would be – by the opening phrase and its seeming affinity to Elgar. Tristan-esque harmonies made their mark, of course, so did the Klingsor-like, fin-de-siècle world of the ‘sauvage’ we both heard and embraced. Chamber music, as in Wagner, proved to be much of the story too, Petrenko acting as much as enabler as director, without shirking his responsibilities in the latter role where necessary. Greater urgency in the third section marked out a fresh start: related, yes, but also perhaps redolent of Nietzsche, in The Gay Science: ‘At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’. Wagnerism knows no boundaries; nor should it.

Image: Arnold Schönberg Center - Wien

Zemlinsky would surely have nodded assent to that, whether as composer or conductor. Petrenko’s reading of Die Seejungfrau (‘The Little Mermaid’), after Hans Christian Andersen, at least equalled any recorded performance I have heard – with the inestimable advantage, of course, of ‘liveness’. When I hear it I cannot help but think of Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, not least since both works received their premieres in the same concert, the final, January 1905 outing for the short-lived Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler (‘Society of Creative Musicians’). Neither is an easy work to bring off, yet Petrenko seemed to me very much to have the measure of Zemlinsky’s ‘fantasy in three movements for large orchestra’, especially its very own motivic integrity: not entirely unlike Schoenberg’s, yet certainly not merely to be assimilated to it.

Through that joint inheritance from Brahms and Wagner, the three movements seemed quite naturally, even organically – however loaded those terms may be – to emerge. Would it have mattered if it had been called a symphony? Perhaps not. But it was better called, and performed as, something else. The narrative was very much its own, perhaps not entirely unlike another, more celebrated maritime symphonic poem, by a composer hovering at the edges of the programme: Debussy. The waves of La Mer certainly came involuntarily to my mind at the opening of the second of the work’s three movements. Thinking of the symphonic or tone poem as a genre, work and performance sounded not un-Straussian at some points, yet never – quite rightly, I think – displayed Strauss’s cynical and/or materialist delight in phantasmagoria for its own sake. Zemlinsky, for better or worse, was simply too nice a man and composer for that. He withdrew the work, for whatever reason, after that Musikverein performance. Schoenberg, as ever, bore the violent brunt of the reaction. ‘Reviews were unusually violent,’ he would recall: ‘one of the critics suggested to put me in an asylum and keep music paper out of my reach’. Zemlinsky, however, deserved far more than indifference – as Schoenberg and this evening’s excellent performers knew well.

Kolesnikov - Lachenmann, Debussy, Chopin, Liszt, Bach, Louis Couperin, and Schumann, 30 April 2018

Wigmore Hall

Lachenmann: Ein Kinderspiel: ‘Schattentanz’

Debussy: Children’s Corner, interspersed with:

            Lachenmann: Ein Kinderspiel: ‘Akiko’

            Chopin: Mazurka in C-sharp minor, op.30 no.4; Etude in F minor, op.25 no.2

            Liszt: Etude in G-sharp minor, ‘La campanella’, S 141/3

            Lachenmann: ‘Schattentanz’

            Bach: Prelude in C-sharp major, BWV 872

            Lachenmann: Ein Kinderspiel: ‘Filter-Schaukel’

Debussy: Préludes, Book II: ‘Feux d’artifice’

Louis Couperin: Tombeau de Mr de Blancrocher

Schumann: Fantasie in C major, op.17

Pavel Kolesnikov (piano)

This was anything but an ordinary recital. Sometimes, however, an inventive programme can fail in practice, either because it is too inventive for its own good, or because the performer is less than equal to its strenuous demands – or both. Here, Pavel Kolesnikov, whom I had been looking forward to hearing for quite some time – alas, I had to cancel attendance at a Visions de l’Amen with Samson Tsoy – triumphantly, elegantly, even insouciantly swatted like flies any doubts I might have entertained, and proved equal to the task he had set himself not only in his programming, but in his spoken (recorded) introduction, prior to coming on stage. Kolesnikov acknowledged that the programme might have looked like Schumann with a stuffed version of Debussy’s Children’s Corner, but winningly avowed that he would rather the audience have gone hungry than set such a meal before it. Instead, he said, these ‘musical pieces are characters in a play’, all connected by ‘extreme purity of the musical language’. (Again, my ideological alarm bells started ringing; performance and listening would prove me wrong.) Dedicated to Debussy, the recital aimed to show the ‘magical chemical reaction’ his music in particular enjoyed with the music of other composers.

It was with Helmut Lachenmann, however, that the recital proper began: with the ‘Schattentanz’ from his 1980 suite, Ein Kinderspiel. Not with that work’s opening ‘Hänschen Klein’ – perhaps that would have been too easy, too redolent of ‘child’s play’ – but with its closing ‘Schattentanz’. Its opening Nibelheim gallop in the extreme treble of the instrument – typically, the piano’s highest two notes, B and C – was judged, as it must be, with the utmost precision and ease of dynamic gradation: not unlike Mozart, or indeed Debussy. Was that Nibelheim or was it the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, or an apotheosis of something or somewhere in between, perhaps, as it were, of the Schattentanz? It could be any of those things, or none. Already, I began to understand, or think I did, what Kolesnikov had meant by ‘extreme purity of the musical language’: not exclusive, but something irreducible. Perhaps Stravinsky had not been wrong after all; nor, however, had Liszt, for there was surely something of Mephistopheles here too. Childhood is not for children, not really. Or, as Lachenmann put it, quoted in Jessica Duchen’s programme note, ‘Although it was written for my son David and partly played in public by my daughter Akiko, who at that time (1980) was seven years old, Kinderspiel is not a pedagogical music or a music intended specially for children either. Childhood and musical experiences related to it are an essential part of every adult’s inner world.’

On, then, to Children’s Corner and its sly wit, Debussy awakening from the shadows of the shadow-dance. Interestingly, ‘Doctor Gradus’ sounded, for all its C major ‘purity’ and for all Kolesnikov’s teasing rubato, all the more modernist in its radical resort to and/or play with tonality. And yes, there was a true sense of a new character being introduced, whether in a play or a novel.  ‘Jimbo’s Lullaby’ again offered character, not caricature, returning one’s thoughts to those of Lachenmann, and so many others, on ‘childhood’, and to those of Kolesnikov on musical purity. For each pitch, each dynamic gradation, one could imagine a quasi-serialist value. ‘Total serialism’, after all, surely owed at least as much to Debussy as to the Second Viennese School, even Webern. Emerging from Debussy, Lachenmann’s ‘Akiko’ sounded almost Romantic: only, of course, because it is. The sense of a strong relationship between pitch and other parameters remained – not despite, but because of its Romanticism. Returning to Debussy, for the ‘Serenade of the Doll’, it worked just as beautifully ‘in itself’ as because of any images that may or may not have been provoked. I especially loved the way Kolesnikov leaned into phrases: related, yet never the same.

Chopin’s C-sharp minor Mazurka, Op.30 no.4, might have sounded mannered in abstracto – but not if one knew some of the great Chopin pianists of the past, and certainly not if one listened to it in context. Here it sounded truly magical, not despite the sometimes extreme level of play with its dance rhythms, but partly on account of that. Was this perhaps itself a form of musique concrète instrumentale? Certainly the way in which Chopin’s harmonies dissolved spoke of Debussy and beyond. The F minor Etude, op.25 no.2, suggested Debussy’s doll returning to stage, dancing a pas de deux with the subject, whoever or whatever it may be, of Lachenmann’s ‘Akiko’. And then the Snow Danced too, Debussy’s harmonic ambiguities as eloquent, as mysterious as I have heard, intensified by Chopin’s preparation. We seemed to be in a state of semi-suspended animation – which, when one thinks about it, we should have to be, for the snow to be dancing. Liszt’s ‘La campanella’ had something of the ballet to it to, albeit a ballet without dancers, like Wagner’s ironic – although how ironic? – late desire for an invisible theatre. The notes themselves were the dancers, perhaps, returning us to Kolesnikov’s æsthetic credo. Liszt, at any rate, was not played to the gallery, but music that brought the gallery to the keyboard itself. In similar vein, the keyboard almost expanded before our ears at the close, an aural equivalent to the growth of the Christmas Tree in The Nutcracker. Lachenmann’s ‘Schattantanz’ returned: the same, different, or both? It was difficult to tell, and that was surely the point.

‘The Little Shepherd’ trod the boards next, seemingly transformed by those experiences, both ‘musical’ and ‘characterful’. The experience was unsettling, rendering necessary our listening – not unlike the music of Luigi Nono, Lachenmann’s teacher. The Bach Prelude that followed (C-sharp major, Book II) sounded as if Dr Gradus had returned, tonally upgraded, as it were, having both learned and spurned the lessons in between, nevertheless taking it all in his stride. Kolesnikov’s playful legato and sheer delight in the music were infectious indeed. ‘Golliwogg’s Cakewalk’ answered the final phrase of the closing fugato, the Tristan music apparently ‘without hammers’. Lachenmann’s ‘Filter-Schaukel’ then sounded the alarm – both against premature applause and as ‘pure’ sonority, its clusters all the weirder in context. It played with both our hearing and our listening. ‘Feux d’artifice’ closed this extraordinary first half, with fireworks that were far from only visual, far from mere display, mere ‘artifice’. Performance is alchemy too.

Louis Couperin’s Tombeau de Mr de Blancrocher opened the second half: more languid and improvisatory than Debussy. And yet, there was a not entirely dissimilar sense of play with the basic musical materials. Dr Gradus, perhaps in a new disguise? Perhaps in a late-night lockdown, at last able truly to let his hair down? For there was, it seemed, something of the jazz world to Kolesnikov’s performance, to this tribute to a lutenist, a relish of its dissonances that yet declined unduly to underline.

For all we know of the connections between Schumann and Debussy, they had rarely sounded so close as here, in the opening to the C major Fantasie. Perhaps that was all the stranger given Kolesnikov’s grand Romantic manner, only rarely unleashed earlier on. The music could melt, of course, quite unlike Debussy’s snow, yet never as anything but an expression of Schumann’s formal dynamism. The characters here? Florestan and Eusebius, of course, yet they were joined by, even changed by reappearances from the earlier cast. Schumann here needs relatively little encouragement to sound like Liszt, yet the encouragement he did receive was beautifully judged, guiding one to hear one composer’s transformational anticipations of another. Brahms was here too, of course: for once, neither too late nor too early. The Innigkeit, however, was entirely Schumann’s own. A kinship with Beethoven – quite absent from the earlier music, I think – was unquestionably apparent – in the second movement, yet its caprice was quite different. Likewise the ‘late Beethoven’ rarity of the closing Adagio, shaped with a true mastery of musical narrative. What a special piece this is, and what a special performance this was. And then, as if to confirm yet also affectionately to mock my construction of the play we had heard, ‘Dr Gradus’ bis: like the Lachenmann repeat in the first half, both the same and anything but the same. There was something rather wonderful to a new beginning, a new limbering up; and there was also a warning, which perhaps I should have taken to heart earlier, that perhaps only music could tell this tale after all.

(This recital was recorded for future broadcast by BBC Radio 3.)