Throwing down the symphonic gauntlet: piano music by Beethoven-Liszt, Schubert, and Prokofiev

Humanist Heroism

Unveiling of the Beethoven monument, Bonn, in 1845. Liszt ensured that the project succeeded, contributing money, advocacy, performances, and his own music.

In his Third Symphony, Beethoven threw down the gauntlet: to himself, to contemporaries and to successors in the 19th and even 20th centuries. The scale and public quality of its utterance seem, like the composer’s visage in glowering, ineffably human portraits, to speak of and with something new: Beethoven’s heroic voice.

In the sonata-form first movement, generative simplicity and development of unprecedented length and complexity prove two sides of the same coin. Its opening E flat major triad, heard first vertically then horizontally, gives the appearance of organic necessity in informing all that is to come; so too does its subsequent – consequent? – turning away: E flat–D–C sharp. This music is in a dramatic, persistent state of becoming as opposed to being, not least a coda functioning as fully fledged second development. The monumental ceremonial of the Marcia funebre, the funeral games of the Scherzo and the thrills and spills of the Finale’s set of ultimately fugal variations present not only Beethoven’s titular ‘memory of a great man’ but also a present and future for heroism that lies in common humanity. Dedication to one man, Napoleon, even had his memory not been tarnished, could never have been enough. As Wagner would argue in a programmatic explanation to accompany a performance he conducted, ‘the term “heroic” must be taken in the widest sense, and not simply as relating to a military hero’; ‘understand “hero” to mean, above all, the whole, complete man’.

Liszt stood equal to Wagner in formulation and development of the 19th century’s Beethoven. Having met the composer in 1823 – alleged occasion of the mythical ‘Weiheküss’ (consecration kiss) – Liszt proceeded to act as champion in multiple ways: pianist, arranger, conductor, benefactor (to Bonn’s Beethoven Monument), custodian (to Beethoven’s Broadwood piano) etc. As recitalist – he invented the term – Liszt brought Beethoven’s piano sonatas to a rank of public utterance close to that of the symphonies; he likewise brought the symphonies to audiences that would rarely, if ever, hear an orchestra. Liszt transcribed the Marcia funebre of the ‘Eroica’ as early as 1837, alongside the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies. The remaining three movements of the Third were added in 1863, after which he revised the slow movement. That first transcription afforded a model from which to work – literally, for Liszt wrote his modifications into an old copy – with certain difficulties now benefiting from more graceful solutions. In 1865, the Symphony was published as part of a complete set of nine, dedicated to Hans von Bülow.

Large hands are a prerequisite, with stretches of a tenth commonplace. If amateur pianists can happily make their way through the piano duet versions of orchestral music popular throughout the 19th century and even much of Liszt’s transcription of the First Symphony, the Third is another matter – the Ninth still more so. What is readily accomplished by orchestra is not always by piano, and vice versa. Liszt’s solutions, however difficult, are comprehending and ingenious. He notes instrumentation, and lines impossible to incorporate are included on a separate stave. Ossia passages for the more adventurous (and dexterous) cross hands to include further material, or to do so at the correct octave. Suggestions for pedalling are well thought out and imaginative, always deserving of consideration. To ask whether the purpose is interpretative or to further acquaintance with Beethoven’s score is to miss the point; Liszt rarely trades in the either/or.

The notes are on one fundamental level Beethoven’s. How much do they become Liszt’s and/or the pianist’s? Such questions would in a sense always be present: how much did they become Wagner’s or Furtwängler’s? We cast our imaginative net as wide or as narrow as we wish. Yet there is something more here, thanks not only to Liszt’s presence as intermediary – how ‘faithful’ will or should the pianist be to him? – but also to demands of transcendental piano virtuosity. What Romantics such as Liszt and Wagner would have called Beethoven’s ‘poetic idea’ is both treasured and transformed. The heroism of transcription and performance for solo piano offers a study in fidelity, infidelity and the complexity of their dialectical relationship.

Breadth and Introspection

 

A pallbearer at Beethoven’s funeral, Schubert long fell too readily under his shadow, especially in the realm of instrumental music. If Schubert’s stature as songwriter – further inspiration to Liszt the arranger – no longer eclipses his instrumental achievements, it can remain tempting to consider them in relation to divergence from an alleged Beethovenian model. That said, when hearing Schubert immediately after Beethoven, some degree of comparison seems inevitable; it does little harm so long as it does not over-determine our response. For, in John Daverio’s words, ‘whereas Beethoven, especially in the symphonic works of his “heroic” phase, drives headlong from the present into the future, thus emulating the teleological thrust of drama, Schubert treats the present as a pretext for summoning up or mulling over the past, tending as he does toward epic breadth and lyric introspection’. That bardic impulse may be heard in Schubert’s Drei Klavierstücke. These three pieces, composed in Beethoven’s wake, in 1827–8, may have been intended to contribute toward a third set of (four) impromptus, although a different paper type for the third may indicate otherwise (or simply earlier composition). They went unpublished until 1868, collected and edited (anonymously) by Brahms.

An E flat minor winter wind blows through much of the First, though oscillation with the tonic major renders its chill more uncertain, if hardly consoling. For consolation, we await the warm, almost hallucinatory lyricism – recognizable from Winterreise – of the central Andante section; in remote B major, it is not itself without moments of tragic vehemence. Schubert’s original conception of a five-part rondo, ABACA, became a ternary ABA form, the ‘C’ episode crossed out entirely in the manuscript. His motive remains a matter for speculation; René Rusch has recently pointed to differences in Schubert’s use of modal mixture (borrowing chords from E flat major) in the first two pieces. Some pianists follow Schubert’s deletion; others are unwilling to resist the lure of extra material and follow Brahms’s editorial reinstatement. Who knows what Schubert would have decided in performance or preparation for publication.

Schubert, in any case, employed that five-part form next, the second piece’s tender barcarolle, taking up where its predecessor had left off, in E flat major. Enharmonic means, similar yet different, take us on a journey through dark episodes of pathos that in themselves contain passages of modal transfiguration. The urgency of the final piece’s flights of syncopation once more offers strong, seemingly necessary contrast with the hymn-like central section, a semitone higher, yet a flatter key (D flat major to surrounding C major). Decidedly un-Beethovenian ambiguities persist.

 

‘In real time’

 

The quizzical opening of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata might suggest a similar path. Its first movement’s marking, ‘Allegro inquieto’, indicates tempo in the fullest sense: concerned as closely with character and mood as speed. Needless to say, though, Prokofiev’s way proves very much his own, albeit with points of connection to all three composers heard previously.

Much depends, of course, on performance. As with Schubert’s Klavierstücke, Sviatoslav Richter – different from himself in alternative performances – will present something different from Maurizio Pollini; Igor Levit something different from both. Richter never performed Liszt’s Beethoven, publicly disavowing most transcriptions, Liszt’s response to ‘Erlkönig’ a rare exception. Given the depth of Richter’s ‘at home’ repertoire, he may well have explored more; at any rate, he certainly performed much Beethoven, Liszt, Schubert and Prokofiev, and loved to play symphonic and operatic music on the piano for himself. Prokofiev, who entrusted Richter with this work’s premiere, was more open-minded concerning transcription, whether of his own music or that of others, ranging from Buxtehude to Schubert. He was also a superlative pianist who knew, like Liszt, godfather to Russian schools of composers and pianists alike, how to compose ferociously demanding music that was always written ‘for’, not ‘against’, the instrument.

Moreover, whatever his enfant terrible reputation, principally a matter of contrast with reactionary conservatory professors, Prokofiev’s musical grounding was rooted in Classical tradition. Beethoven, whose music he had often as a child heard his mother play, always loomed large, whether in performance or composition; sonata forms and genres were ever present in Prokofiev’s music, modernist or more nostalgic. The distinction was always problematic, as we discover in the Seventh and its fellow ‘War’ sonatas – not a Russian term – of 1939–42. To many Western ears, the Seventh, as recorded by Pollini, seems most modernistic, at least in the wandering tonality of the first movement and the brutal insistence of the Finale; however, that begs more questions than it answers. It is more meaningful to follow Boris Berman’s argument that the Sixth anticipates war and the Eighth recalls it, while the Seventh ‘projects the anguish and the struggle […] experienced in real time’. For Richter, it plunged an audience ‘into the anxiously threatening atmosphere of a world that has lost its balance’.

Chaos and uncertainty reign. We see murderous forces unleashed. But this does not mean that what we lived by therefore ceases to exist. We continue to feel and to love. Now the full range of human emotions bursts forth. Together with our fellow men and women, we raise a voice of protest and share the common grief. We sweep everything before us, borne along by the will for victory. In the tremendous struggle that this involves, we find the strength to affirm the irrepressible life force.

Marina Frolova-Walker has similarly discerned a ‘Beethovenian narrative of victory won through struggle’: socialist realism, perhaps, though not of a dogmatic variety, and coming more naturally to Prokofiev than some would like.

Beethovenian realism might be better: in its inner voices, the second half of the opening theme bears apparent reference to what we have come to know as Beethoven’s motif of fate. This is no transcription, yet ambition to attain orchestral stature or suggestion remains, as in the marking ‘quasi Timp.’. Grotesquerie of yore is intermittently present, yet in a context of militaristic discipline is no longer a laughing matter. If the first movement offers a Beethovenian contrast between thematic groups, almost conventionally ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, its progress, both mocking and honouring hallowed sonata form, stands as close to theatre or cinema. The principal theme of the Andante caloroso may be heard as a reminiscence as false as it is fond, both in register and chordal accompaniment, of kindred movements in Beethoven. Ternary form stands familiar from many of its kind – and from two of Schubert’s Klavierstücke. The closing Precipitato offers synthesis in combat between jaunty 7/8 machine-irregularity and the Classical frame of a rondo finale. Hammered, even frenetic insistence, seemingly inherited from Prokofiev’s piano concertos, on the tonic of B flat speaks solely of the here and now. The Sonata hurtles to a close, exhilarating and only in retrospect exhausted: ‘in real time’, because it can do no other.

 

(This essay was originally published to accompany a recital by Igor Levit at the 2021 Salzburg Festival.)

‘Let music not be forgotten in the meantime’: Sonatas, Fantasies, and Fragments by Schumann and Chopin

 

In Beethoven’s wake, composers, especially in the Austro-German tradition, asked themselves what should become of forms and genres he had seemingly taken to their ultimate, foremost among them the sonata and symphony. Allied to increasing interest, born of literary Romanticism, in the idea of the ‘fragment’ – for Friedrich Schlegel, ‘a small work of art, complete in itself and separated from its surrounding world, like a hedgehog’ – such pressure led in several directions: rejuvenation and rejection of old forms only two possible polarities. We shall hear in this programme Schumann wrestle with such questions; Chopin take, to Schumann’s bemusement, a very different sonata path; and much territory both between and beyond.

‘For ladies’

Writing in 1843, Schumann argued that ‘difficulties in form and content’ had prevented much of his music from gaining greater public esteem. The C major Arabeske, composed over his Vienna winter of 1838–9, had represented an attempt to offer something less elusive, less enigmatic, or, as Schumann put it, ‘for ladies’. In Classical terms, we may consider it a rondo: ABACA plus coda. Schumann’s literary alter egos, Florestan and Eusebius, appear respectively in passionately extrovert, minor-key episodes and wistful, introspective postlude. Strong interrelationships between first section and episodes, whether in thematic derivation or transitional return, suggest a fluid conception of developmental variation somewhere between Beethoven and Brahms.

A Lone First Movement

Schumann’s love of dotted quaver-semiquaver figures – the first note may be a quaver, followed by a semiquaver rest – as heard in the Arabeske also informs the Allegro in B minor op. 8. Conceived as the first movement to a piano sonata, completed or nearly so, yet otherwise destroyed, it occupies an interesting place in Schumann’s development. The pianist-composer integrates aspects of virtuoso display into a respectable, even venerable, musical form. We might suspect the opening cadenza to announce an improvisatory fantasia; it turns out instead to be a sonata-form movement’s first thematic group. The stark motto enunciated at its heart—B–C sharp–F sharp—proves to have multiple thematic consequences, serving, John Daverio observed, ‘as bass line for the elaboration of the first group, melodic backbone for the opening of the lyric second theme, head motif for the development, underpinning for the sequentially conceived retransition, and herald of the coda’. We might not be surprised to discern in those letters an extra-musical cipher, though that seems not to be the case. For Romanticism, incompletion does not itself signify a fragment; a fragment must in some sense be complete. However, like a ruin of yore, incompletion, however construed, forms a good basis on which to construct a fragment.

Sonata or Fantasy?

The Fantasie op. 17 is a very different kettle of fish: in Charles Rosen’s words, ‘the monument that commemorates the death of the Classical style’. The idea is especially apt given Schumann’s intention at one point during its complicated genesis to offer proceeds as his contribution to a Beethoven monument in Bonn (its committee chaired by the other Schlegel brother, August Wilhelm). Schumann expanded a single movement of 1836, a ‘fantasy’ called Ruinen – ‘a deep lament for you’, he told Clara during their enforced separation – into a three-movement ‘sonata’ entitled Ruinen, Trophaen, Palmen, tension between ancient and modern, introspection and the monumental integral to its design. Many continue to view the Fantasie in relation to sonata genre and forms, yet Schumann seems to have become convinced during, perhaps by virtue of, its composition that they had ‘run their course’, at least as comprehensible to his Classical forebears. ‘We should not repeat the same thing century after century’, he wrote in 1839; by all means write ‘sonatas, or fantasies (what’s in a name!), but let music not be forgotten in the meantime’.

Form, then, must not become formula; it is experienced as interplay between sonata and fantasy and other opposing yet related forces. Outer movements begin in medias res, with something to them of the old improvisatory fantasia. On the first’s stage appear Florestan and Eusebius as equals. The third hymns the latter, seemingly have cast off the last vestiges of Florestan’s sonata-like material. They frame and are framed by Florestan’s grand second-movement march. Mediating these oppositions, there appear (at least) two ghosts from Romanticism’s past and one from its present. First is Beethoven: in musical inheritance, but also in the first movement coda’s allusion to the closing song of Beethoven’s song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte, where the protagonist bids his ‘beloved’ during their separation to accept the songs he had once sung. Second is Schlegel, in musico-literary method and, explicitly, in Schumann’s inscription from his Die Gebüsche (once set by Schubert):

Durch alle Töne tönet
Im bunten Erdentraume,
Ein leiser Ton gezogen,
Für den, der heimlich lauschet.
(Through all the sounds
in the earth’s many-coloured dream,
one faint sound echoes
for him who secretly listens.)

Third and most important is Clara. ‘Are you not’, Schumann wrote to her, ‘the tone in the inscription?’. Is she (or Robert)? Who, then, is the secret listener? It need not be either/or.

The array of reference is dizzying: internal, external, and in a strange liminal zone of the literary-musical. Tonal and thematic relationships, as ambiguous as they are complex and thoroughgoing, fuse with questions of genre. The distinction Schumann drew between ‘higher’ or ‘noble’ forms, such as sonata, symphony or ‘fantasy’, and smaller, ‘characteristic’, simpler pieces, pertains within as well as between works. ‘Im Legendenton’, a Eusebian Lieder ohne Wortre of paradoxically timeless archaism – a musical ruin – that blossoms with typical Romantic passion, is flanked by Florestan’s sonata tendencies. For Daverio, it offers an instance of Schlegel’s conception of the Arabeske: ‘humorous, witty, or sentimental digressions that intentionally disturb the chronological flow of a narrative’, yet, ‘as a total form, […] tempers a seemingly chaotic diversity through a deliberately concealed logical process’. For Nicholas Marston, it is from here that Florestan’s flanking music is derived, if only in retrospect, by way of parallel to Schlegel’s fragmentary novel La Lucinde. The idea of a single reading misses the point. A multiplicity of readings, of (potential) performances, both fragments and unifies. Such, then, are those ‘difficulties in form and content’ to which Schumann would later refer, and which seem to have discouraged even Liszt, the dedicatee of the Fantasie, from frequent performance: ‘too difficult’, he wrote to Schumann, ‘for the public to digest’.

‘Unruly children’

We turn to Chopin for the single work named a ‘Piano Sonata’: his Second, in B flat minor op. 35. Schumann commented, sceptically, that Chopin having ‘called it a “sonata” suggests a joke, if not sheer bravado. He seems to have taken four of his most unruly children and put them together, possibly thinking to smuggle them, as a sonata, into company where they might not be considered individually presentable.’ There is no evidence to back up that observation, which says more about Schumann in 1841 than Chopin in 1839, when he wrote three of the four movements. Less weighed down by Beethoven’s example, Chopin had greater liberty to strike out on his own. He used the sonata genre, to quote Jim Samson, as ‘a framework within which the achievements of his earlier music – the figurative patterns of the Études and Preludes, the cantilenas of the Nocturnes, and even the periodicity of the dance pieces –might be drawn together in a kind of synthesis’.

More readily than the first movement of Schumann’s Fantasie, we may hear Chopin’s opening movement in terms of (modified) sonata form, especially in its exposition: a brief, powerful ‘Grave’ introduction followed by a headlong first subject and songful successor. ‘There is beautiful song in this first movement, too’, Schumann wrote, adding that the younger Chopin’s Polish qualities were vanishing, ‘via Germany, towards Italy’. We may beg to differ; Schumann did himself, continuing: ‘As soon as the song is sung, the Pole flashes forth again in all his bold originality. Certainly, Bellini never would nor could have dared the interwoven chords encountered after the close of the first episode of the second part.’ Indeed, though to be fair to Bellini, he had no more wish to do so than Chopin had to follow the hallowed (German) tonal pattern of the ‘double reprise’. The question is not ‘why did he not?’ but ‘why might you think he would have done?’. In place of the archetypal tonal drama of the Beethoven sonata, Chopin reveals his nocturne-like second subject as both heart and destination.

Typically for a Chopin scherzo, the second movement is quite without humour, even of Beethoven’s gruff variety. In dark E flat minor, its central ‘Più lento’ section shifts for the Trio to G flat major, more song – echoing the first movement’s second subject – than dance. Inner part voicing delineates Chopin’s delicate balance, born more of Bach and Mozart than Beethoven, between melody, harmony and counterpoint. Written two years earlier, the celebrated Marche funèbre offers similar contrast, this time between memorial and nocturne.

The moto perpetuo Finale represented, for Schumann, ‘more mockery than music. And yet one must confess that from this songless and cheerless movement there breathes a special and dreadful spirit, suppressing with resolute fist every inclination to resist.’ The music has certainly proved an enigma to many: Chopin at his most modernistic, even athematic? Perhaps. Again, however, is that the point? There is irony, bitter or otherwise, in this display, both in character and brevity, following the funeral march. Arthur Rubinstein described ‘night winds sweeping over churchyard graves’. The music needs neither poetic nor formal naming. Like a Prelude or Étude, it sweeps across the keys with diabolical magic entirely the piano’s own.

Singing on Its Own Terms

The Berceuse op. 57 bears affinities with the central section of the Sonata’s Scherzo. Like the Sonata itself, though, it speaks, or rather sings, on its own terms. Whatever its starting point – allegedly a lullaby for singer Pauline Viardot’s baby daughter – the music’s glittering ornamentation beguiles us into believing it, not the ostinato bass, to be the form-creating substance of 15 variations. Sometimes our ears know better than our eyes or biographies. Samson observes the patterns of Chopin’s ornamentation gain ‘new meaning precisely because of their divorce from harmonic progression, dynamic curve and even melody’. They become objects of contemplation, heard, like the Sonata’s Finale, simply as themselves. Liszt, Debussy, Ravel and other composers to this day have savoured and furthered this Romantic legacy. 

Swagger and Suggestion

The A flat major Polonaise op. 53 was Chopin’s last (bar, aptly enough, a Polonaise-Fantasy, op. 61). It strides majestically across the keyboard with fierce confidence and purpose that render its genre a starting point rather than a destination. It is clearly not intended straightforwardly to ‘be’ a dance. The composer bears witness, as if prefiguring a Liszt tone poem, to both particular and universal in wounded ‘national’ pride and heroism. Chopin’s late preoccupation with ostinato refreshes the central section, once more rejecting any notion of form as formula. Orchestral suggestiveness is no mere imitation. A piano can suggest an orchestra, but an orchestra cannot suggest itself – at least not prior, say, to Helmut Lachenmann. In sonority as in form, music is certainly not, as Schumann had it, ‘forgotten in the meantime’.

 (This essay was first published in a 2021 Salzburg Festival programme to accompany a recital by Maurizio Pollini.)

Die Zauberflöte, Royal Opera, 15 September 2021

Royal Opera House

Tamino – Bernard Richter
Pamina – Salome Jicia
Papageno – Huw Montague Rendall
Queen of the Night – Brenda Rae
Sarastro – Krzysztof Baczyk
Monostatos – Michael Colvin
Papagena – Haegee Lee
Speaker – Jochen Schmeckenbecher
Three Ladies – Alexandra Lowe, Hanna Hipp, Stephanie Wake-Edwards
Two Priests – Harry Nicoll, Donald Maxwell
Two Armoured Men – Alan Pingarrón, James Platt
Three Boys – Rafael Flutter, Benjamin Jardim, Victor Wiggin

David McVicar (director)
Dan Dooner (revival director)
John Macfarlane (designs)
Paule Constable (lighting)
Leah Hausman, Angelo Smimmo (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Hartmut Haenchen (conductor)

Images: Bill Cooper. (C) ROH 2021

David McVicar’s 2003 Magic Flute production is really starting to look—more to the point, feel—its age. When fresh and new, especially when conducted by Colin Davis, it had a winning sense of theatrical wonder. If it never tried to plumb the work’s Enlightenment, Rosicrucian, or other depths, it left open possibilities in performance for others to do so. There was striking imagery in John Macfarlane’s designs and the story was told with clarity and intelligence—even if the final scene always seemed a little trite. Now, however, on its n^th revival, much has degenerated into mere silliness. There is enough there to remind us of what it once was, with stronger direction, but enough missing to have one regret its lack. Seeing the first night of this revival on the same day that Nadine Dorries was named Culture Secretary suggested a rare moment of Dorries enlightenment, given her strange claim that ‘left-wing snowflakes’ had somehow managed to ‘dumb down’ pantomime. Once we reached the stage of fart jokes, I began to wonder whether, politics and flakiness aside, Dorries might, perish the thought, have unwittingly hit on a point. I suspect coronavirus restrictions played a part, getting in the way not only of interaction but some of the more ambitious mechanical elements, but it was difficult not to think more interesting solutions might have been explored. Perhaps there was simply not enough rehearsal time.

Tamino (Bernard Richter)

Singing, at least, was in another league. Bernard Richter’s Tamino was everything one could reasonably expect: alluring of tone, careful of words, warmly sympathetic. Huw Montague Rendall’s Papageno proved both lively and thoughtful, likewise respectful of the text, whist appreciating that it is the starting- and not the end-point for a performance. His was a properly physical performance, which nonetheless appreciated that there is much more to the character than that. Salome Jicia’s beautifully sung and acted Pamina and Brenda Rae’s astonishingly accurate, far from entirely unsympathetic Queen of the Night impressed similarly. The Three Boys can sometimes prove a weak link, but not here, Rafael Flutter, Benjamin Jardim, Victor Wiggin comprising an uncommonly fine trio. Krzysztof Baczyk initially sounded a little underpowered as Sarastro, but came into his own in the second act. Choral singing had its moments, in positive and less positive ways.

Brenda Rae (Queen of the Night)

Hartmut Haenchen’s conducting could have been worse. Indeed, I have heard much worse, though a rushed, scrappy Overture, the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House on decidedly sub-par form, was cause for concern. Thereafter, breackneck tempi were not, let us be thankful, the order of the day. Indeed, speeds in themselves were rarely a problem. There was rarely much sense of grace, light, or indeed, where necessary, wisdom and weight in the orchestra and its direction, though; for that, the singers seemed more or less left to themselves. Instead, we trudged from number to number, sometimes even from bar to bar, without much sense of a greater whole. It was dutiful Kapellmeisterei, neither more nor less, a world away from Constantin Trinks’s revelatory Don Giovanni in here July.

An unruly audience did not help, applauding, even cheering etween and sometimes even in the middle of numbers: the second-act finale, for instance. That may occasionally, regrettably, happen, but Haenchen seemed to go out of his way to facilitate it. (He even turned for a bow at one point.) So, still more, did the revival direction, which went so far as to leave pauses without anyone or anything on stage. There is quietly accepting the near-inevitable; there can even be metatheatrical framing; there is also pandering to the lowest common denominator. If The Magic Flute is not about about gently, joyously assisting Bildung or self-cultivation, then I do not know what is. Ultimately, though, this speaks of how tired McVicar’s production has become. Time for a change, I think.

Papageno (Huw Montague Rendall)

When a work such as this is given in the original language—German at least, though little sounded especially Viennese—the dialogue needs greater attention. Fidelio often suffers similarly. Some performers were excellent in this respect, Richter and Montague Rendall first and foremost, and there were other perfectly reasonable performances. A few, however, spoke in bizarrely laboured fashion, at barely half speed. The effect was more weirdly expressionist than humorous. Given the dialogue fulfils a similar role here to recitativo secco, it deserves the same care in terms of pacing and rhythm, as well as pronunciation. Appearing to mean something would be a distinct advantage too, as would more accurate titles for those who insist on laughing uproariously at them.

For what it is worth, most of the audience seemed to love it. I was delighted to hear some excellent singing. The production may be seen on ROH Stream from Friday 1 October and is rep until 7 October.

A Venetian Traveller: Luigi Nono, La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura

Luigi Nono was many things: composer, human being, quite often both. Nono was an artist of burning political commitment, never more so than in his agitprop opera Intolleranza 1960, also to be heard at this year’s Salzburg Festival. He was a modernist, an avant gardist, a serialist. At least as important as those qualities, however, he was Venetian and a traveller, both personally and in his music: to, from, and around the city of his birth (1924), death (1990), and much of his life in between. Take the ravishingly beautiful yet equally instructive late documentary from 1988, Archipel Luigi Nono, made when Nono was at work on La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura. Olivier Mille interviews the composer about his work while the pair walk around the city. No one could doubt that Nono was both utterly at home yet capable of the considered distance of an inquisitive visitor, ever alert to the intersection of Venice’s and, specifically, the island of Giudecca’s geographical, historical and social boundaries.

Nono’s studies at the Venice Conservatory with Gian Francesco Malipiero, crucial in the rediscovery of Monteverdi, encompassed the golden ages of polyphony and the madrigal. He loved the idea of the Venetian workshop, in which art, craft and community came together as indissoluble artistic and political whole. Moreover, delight in vocal writing would inform Nono’s composition from beginning to close; that certainly includes his instrumental music, both with and without electronics. Many composers, even of the most exalted rank, have found themselves, rightly or wrongly, accused of ‘instrumental’ writing for voices. Nono’s deep grounding in Renaissance music helped ensure he would be of Monteverdi’s party as well as Mozart’s, Palestrina’s – and Schoenberg’s. Nono, like Chopin, avowed what is perhaps a surprising interest in the operas of Bellini, fascinated by the Sicilian composer’s combination of vocal writing and receptivity to a wider Mediterranean culture. As Claudio Abbado attested in a tribute to his friend and frequent collaborator:

[Nono] never lost the deep-rooted ties to the long tradition of Venetian music, as demonstrated by his unerring feeling for the relation of sound and space, recalling the music [Giovanni] Gabrieli wrote for the church of San Marco. Gigi’s sense of an espressivo or cantabile line also stems from this tradition. 

In that respect, Nono differed from fellow post-war Webern enthusiasts, such as Boulez and Stockhausen, though not from his fellow Malipiero pupil, Bruno Maderna. That, as much as more overt ‘political’ concerns (or lack of them) may help explain why Boulez and Stockhausen seem to have misunderstood Nono’s aesthetics and, indeed, his music. To quote Jonathan Impett’s recent study of Nono, polyphony stands ‘at the core of Nono’s musical thought, entailing simultaneity of directions, perspectives, times and possibilities’. To those and to the crucial spatial element highlighted by Abbado, we should never forget the spatial drama of Venice itself. This is music whose mists, bells, rising waves, café and street chatter are specific and yet, in that specificity, reach out toward the universal. The relationship between performer(s) and composer, score, the distorting sonic mirror of electronics, and listener is the very material of Nono’s musical dramas, whatever the space – another crucial, considered relationship – in which they unfold. Heir to the great tradition of Venetian opera dating back to Monteverdi, Nono always conceives music as azione scenica, often in more than one fashion simultaneously.

Artistically expressed political commitment likewise took different forms. There is, however, no truth whatsoever to the claim sometimes heard that, following his second opera, Al gran sole carico d’amore, a grand 1970s traversal of modern European, often female, revolutionary experience, his work withdrew in some allegedly typical ‘late’ form from the political sphere. It simply – or not so simply – addressed it differently, as we shall find in La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura. For Nono, there was no absolute distinction to be drawn between the individually and the socially transformative in music – so long, that is, as such transformation were well directed.

 

No Roads, Only Travelling

 

‘Caminantes, no hay caminos, hay que caminar’ (travellers, there are no roads, there is just travelling): Nono derived inspiration for several late works, La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura included, from an inscription on a Toledo monastery wall. Written during a period of intensive collaboration with Gidon Kremer – an heir to earlier partnerships with Abbado and Maurizio Pollini – whose initial suggestion had been a contemporary response to Vivaldi’s (Venetian) Le quattro stagioni, the work acquired its definitive title – adding both ‘utopica’ and ‘madrigale per più “caminantes” con Gidon Kremer’ – and its form several months after the September 1988 Berlin Festival premiere. Salvatore Sciarrino, the work’s dedicatee as an ‘exemplary traveller’, elucidated the title’s dramatic and political space: ‘the past reflected in the present (nostalgica) brings about a creative utopia (utopica), the desire for what is known becomes a vehicle for what will be possible (futura) through the medium of distance (lontananza)’.

There was a good deal of backstreet Venetian messiness involved, however, in reaching this madrigal of many travellers. Nono and Kremer recorded the tape part – now heard digitally, performed by André Richard, who assisted at the premiere – in February 1988 at SWR’s Experimentalstudio in Freiburg. Its richness was both intentional and accidental, incorporating not only Kremer’s violin improvisations, but sounds of tuning, ambient studio noise, discussion between Nono and Kremer, and so on, Nono having his soundworld expanded by sounds he had never heard before, Kremer compelled to summon them, wittingly and sometimes otherwise. Impett’s account of the unedited tapes makes for fascinating reading: 

With quiet concentration, [Nono] asks Kremer to play high and as quietly as possible. These high sounds, sustained to focus on their inner life, are followed by the fifths and microtonal variations of Nono’s initial plan. Kremer continues with high phrases – mostly extracted from the core solo repertoire, but recorded closely to reveal subtones, additional partials, bow noise and instability – and the percussion of attack. […] While phrases from Beethoven, Bach and Bartók begin to emerge, the obsessive repetition of practising draws attention away from figure or reference to the particular sonic qualities of each sound, to the nature of individual connections. […] As the artists relax into their project, Kremer plays longer passages – entire movements of Bach, of Schumann – stopping to focus on sounds that fascinate or trouble him. […] As Kremer searches for sounds and gestures, and then rehearses his own actions, these tapes explore an entire strand of Western music as embodied in one musician.

Having edited the tapes with Freiburg’s Hans Peter Haller, relentlessly organizing and reorganizing sounds until something composed emerged, Nono struggled to complete the violin part in time. According to Kremer’s account, he eventually, ‘nervously, apologetically’ proffered ‘some bits of manuscript paper: here a line, there four bars, there three lines, and said with almost fatherly calm: “No problem, no worry, I’ve got it all. Tonight I’ll write it.” There were still 36 hours to the premiere.’ Dissatisfied with that premiere or at least sensing that he could travel further, in January 1989 Nono revised the violin and tape parts, as well as, crucially, the relationship between them. 1989 was, of course, a year whose strange, largely unanticipated political events would throw questions of roads, travelling, nostalgia and utopia further into confusion. It is not difficult to imagine, however, what the communist composer, who died the following year, would have made of the neoliberal triumphalism that ensued and of any claims concerning the end of history or of travelling.

Six violin parts are split between six music stands positioned around the performing space. Additional stands will remain empty, heightening dramatic unpredictability for the audience. The violinist makes her way between them, instructed to search for the next stand rather as she is to search for sounds themselves, so as to be ready to perform the next part of a score replete with performing instructions so detailed that they require more printed space than the notes. Extremes of pitch and dynamics take performer, listener and musical collaborator further to the edge of possibility – even when rehearsal time has proved less limited. Harmonics, microtones, all manner of musical mirroring both carefully conceived and apparently spontaneous: the soundworld of Kremer’s virtuosity finds itself both retained and transformed. Eight loudspeakers stand at the disposal of the sound director, who will choose which of eight tracks, for Nono ‘a multipolarity of elements’, to play when, at what varying (fading up to full and down to zero) volume, so long as they are not all played at once, and in what space. It is thus in the specific, human confrontation and collaboration between violinist and sound director that the work will come to life.

This, then, is chamber music, poised somewhere between creation and re-creation. For a host of reasons, some structural, some contingent, no single walk around a neighbourhood we ‘know’ will ever be the same; nor should it be. Yet it is surely worthy of note that, from Berlin to final revision, the piece’s opening gesture remained the same. In that, it is perhaps the musical counterpart to the political ‘provocation’ Nono noted each of his artworks required, when reflecting almost 30 years earlier on Intolleranza: ‘an event, an experience, a test in our lives, which provokes my instinct and my consciousness, as man and musician, to bear witness’.

Remembrance and Misremembrance

 

US poet Wayne Koestenbaum recalled a sabbatical month he spent in Venice in 2004. He would pass what had been Nono’s house every day.

I didn’t travel to Venice solely to pay homage, but I brought with me a CD of his music – La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura – and listened to it on my rented apartment’s boombox while shelling peas and broiling branzino and writing poems and taking naps; the sound of Nono’s music mingled with ambient sounds outside my window (church bells, footsteps on quarried granite, shutters opening and closing, cutlery clattering, adolescents laughing and shouting). Often I’d not be able to differentiate what was Nono coming from the boombox and what was Venice coming through the window. Listening, I’d drift into daydream, and then snap back to consciousness, and wonder, “for how long have I not been paying strict attention to the music?” but then I’d once again closely listen; Nono seemed to countenance my inattentiveness.

Should you fall into a similar trap, you may well discover that Nono the humanist composer has already written in that lapse. If not, you will assuredly find other aural Venetian lagoons and alleyways to haunt and be haunted by, to explore and be explored by, and ultimately both to remember and misremember.

 

(This essay was first published by the 2021 Salzburg Festival, to accompany a performance by Patricia Kopatchinskaja.)

Argerich/Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim - Schumann, 6 September 2021

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Schumann: Symphony no.1 in B-flat major, op.38, ‘Spring’
Piano Concerto in A minor, op.54
Symphony no.2 in C major, op.61

 
Martha Argerich (piano)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

There are worse ways to celebrate one’s birthday than to hear Martha Argerich, the Staatskapelle Berlin, and Daniel Barenboim in an all-Schumann concert. In truth, there are few, if any, better. Tastes vary, of course; there is notoriously no account for them. Taste, a merely personal matter, aside, though, there are no musicians alive any reasonable listener would esteem in this music. What a treat, moreover, to have Barenboim defiantly—whether in the face of endemic ‘period’ talk or pandemic viral contagion—deploy a full-scale symphony orchestra, from sixteen first violins down to eight double basses, on the Staatsoper stage.

An echt-Romantic horn call, full of expectancy, repeated by full orchestra heralded the Spring Symphony. This introduction had such depth of tone and palpable drama, one knew it would be a special evening. Freshness, precision, and depth characterised playing throughout, the first movement development’s counterpoint clear, directed, and above all meaningful. The music fairly danced, even balletically, when called for. Festal, with inwardness where required, its balances were just right. The second movement flowed tenderly, Barenboim here and elsewhere often content to let the players play with little or no direction from him. Shifting moods were always, rightly, founded on harmonic change. The scherzo was on the grand scale, wanting nothing either in vigour nor in ravishing woodwind solo playing; likewise its trios. Magnificent! A finale full of picturesque incident, Mendelssohn and even Elgar coming to mind, revealed its not uncomplicated structure readily, Barenboim never losing sight of the wood for the trees. A Tristan-esque ripeness to the Staatskapelle horns recalled former nights in this very house. Splitting violins left and right truly paid dividends in antiphonal statement and response. The closing flourish alone was worth the price of admission.

Lyricism and grandeur, urgency and expanse: that was only the first few bars of the Piano Concerto. This was both chamber and orchestral music, with again extraordinarily fine woodwind solos. Argerich’s shading of a single phrase was eloquent, never fussy, never for its own sake. Even at the height of reverie, there was no question of line and direction. Voice-leading beguiled yet with clear purpose. The first-movement cadenza has its own trajectory, of course, verging on Brahms—and so it sounded here. Just to hear Argerich’s trills was (almost) enough. Eusebius responded in the slow movement, taken attacca, thereby heightening the impression of two sides to the same coin of personality. Its tricky mix of skittishness and Innigkeit suited Argerich to a tee. Strings, above all cellos, shone with equal brightness. It seemed over almost before it had begun, transition to the finale begun. It was ever inch a concerto finale, full of light and shade, for there was quite a journey still to go, ever more exhilarating, infections even (in a good sense!) Piano and woodwind ravished alike, counterpoint and harmony directed as one. If again the piano sometimes sounded close to Brahms, that is only because it should. What strength and delicacy there was in those fingers, so ably supported by Barenboim and his orchestra. As an encore—yes, an Argerich encore—we heard the first of Schumann’s Kinderszenen, ‘Von fremden Ländern und Menschen’. Limpid, warm, and directed, it sounded as if a microcosm of the Concerto.

If counterpoint were crucial before, it was at least doubly so in the Second Symphony, which opened in strikingly Bachian style: not the lamentable, enfeebled Bach of today’s ‘specialists’, but Schumann’s Bach, the world’s Bach. And so it continued, with well-nigh Beethovenian strength of purpose, urgency something born from within, not applied from without. (You know the sort of performance and conductors I have in mind.) To hear this string section in all its glory was everything. One heard afresh, moreover, quite what a complex, radical opening movement this is, imbued with post-Beethovenian humanism that by now is almost Barenboim’s own. Fast need not mean dehumanised, though all too often it does in a culture that prizes all things other than spirit. The scherzo thrilled at quite a tempo, virtuosic, but in a musical sense, Beethoven steel added to Mendelssohn-like effervescence. The first trio relaxed, not too much, but enough, Tender and colourful, it looked back to the First Symphony and the Piano Concerto. Its successor sang beautifully, string counterpoint propelling it on its way. The dash to the finish was duly exhilarating: a force of nature, one might say, save for the artistry involved. A gravely beautiful slow movement was richly sustained throughout, strings once again tugging at the heart strings. Bach’s example was felt throughout the counterpoint: calling his name in declaring it anew. If anything, the orchestra sounded still more miraculous in the finale. Weight and warmth, vigour and virtuosity: music poured forth like Wagnerian molten lava, form created in the moment, yet unerringly prepared. We need Barenboim to return to Bach—and, as Edward Said urged him, finally to conduct the St Matthew Passion.

Musikfest Berlin (4) - Ensemble Musikfabrik/Cassidy and Poppe, 5 September 2021

Philharmonie


Ann Cleare: mire/…/veins (2013); ore (2016); Fossil Lights (2020-21, world premiere); the physics of fog, swirling (2018-19); on magnetic fields (2011-12)

Enno Poppe: Prozession (2015-20)

Hannah Weirich (violin)

Sara Cubarsi (violin)

Michele Marelli (clarinet)

Ensemble Musikfabrik

Aaron Cassidy, Enno Poppe (conductors)

Images: Astrid Ackermann

For my final visit to this year’s Musikfest Berlin: two concerts, morning and afternoon, from Ensemble Musikfabrik. The first was devoted to the music of Ann Cleare, the two ensemble pieces conducted at frighteningly short notice by Aaron Cassidy; the second, conducted by the composer, was devoted to Enno Poppe’s Prozession, begun in 2015, then set aside after eight minutes’ worth of music, to be resumed during lockdown and extended to about fifty in total.

The morning’s Ann Cleare portrait suggested a communicative interest, variety notwithstanding, in instrumental sound as sculpted material. mire/…/veins for wind quintet imparted, from its muted brass opening, a sense of masked volatility, of activity located somewhere just below a geological surface—and rising. Febrile oscillations were observed and felt, the horn seemingly adopting a central, even mediating, role between the other pairs of instruments: trombone and tuba on one side, two trumpets on the other. 

ore is written for string trio and high reed instrument, here clarinet, whose opening shrillness against glassy strings suggested a more important role for pitch than its predecessor. Different sections offered a different sense of materiality, as interested in combination as opposition. Indeed, the closeness of clarinet to string timbre was at times surprising. The first performance of Fossil Lights followed, clarinet, violin, and cello remaining, now joined by piano. It proved a haunting piece. Atmosphere may not have been the point; it nevertheless had plenty. Aural beams and slight rotations (whether of pitch, dynamics, etc.) helped me work towards a sense of bifurcation, of two aural visions, connections growing in different ways, according to vantage point: musical work or subject.

 

Two works for ensemble followed, the physics of fog, swirling commencing with an almost ‘traditional’, Romantic horn call, sound soon changing all manner of ways, both for horn and greater ensemble. Each part of the title gained importance: fog and swirling, of course, but physics too with respect to method. There is, of course, a myriad ways to swirl, but this was not a catalogue, more a quasi-scientific narrative, even an experiment, which eventually went into reverse, unravelled. Finally, on magnetic fields, for two violins and ensemble, once again offered at least a way in through its title, seemingly realised spatially too by different instrumental groups led by the soloists. It seemed to speak of and with magnetism, fields opposed but also interacting and thus engendering movement. There were moments of galvanising drama, a crackling conclusion to a fascinating programme.

 

Was Poppe’s Prozession to be a work of music theatre? No, at least not straightforwardly. The musicians stayed where they were, although the slightly unusual make-up of the ensemble had a visual element too: percussion at the back joined by two electronic organs and electric guitar. Its opening seemed almost pictorial, at least in the way a procession by Berlioz or Mahler might be, albeit in a world of spectralism. The procession seemed to be getting under way, or perhaps in preparation, coming to life from drums to solo instruments, to combinations. There was certainly a sense of movement that, however irregular its parts, resulted in something more regular. It died down, returned to its beginnings, then started up again, albeit differently—and again, all the more differently. Instruments picking up the figurative baton from one another seemed, intriguingly, to pick up characteristics too: clarinet from electric guitar, trumpets from saxophone, and so on. The process began to mesmerise, or perhaps one began to realise that it had mesmerised all along. Double bass out of the debris, with others in its penumbra: here was another different path, more shadowy, more distant. Microtonal disorientation became more intense. At some point, the procession began to head away and/or subside, depending on who or what was its subject. What had it meant? That was not really the question: it had been a rite, so it seemed, from another world.

Musikfest Berlin (3): Stefanovich/RSB/Jurowski - Stravinsky and Hindemith, 4 September 2021

Philharmonie

Stravinsky: Symphonies of Wind Instruments
Stravinsky: Abraham and Isaac
Stravinsky: Concerto for piano and wind instruments
Stravinsky: Variations for Orchestra (Aldous Huxley in memoriam)
Hindemith: Symphony: Mathis der Maler

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)
Georg Nigl (baritone)
Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

Images: Peter Meisel

A darkened hall, monochrome lighting, considerable distance between conductor and orchestra (strings absent): Symphonies of Wind Instruments, given in its superior, 1920 version, looked as well as sounded hieratic. It was as precise as it was hieratic, only adding to the aggression that lies only just beneath the surface, presaging so much neoclassical Stravinsky as well as echoing the Russian ballets. Strange flute solos recalled the Rite in particular. Combinations of instruments surprised, enchanted, and drove Stravinsky’s quasi-liturgy. In its intense drama of sounds, it looked forward to Birtwistle and others. And yet, Vladimir Jurowski was equally alert to the crucial role of the static. By the close, it was possible that much had changed, but had it? Here was something implacable, unanswerable, quite beyond the Austro-German aesthetic.

 

When does one have opportunity to hear Abraham and Isaac? In my case, never before this Musikfest concert (apart, of course, from recordings, of which there are few). Webernesque violas met woodwind from the previous piece, introducing Georg Nigl as soloist. Here was a narrative one could follow even if one did not understand it verbally (that is, in Hebrew): a ‘sacred ballad’ indeed. There was no sense of Nigl ventriloquising, but there were times when I fancied I could hear this was a piece ‘for’, or at least first performed by, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (here in Berlin, in 1964). I could not help but notice that, time and time ago it was the RSB strings that evoked Webern and Schoenberg, wind and voice in almost another world. Canons abounded, as did melismata. Once again, Stravinsky and his performers said all that needed to be said, no more, no less.

 

Tamara Stefanovich, fresh from her wonderful performance of Movements with George Benjamin and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, joined the orchestra for Stravinsky’s 1923-4 Piano Concerto. The mock, neo-Baroque ostentation of the wind opening did not mask an underlying darkness that may or may not have been yet another Stravinskian mask, yet seemed real enough—until it too was banished (or was it?) by the energetic vehemence of the piano and new material. It was very ‘white’, irrespective of the keys. If Benjamin’s intriguing Pulcinella Suite had sometimes, seemingly on purpose, lacked bite, it was to be heard here in spades from all in ricochet and incitement. The strange synthesis of material at this first movement’s close pulled no punches either; it was thrillingly immediate. The opening chord of the slow movement teased: it might so easily have become late Beethoven, yet absolutely did not. There was, at least implicitly, a proper note of disdain for that path. Another mask? At any rate, its gravity seemed real. Provocative cadenza writing—where does it lead?—transformed the mood, as we heard when the orchestra returned. Static, like Symphonies of Wind Instruments? It was genuinely unclear, in a good sense. The third movement was very much a finale. What intransigence there was in those ostinatos—and in so much else. Throughout, this was a performance that understood and communicated the very particular qualities of the work. I was no clearer at the end than the beginning whether I liked it, but that is not the point. The final flourish came as a genuine surprise, even when one supposedly ‘knew’.

 

Much of what we had heard previously appeared both compressed and liberated in the ‘Aldous Huxley’ Variations. Everything counted in a gem such as Stravinsky saw—heard—crafted (Crafted too, for better or worse) in Webern. Here is an imagination just as extraordinary as that heard in the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and so it sounded. What strange string writing there is too, as one could not fail to hear. It was a labyrinth as enticing as those of Berg, Birtwistle, and others. Jurowski then announced he would play the piece, too seldom heard, again, this time with an illuminating spoken introduction. The character of different sections emerged, at least for me, more strongly than ever, in line with Jurowski’s astute guidance to follow the balletic muse. It was, even on a second hearing, less hermetic, more lyrical, and with all the potential for the visual imagination of Petrushka. More please!

 

What could be more of a Berlin piece than the Mathis der Maler Symphony, premiered by the Philharmonic and Furtwängler in 1934, a regrettable milestone in both artists’ relations with the Nazi regime and Goebbels in particular. Not that one heard any of that here, though one certainly noted from the outset a very different sound and compositional method from that heard in Stravinsky’s music. The first movement flowed well with no suspicion of worthiness, let alone dullness (however unfair the charge to Hindemith). And then, almost before one knew it, the motoric side of Hindemith kicked in, suggestive less of Stravinsky than of earlier Hindemith, Cardillac in particular. That conflict of material seemed to be what was at stake. Might Jurowski have bowed a little more to the dictates of sentiment? Perhaps, but the lack of sentimentality was welcome. The second movement likewise benefited from clarity and interest in delineating timbre as well as counterpoint. Well shaped, it emerged as an intermezzo almost distinct from its role in the opera. Jurowski imparted to the opening phrases of the finale an almost Mahlerian weight, though the music travelled in a very different direction. Here, as elsewhere, he was aided by excellent orchestral playing, both weighty and vivid. There was drama aplenty. What, after all, is ‘symphonic’?

Musikfest Berlin (2): Stefanovich/MCO/Benjamin - Knussen, Purcell, Stravinsky, and Benjamin, 2 September 2021

Philharmonie

Knussen: The Way to Castle Yonder, op.21a
Purcell, arr. Benjamin: Three Consorts (German premiere)
Stravinsky: Movements
Benjamin: Concerto for Orchestra (German premiere)
Stravinsky: Pulcinella Suite

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

George Benjamin (conductor)

Images: Astrid Ackermann

In this concert George Benjamin, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and Tamara Stefanovich paid tribute to a number of influences on and/or connections with Benjamin’s music, as well as presenting two new works, which had had their first performances a few days earlier at the Proms. Oliver Knussen, featured both as himself, in The Way to Castle Yonder—as well as in Stefanovich’s solo encore—and as dedicatee of Benjamin’s Concerto for Orchestra would surely have approved of the programming, which also took in Purcell and Stravinsky. I imagine Pierre Boulez, Benjamin’s friend, mentor, and fellow Messiaen pupil, would have done too.

Knussen’s ‘pot-pourri’ from his opera Higglety Pigglety Pop! made for a delightful curtain-raiser, akin to the traditional overture. Exquisite craft was revealed in a performance both detailed and atmospheric, atmosphere revealed to be very much a creature of detail. I seem to recall Benjamin, Knussen’s efforts notwithstanding, to have admitted a lack of affinity with Schoenberg’s twelve-note music. (I may be imagining that; please forgive if so.) Whatever the truth of that, Schoenberg’s serial shadow fell generatively here, as, at least I felt, did the colouristic influence of his op.16 Five Orchestral Pieces. Ravel and Mussorgsky—the bells—seemed present too. The music, in any case, spoke of enchanting danger and, perhaps, parallel dangerous enchantment. A world played and danced before us, before closing in mystery, albeit a different mystery from that with which the piece had begun.

 

Three Consorts transcribes, as you might expect, three of Purcell’s viol consorts for chamber orchestra. In the first, the Six-Part In Nomine in G minor, strings, gravely beautiful, were gradually joined by other instruments: first a pair of trombones, next a pair of trumpets, then other woodwind and bells (tubular and Korean temple). Restrained and respectful in the best sense, the transcription not only permitted Purcell’s music to unfold as if by itself, but played a crucial part in the set of three considered as a whole. The second, the seventh of Purcell’s Fantazias (previously transcribed by Benjamin for chamber ensemble, unless I am mistaken), earlier scoring sounded as if it had been turned inside out, almost as if we now heard the skeleton on the outside and flesh within. A more overtly modernist glassy sound, when heard, seemed to evoke the world of Benjamin’s opera Written on Skin, or rather take angelic inspiration from there. (The MCO, it may be noted, gave the premiere of that opera.) Other refractions surprised and even reassured. I am not quite sure how Benjamin or the players had a pair of horns sound so Purcellian, yet they did, uncannily so. The third and final movement, the Fantazia Upon One Note, relished and communicated Purcell’s conceit. It was the most ‘colourful’ in the usual orchestral sense of the three too: good-natured, almost (I thought, bizarrely) Christmassy. But that was only the beginning. Things were not quite as they seemed. Bowed percussion and a darker, graver interlude were never quite dispelled by the return to Technicolor. Wonderful!

 

Angular play with Webern, in particular, was the name of the game—and game it is—in Movements. Process and play were felt almost as if we were hearing a successor work to the second book of Boulez’s Structures, which in a way we are. (It is surely no coincidence that Tamara Stefanovich has performed that music so memorably with Pierre-Laurent Aimard.) Timbre, needless to say, continued to be a preoccupation. Whatever the apparent similarities with Webern, Boulez, or Schoenberg, this could only ever be Stravinsky; a single flute note could—and did—tell us that, as did the particular gravity of a trio of trombones and that ever-strange use of violins. Piano phrasing was in every sense vital, ensuring that serial chess moves—however odd this may sound—sang. So too was a sense of chamber music engagement between soloist and other musicians, in which both Stefanovich and the MCO excelled. What expression there is here in a single gesture. The relation of the five movements to each other was a crucial part of the jigsaw too: there was straightforward rightness to how they fit together. And pitch repetition proved fathomlessly expressive toward the end, connecting intriguingly with Purcell.

 

As a generous encore, Stefanovich gave us Knussen’s Prayer Bell Sketch, op.29. If its opening gesture seemed to emerge from what we had just heard, the music went in a very different direction thereafter: more sustained, even Debussyan, not only in attack and reverberation, but also in spacing and even harmony. This was both a gentler and more sensual, yet constantly surprising journey.

 

Woodwind, soon joined by strings, announced Benjamin’s Concerto for Orchestra. The darkness of this opening had me almost tempted to think this a ‘Covid work’, though the dates of composition, 2019-21, suggest an earlier conception. Perhaps Bartók’s work of the same name offered something of a precedent in that regard, though the path it takes is quite different. Benjamin honoured precedent in permitting members of the orchestra, both as soloists and in (Bartókian) pairs, their moments in the limelight, but that felt entirely natural, never merely for the sake of the genre. Were there shards of Knussen too? Was that even a figure from, or at least with kinship to Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks? Almost certainly not, but there were perhaps connections with Stravinsky worth exploring on another occasion. More to the point than any alleged influence, viral or musical, this was a work extending the emotional soundworld of Benjamin’s third opera, Lessons in Love and Violence. A good deal of anguished tutti writing, by the standards both of composer and genre, led to a closing sense of magical stitching that perhaps did pay tribute to Knussen after all. Whatever the case of that may be, Benjamin ensured a fully satisfying sense of wholeness was cast in retrospect on the work even on a first hearing.

 

Benjamin’s performance of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite was puzzling: at first quite disconcerting, and not only because it took ears some time to adjust, but ultimately provocative and even revealing. The first two movements seemed to lack bite but that appeared to be strategy rather than failure, especially in the ‘Serenata’ where Stravinsky’s extraordinary orchestration (perhaps in the light of Benjamin’s reworking of Purcell) sounded stranger than ever. It was not so much a matter of Benjamin remoulding Stravinsky in his own image as offering a composer’s insight as conductor such as one rarely hears. (Again, both Knussen and Boulez sprang to mind.) Likewise the ‘Scherzino’ seemed reheard through late Stravinsky, perhaps Knussen too. For there was certainly rhythmic bite where Benjamin decided there should be, aggressively so in the ‘Tarantella’, almost to the exclusion of anything else. The second half of the suite seemed to react necessarily as well as charmingly to that high watermark. Again, the sheer strangeness of Stravinsky’s—and the orchestra’s—colours confounded in the ‘Gavotta con due variazioni’. Flute (Chiara Tonelli) and bassoons (Guilhaume Santana and Pierre Gomes) were very much cases in point in the second variation. Benjamin’s ear for timbre communicated a vision for the first part of the final movement darker and, I think, slower than I can recall hearing before. That made final release all the more joyous and necessary.

Musikfest Berlin (1): Fleming/Concertgebouw/Harding - Stravinsky, Messiaen, and Debussy, 31 August 2021

Philharmonie

Stravinsky: Agon
Messiaen: Poèmes pour Mi
Debussy: La Mer

Renée Fleming (soprano)

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Daniel Harding (conductor)

Image: Astrid Ackermann

Size is not everything, yet to hear—and even to see—my largest orchestra for over eighteen months was certainly not nothing. With a string section extending from sixteen first violins to eight double basses, and plentiful wind, percussion, even a mandolin, this was a treat in itself, a sign, dare we hope, of progress in our return to concert life. That the orchestra in question was the Concertgebouw was a distinct advantage too, as was Daniel Harding’s mouth-watering programme of Stravinsky, Messiaen, and Debussy. 

Harding’s direction of the orchestra in Stravinsky’s Agon was insistent and precise, likewise the Concertgebouw’s response. Manhattan traffic came to Berlin’s Philharmonie for one night only. The three pas-de-quatre, single, double, and triple increased in their menace, even fury, the composer’s wartime Symphony in Three Movements an unusually immanent progenitor. All the while, audible serial processes did their work both mechanical and human. One could well-nigh see their working out in twin homage to Webern and balletic tradition. I was struck by the utter distinctiveness of Stravinsky’s encounter with the French Baroque: so different, say, from that of Richard Strauss, indeed diametrically opposed to it (as in so much else). For all the claims we often hear of the necessity of ‘period’ colour in, say, Rameau, it was striking that use of a modern bassoon could evoke that composer and a whole world without any such requirement. The more shadowy, hieratic passages—a gestures as courtly as they were ghostly—compelled fascination, as did Stravinsky’s inimitable orchestration. And what combinations of instruments one heard: they could only be Stravinsky, however much they played with other expectations and recollections. Harding and the orchestra played with them too, bringing Stravinsky’s games all the more immediately to our attention.

Renée Fleming joined the orchestra for Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi. There was an unusual note of freedom—not licence, but freedom—to the first song, ‘Action des grâces’, Fleming’s approach perhaps surprisingly verse-led, without sacrifice to rhythm, indeed to its enhancement. Indeed, there was something chant-like to her despatch of melismata. The orchestra evoked liturgy too: for Messiaen, all was sacred. Delight in Creation was to be heard in ‘Paysage’, both as work and performance. So, in ‘Epouvante’ and its knowing successor, ‘Le Collier’, was keen awareness of malevolent forces at work, Act II of Parsifal coming strongly to mind. Sweetness of harmonic mysticism followed in both cases, in ‘L’Épouse’ and ‘Prière exaucée’. The latter’s closing ecstasies, bells and all, proved a resurrection, so it seemed, not only of flesh but also of fleshly desires. Above all, there was wonder in these songs: not only to be observed, but to be felt.

A vividly pictorial performance of La Mer followed. It boasted both precision and atmosphere, Harding’s picture painted very much a landscape, no mere snapshot. In the opening ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, figures proved busily generative. It seemed a brighter, warmer account than is often the case: later in the morning, perhaps. Whatever the horological verdict, conductor and orchestra left plenty in reserve for the movement’s climax. Mystery and a keen sense of play were twin hallmarks of ‘Jeux des vagues’. Clarity of direction, at least in retrospect, heightened both aspects in what emerged as a scherzo taking its place in French orchestral tradition, Dukas included. Darker thoughts, as presaged in the Messiaen songs, haunted ‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’; so did further, post-Pelléas ambiguities, up to and including the final blazing of Debussy’s orchestra. Modern symphony orchestras are wonderful things; so is their repertoire.