Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Tristan – Ben Heppner
King Marke – Sir John Tomlinson
Isolde – Nina Stemme
Kurwenal – Michael Volle
Brangäne – Sophie Koch
Melot – Richard Berkeley Steele
Sailor – Ji-Min Park
Steersman – Dawid Kimberg
Shepherd – Ryland Davies
Christof Loy (director)
Johannes Leiacker (designs)
Olaf Winter (lighting)
Marion Tiedtke (dramaturge)
Chorus of the Royal Opera House (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Antonio Pappano (conductor)
‘I fear the opera will be banned – unless the whole thing is parodied in a bad performance –: only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, – I cannot imagine it otherwise.’ Sadly, I think, Wagner’s words to Mathilde Wesendonck came nowhere near to fulfilment; or, to put it, another way, they did, but there was no chance of the work being banned. A performance of Tristan und Isolde that fails to grab one by the throat and drive one at least to the borders of insanity has failed, plain and simple. Tristan without its Rausch (intoxication) is no Tristan at all.
Most of the fault for this lies with Christof Loy’s production. There is no especial need – indeed, I suspect that it is not even desirable – for Tristan to be set ‘somewhere’, whether in Cornwall or in a multi-storey car-park. Abstraction works well, as Herbert Wernicke’s infinitely preferable Covent Garden production showed. Loy, however, contrives to have the worst of both worlds. At the front of the stage, we see in Johannes Leiacker’s designs minimalism that is drab to the point of excess; this is the world of existentialism, according to a programme interview with the director. At the back, sometimes revealed by the drawing back of a curtain, is what appears to be the real world, the specific setting of Marke and Isolde’s wedding breakfast, again according to that interview. I assume that it was significant that there are no female guests. I likewise assume that the edging forward of a wall at the end of the second act was an accident. It appeared that something was about to be revealed, but alas not; perhaps it was a metaphor for the production as a whole. At any rate, the prolonged dimming of the lights afterwards suggested a lack of intention.
Isolde emerges from the latter world during the opening Prelude. Wandering around, looking lost and slightly – but not too much – bereft, her progress, such as it is, completely undermined the progress of the music, its orgasmic climax coming to nothing. Perhaps that is the point, or perhaps not. According to Loy, ‘the two spaces’ are, during the action, ‘almost completely redefined’. Apart from the odd case of a new table, they look and act pretty much as they always had done, at least so far as I could tell. And surely a time to have bridged the gap would have been Tristan’s appearance at the helm, or whatever it transpired to be in this production; what should be an earth-moving moment once again went for nothing. Perhaps most unforgivable was the appearance of Marke, Melot, and the other men long before the moment of coitus interruptus; extraordinary though this might seem, the cadence sounded only so slightly interrupted, a fault of the musical direction too.
So we had an ‘existential world’, fair enough, which interacted awkwardly with a highly specific setting that contradicted a great deal of what we heard in the words. Without wishing to seem like a stage direction fetishist, the first act references to a ship, the second act references to the hunt, and so forth, stand in glaring and unproductive contradiction to the monotonous revelations of the backstage banquet. If all is abstract, one can simply imagine, or not; one can concentrate upon the essence of the work, which has nothing to do with the setting and everything to do with the music. Musical drama should, as Wagner writes in his Schopenhauer-infused Beethoven essay, be a case of deeds of music rendered visible. This is simply not possible here.
For it seems that Loy does not like Schopenhauer very much, not just in terms of æsthetics, but also because he cannot ‘really equate the couple’s position as outsiders with a Schopenhauerian denial of the world’. Wagner and many others managed to do so, but we shall let that pass for the moment, for there is nothing wrong with approaching a work from a different angle. But what Loy reduces Tristan too is a strange and, to my mind, incompatible mix of something between Ibsen and Strindberg on the one hand and unamusing farce on the other. Perhaps the latter was unintentional, but the glimpses behind the curtain of Kurwenal and Brangäne imitating their master and mistress were hardly daring, just a little tacky. At least with Calixto Bieito, there might have been something a little more to see. ‘Character direction which is rich in detail and specific’ is what interests Loy most as a director, which is why, he says, he had generally steered clear of Wagner. Tristan, however, seemed to him something of an exception. I cannot imagine why, for it is only superficially concerned with the characters at all; if anything, it is the most supreme example of what he professes to dislike. How small it all seemed.
And if Loy does not like Schopenhauer or even Wagner, Antonio Pappano does not seem to like myth. The abstract nature of Tristan, he says in the same programme interview cited above, ‘is overrated. These are people on stage!’ Well, sort of, but are we seriously supposed to think that what matters about Tristan is the plot in itself. Though there is relatively little stage action to speak of, Wagner omitted even some of that when called upon to explain what the work was about. But what did he know? This perhaps helps explain the musical performance’s greatest failing. Though this was certainly Pappano’s best Wagner performance at Covent Garden, and every so often revelatory in terms of instrumental, especially wind, colour, at other times the musical structure, the longer line, was once again sadly lacking. Nowhere was this more the case than during the second act love duet: shapeless, just going on for a long time. Why do I say that Pappano’s words might help to explain? Because it seemed to me that his reading – unlike Loy’s! – was very much dictated by the words. The words have their place in a musical interpretation, of course, but in this of all works, the music must take precedence. It has its own demands; it undercuts the words, sometimes with a radicalism of which a director could only dream. Tristan for the most part therefore sounded as if it were a work with some wonderful moments, not the all-enveloping whole, the representation of the Schopenhauerian Will, it simply has to be. The third act was considerably better.
The best reason to see this Tristan would be the singing: a most unusual state of affairs. Ben Heppner struggled during stretches of the second and third acts; he really does seem to have lost his former steely security. But he sang better than one has come to expect in this impossible role and his diction was impressive. Loy’s desire for ‘character direction which is rich in detail and specific’ did him no favours, though; the moments in which he became amorous were too embarrassing even to register as farce. Nina Stemme’s performance as Isolde was excellent. One does not hear the majesty of a Flagstad, nor the steely sarcasm and irony of a Nilsson; one hears an intensely musical, variegated portrayal, which again – and more appropriately – seems very much to arise from the words. Lieder-singing would seem to inform her approach, which is not to say that it lacks a greater musical line, far from it. As Kurwenal and Brangäne, Michael Volle and Sophie Koch were hamstrung by Loy’s apparent determination to present them just as best friends to Tristan and Isolde; there was little sense of hierarchy, subservience, or even devotion. But they succeeded triumphantly in musical terms, barely putting a foot wrong, and helping to distract one’s attention from the visual realisation, despite approaching their well-nigh hopeless tasks with commendable enthusiasm. Brangäne’s description of the potions was a case in point. Sir John Tomlinson’s Marke was grave and meaningful as seemingly only he knows how. In this context, however such a Lear-like portrayal served to highlight the shortcomings of the production. I was also impressed by Ryland Davies’s keenly observed Shepherd, drawing upon a wealth of operatic and musical experience, and the winning Steersman of the splendid Jette Parker Young Artist, Dawid Kimberg: certainly one to watch. If you can bear to forget the work and concentrate on some fine singing, then there are rewards to reap. There is, I suppose a bright side: you might sympathise with the vigorous first-night booing for the production team, but at least you will not, as Wagner feared, descend into madness.
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
Tuesday, 29 September 2009
LPO/Jurowski - Kurtág and Mahler, 26 September 2009
Royal Festival Hall
Kurtág – Stele, op.33
Mahler – Symphony no.2 in C minor, ‘Resurrection’
Adriana Kučerová (soprano)
Christianne Stotijn (mezzo-soprano)
London Philharmonic Choir
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)
This is not the first time Kurtág’s Stele and Mahler’s Second Symphony have been performed together. The former’s association with memorial and the latter’s focus upon resurrection are suggestive. Likewise, the large forces common to both – this must be one of the few cases when musicians exit the stage in preparation for a work by Mahler – make practical and doubtless economic sense in programming terms. Michael Gielen in his Hänssler recording presents both works with Schoenberg’s Kol Nidre. The Mahler is, however, more often than not programmed alone, so we were hardly short-changed.
Stele received an excellent performance. Written for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra when Kurtág was composer in residence, the London Philharmonic proved more than equal to the task. So did Vladimir Jurowski in succession to Claudio Abbado. The opening proved expectant in its expansion, the initial pitch of G dissipated through microtonal subversion. The beauty of the doleful woodwind sounds to which this led put me in mind of another memorial, the Berg Violin Concerto, and in particular the Bach chorale used therein, but also of something older, antique even, the Greek world from which the piece gains its title. Guest principal flautist Mattia Petrilli, both here and in the Mahler, was extremely impressive. In the ensuing controlled hysteria, one truly heard how huge the orchestra was, yet Jurowksi ensured that a fine sense of rhythmic momentum was maintained, even in the static passages. At the end, the hints – arguably more than that – of a funeral procession sounded almost as if for Mahler himself.
Jurowski’s account of the Mahler symphony was highly unusual. He has not, at least in London, conducted much of the composer’s music so far, but it is clear that he had given great consideration to this performance. I was not quite sure that everything cohered into a whole, but there could be no doubt that here was someone who had something to say about the composer and his music. This was not just another Mahler Second, for, at a time when that music is arguably over-exposed, we need more than ever a reason to perform it beyond filling concert halls (that in itself, of course, quite a reversal in fortune).
Jurowski began with Boulezian attack but allied to a far swifter tempo; indeed, I am not sure that I have ever heard the music taken so quickly. The brass sometimes blared a bit and there was the odd horn fluff. However, Jurowski displayed a good ear for orchestral detail, not least the all-important, often obscured figures for double bass. The English horn’s sadness put me in mind of Tristan’s shepherd song. Moments of stasis revealed a kinship with Kurtág, though I wondered whether they might have been slightly exaggerated to that end. This, then, was a bracingly modernist first movement, though sometimes perhaps too much; Boulez and Gielen both know that this is a Romantic work too. And then, later on, at the close of the development, there was an almost Bernstein-like hysteria: magnificently performed, but was it really compatible with what had gone before? The movement as a whole came across as somewhat disjointed, especially when the recapitulation reverted, as I suppose it must, to the rushed opening tempo. Portamento for the second subject was beautiful in itself, but sounded in context a little appliqué. Perhaps Jurowski was saying that such unresolved oppositions are what Mahler is about; certainly that was the impression I gained from the performance of the symphony as a whole. One thing for which to be extremely grateful: he rightly silenced the idiotic applause that began at the end of the movement. There was not the length of silence that Mahler requested between this and the second movement, but then I have never been to a performance respecting that wish. Perhaps it is simply impractical. Instead, a barrage of coughing and low-level chatter accompanied the entrance of soloists and chorus.
The Andante moderato was much slower than I have ever heard: considerably slower than even what used to be considered – and by some of us still us – the just tempo for a minuet, and certainly more akin to a ‘slow movement’ than usual. It was charmingly nostalgic, the warmth of string tone, especially in the cello section, contrasting with the steely gleam of the first movement. The minor mode trio sections were very insistent rhythmically – again echoes of Kurtág – though perhaps one was made a little too aware of the bar lines. The effect at so slow a tempo of the pizzicato passages was glacial, the harp unusually and welcomely prominent. I liked this movement very much, though it was decidedly non- or even anti-traditional.
It was good to have the scherzo’s opening kettledrum clatter silence the recidivist coughers. In Jurowski’s hands, this movement was a sardonic danse macabre, the ‘witch’s brew’ of which Mahler himself once spoke. The trio was raucous, vulgar even; there was no attempt to iron out its rusticity. Indeed, its highlighting made that sound unusually banal. I could almost see the village ‘characters’ dancing. Again, I was set thinking that Jurowski’s idea might be to incorporate ‘everything’ into Mahler’s world; after all, the composer famously told Sibelius that a symphony should be a world. The performance as a whole was coming to resemble – and would continue to do so – a vast symphonic poem, which of course is how, in the guise of Totenfeier, it set out. It was a bit like a conflation of Liszt’s Faust and Dante symphonies – and then some. If my preference would be for something more symphonically integrative, I undoubtedly heard many new perspectives upon a work I flattered myself I knew well.
Urlicht was perhaps too ‘different’ in conception. It lacked the hush I think it really needs, being presented instead as a simple, peasant-like explanation of how things will turn out in the hereafter. Christianne Stotijn brought a Lieder-singer’s attention to the meaning of the words, her diction superb. And the spatial dimension of the finale was presaged by having a wind band above the orchestral platform answer that initial, imploring ‘O Röschen rot!’
With the opening sound of the finale, we reverted to the modernism of the first movement. Once again, there was rhythmic insistence, but not always to the benefit of the longer line. The off-stage brass could be fractionally ahead of the on-stage musicians – at least from where I was sitting – but Jurowski brought them into line. This movement received a brazenly pictorial account, cinematic even. I fancied, once again, that I could see the characters, this time members of a procession; I certainly heard their cries. The spatial dimension was heightened immeasurably when one heard the last trumpet from various directions of the beyond. Moreover, the choral contribution was superb, both in diction and tonal variegation. ‘Sterben werd’ ich, um zu Leben!’ (‘I shall die so as to live’) and ‘Aufersteh’n,’ the assurance that we should rise again, sent shivers down my spine. Now I was utterly convinced and was reminded what truly astounding music this is. As the bells rang out – and rang out they most certainly did – one could hear, if this time not see, something of whatever it might be that lies beyond this world.
Kurtág – Stele, op.33
Mahler – Symphony no.2 in C minor, ‘Resurrection’
Adriana Kučerová (soprano)
Christianne Stotijn (mezzo-soprano)
London Philharmonic Choir
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)
This is not the first time Kurtág’s Stele and Mahler’s Second Symphony have been performed together. The former’s association with memorial and the latter’s focus upon resurrection are suggestive. Likewise, the large forces common to both – this must be one of the few cases when musicians exit the stage in preparation for a work by Mahler – make practical and doubtless economic sense in programming terms. Michael Gielen in his Hänssler recording presents both works with Schoenberg’s Kol Nidre. The Mahler is, however, more often than not programmed alone, so we were hardly short-changed.
Stele received an excellent performance. Written for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra when Kurtág was composer in residence, the London Philharmonic proved more than equal to the task. So did Vladimir Jurowski in succession to Claudio Abbado. The opening proved expectant in its expansion, the initial pitch of G dissipated through microtonal subversion. The beauty of the doleful woodwind sounds to which this led put me in mind of another memorial, the Berg Violin Concerto, and in particular the Bach chorale used therein, but also of something older, antique even, the Greek world from which the piece gains its title. Guest principal flautist Mattia Petrilli, both here and in the Mahler, was extremely impressive. In the ensuing controlled hysteria, one truly heard how huge the orchestra was, yet Jurowksi ensured that a fine sense of rhythmic momentum was maintained, even in the static passages. At the end, the hints – arguably more than that – of a funeral procession sounded almost as if for Mahler himself.
Jurowski’s account of the Mahler symphony was highly unusual. He has not, at least in London, conducted much of the composer’s music so far, but it is clear that he had given great consideration to this performance. I was not quite sure that everything cohered into a whole, but there could be no doubt that here was someone who had something to say about the composer and his music. This was not just another Mahler Second, for, at a time when that music is arguably over-exposed, we need more than ever a reason to perform it beyond filling concert halls (that in itself, of course, quite a reversal in fortune).
Jurowski began with Boulezian attack but allied to a far swifter tempo; indeed, I am not sure that I have ever heard the music taken so quickly. The brass sometimes blared a bit and there was the odd horn fluff. However, Jurowski displayed a good ear for orchestral detail, not least the all-important, often obscured figures for double bass. The English horn’s sadness put me in mind of Tristan’s shepherd song. Moments of stasis revealed a kinship with Kurtág, though I wondered whether they might have been slightly exaggerated to that end. This, then, was a bracingly modernist first movement, though sometimes perhaps too much; Boulez and Gielen both know that this is a Romantic work too. And then, later on, at the close of the development, there was an almost Bernstein-like hysteria: magnificently performed, but was it really compatible with what had gone before? The movement as a whole came across as somewhat disjointed, especially when the recapitulation reverted, as I suppose it must, to the rushed opening tempo. Portamento for the second subject was beautiful in itself, but sounded in context a little appliqué. Perhaps Jurowski was saying that such unresolved oppositions are what Mahler is about; certainly that was the impression I gained from the performance of the symphony as a whole. One thing for which to be extremely grateful: he rightly silenced the idiotic applause that began at the end of the movement. There was not the length of silence that Mahler requested between this and the second movement, but then I have never been to a performance respecting that wish. Perhaps it is simply impractical. Instead, a barrage of coughing and low-level chatter accompanied the entrance of soloists and chorus.
The Andante moderato was much slower than I have ever heard: considerably slower than even what used to be considered – and by some of us still us – the just tempo for a minuet, and certainly more akin to a ‘slow movement’ than usual. It was charmingly nostalgic, the warmth of string tone, especially in the cello section, contrasting with the steely gleam of the first movement. The minor mode trio sections were very insistent rhythmically – again echoes of Kurtág – though perhaps one was made a little too aware of the bar lines. The effect at so slow a tempo of the pizzicato passages was glacial, the harp unusually and welcomely prominent. I liked this movement very much, though it was decidedly non- or even anti-traditional.
It was good to have the scherzo’s opening kettledrum clatter silence the recidivist coughers. In Jurowski’s hands, this movement was a sardonic danse macabre, the ‘witch’s brew’ of which Mahler himself once spoke. The trio was raucous, vulgar even; there was no attempt to iron out its rusticity. Indeed, its highlighting made that sound unusually banal. I could almost see the village ‘characters’ dancing. Again, I was set thinking that Jurowski’s idea might be to incorporate ‘everything’ into Mahler’s world; after all, the composer famously told Sibelius that a symphony should be a world. The performance as a whole was coming to resemble – and would continue to do so – a vast symphonic poem, which of course is how, in the guise of Totenfeier, it set out. It was a bit like a conflation of Liszt’s Faust and Dante symphonies – and then some. If my preference would be for something more symphonically integrative, I undoubtedly heard many new perspectives upon a work I flattered myself I knew well.
Urlicht was perhaps too ‘different’ in conception. It lacked the hush I think it really needs, being presented instead as a simple, peasant-like explanation of how things will turn out in the hereafter. Christianne Stotijn brought a Lieder-singer’s attention to the meaning of the words, her diction superb. And the spatial dimension of the finale was presaged by having a wind band above the orchestral platform answer that initial, imploring ‘O Röschen rot!’
With the opening sound of the finale, we reverted to the modernism of the first movement. Once again, there was rhythmic insistence, but not always to the benefit of the longer line. The off-stage brass could be fractionally ahead of the on-stage musicians – at least from where I was sitting – but Jurowski brought them into line. This movement received a brazenly pictorial account, cinematic even. I fancied, once again, that I could see the characters, this time members of a procession; I certainly heard their cries. The spatial dimension was heightened immeasurably when one heard the last trumpet from various directions of the beyond. Moreover, the choral contribution was superb, both in diction and tonal variegation. ‘Sterben werd’ ich, um zu Leben!’ (‘I shall die so as to live’) and ‘Aufersteh’n,’ the assurance that we should rise again, sent shivers down my spine. Now I was utterly convinced and was reminded what truly astounding music this is. As the bells rang out – and rang out they most certainly did – one could hear, if this time not see, something of whatever it might be that lies beyond this world.
Wednesday, 23 September 2009
Goerne/Schmalcz - Schubert, 20 September 2009
Wigmore Hall
Nacht und Träume
Der blinde Knabe
Hoffnung
Die Sterne
Im Abendrot
Totengräbers Weise
Greisengesang
Tiefes Leid
Totengräbers Heimweh
An den Mond
Die Mainacht
An Silvia
Ständchen
Der Schäfer und der Reiter
Die Sommernacht
Erntelied
Herbstlied
Jägers Abendlied
Der liebliche Stern
An die Geliebte
Matthias Goerne (baritone)
Alexander Schmalcz (piano)
One is hardly more likely to associate light relief with Matthias Goerne than with Pierre Boulez, though for somewhat different reasons. This was not an occasion to buck the trend. Having said that, this was not so dark a recital as that of Wolf and Liszt he recently gave in Salzburg with Andreas Haefliger. Intelligently programmed as ever, the second of Goerne’s two present Wigmore Hall Schubert recitals presented songs of night, sorrow, and the grave but also songs of the stars, the harvest, and dreams. Melancholy and occasional joy accompanied old age and death. Slow songs were preponderant in the first half, whilst the second brought greater variation, a broadening of horizons.
To open a recital with Nacht und Träume was a bold move: one that paid off handsomely. A wondrous introduction to the recital as a whole was provided by its hushed expectancy, not least thanks to the steadfast rocking – something of a contradiction in terms, I know – of Alexander Schmalcz’s piano part. Hope of sorts coloured Der blinde Knabe and Hoffnung. The blind boy’s happiness with or resignation to his lot – he knows nothing of the sun and its setting, so cannot truly regret it – was poignant indeed, especially in the final stanza, whilst Schubert’s brand of hope in the latter Schiller setting proved to be of the flickering variety: no Beethovenian flame here. Schmalcz intelligently highlighted the extraordinary proto-Lisztian harmony of the introduction and interlude to Friedrich Schlegel’s Die Sterne, whilst Goerne’s response to the text illuminated like the stars themselves. A single telling example was the floated melisma upon ‘himmlischen’, noting the heavenly nature of the signs at which we marvel. In a rapt account of Im Abendrot, the rise and fall of the words and musical structure was expertly shaped.
The second group of the first half was that concerned with the grave. Goerne’s pale, deathly tone brought out the reality (‘Wirklichkeit’, in Rückert’s verse) of the old man’s song (Greisengesang). The gravedigger’s resolve was clear from the outset in Totengäbers Heimweh, whilst the stillness of death itself was chillingly apparent from both musicians – undoubtedly led, however, by Goerne – during the final stanza.
A more enchanted form of night followed the interval. Schmalcz’s piano introduction to An den Mond underlined what is surely Schubert’s tribute to Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata, however much we might regret the nickname. The pianist also imparted a winning rhythmical lilt to Die Mainacht, continued and developed by Goerne, whose An Sylvia proved mellifluous to a degree. In the second Shakespeare setting, Ständchen, I was disappointed by the initial limpness of the piano part. Goerne’s charm – as I said, it was not all doom and gloom – and detailed response to the text clearly rubbed off upon his partner, however. Another drawback was the awkwardness of the piano transition to the huntsman’s music in Der Schäfer und der Reiter. It is tricky, of course, but can be better handled than it was here.
Goerne’s reading of the Goethe setting, Jägers Abendlicht was so intense that it was almost as if the huntsman wished to seduce the moon. This proved an abiding memory of a fine recital. I could not help wondering, however, whether Goerne might on occasion have been better served by a pianist such as Paul Lewis, who had himself seemed somewhat oddly matched with Mark Padmore during the previous Sunday's recital.
Nacht und Träume
Der blinde Knabe
Hoffnung
Die Sterne
Im Abendrot
Totengräbers Weise
Greisengesang
Tiefes Leid
Totengräbers Heimweh
An den Mond
Die Mainacht
An Silvia
Ständchen
Der Schäfer und der Reiter
Die Sommernacht
Erntelied
Herbstlied
Jägers Abendlied
Der liebliche Stern
An die Geliebte
Matthias Goerne (baritone)
Alexander Schmalcz (piano)
One is hardly more likely to associate light relief with Matthias Goerne than with Pierre Boulez, though for somewhat different reasons. This was not an occasion to buck the trend. Having said that, this was not so dark a recital as that of Wolf and Liszt he recently gave in Salzburg with Andreas Haefliger. Intelligently programmed as ever, the second of Goerne’s two present Wigmore Hall Schubert recitals presented songs of night, sorrow, and the grave but also songs of the stars, the harvest, and dreams. Melancholy and occasional joy accompanied old age and death. Slow songs were preponderant in the first half, whilst the second brought greater variation, a broadening of horizons.
To open a recital with Nacht und Träume was a bold move: one that paid off handsomely. A wondrous introduction to the recital as a whole was provided by its hushed expectancy, not least thanks to the steadfast rocking – something of a contradiction in terms, I know – of Alexander Schmalcz’s piano part. Hope of sorts coloured Der blinde Knabe and Hoffnung. The blind boy’s happiness with or resignation to his lot – he knows nothing of the sun and its setting, so cannot truly regret it – was poignant indeed, especially in the final stanza, whilst Schubert’s brand of hope in the latter Schiller setting proved to be of the flickering variety: no Beethovenian flame here. Schmalcz intelligently highlighted the extraordinary proto-Lisztian harmony of the introduction and interlude to Friedrich Schlegel’s Die Sterne, whilst Goerne’s response to the text illuminated like the stars themselves. A single telling example was the floated melisma upon ‘himmlischen’, noting the heavenly nature of the signs at which we marvel. In a rapt account of Im Abendrot, the rise and fall of the words and musical structure was expertly shaped.
The second group of the first half was that concerned with the grave. Goerne’s pale, deathly tone brought out the reality (‘Wirklichkeit’, in Rückert’s verse) of the old man’s song (Greisengesang). The gravedigger’s resolve was clear from the outset in Totengäbers Heimweh, whilst the stillness of death itself was chillingly apparent from both musicians – undoubtedly led, however, by Goerne – during the final stanza.
A more enchanted form of night followed the interval. Schmalcz’s piano introduction to An den Mond underlined what is surely Schubert’s tribute to Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata, however much we might regret the nickname. The pianist also imparted a winning rhythmical lilt to Die Mainacht, continued and developed by Goerne, whose An Sylvia proved mellifluous to a degree. In the second Shakespeare setting, Ständchen, I was disappointed by the initial limpness of the piano part. Goerne’s charm – as I said, it was not all doom and gloom – and detailed response to the text clearly rubbed off upon his partner, however. Another drawback was the awkwardness of the piano transition to the huntsman’s music in Der Schäfer und der Reiter. It is tricky, of course, but can be better handled than it was here.
Goerne’s reading of the Goethe setting, Jägers Abendlicht was so intense that it was almost as if the huntsman wished to seduce the moon. This proved an abiding memory of a fine recital. I could not help wondering, however, whether Goerne might on occasion have been better served by a pianist such as Paul Lewis, who had himself seemed somewhat oddly matched with Mark Padmore during the previous Sunday's recital.
Monday, 14 September 2009
South Bank Show: The Wagner Family, 13 September 2009
I shall probably regret this, given the risk of eliciting knee-jerk reactions from the monstrous regiment of Wagner-haters. However, I felt I could not simply remain silent after the quite disgraceful treatment of Wagner on last night's South Bank Show.
Directed by Tony Palmer, The Wagner Family was at best a confused mess, with little apparent direction - in any sense - and little ostensible point beyond muck-raking. I cannot imagine that anyone without prior knowledge would have understood what was going on, still less why this might be of any importance. The tedious yet all-too-expected reference to the dreadful clan as Germany's 'Royal Family' was made, and indeed much of it resembled the assemblage of gossip we have come to expect from anything concerning the real thing. But really? I have never met anyone, from Germany or elsewhere, who thinks of the family as deserving anything like that level of attention. One can well understand why Wieland Wagner's children and the elder children of Wolfgang Wagner would feel bitter; it seems pretty clear that they have been wronged. I hold no brief for Wolfgang. As a director, he is at best a non-entity, though his administrative skills clearly helped Bayreuth. I certainly hold no brief for his younger daughter, whose attempts at direction seem at best risible. But would it not have been proper to have someone put their side of the story? It hardly seems credible that anyone would have changed his mind on the relative merits of the brothers; indeed, it would surely have strengthened the case. And surely Katharina Wagner's declaration of intent to open the family archive should have been mentioned, if only sceptically.
That was one thing; it is difficult and doubtless not worth the effort to feel sorry for Wolfgang. But the initial treatment of his grandfather, the one who matters, was nothing short of a disgrace. As sole commentator on Parsifal, there was Robert Gutman, whose extremism on the subject would embarrass even those inclined to a racialist interpretation. His assertion, for this was no argument, that Parsifal was somehow about 'racial purity' was never questioned, let alone challenged, likewise his assertion that there was nothing Christian to the work. The latter is a complex issue, but it deserves proper consideration or otherwise leaving alone. As for the claim that Wagner somehow - at least Joachim Köhler argues his case - led to Hitler and even to the Holocaust...
In many cases, I should be tempted to shrug my shoulders, and ask, 'so what?' None of this, nor indeed Hitler's enthusiasm, has any effect upon the greatness of Wagner's works, any more than the teachings of Calvin or John Paul II detract from the message of Christ. What it does influence, however, is the general public's understanding. What people who have never encountered the dramas themselves 'know' comes from pieces such as this, which in turn has consequences for funding and, in the notorious case of the State of Israel, de facto prohibition. Wagner deserves better, even if many of his descendants do not.
We were also treated to the bizarre rantings, unquestioned throughout, of Gottfried Wagner. One can only feel sorry for him on a personal level - or at least I can - but his claim that successive mayors of Bayreuth had banned him from the city was surely more than enough to discredit rumours of even relative sanity.
Watch instead the riveting Confessions of Winifred Wagner by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Give someone enough rope...
Directed by Tony Palmer, The Wagner Family was at best a confused mess, with little apparent direction - in any sense - and little ostensible point beyond muck-raking. I cannot imagine that anyone without prior knowledge would have understood what was going on, still less why this might be of any importance. The tedious yet all-too-expected reference to the dreadful clan as Germany's 'Royal Family' was made, and indeed much of it resembled the assemblage of gossip we have come to expect from anything concerning the real thing. But really? I have never met anyone, from Germany or elsewhere, who thinks of the family as deserving anything like that level of attention. One can well understand why Wieland Wagner's children and the elder children of Wolfgang Wagner would feel bitter; it seems pretty clear that they have been wronged. I hold no brief for Wolfgang. As a director, he is at best a non-entity, though his administrative skills clearly helped Bayreuth. I certainly hold no brief for his younger daughter, whose attempts at direction seem at best risible. But would it not have been proper to have someone put their side of the story? It hardly seems credible that anyone would have changed his mind on the relative merits of the brothers; indeed, it would surely have strengthened the case. And surely Katharina Wagner's declaration of intent to open the family archive should have been mentioned, if only sceptically.
That was one thing; it is difficult and doubtless not worth the effort to feel sorry for Wolfgang. But the initial treatment of his grandfather, the one who matters, was nothing short of a disgrace. As sole commentator on Parsifal, there was Robert Gutman, whose extremism on the subject would embarrass even those inclined to a racialist interpretation. His assertion, for this was no argument, that Parsifal was somehow about 'racial purity' was never questioned, let alone challenged, likewise his assertion that there was nothing Christian to the work. The latter is a complex issue, but it deserves proper consideration or otherwise leaving alone. As for the claim that Wagner somehow - at least Joachim Köhler argues his case - led to Hitler and even to the Holocaust...
In many cases, I should be tempted to shrug my shoulders, and ask, 'so what?' None of this, nor indeed Hitler's enthusiasm, has any effect upon the greatness of Wagner's works, any more than the teachings of Calvin or John Paul II detract from the message of Christ. What it does influence, however, is the general public's understanding. What people who have never encountered the dramas themselves 'know' comes from pieces such as this, which in turn has consequences for funding and, in the notorious case of the State of Israel, de facto prohibition. Wagner deserves better, even if many of his descendants do not.
We were also treated to the bizarre rantings, unquestioned throughout, of Gottfried Wagner. One can only feel sorry for him on a personal level - or at least I can - but his claim that successive mayors of Bayreuth had banned him from the city was surely more than enough to discredit rumours of even relative sanity.
Watch instead the riveting Confessions of Winifred Wagner by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Give someone enough rope...
Sunday, 13 September 2009
Padmore/Lewis - Die schöne Müllerin, 12 September 2009
Wigmore Hall
Schubert – Die schöne Müllerin, D 795
Mark Padmore (tenor)
Paul Lewis (piano)
At least so far as the vocal part was concerned, this was a peculiar account of Schubert’s first song cycle. There were some very good things in Mark Padmore’s performance. I shall come to those a little later, but I could not help wondering whether his was really an appropriate voice for this repertoire. Of course, there is room for all sorts of approaches, a principal distinction being whether to use a tenor or a lower voice, transposed, allowing artists as different as Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Fritz Wunderlich and Matthias Goerne, to put forward their interpretations; the cycle has even occasionally been borrowed by female singers, for instance Brigitte Fassbaender. The recording Pears made with Britten certainly does not present a typically German voice, of whatever variety, yet it works very well, not least on account of Britten’s superlative contribution, but also thanks to Pears’s marriage of verbal and musical understanding.
Padmore’s voice comes closer to Pears than to the other singers I have mentioned, but not only is it very much the sound of an ‘English tenor’, it is limited in tone, or at least it was here, and eschews vibrato to an extent that helps one understand why he is an Evangelist of choice amongst the ‘authenticke’ brigade. Use of the head voice was too frequent to make any particular point; it ended up merely sounding fey. Indeed, archness was markedly more characteristic of this performance than vernal freshness. Whilst diction was generally excellent, there were a few occasions when vowels sounded a little odd, often though not always when umlauts were involved. I was a little surprised to hear ‘heller’ for ‘frischer’ in Wohin? and ‘sagt’ for spricht in Am Feierabend, but too much could easily be made of such matters. More worryingly, there were several instances of questionable intonation.
However, there were, as I said, highly commendable aspects to Padmore’s performance too. His experience as an Evangelist often told, in the very real sense one had of a narrator – often more a narrator than a participant, it might be added, certainly more so than, say, with Peter Schreier. Padmore’s attention to the words themselves was often exemplary. To take one example, in Ungeduld, his leaning into the word ‘Dein’ on ‘Dein ist mein Herz’, conveyed a delivery of the heart from our hero to his beloved. The questioning tone at the end of Halt! really did give a sense of a participant, asking the inscrutable brook what it meant. Perhaps if the young man had been able to understand then what, if anything, he was being told, things might have turned out differently, but such is Fate.
Where this performance truly scored, however, was in the contribution from Paul Lewis at the piano. Lewis imparted a powerful, inexorable continuity to the unfolding drama, not unlike the contribution of Wagner’s orchestral Greek chorus. The opening number, Das Wandern, was a case in point, the piano part properly muscular, to borrow an apposite adjective from Gavin Plumley’s excellent programme notes. Moreover, one heard a subtle yet undeniable growth in intensity through the stanzas of this strophic song, initially matched by Padmore, though the latter drew back at the end: less, it seemed, on account of a response to the text, but rather because his vocal reserves demanded it. The presence of the brook was strong throughout so many of the songs; this, one truly felt, was another character, perhaps even the most important character of all. Another character was no less impressively, if fleetingly, introduced with the huntsman of Der Jäger. Impatience (Ungeduld) was immediately present in the song of that name, whilst the harmonic shifts in Morgengruß registered piercingly, yet without inverted commas. I was especially taken with, and disturbed by, the harmonic premonitions of Schumann to which Lewis pointed in Tränenregen. The echt-Schubertian melancholic tread of Die liebe Farbe responded in equal measure to the verbal text – suicide beckons – and to the repeated-note hints of Chopin (the so-called ‘Raindrop’ Prelude). This made me suspect that Lewis might have an interestingly Classical perspective upon Chopin’s music. One heard the Romantic horns of Die böse Farbe, whilst, in Trockne Blumen, the piano ensured that the flowers were truly withered, Finally, one could hardly resist the attraction of the waters in the closing Des Baches Wiegenlied, drawn in as the hero himself.
Padmore and Lewis are to record all three Schubert song cycles for Harmonia Mundi. Fans of either artist or of both will doubtless wish to hear their interpretations. Theirs did not, however, seem to me an ideal partnership. It occurred to me that Padmore might have been happier with, or at least more suited to, a fortepiano performance. Certainly his performance had its virtues. But listen, for instance, to Wunderlich and one hears such ease with the music, a performance that does not need to underline every verbal nuance; the music and the sheer beauty of the voice permit the words to speak for themselves. Listen to Goerne, especially his second recording with Christoph Eschenbach, and one hears something altogether darker, daring to look into an expressionist abyss. There is room for both and for much else besides. A Müllerin for devotees of Choral Evensong perhaps has its place, but it is not for me.
Schubert – Die schöne Müllerin, D 795
Mark Padmore (tenor)
Paul Lewis (piano)
At least so far as the vocal part was concerned, this was a peculiar account of Schubert’s first song cycle. There were some very good things in Mark Padmore’s performance. I shall come to those a little later, but I could not help wondering whether his was really an appropriate voice for this repertoire. Of course, there is room for all sorts of approaches, a principal distinction being whether to use a tenor or a lower voice, transposed, allowing artists as different as Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Fritz Wunderlich and Matthias Goerne, to put forward their interpretations; the cycle has even occasionally been borrowed by female singers, for instance Brigitte Fassbaender. The recording Pears made with Britten certainly does not present a typically German voice, of whatever variety, yet it works very well, not least on account of Britten’s superlative contribution, but also thanks to Pears’s marriage of verbal and musical understanding.
Padmore’s voice comes closer to Pears than to the other singers I have mentioned, but not only is it very much the sound of an ‘English tenor’, it is limited in tone, or at least it was here, and eschews vibrato to an extent that helps one understand why he is an Evangelist of choice amongst the ‘authenticke’ brigade. Use of the head voice was too frequent to make any particular point; it ended up merely sounding fey. Indeed, archness was markedly more characteristic of this performance than vernal freshness. Whilst diction was generally excellent, there were a few occasions when vowels sounded a little odd, often though not always when umlauts were involved. I was a little surprised to hear ‘heller’ for ‘frischer’ in Wohin? and ‘sagt’ for spricht in Am Feierabend, but too much could easily be made of such matters. More worryingly, there were several instances of questionable intonation.
However, there were, as I said, highly commendable aspects to Padmore’s performance too. His experience as an Evangelist often told, in the very real sense one had of a narrator – often more a narrator than a participant, it might be added, certainly more so than, say, with Peter Schreier. Padmore’s attention to the words themselves was often exemplary. To take one example, in Ungeduld, his leaning into the word ‘Dein’ on ‘Dein ist mein Herz’, conveyed a delivery of the heart from our hero to his beloved. The questioning tone at the end of Halt! really did give a sense of a participant, asking the inscrutable brook what it meant. Perhaps if the young man had been able to understand then what, if anything, he was being told, things might have turned out differently, but such is Fate.
Where this performance truly scored, however, was in the contribution from Paul Lewis at the piano. Lewis imparted a powerful, inexorable continuity to the unfolding drama, not unlike the contribution of Wagner’s orchestral Greek chorus. The opening number, Das Wandern, was a case in point, the piano part properly muscular, to borrow an apposite adjective from Gavin Plumley’s excellent programme notes. Moreover, one heard a subtle yet undeniable growth in intensity through the stanzas of this strophic song, initially matched by Padmore, though the latter drew back at the end: less, it seemed, on account of a response to the text, but rather because his vocal reserves demanded it. The presence of the brook was strong throughout so many of the songs; this, one truly felt, was another character, perhaps even the most important character of all. Another character was no less impressively, if fleetingly, introduced with the huntsman of Der Jäger. Impatience (Ungeduld) was immediately present in the song of that name, whilst the harmonic shifts in Morgengruß registered piercingly, yet without inverted commas. I was especially taken with, and disturbed by, the harmonic premonitions of Schumann to which Lewis pointed in Tränenregen. The echt-Schubertian melancholic tread of Die liebe Farbe responded in equal measure to the verbal text – suicide beckons – and to the repeated-note hints of Chopin (the so-called ‘Raindrop’ Prelude). This made me suspect that Lewis might have an interestingly Classical perspective upon Chopin’s music. One heard the Romantic horns of Die böse Farbe, whilst, in Trockne Blumen, the piano ensured that the flowers were truly withered, Finally, one could hardly resist the attraction of the waters in the closing Des Baches Wiegenlied, drawn in as the hero himself.
Padmore and Lewis are to record all three Schubert song cycles for Harmonia Mundi. Fans of either artist or of both will doubtless wish to hear their interpretations. Theirs did not, however, seem to me an ideal partnership. It occurred to me that Padmore might have been happier with, or at least more suited to, a fortepiano performance. Certainly his performance had its virtues. But listen, for instance, to Wunderlich and one hears such ease with the music, a performance that does not need to underline every verbal nuance; the music and the sheer beauty of the voice permit the words to speak for themselves. Listen to Goerne, especially his second recording with Christoph Eschenbach, and one hears something altogether darker, daring to look into an expressionist abyss. There is room for both and for much else besides. A Müllerin for devotees of Choral Evensong perhaps has its place, but it is not for me.
Friday, 11 September 2009
Interview with Irvine Arditti
After further discussion with Irvine Arditti, a few corrections and explanations have been made to the text of our interview. Please click here to read the amended version. Sad, if unsurprising news, is that Pierre Boulez has confirmed that he has no plans to write a further string quartet.
Tuesday, 8 September 2009
Prom 69: Abboud Ashkar/Gewandhaus/Chailly - Mendelssohn and Mahler, 7 September 2009
Royal Albert Hall
Mendelssohn – Piano concerto no.1 in G minor, op.25
Mahler (ed. Cooke) – Symphony no.10
Saleem Abboud Ashkar (piano)
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Riccardo Chailly (conductor)
Judging by the warmth and sheer volume of the applause this concert received, most of the audience reacted a great deal more ecstatically than I did. At least the end of the concert proved a valuable opportunity for a minority menace to do something other than cough, talk, or, in some cases, sound their electronic equipment. Small mercies and all that...
The first Mendelssohn concerto was performed extremely well by Saleem Abboud Ashkar. I first heard him in 2006, in the Mozart concerto for two pianos, with the Vienna Philharmonic no less, under Riccardo Muti; reacquaintance found Abboud Ashkar equally impressive. Possessed of a pearly tone, not unlike Murray Perahia, he imparted a Mozartian beauty to the piano part, also hinting at Schumann and Brahms in the opposite chronological direction. The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly played well enough and, in the case of the woodwind, quite magically at times, though the sheer ease in this idiom with which the orchestra played under Kurt Masur and often Herbert Blomstedt did not seem so readily apparent here. Some of Chailly’s direction in the first movement was hard-driven, though he proved able to relax on occasion. Yet I am afraid I could not bring myself to be wildly excited about the work itself. It has its moments and, in the slow movement, rather more than that. But hearing Abboud Ashkar made me wish I were hearing him in Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, or Brahms. Even those passages that sound closer to the inspired magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream throw into relief what is missing elsewhere. Prettiness need not always be disdained but there seems to me quite a lot of note-spinning in this piece: pleasant enough, and more substantial than anything by the briefly and incomprehensibly fashionable Hummel, but little more than that. Perhaps one of the perverse advantages of intensive anniversary coverage is to make one realise the gulf, at least in many cases, between a composer’s good and great works on the one hand and, on the other, the rest. If, on the other hand, we had been treated to more Haydn...
Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, as edited by Deryck Cooke – I realise that the situation is far less straightforward than that, but sometimes shorthand is helpful – was, I think, the second live performance of a Mahler symphony I ever heard. That performance, from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Mark Wigglesworth, was also the second live Prom I attended. Sometimes one romanticises early experiences. However, not only can I say that that performance knocked me for six at the time; I can also report that listening to a BBC recording thereafter has barely dimmed my enthusiasm. The Welsh orchestra is perhaps not the most refulgent in tone and lacks the pedigree of the Leipzig band – though is the Leipzig pedigree right for Mahler? – but Wigglesworth’s direction is clear, dramatic, and makes an extremely strong case for Cooke’s edition/completion/call-it-what-you-will. I was considerably less convinced by this performance, which moreover made me harbour greater doubts than I have previously entertained concerning the edition. In theory, I suppose that could mean a good performance revealing shortcomings – consider, for instance, Boulez and his reservations concerning Schoenberg – but I do not think that was primarily the case here. Anyway, a performer would usually, with a few celebrated exceptions, consider himself to be counsel for the defence.
First off, this seemed a very lengthy account. Whether that were the case in reality, I have no idea, since, for better or worse, I am not one of those listeners prone to take timings. I am certainly no foe of broad, expansive performances in any repertoire; but that is a different matter from sounding as though it might never end, which the opening Adagio came very close to doing. Part of the problem seemed to be Chailly’s penchant for excessive underlining of the closing both of phrases and paragraphs. The caesura can be an integral part of Mahler’s style and, in the right hands, this can be accomplished without disruption to the longer line. Here, however, there was a strange, indeed paradoxical combination of smoothness and yet stopping and starting. By contrast, a performance last year from Vladimir Jurowski of the Adagio alone had certainly been expansive and might well have lasted for longer than this, but so intensely dramatic had the music-making been, so seamless had the musical golden thread proved, that I had merely regretted that it could not go on for longer.
Another problem I had was the sound of the orchestra, or rather of the strings, which simply did not sound right for Mahler. Perhaps it is no coincidence that I greatly admired a Brahms Fourth Symphony from Chailly and this orchestra at the Proms a couple of years ago, for often this is what it reminded me of. I missed Viennese sweetness or at least a convincing substitute. The darkness did not sound like the right sort, or at least a right sort, of darkness. Somehow Daniel Barenboim managed to accomplish a similar trick with the Staatskapelle Berlin in 2007 with the Seventh Symphony. I still do not quite know how, but his achievement would still seem to very much an exception – and it did not work during the Fifth. I should probably mention too that the Berlin strings were a good couple of degrees richer in tone than their Leipzig counterparts. Or perhaps it was the auld enemy of the Royal Albert Hall’s acoustic. Barenboim, after all, had the Philharmonie...
Another thing missing for me was the malevolent darkness, as opposed to the darkness of string sound, in the first scherzo. However, I should note that David Matthews, in his truly excellent programme note – quite a change from a number of Proms contributions this year – described Mahler as not having ‘written a scherzo so free from malice since the Fifth Symphony’. Overt references aside, my difficulty was that this sounded all too much like the scherzo of the Fifth Symphony – and that, I should contend, is far from untroubled. More worryingly, textures, especially during the scherzi, sometimes sounded as if something were missing. Of course, in a very real sense, something is – but unless this were intended as a critique of Cooke and the Matthews brothers, that is perhaps not something of which one should really be aware. On the other hand, there was some truly extraordinary woodwind playing, which I noticed with something bordering upon amazement in each movement. The alternation of icy, Webern-like purity and pastoral warmth in the Purgatorio was utterly convincing. Indeed, it set me thinking that this is precisely what Purgatory should be like: invigorating purification, just like Webern. The three clarinets in the final movement once again sounded spot on, evoking both Mozartian Harmoniemusik and the Berg of the Violin Concerto’s chorale. This movement and the Purgatorio seemed to me the strongest – and I should certainly recall the superlative percussion contribution with which the orchestra groped towards its opening.
I have deliberately written very much in the first person, since I have a sense that much of this was about my reaction, not just in the sense that others clearly reacted very differently, but also that this concerns differently held approaches to and understandings of Mahler. When the music sounded on the threshold of the Second Viennese School, especially Webern, I was most captivated, but for long stretches it seemed to me not merely ‘late Romantic’, but ‘late Romantic’ in a not entirely appropriate way. With Barenboim, a surprising relation to Brahms had worked in the Seventh Symphony, even if it might rarely be suggested by the score in itself. Whilst there was much to appreciate here, I remained unconvinced by the interpretation as a whole, except in the rather troubling – but perhaps necessary? – sense of the doubts elicited concerning the edition. I shall now perhaps look again at some of the competing completions, which would doubtless be no bad thing.
Mendelssohn – Piano concerto no.1 in G minor, op.25
Mahler (ed. Cooke) – Symphony no.10
Saleem Abboud Ashkar (piano)
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Riccardo Chailly (conductor)
Judging by the warmth and sheer volume of the applause this concert received, most of the audience reacted a great deal more ecstatically than I did. At least the end of the concert proved a valuable opportunity for a minority menace to do something other than cough, talk, or, in some cases, sound their electronic equipment. Small mercies and all that...
The first Mendelssohn concerto was performed extremely well by Saleem Abboud Ashkar. I first heard him in 2006, in the Mozart concerto for two pianos, with the Vienna Philharmonic no less, under Riccardo Muti; reacquaintance found Abboud Ashkar equally impressive. Possessed of a pearly tone, not unlike Murray Perahia, he imparted a Mozartian beauty to the piano part, also hinting at Schumann and Brahms in the opposite chronological direction. The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly played well enough and, in the case of the woodwind, quite magically at times, though the sheer ease in this idiom with which the orchestra played under Kurt Masur and often Herbert Blomstedt did not seem so readily apparent here. Some of Chailly’s direction in the first movement was hard-driven, though he proved able to relax on occasion. Yet I am afraid I could not bring myself to be wildly excited about the work itself. It has its moments and, in the slow movement, rather more than that. But hearing Abboud Ashkar made me wish I were hearing him in Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, or Brahms. Even those passages that sound closer to the inspired magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream throw into relief what is missing elsewhere. Prettiness need not always be disdained but there seems to me quite a lot of note-spinning in this piece: pleasant enough, and more substantial than anything by the briefly and incomprehensibly fashionable Hummel, but little more than that. Perhaps one of the perverse advantages of intensive anniversary coverage is to make one realise the gulf, at least in many cases, between a composer’s good and great works on the one hand and, on the other, the rest. If, on the other hand, we had been treated to more Haydn...
Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, as edited by Deryck Cooke – I realise that the situation is far less straightforward than that, but sometimes shorthand is helpful – was, I think, the second live performance of a Mahler symphony I ever heard. That performance, from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Mark Wigglesworth, was also the second live Prom I attended. Sometimes one romanticises early experiences. However, not only can I say that that performance knocked me for six at the time; I can also report that listening to a BBC recording thereafter has barely dimmed my enthusiasm. The Welsh orchestra is perhaps not the most refulgent in tone and lacks the pedigree of the Leipzig band – though is the Leipzig pedigree right for Mahler? – but Wigglesworth’s direction is clear, dramatic, and makes an extremely strong case for Cooke’s edition/completion/call-it-what-you-will. I was considerably less convinced by this performance, which moreover made me harbour greater doubts than I have previously entertained concerning the edition. In theory, I suppose that could mean a good performance revealing shortcomings – consider, for instance, Boulez and his reservations concerning Schoenberg – but I do not think that was primarily the case here. Anyway, a performer would usually, with a few celebrated exceptions, consider himself to be counsel for the defence.
First off, this seemed a very lengthy account. Whether that were the case in reality, I have no idea, since, for better or worse, I am not one of those listeners prone to take timings. I am certainly no foe of broad, expansive performances in any repertoire; but that is a different matter from sounding as though it might never end, which the opening Adagio came very close to doing. Part of the problem seemed to be Chailly’s penchant for excessive underlining of the closing both of phrases and paragraphs. The caesura can be an integral part of Mahler’s style and, in the right hands, this can be accomplished without disruption to the longer line. Here, however, there was a strange, indeed paradoxical combination of smoothness and yet stopping and starting. By contrast, a performance last year from Vladimir Jurowski of the Adagio alone had certainly been expansive and might well have lasted for longer than this, but so intensely dramatic had the music-making been, so seamless had the musical golden thread proved, that I had merely regretted that it could not go on for longer.
Another problem I had was the sound of the orchestra, or rather of the strings, which simply did not sound right for Mahler. Perhaps it is no coincidence that I greatly admired a Brahms Fourth Symphony from Chailly and this orchestra at the Proms a couple of years ago, for often this is what it reminded me of. I missed Viennese sweetness or at least a convincing substitute. The darkness did not sound like the right sort, or at least a right sort, of darkness. Somehow Daniel Barenboim managed to accomplish a similar trick with the Staatskapelle Berlin in 2007 with the Seventh Symphony. I still do not quite know how, but his achievement would still seem to very much an exception – and it did not work during the Fifth. I should probably mention too that the Berlin strings were a good couple of degrees richer in tone than their Leipzig counterparts. Or perhaps it was the auld enemy of the Royal Albert Hall’s acoustic. Barenboim, after all, had the Philharmonie...
Another thing missing for me was the malevolent darkness, as opposed to the darkness of string sound, in the first scherzo. However, I should note that David Matthews, in his truly excellent programme note – quite a change from a number of Proms contributions this year – described Mahler as not having ‘written a scherzo so free from malice since the Fifth Symphony’. Overt references aside, my difficulty was that this sounded all too much like the scherzo of the Fifth Symphony – and that, I should contend, is far from untroubled. More worryingly, textures, especially during the scherzi, sometimes sounded as if something were missing. Of course, in a very real sense, something is – but unless this were intended as a critique of Cooke and the Matthews brothers, that is perhaps not something of which one should really be aware. On the other hand, there was some truly extraordinary woodwind playing, which I noticed with something bordering upon amazement in each movement. The alternation of icy, Webern-like purity and pastoral warmth in the Purgatorio was utterly convincing. Indeed, it set me thinking that this is precisely what Purgatory should be like: invigorating purification, just like Webern. The three clarinets in the final movement once again sounded spot on, evoking both Mozartian Harmoniemusik and the Berg of the Violin Concerto’s chorale. This movement and the Purgatorio seemed to me the strongest – and I should certainly recall the superlative percussion contribution with which the orchestra groped towards its opening.
I have deliberately written very much in the first person, since I have a sense that much of this was about my reaction, not just in the sense that others clearly reacted very differently, but also that this concerns differently held approaches to and understandings of Mahler. When the music sounded on the threshold of the Second Viennese School, especially Webern, I was most captivated, but for long stretches it seemed to me not merely ‘late Romantic’, but ‘late Romantic’ in a not entirely appropriate way. With Barenboim, a surprising relation to Brahms had worked in the Seventh Symphony, even if it might rarely be suggested by the score in itself. Whilst there was much to appreciate here, I remained unconvinced by the interpretation as a whole, except in the rather troubling – but perhaps necessary? – sense of the doubts elicited concerning the edition. I shall now perhaps look again at some of the competing completions, which would doubtless be no bad thing.
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
Edinburgh International Festival (4): Hannigan/Arditti Quartet - Beethoven, Dutilleux, Webern, and Schoenberg, 1 September 2009
Queen's Hall
Beethoven - String Quartet in B-flat major, op.133, 'Grosse Fuge'
Dutilleux - Ainsi la nuit
Webern - Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, op.9
Schoenberg String Quartet no.2
Barbara Hannigan (soprano)
Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)
Ralf Ehlers (viola)
Lucas Fels (cello)
The second of the Arditti Quartet’s two Queen’s Hall series proved at least as successful as the first ; indeed, I thought the Beethoven performance, on this occasion the Grosse Fuge, surpassed that of the op.95 quartet the previous morning. It was interesting to note, in the light of my prior conversation with Irvine Arditti, the nature of the audience. He had spoken of the presence of Beethoven as a potential way to make an Arditti programme ‘a little more attractive for the non-contemporary music aficionado: people interested in hearing string quartets but who are not exactly contemporary music specialists’. This is doubtless impressionistic or downright prejudiced, but my impression of the audience was that this was in large part composed of those more likely to be interested in the chamber music repertoire. If so, such listeners could hardly have had a better opportunity to be introduced to two twentieth-century quartet masterpieces: Webern’s Bagatelles and Schoenberg’s second quartet. About Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit I felt more ambivalent but it certainly received every bit as fine a performance.
Arditti also spoke of his longstanding ‘desire to put the Grosse Fuge at the beginning of a programme and continue with contemporary music, rather as a statement to living composers, like: “This is what Beethoven did; now let’s see what you can do.”’ This was not quite the nature of the programme here, but Beethoven’s extraordinary work fulfilled a not entirely dissimilar function nevertheless; it certainly sounded here, as it should, at least as shockingly modern as anything that came thereafter. I heard an audience member during the interval lamenting that Beethoven had ‘sounded violent’; surely that is the point. From the opening, which was jagged, angular, and abrupt, such music alternated, albeit with a weighting towards the former, with a Beethoven who could be sweet, gentle, but never, repeat never, cloying. Sparks flew in what seemed almost a masterclass in the expression of Beethovenian struggle and defiance. Although the scale and nature of the forces are entirely different, I was more than once put in mind of the Missa Solemnis and, during the slow episode, the Adagio to the Ninth Symphony. The rhythmical and metrical complexity of Beethoven’s writing shone through, in a way that must have appealed to Conlon Nancarrow when he lauded this quartet’s performance of both the Grosse Fuge and his own third quartet (see the interview again). Tonality at times almost seemed to be beside the point, certainly not in the case of having ceased to function, but instead of having at times ceded its leading role to counterpoint.
Henri Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit seemed, as I said, to be performed extremely well; certainly the work’s structure was clearly delineated, as were its debts to Webern and to Bartókian night music. I also fancied that I heard a kinship – I suspect that rather than influence – to Messiaen. Prominent pizzicatos and playing sul ponticello added to the atmosphere. For whatever reason, however, I remained somewhat unreceptive, so shall move on to a very fine performance, following the interval, of Webern’s op.9 Bagatelles. Sighs, clarity, crystalline perfection, echoes (apparent or other) of the Grosse Fuge, great and minute dynamic contrasts: all of these were here. So was an aching, Schubertian beauty – how close Schubert so often stands to the Second Viennese School! – and a kinship of premonition to the Ligeti quartet heard in the previous concert, especially the sense of ethereal expiration. Above all, this Webern performance made one listen, reminding me once again why Nono so revered his predecessor.
This was the second time I had heard the Arditti Quartet perform both the Webern pieces and Schoenberg’s second quartet, the previous occasion having been a concert during the Southbank Centre’s Nono series. Claron McFadden was here replaced by the equally excellent Barbara Hannigan, whom I have previously encountered in a variety of challenging repertoire, including Nono and Berg. The density of Schoenberg’s counterpoint, so rich in expression, was conveyed from the opening of the first movement without fail. One could hear precisely what Schoenberg meant when writing, ‘In the first and second movements there are many sections in which the individual parts proceed regardless of whether or not their meeting results in codified harmonies.’ Programming and performance also revealed close parallels in this respect with the Grosse Fuge. Verklärte Nacht-like richness was revealed at times, yet sparingly, ensuring that appreciation of one’s harmonic bearings did not preclude following of neo-Brahmsian continuous motivic development. Harmonic nods to the First Chamber Symphony were unusually apparent in the scherzo. Still more prominent was a strong sense of how rhythmic and harmonic motion were as one. There was, moreover, a real charm to the celebrated quotation from ‘O du lieber Augustin,’ second violinist Ashot Sarkissjan and violist Ralf Ehrens providing just the right element of lilt and inflection, without resorting to all-too-audible inverted commas. This was poignant but clear-eyed, rather like the performance as a whole, a characteristic which in no sense precluded great intensity of musical expression – rather like Schoenberg’s œuvre as a whole.
There was a true sadness to the opening of Litanei, a passionate cello outburst from Lucas Fels preparing the way for the soprano entry: ‘Tief ist die trauer die mich umdüstert’ (‘Deep is the grief enveloping me’). Hanningan proved attentive as a Lieder-singer to the varying demands of Stefan George’s text and its implications: seductive and sultry, but also still and peaceful. The great final climax upon the word ‘liebe’ prepared the way for a peace of sorts, certainly a sense that everything had changed in the afterglow of the instrumental postlude. A very real sense of liberation could therefore characterise the instrumental opening of the final movement: hushed expectancy announcing the air of another planet. Entrückung, the movement’s title, was precisely what one felt: the ecstasy of transportation. The ‘soothing tremor of a sacred awe’ was followed by string-playing of an almost unbearable intensity, inevitably recalling Tristan und Isolde, as did the next stanza with its frankly Tristan-esque language, ‘atem wunschlos’ and all. When a ‘wild gust’ of wind gripped the verse, it felt musically as well as verbally inevitable, the product no doubt of so many years’ immersion in this endlessly fascinating score. The final stanza brought a sense of transfiguration: Wagnerian Verklärung. But there was also in the transfigured postlude ambiguity: where next? Schoenberg would soon embark upon his lonely, arduous, but necessary journey.
Beethoven - String Quartet in B-flat major, op.133, 'Grosse Fuge'
Dutilleux - Ainsi la nuit
Webern - Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, op.9
Schoenberg String Quartet no.2
Barbara Hannigan (soprano)
Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)
Ralf Ehlers (viola)
Lucas Fels (cello)
The second of the Arditti Quartet’s two Queen’s Hall series proved at least as successful as the first ; indeed, I thought the Beethoven performance, on this occasion the Grosse Fuge, surpassed that of the op.95 quartet the previous morning. It was interesting to note, in the light of my prior conversation with Irvine Arditti, the nature of the audience. He had spoken of the presence of Beethoven as a potential way to make an Arditti programme ‘a little more attractive for the non-contemporary music aficionado: people interested in hearing string quartets but who are not exactly contemporary music specialists’. This is doubtless impressionistic or downright prejudiced, but my impression of the audience was that this was in large part composed of those more likely to be interested in the chamber music repertoire. If so, such listeners could hardly have had a better opportunity to be introduced to two twentieth-century quartet masterpieces: Webern’s Bagatelles and Schoenberg’s second quartet. About Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit I felt more ambivalent but it certainly received every bit as fine a performance.
Arditti also spoke of his longstanding ‘desire to put the Grosse Fuge at the beginning of a programme and continue with contemporary music, rather as a statement to living composers, like: “This is what Beethoven did; now let’s see what you can do.”’ This was not quite the nature of the programme here, but Beethoven’s extraordinary work fulfilled a not entirely dissimilar function nevertheless; it certainly sounded here, as it should, at least as shockingly modern as anything that came thereafter. I heard an audience member during the interval lamenting that Beethoven had ‘sounded violent’; surely that is the point. From the opening, which was jagged, angular, and abrupt, such music alternated, albeit with a weighting towards the former, with a Beethoven who could be sweet, gentle, but never, repeat never, cloying. Sparks flew in what seemed almost a masterclass in the expression of Beethovenian struggle and defiance. Although the scale and nature of the forces are entirely different, I was more than once put in mind of the Missa Solemnis and, during the slow episode, the Adagio to the Ninth Symphony. The rhythmical and metrical complexity of Beethoven’s writing shone through, in a way that must have appealed to Conlon Nancarrow when he lauded this quartet’s performance of both the Grosse Fuge and his own third quartet (see the interview again). Tonality at times almost seemed to be beside the point, certainly not in the case of having ceased to function, but instead of having at times ceded its leading role to counterpoint.
Henri Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit seemed, as I said, to be performed extremely well; certainly the work’s structure was clearly delineated, as were its debts to Webern and to Bartókian night music. I also fancied that I heard a kinship – I suspect that rather than influence – to Messiaen. Prominent pizzicatos and playing sul ponticello added to the atmosphere. For whatever reason, however, I remained somewhat unreceptive, so shall move on to a very fine performance, following the interval, of Webern’s op.9 Bagatelles. Sighs, clarity, crystalline perfection, echoes (apparent or other) of the Grosse Fuge, great and minute dynamic contrasts: all of these were here. So was an aching, Schubertian beauty – how close Schubert so often stands to the Second Viennese School! – and a kinship of premonition to the Ligeti quartet heard in the previous concert, especially the sense of ethereal expiration. Above all, this Webern performance made one listen, reminding me once again why Nono so revered his predecessor.
This was the second time I had heard the Arditti Quartet perform both the Webern pieces and Schoenberg’s second quartet, the previous occasion having been a concert during the Southbank Centre’s Nono series. Claron McFadden was here replaced by the equally excellent Barbara Hannigan, whom I have previously encountered in a variety of challenging repertoire, including Nono and Berg. The density of Schoenberg’s counterpoint, so rich in expression, was conveyed from the opening of the first movement without fail. One could hear precisely what Schoenberg meant when writing, ‘In the first and second movements there are many sections in which the individual parts proceed regardless of whether or not their meeting results in codified harmonies.’ Programming and performance also revealed close parallels in this respect with the Grosse Fuge. Verklärte Nacht-like richness was revealed at times, yet sparingly, ensuring that appreciation of one’s harmonic bearings did not preclude following of neo-Brahmsian continuous motivic development. Harmonic nods to the First Chamber Symphony were unusually apparent in the scherzo. Still more prominent was a strong sense of how rhythmic and harmonic motion were as one. There was, moreover, a real charm to the celebrated quotation from ‘O du lieber Augustin,’ second violinist Ashot Sarkissjan and violist Ralf Ehrens providing just the right element of lilt and inflection, without resorting to all-too-audible inverted commas. This was poignant but clear-eyed, rather like the performance as a whole, a characteristic which in no sense precluded great intensity of musical expression – rather like Schoenberg’s œuvre as a whole.
There was a true sadness to the opening of Litanei, a passionate cello outburst from Lucas Fels preparing the way for the soprano entry: ‘Tief ist die trauer die mich umdüstert’ (‘Deep is the grief enveloping me’). Hanningan proved attentive as a Lieder-singer to the varying demands of Stefan George’s text and its implications: seductive and sultry, but also still and peaceful. The great final climax upon the word ‘liebe’ prepared the way for a peace of sorts, certainly a sense that everything had changed in the afterglow of the instrumental postlude. A very real sense of liberation could therefore characterise the instrumental opening of the final movement: hushed expectancy announcing the air of another planet. Entrückung, the movement’s title, was precisely what one felt: the ecstasy of transportation. The ‘soothing tremor of a sacred awe’ was followed by string-playing of an almost unbearable intensity, inevitably recalling Tristan und Isolde, as did the next stanza with its frankly Tristan-esque language, ‘atem wunschlos’ and all. When a ‘wild gust’ of wind gripped the verse, it felt musically as well as verbally inevitable, the product no doubt of so many years’ immersion in this endlessly fascinating score. The final stanza brought a sense of transfiguration: Wagnerian Verklärung. But there was also in the transfigured postlude ambiguity: where next? Schoenberg would soon embark upon his lonely, arduous, but necessary journey.
Edinburgh International Festival (3): Skride/Vogler/BBC SSO/Runnicles - Webern, Brahms, and Strauss, 31 August 2009
Usher Hall
Webern – Im Sommerwind
Brahms – Double concerto for violin and violoncello in A minor, op.102
Strauss – Don Quixote, op.35
Baiba Skride (violin)
Jan Vogler (violoncello)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Donald Runnicles (conductor)
This concert, surprisingly sparsely attended, took place on the eve of Donald Runnicles’s accession to the chief conductorship of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. It would seem, from both this programme and a glance at plans for next season, that Runnicles is, quite rightly, keen to impart his great experience in the core German repertoire. Webern’s very early Im Sommerwind seemed, however, an odd choice with which to open. It is worth hearing occasionally, but how much more of a statement it would have been to commence with one of the composer’s many bejewelled masterpieces, than with this prolix – surely the only instance in Webern’s output – piece of ersatz Strauss. Programming complaints aside, Runnicles imparted a Wagnerian glow to the opening, coloured by would-be Straussian harmonic deviations – and, interestingly, odd hints of Debussy too. The BBC SSO’s horns sounded very Straussian, bar the odd unfortunate cracked note. The strings sometimes possessed a greater depth than at other times, but at their best were impressive, as were leader Elizabeth Layton’s solos. If the music stopped and started a bit, that reflects the work itself rather than the performance as such.
In Baiba Skride and Jan Vogler, the orchestra welcomed two fine soloists for the Brahms double concerto. The orchestral opening was measured, indeed a touch stiff, but Vogler’s passionate cello entry, matched – well, almost – by Skride’s response, seemed to rub off upon Runnicles and his players. Theirs, though not necessarily the soloists’, was a Brahms of summer brightness rather than autumnal mahogany, closer to Beethoven than one often hears. I am not sure how apt this ultimately is, but at least the BBC SSO proved impressively full of tone. The richness of the soloists’ tone was immediately apparent in the songful opening in octaves to the slow movement. It flowed as an Andante without sounding all-too-fashionably brisk. The woodwind sound for the exquisite second subject once again reminded me of Beethoven. Unfortunately there was a very noticeable slip in the movement’s final chord, although these things happen. Wisely, even if this could hardly have been the reason for doing so, the finale was taken attacca. Again, lyricism was to the fore for both Skride and Vogler: a lyricism that could encompass both wistfulness and verve. There was a nice contrast in their presentations of the principal theme: the cello more playful, the violin more serene. Vogler’s first voicing of the second theme was simply perfect, as was Skride’s response. However, if the first tutti exuded testosterone, later on there were a few signs of flagging.
Don Quixote had the second half to itself. Vogler was joined by the orchestra’s excellent principal violist, Scott Dickinson, far from outshone by his partner in crime. And indeed, there were many other well-taken opportunities for orchestral solos: for instance, oboe and clarinet during the Introduction, the leader once again showing a good rapport with Vogler during the ensuing statement of the Theme, and implacable kettledrums during the funeral march. Ensemble work was often equally fine, for instance with the pair of bassoons depicting the Benedictine monks, the archaic brass pilgrims, and the characterful, bucolic wind band and percussion during the meeting with Dulcinea. Vogler naturally remained first amongst equals, from his entry onwards, and never more so than in the dark, Romantic solo of the Knight’s Vigil. That is, never more so until his noble performance during the hero’s death, sadly disrupted by a barrage of coughing. Runnicles’s shaping of Strauss’s vast structure seemed a little listless, or at least rhapsodic, during the Introduction, but afterwards there was little problem in that respect. Technicolor was the operative word for much of the performance, but there is nothing wrong with that on occasion.
Webern – Im Sommerwind
Brahms – Double concerto for violin and violoncello in A minor, op.102
Strauss – Don Quixote, op.35
Baiba Skride (violin)
Jan Vogler (violoncello)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Donald Runnicles (conductor)
This concert, surprisingly sparsely attended, took place on the eve of Donald Runnicles’s accession to the chief conductorship of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. It would seem, from both this programme and a glance at plans for next season, that Runnicles is, quite rightly, keen to impart his great experience in the core German repertoire. Webern’s very early Im Sommerwind seemed, however, an odd choice with which to open. It is worth hearing occasionally, but how much more of a statement it would have been to commence with one of the composer’s many bejewelled masterpieces, than with this prolix – surely the only instance in Webern’s output – piece of ersatz Strauss. Programming complaints aside, Runnicles imparted a Wagnerian glow to the opening, coloured by would-be Straussian harmonic deviations – and, interestingly, odd hints of Debussy too. The BBC SSO’s horns sounded very Straussian, bar the odd unfortunate cracked note. The strings sometimes possessed a greater depth than at other times, but at their best were impressive, as were leader Elizabeth Layton’s solos. If the music stopped and started a bit, that reflects the work itself rather than the performance as such.
In Baiba Skride and Jan Vogler, the orchestra welcomed two fine soloists for the Brahms double concerto. The orchestral opening was measured, indeed a touch stiff, but Vogler’s passionate cello entry, matched – well, almost – by Skride’s response, seemed to rub off upon Runnicles and his players. Theirs, though not necessarily the soloists’, was a Brahms of summer brightness rather than autumnal mahogany, closer to Beethoven than one often hears. I am not sure how apt this ultimately is, but at least the BBC SSO proved impressively full of tone. The richness of the soloists’ tone was immediately apparent in the songful opening in octaves to the slow movement. It flowed as an Andante without sounding all-too-fashionably brisk. The woodwind sound for the exquisite second subject once again reminded me of Beethoven. Unfortunately there was a very noticeable slip in the movement’s final chord, although these things happen. Wisely, even if this could hardly have been the reason for doing so, the finale was taken attacca. Again, lyricism was to the fore for both Skride and Vogler: a lyricism that could encompass both wistfulness and verve. There was a nice contrast in their presentations of the principal theme: the cello more playful, the violin more serene. Vogler’s first voicing of the second theme was simply perfect, as was Skride’s response. However, if the first tutti exuded testosterone, later on there were a few signs of flagging.
Don Quixote had the second half to itself. Vogler was joined by the orchestra’s excellent principal violist, Scott Dickinson, far from outshone by his partner in crime. And indeed, there were many other well-taken opportunities for orchestral solos: for instance, oboe and clarinet during the Introduction, the leader once again showing a good rapport with Vogler during the ensuing statement of the Theme, and implacable kettledrums during the funeral march. Ensemble work was often equally fine, for instance with the pair of bassoons depicting the Benedictine monks, the archaic brass pilgrims, and the characterful, bucolic wind band and percussion during the meeting with Dulcinea. Vogler naturally remained first amongst equals, from his entry onwards, and never more so than in the dark, Romantic solo of the Knight’s Vigil. That is, never more so until his noble performance during the hero’s death, sadly disrupted by a barrage of coughing. Runnicles’s shaping of Strauss’s vast structure seemed a little listless, or at least rhapsodic, during the Introduction, but afterwards there was little problem in that respect. Technicolor was the operative word for much of the performance, but there is nothing wrong with that on occasion.
Edinburgh International Festival (2): Arditti Quartet - Beethoven, Berg, Nigel Osborne, and Ligeti, 31 August 2009
Queen's Hall
Beethoven - String Quartet no.11 in F minor, op. 95
Berg - String Quartet, op.3
Nigel Osborne - Tiree (world premiere, EIF commission)
Ligeti - String Quartet no.2
Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)
Ralf Ehlers (viola)
Lucas Fels (cello)
The Arditti Quartet playing Beethoven is not unprecedented, but it qualifies as ‘early music’ for these players. (For an interview in which, amongst other things, Irvine Arditti discussed with me the programming of the quartet’s two Queen’s Hall recitals, please click here.) This performance of the op.95 ‘Quartett serioso’ was though-provoking, not unlike hearing, say, Michael Gielen conduct one of the symphonies. The furious concision of the opening bars announced a fiercely modernist Beethoven: Bartók meets Webern. It was certainly not an old-world Beethoven we heard, though Irvine Arditti allowed an odd touch of portamento, for instance in the first movement’s second subject. And there was violence too in the coda, leading, quite rightly, to exhaustion rather than triumph. The second movement was songful, conversational, its counterpoint not unduly severe, though every note was made to sound as utterly necessary. There were perhaps even hints of Schubert in the sense conveyed of a melancholic onward trudge. Underpinned so often by the gentle security of Lucas Fels’s cello line, the harmonic implications were thereby permitted to flower. Also noteworthy was the varied use of vibrato, always expressively gauged, especially by Arditti himself. The transition to the scherzo was very well judged: somehow both seamless and rupture. Benefiting from a string rhythmic drive, the scherzo’s thematic profile was equally keenly observed, with only momentary relief expressed in the trio sections. There were, however, odd lapses of intonation here: surprising, given their distinct lack elsewhere, though their importance should not be exaggerated. I liked the initial sense of the finale’s introduction as the opening of the slow movement we had never had and its subsequent self-revelation not as that, but as the gateway to the Allegretto agitato. The Arditti’s reading was certainly agitato: febrile and intense, summing up the fierce concision of the work. And then: a brief glimpse of Mozart, Figaro even, in the quite delightful, joyous coda.
If I was provoked by the quartet’s Beethoven, whilst missing a little a sense of old Vienna – my problem, not the performers’ – then the performance of Berg’s op.3 quartet left me with no reservations whatsoever. The incisive delivery of the opening lines drew one in to an unmistakeably Bergian labyrinth, from which there was no escape, even had one wished to find it. Each player was indubitably an equal explorer and the whole proved so much greater than the sum of its parts. The intensity of expression and its quality – Romantic-expressionist, or expressionist-Romantic? – ensured that one listened not only to every note, but to its placing and to its implications. The ghosts of Viennese dance-forms, Mahler’s precedent still very much alive, came into focus fleetingly and just as quickly disappeared into the abyss. Indeed, the whole of the first movement came close to what Nietzsche so memorably termed Tristan und Isolde’s ‘voluptuousness of Hell’, albeit never lacking a distinct modernist edge. There was perhaps a still greater intensity to the furious opening bars of the second and final movement. Textural complexity was rejoiced in and turned to expressive ends, again an almost Wagnerian eroticism, which yet has precedent in Schoenberg and Zemlinsky. Through the cascades of passion, direction was always clear; indeed, such clarity of direction was vital to the articulation of Berg’s allegedly autobiographical outpourings.
Nigel Osborne’s Tiree received its first performance after the interval. There is no gainsaying – and why should one try? – the Arditti Quartet’s commitment to and expertise in new music, whether here or on other occasions. Tiree is so named after a ringing stone, ‘Clah a’ Choire’: in the composer’s words, ‘an erratic granite boulder carried to the island by glaciers in the ice age; it is cup-marked by many centuries of being played by percussive stones, exactly like the Neolithic rock gongs of Lake Victoria and the Serengeti (our planet is large, our human family small). The oldest known melody collected upon the island of Tiree, voiced by the two violins in response to each other, rather like an antiphon with halo-like accompaniment, is thus harmonised by these resonances, subsequently counterpointed by fragments derived from the fractal geometry of the coastline. And so, there emerges a piece that can truly be said to derive from its geographical and (pre-)historical inspiration: a sense of landscape that does not really rely upon pictorialism: not that there is necessarily anything wrong with pictorialism, but that is not Osborne’s concern. Nor, as his comparisons with Africa imply, is parochialism. The quartet makes considerable use of harmonics and non-traditional tuning, whilst remaining within a framework possessing some tonal references. Throughout the twists and turns, a sense of line – Ariadne in the labyrinth, I thought, referring back to Berg and also to Birtwistle – endures in a common thread: tribute as well of course to the skill of the performers. Inevitable reminders of Messiaen surfaced in the use of birdsong, but Osborne very much makes such material his own; it never sounded imposed upon the material, but grew out of it, likewise the stone resonances. Then, at the end, almost imperceptible but also very real, are heard the full resonances of the stone, its harmonics heard through a stone-metal plate speaker, ‘to enhance “liveness”’.
Finally, we were treated to an incendiary performance of Ligeti’s second quartet. The opening, notated silence and striking unanimity of the following pizzicato put me in mind of Horace’s ideal for the epic poet: ‘Nor does he [Homer] begin the Trojan War from the double egg, but always he hurries to the action, and snatches the listener into the middle of things.’ Thence composer and players swiftly transported us into the quasi-ether and equally swiftly into a world of neo-Bartókian violence. The intensity – that word again, I know – of this performance threatened even to surpass that of the Berg; its precision was equally astonishing and equally crucial. That calm which opens and intervenes in the second movement – Sostenuto, molto calmo – contrasted with duly ferocious outbursts, whose virtuosity was but a precondition for the still greater musical challenges set by the composer. The extraordinary ticking of the third movement, Come uno meccanismo de precisione, imparted a real sense of it not only taking place in time, but being ‘about’ time itself, before, in programme annotator Malcolm Hayes’s words, ‘retreating into the void from which it came’. Tension, violence, precision: the fourth movement embodied many of the qualities of the quartet and its performance as a whole. This was a Webern-like statement with absolutely nothing extraneous. The fifth and final movement offered intensity of a very different sort, stretching our ears in order for us fully to hear the crucial, minute variations in sound during this quiet but never still music: extreme in perhaps an even more radical way than what has gone before. Nono must surely have admired this music – and would surely have admired this outstanding performance. There was always a strong sense of dramatic flow, leading towards apotheosis – and then, this Ligeti’s masterstroke, escape.
Beethoven - String Quartet no.11 in F minor, op. 95
Berg - String Quartet, op.3
Nigel Osborne - Tiree (world premiere, EIF commission)
Ligeti - String Quartet no.2
Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)
Ralf Ehlers (viola)
Lucas Fels (cello)
The Arditti Quartet playing Beethoven is not unprecedented, but it qualifies as ‘early music’ for these players. (For an interview in which, amongst other things, Irvine Arditti discussed with me the programming of the quartet’s two Queen’s Hall recitals, please click here.) This performance of the op.95 ‘Quartett serioso’ was though-provoking, not unlike hearing, say, Michael Gielen conduct one of the symphonies. The furious concision of the opening bars announced a fiercely modernist Beethoven: Bartók meets Webern. It was certainly not an old-world Beethoven we heard, though Irvine Arditti allowed an odd touch of portamento, for instance in the first movement’s second subject. And there was violence too in the coda, leading, quite rightly, to exhaustion rather than triumph. The second movement was songful, conversational, its counterpoint not unduly severe, though every note was made to sound as utterly necessary. There were perhaps even hints of Schubert in the sense conveyed of a melancholic onward trudge. Underpinned so often by the gentle security of Lucas Fels’s cello line, the harmonic implications were thereby permitted to flower. Also noteworthy was the varied use of vibrato, always expressively gauged, especially by Arditti himself. The transition to the scherzo was very well judged: somehow both seamless and rupture. Benefiting from a string rhythmic drive, the scherzo’s thematic profile was equally keenly observed, with only momentary relief expressed in the trio sections. There were, however, odd lapses of intonation here: surprising, given their distinct lack elsewhere, though their importance should not be exaggerated. I liked the initial sense of the finale’s introduction as the opening of the slow movement we had never had and its subsequent self-revelation not as that, but as the gateway to the Allegretto agitato. The Arditti’s reading was certainly agitato: febrile and intense, summing up the fierce concision of the work. And then: a brief glimpse of Mozart, Figaro even, in the quite delightful, joyous coda.
If I was provoked by the quartet’s Beethoven, whilst missing a little a sense of old Vienna – my problem, not the performers’ – then the performance of Berg’s op.3 quartet left me with no reservations whatsoever. The incisive delivery of the opening lines drew one in to an unmistakeably Bergian labyrinth, from which there was no escape, even had one wished to find it. Each player was indubitably an equal explorer and the whole proved so much greater than the sum of its parts. The intensity of expression and its quality – Romantic-expressionist, or expressionist-Romantic? – ensured that one listened not only to every note, but to its placing and to its implications. The ghosts of Viennese dance-forms, Mahler’s precedent still very much alive, came into focus fleetingly and just as quickly disappeared into the abyss. Indeed, the whole of the first movement came close to what Nietzsche so memorably termed Tristan und Isolde’s ‘voluptuousness of Hell’, albeit never lacking a distinct modernist edge. There was perhaps a still greater intensity to the furious opening bars of the second and final movement. Textural complexity was rejoiced in and turned to expressive ends, again an almost Wagnerian eroticism, which yet has precedent in Schoenberg and Zemlinsky. Through the cascades of passion, direction was always clear; indeed, such clarity of direction was vital to the articulation of Berg’s allegedly autobiographical outpourings.
Nigel Osborne’s Tiree received its first performance after the interval. There is no gainsaying – and why should one try? – the Arditti Quartet’s commitment to and expertise in new music, whether here or on other occasions. Tiree is so named after a ringing stone, ‘Clah a’ Choire’: in the composer’s words, ‘an erratic granite boulder carried to the island by glaciers in the ice age; it is cup-marked by many centuries of being played by percussive stones, exactly like the Neolithic rock gongs of Lake Victoria and the Serengeti (our planet is large, our human family small). The oldest known melody collected upon the island of Tiree, voiced by the two violins in response to each other, rather like an antiphon with halo-like accompaniment, is thus harmonised by these resonances, subsequently counterpointed by fragments derived from the fractal geometry of the coastline. And so, there emerges a piece that can truly be said to derive from its geographical and (pre-)historical inspiration: a sense of landscape that does not really rely upon pictorialism: not that there is necessarily anything wrong with pictorialism, but that is not Osborne’s concern. Nor, as his comparisons with Africa imply, is parochialism. The quartet makes considerable use of harmonics and non-traditional tuning, whilst remaining within a framework possessing some tonal references. Throughout the twists and turns, a sense of line – Ariadne in the labyrinth, I thought, referring back to Berg and also to Birtwistle – endures in a common thread: tribute as well of course to the skill of the performers. Inevitable reminders of Messiaen surfaced in the use of birdsong, but Osborne very much makes such material his own; it never sounded imposed upon the material, but grew out of it, likewise the stone resonances. Then, at the end, almost imperceptible but also very real, are heard the full resonances of the stone, its harmonics heard through a stone-metal plate speaker, ‘to enhance “liveness”’.
Finally, we were treated to an incendiary performance of Ligeti’s second quartet. The opening, notated silence and striking unanimity of the following pizzicato put me in mind of Horace’s ideal for the epic poet: ‘Nor does he [Homer] begin the Trojan War from the double egg, but always he hurries to the action, and snatches the listener into the middle of things.’ Thence composer and players swiftly transported us into the quasi-ether and equally swiftly into a world of neo-Bartókian violence. The intensity – that word again, I know – of this performance threatened even to surpass that of the Berg; its precision was equally astonishing and equally crucial. That calm which opens and intervenes in the second movement – Sostenuto, molto calmo – contrasted with duly ferocious outbursts, whose virtuosity was but a precondition for the still greater musical challenges set by the composer. The extraordinary ticking of the third movement, Come uno meccanismo de precisione, imparted a real sense of it not only taking place in time, but being ‘about’ time itself, before, in programme annotator Malcolm Hayes’s words, ‘retreating into the void from which it came’. Tension, violence, precision: the fourth movement embodied many of the qualities of the quartet and its performance as a whole. This was a Webern-like statement with absolutely nothing extraneous. The fifth and final movement offered intensity of a very different sort, stretching our ears in order for us fully to hear the crucial, minute variations in sound during this quiet but never still music: extreme in perhaps an even more radical way than what has gone before. Nono must surely have admired this music – and would surely have admired this outstanding performance. There was always a strong sense of dramatic flow, leading towards apotheosis – and then, this Ligeti’s masterstroke, escape.
Sunday, 30 August 2009
Edinburgh International Festival (1): Ivo Pogorelich piano recital - Chopin, Liszt, Sibelius, and Ravel, 29 August 2009
Usher Hall
Chopin – Nocturne in E major, Op.62 no.2
Chopin – Piano sonata no.3 in B minor, Op.58
Liszt – Mephisto Waltz no.1
Sibelius – Valse triste, op.44
Ravel – Gaspard de la nuit
This was the strangest piano recital I have ever attended. Prefacing a transcendental account of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit were some of the most astonishingly perverse performances of other works I can recall. Perhaps the least odd element was the pianist’s incongruous dress: black tie and tails. Of course, Ivo Pogorelich has always been a controversial musician. Fame was thrust upon him by elimination after the third round from the 1980 Chopin Competition in Warsaw. Martha Argerich was so outraged that she resigned from the jury. Thereafter, performances and recordings elicited wildly divergent appraisals. Some thought Argerich’s hailing of a ‘genius’ not at all far from the mark. At least two recordings would readily find a place in my pianistic pantheon: one of Scarlatti sonatas, the other of Prokofiev’s Sixth Sonata and Gaspard de la nuit. Others were shocked by the liberties they heard. I am certainly no purist and should always welcome with open arms explorative risk-taking over dreary conformism, but I was nevertheless entirely unprepared for what was to follow.
Speaking of competition-winners – or otherwise – few composers have suffered at their hands so much as Chopin. The number of bland, technically perfect performances inflicted upon this poet of the keyboard can scarcely be guessed. Pogorelich was having none of that, instead presenting a deliberate, nay trudging, E major Nocturne, with great emphasis – to put it mildly – placed upon the melodic line. Think of an organist thumping out a fugue subject on a trumpet stop and you might approach the idea. There was greater movement, for there could hardly have been less – or so I thought – as the music became more contrapuntally involved: fair enough. There was also a wholesale transformation from deliberation to an improvisatory quality that suggested bar lines had magically melted away. This was distinctly odd but in a way refreshing. But then, we returned back to earth with a reprise of the opening style. The music pretty much ground to a halt. I suppose it made one consider the score anew, but even so…
The opening to the Allegro maestoso of the same composer’s third sonata was certainly maestoso, though decidedly grim. Hints of passion could be heard – briefly – in the build up to the second subject, but were soon banished. That theme was sung, but sung in a decidedly aggressive fashion, as if Pogorelich were determined to rid the music of any hint of degenerate Bellinian inspiration. Perhaps he was. There was a general feeling throughout of great listlessness. The scherzo brought mercurial virtuosity but its trio was distended almost beyond belief. (The first but not last intervention of a mobile telephone intensified the agony, whilst the bronchially-challenged made their presence felt unusually keenly throughout.) A strangely severe introduction to the Largo sounded as though it had come from the weird world of late Liszt. It led us into a rhythmically implacable, utterly unsmiling, positively – or negatively – glacial account of a movement drawn out to mammoth proportions. I am all for a Largo sounding as a Largo, but even so… The finale was rather more fitting: restless, but that works better here. Not only did one hear often breathtaking virtuosity; there was a certain musical sense to a strormy, vehement performance. It was too late though.
Concluding the first part was Liszt’s first Mephisto Waltz. Weirdness is less out of place here but Pogorelich nevertheless exceeded the bounds of the imaginable. This extraordinary rendition was so disjointed that it appeared to lose musical sense entirely; it resembled a peculiar laboratory experiment rather than a performance. Hammered out, it utterly lacked charm: this was neither Liszt nor Faust the seducer. The contrasting forest-music material was once again glacial in the extreme, though a certain sadness occasionally seeped through. Mephistopheles did not insinuate; he straightforwardly brutalised. One gin-and-tonic was certainly not enough for this browbeaten reviewer during the ensuing interval.
Sibelius’s Valse triste seemed an odd programming choice, but the performance proved far odder still. It was almost unbelievably slow – and I am not sure why I appended ‘almost’. This is a sad waltz, I know, and one does not expect Richard, let alone Johann, Strauss, but even so… There was considerable variation in the basic pulse, sometimes providing relief, sometimes in the opposing direction. The intensity of the climax was quite staggering, yet seemed bizarrely misplaced. However, there was something chillingly pure to the voicing of the final chords, which made one wonder, despite the barrage of coughing, about what might have been.
Finally, Gaspard de la nuit. With the very opening of Ondine, everything suddenly sounded right – and righted. Shimmering right-hand figuration provided a perfect foil to the left-hand song below and above. One could hear every note – almost all of them correct – without any sacrifice to the poetic effect. This certainly sounded more Lisztian than the Liszt piece had, both harmonically and in the well-judged application of virtuoso technique to musico-poetic ends. In Le gibet, a glacial, obstinate persistency, of an infintely more atmospheric quality than earlier on, could at last truly come into its own. Terror was in the air, though so was the noise from another electronic device. Lisztian pyrotechnics were even more to the fore in Scarbo, which received a truly diabolical reading. This sprite was dartingly elusive and unmistakeably malignant. Pogorelich’s performance was a tour de force but a musical one, fantastic in more than one sense. What happened thereafter I cannot tell, since I quickly fled the hall, lest a perverse encore tarnish the memory of what I had just heard.
Chopin – Nocturne in E major, Op.62 no.2
Chopin – Piano sonata no.3 in B minor, Op.58
Liszt – Mephisto Waltz no.1
Sibelius – Valse triste, op.44
Ravel – Gaspard de la nuit
This was the strangest piano recital I have ever attended. Prefacing a transcendental account of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit were some of the most astonishingly perverse performances of other works I can recall. Perhaps the least odd element was the pianist’s incongruous dress: black tie and tails. Of course, Ivo Pogorelich has always been a controversial musician. Fame was thrust upon him by elimination after the third round from the 1980 Chopin Competition in Warsaw. Martha Argerich was so outraged that she resigned from the jury. Thereafter, performances and recordings elicited wildly divergent appraisals. Some thought Argerich’s hailing of a ‘genius’ not at all far from the mark. At least two recordings would readily find a place in my pianistic pantheon: one of Scarlatti sonatas, the other of Prokofiev’s Sixth Sonata and Gaspard de la nuit. Others were shocked by the liberties they heard. I am certainly no purist and should always welcome with open arms explorative risk-taking over dreary conformism, but I was nevertheless entirely unprepared for what was to follow.
Speaking of competition-winners – or otherwise – few composers have suffered at their hands so much as Chopin. The number of bland, technically perfect performances inflicted upon this poet of the keyboard can scarcely be guessed. Pogorelich was having none of that, instead presenting a deliberate, nay trudging, E major Nocturne, with great emphasis – to put it mildly – placed upon the melodic line. Think of an organist thumping out a fugue subject on a trumpet stop and you might approach the idea. There was greater movement, for there could hardly have been less – or so I thought – as the music became more contrapuntally involved: fair enough. There was also a wholesale transformation from deliberation to an improvisatory quality that suggested bar lines had magically melted away. This was distinctly odd but in a way refreshing. But then, we returned back to earth with a reprise of the opening style. The music pretty much ground to a halt. I suppose it made one consider the score anew, but even so…
The opening to the Allegro maestoso of the same composer’s third sonata was certainly maestoso, though decidedly grim. Hints of passion could be heard – briefly – in the build up to the second subject, but were soon banished. That theme was sung, but sung in a decidedly aggressive fashion, as if Pogorelich were determined to rid the music of any hint of degenerate Bellinian inspiration. Perhaps he was. There was a general feeling throughout of great listlessness. The scherzo brought mercurial virtuosity but its trio was distended almost beyond belief. (The first but not last intervention of a mobile telephone intensified the agony, whilst the bronchially-challenged made their presence felt unusually keenly throughout.) A strangely severe introduction to the Largo sounded as though it had come from the weird world of late Liszt. It led us into a rhythmically implacable, utterly unsmiling, positively – or negatively – glacial account of a movement drawn out to mammoth proportions. I am all for a Largo sounding as a Largo, but even so… The finale was rather more fitting: restless, but that works better here. Not only did one hear often breathtaking virtuosity; there was a certain musical sense to a strormy, vehement performance. It was too late though.
Concluding the first part was Liszt’s first Mephisto Waltz. Weirdness is less out of place here but Pogorelich nevertheless exceeded the bounds of the imaginable. This extraordinary rendition was so disjointed that it appeared to lose musical sense entirely; it resembled a peculiar laboratory experiment rather than a performance. Hammered out, it utterly lacked charm: this was neither Liszt nor Faust the seducer. The contrasting forest-music material was once again glacial in the extreme, though a certain sadness occasionally seeped through. Mephistopheles did not insinuate; he straightforwardly brutalised. One gin-and-tonic was certainly not enough for this browbeaten reviewer during the ensuing interval.
Sibelius’s Valse triste seemed an odd programming choice, but the performance proved far odder still. It was almost unbelievably slow – and I am not sure why I appended ‘almost’. This is a sad waltz, I know, and one does not expect Richard, let alone Johann, Strauss, but even so… There was considerable variation in the basic pulse, sometimes providing relief, sometimes in the opposing direction. The intensity of the climax was quite staggering, yet seemed bizarrely misplaced. However, there was something chillingly pure to the voicing of the final chords, which made one wonder, despite the barrage of coughing, about what might have been.
Finally, Gaspard de la nuit. With the very opening of Ondine, everything suddenly sounded right – and righted. Shimmering right-hand figuration provided a perfect foil to the left-hand song below and above. One could hear every note – almost all of them correct – without any sacrifice to the poetic effect. This certainly sounded more Lisztian than the Liszt piece had, both harmonically and in the well-judged application of virtuoso technique to musico-poetic ends. In Le gibet, a glacial, obstinate persistency, of an infintely more atmospheric quality than earlier on, could at last truly come into its own. Terror was in the air, though so was the noise from another electronic device. Lisztian pyrotechnics were even more to the fore in Scarbo, which received a truly diabolical reading. This sprite was dartingly elusive and unmistakeably malignant. Pogorelich’s performance was a tour de force but a musical one, fantastic in more than one sense. What happened thereafter I cannot tell, since I quickly fled the hall, lest a perverse encore tarnish the memory of what I had just heard.
Monday, 24 August 2009
Prom 50: Fidelio - West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Barenboim, 22 August 2009
Royal Albert Hall
Leonore – Waltraud Meier
Florestan – Simon O’Neill
Don Pizarro – Gerd Grochowski
Rocco – Sir John Tomlinson
Marzelline – Adriana Kučerová
Jacquino – Stephan Rügamer
Don Fernando – Viktor Rud
First Prisoner – Andrew Murgatroyd
Second Prisoner – Edward Price
BBC Singers, Geoffrey Mitchell Choir (chorus master: Tim Murray)
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
Fidelio is not just any opera. But then, Beethoven is not just any composer. His only opera – unless one counts Leonore as a work in itself – confounds bureaucratic expectations. The unimaginative and the plain uncomprehending are led to decry it and sometimes, quite staggeringly, to account it a dramatic failure. Even Wagner, who should have known better, could be dismissive, for instance telling Cosima that a German theatre would be better off opening with Weber’s Euryanthe – admittedly, a wonderful work, but certainly a problematical one – ‘rather than with Fidelio, which is much more conventional and cold.’ Conventional? Hardly, given the boldness of substituting for the operatic expectations of conventional ‘characterisation’ the instantiation of an unutterably noble idea, ‘freedom’, itself liberated from the confines of bourgeois expectations. Wagner either could not see, or did not want to see – the latter, I suspect, more likely – that the ‘rescue opera’ was here both transcended and granted its enduring memorial. Cold? This work veritably blazes with heat, and it certainly did on this occasion, ‘occasion’ being truly the operative word. Still worse, we read Cosima a few years later record, again contrasting the work with Richard's beloved Euryanthe: ‘Then we start discussing Fidelio, which R. describes as unworthy of the composer of the symphonies, in spite of splendid individual passages.’ Suffice it to say, however, that there were here many ‘splendid individual passages,’ yet Fidelio was found not only to be worthy of the composer, but to speak directly of and to that all-too-real modern-day catastrophe to which the very existence of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra bears witness.
So much for what one might call the meta-performance, but what of the performance itself? Daniel Barenboim has rightly chided those who speak only of the context to this orchestra and not of its musical accomplishments. One cannot and should not forget the former, but the greatness of the enterprise shows in the extraordinary artistic results; disentangling the two is a fool’s game, and never more so than in a work such as this. I am delighted therefore to report that the expectations built up from the previous night’s two Proms (see here and here) were more than fulfilled. Indeed, the orchestral playing had a greater edge than it had during the first half of the first of those concerts. The strings once again demonstrated a depth that would be the envy of many a professional orchestra – at least it would, were the absurd authenticist fashion not to decry such tone. Occasionally the woodwind might have proved fallible, but so what? One does not expect Klemperer’s Philharmonia, astonishing in a different way. This work is about humanity, warts and all: just, in fact, what Beethoven is about. There were in any case ample compensations in the Harmoniemusik blend. The timpanist, a star from the previous night, once again shone brightly. The brass was often magnificent, nowhere more so than in those treacherous horn parts in Leonore’s first-act aria. They were not outshone by Waltraud Meier, which is saying something. And then, of course, there was that trumpet call. The thoughts and associations that rushed through one’s mind at that point were myriad, but I can certainly report that it brought tears to my eyes.
Barenboim’s direction was vigorous, unfailingly engaged, attentive to singers and orchestra, without ever letting concerns for the possible detract from the necessity of the utopian. Some of the overture – unwisely, I thought, Leonore III – was impetuous rather than climactic in a Furtwänglerian sense. (The performance these musicians gave of the overture ‘as itself’ in Salzburg two years ago was manifestly superior.) But his remained a signal achievement, not least in terms of orchestral training, discipline, and of course inspiration. The other cavil I should register is with the version of the score employed. Messing about with Fidelio seems to be all the rage at the moment. The Paris Opéra recently commissioned new dialogue and re-ordered the opening sequence, beginning moreover with Leonore I. Barenboim did something similar, in eschewing almost all of the dialogue – is it really that bad? – and putting Marzelline’s aria before her duet with Jaquino (without, moreover, the tonal justification for this put forward by Sylvain Cambreling in Paris). But then, I realise that I was speaking above about confounding of expectations, so perhaps I am just lacking in imagination myself. There was, in any case, a reason for replacement of the dialogue, since it was replaced by Edward Said’s English narration for Leonore. On this of all occasions, to do so was quite understandable and it certainly provides a genuinely interesting and in some respects disquieting perspective upon the work. Hearing Leonore recount what had taken place from a chronological distance, and with clear implications that her hopes had since been dashed or at least significantly tempered, warns us against any move towards easy non-solutions. Don Fernando could never have put everything right.
Waltraud Meier, mostly recorded but also partly live, presented the narration vividly, in delightfully accented English. However, it was her vocal-dramatic performance that stole the show. She is of course a true stage animal; this shone through in her facial expressions, her gestures, as well as her voice. Yet, even though this was a concert performance, her performance was certainly notout of place. She actually brought us into the most important theatre of all, that of the imagination. And her account of Abscheulicher! ... Komm, Hoffnung was simply spellbinding. Simon O’Neill was an excellent Florestan. He could not efface memories of Jonas Kaufmann in that Paris performance last December, but to have hoped for that would have been entirely unreasonable. O’Neill proved himself fully capable of the testing demands of this cruel role and even brought the odd hint, if only a hint, of Jon Vickers to his timbre and projection. Gerd Grochowski was a late replacement for Peter Mattei as Pizarro. I have recently heard him both in Berlin and London as Telramund, and this performance was rather similar, evincing commendable attention to musical and verbal text, but remaining underpowered. This was undoubtedly exacerbated by the presence of Sir John Tomlinson as Wotan, sorry, Rocco. Tomlinson’s voice might be showing its age on occasion, but this is as nothing compared to the dramatic truth and commitment he shows. It was, however, somewhat unfortunate that Rocco should from the outset be so much more powerful a presence than Pizarro. Evil might or might not be banal, but we need to believe in the very real power this wicked man wields. The other parts were decently taken, Adriana Kučerová showing to good effect a beautiful voice, of which I should be more than happy to hear more. And it would be unforgivable not to mention the truly outstanding singing from the combined forces of the BBC Singers and the Geoffrey Mitchell Choir. Every note, every word, was audible, but just as immediate was the dramatic effect, whether of imprisonment, of hope, or of jubilation. The legendary Wilhelm Pitz’s Philharmonia Chorus for Klemperer is the gold standard here, but these musicians, if not so great in number – or at least that is how it sounds – have little to fear from such a comparison.
Wagner was doubtless right to prefer the Ninth Symphony for the laying of the foundation stone at Bayreuth. Yet the Ring, the sometime artwork of the future, is not the only nineteenth-century work that speaks immediately to our present condition. Fidelio does too (which is not, of course, to say that many other works do not). And so, still more so, does a performance of Fidelio such as this. Barenboim seems to me both right and wrong to say that when this orchestra comes together, politics disappear, since everyone must concentrate exclusively upon the music. For that coming together in the service of something far greater is unavoidably political. It shames those who create division and worse; it holds up an alternative. Such, after all, was the original intention of Barenboim and Said. To the orchestra, mere congratulations upon a tenth anniversary few, least of all its founders, could ever have anticipated, seem pitifully inadequate. And to Blair, Bush, Olmert, Ahmedinejad, Mugabe, Putin, et al., one wants, indeed needs, to say once again, with Horace, ‘Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur’ (‘Change but the name, and the tale is told of you’). Even if we cannot quite bring ourselves to believe that present-day tyrants and war criminals will be brought to justice, we must hope – and hope that at least some of their victims will be rescued. Beethoven and these inspirational young musicians help us do that. Komm, Hoffnung...
Leonore – Waltraud Meier
Florestan – Simon O’Neill
Don Pizarro – Gerd Grochowski
Rocco – Sir John Tomlinson
Marzelline – Adriana Kučerová
Jacquino – Stephan Rügamer
Don Fernando – Viktor Rud
First Prisoner – Andrew Murgatroyd
Second Prisoner – Edward Price
BBC Singers, Geoffrey Mitchell Choir (chorus master: Tim Murray)
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
Fidelio is not just any opera. But then, Beethoven is not just any composer. His only opera – unless one counts Leonore as a work in itself – confounds bureaucratic expectations. The unimaginative and the plain uncomprehending are led to decry it and sometimes, quite staggeringly, to account it a dramatic failure. Even Wagner, who should have known better, could be dismissive, for instance telling Cosima that a German theatre would be better off opening with Weber’s Euryanthe – admittedly, a wonderful work, but certainly a problematical one – ‘rather than with Fidelio, which is much more conventional and cold.’ Conventional? Hardly, given the boldness of substituting for the operatic expectations of conventional ‘characterisation’ the instantiation of an unutterably noble idea, ‘freedom’, itself liberated from the confines of bourgeois expectations. Wagner either could not see, or did not want to see – the latter, I suspect, more likely – that the ‘rescue opera’ was here both transcended and granted its enduring memorial. Cold? This work veritably blazes with heat, and it certainly did on this occasion, ‘occasion’ being truly the operative word. Still worse, we read Cosima a few years later record, again contrasting the work with Richard's beloved Euryanthe: ‘Then we start discussing Fidelio, which R. describes as unworthy of the composer of the symphonies, in spite of splendid individual passages.’ Suffice it to say, however, that there were here many ‘splendid individual passages,’ yet Fidelio was found not only to be worthy of the composer, but to speak directly of and to that all-too-real modern-day catastrophe to which the very existence of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra bears witness.
So much for what one might call the meta-performance, but what of the performance itself? Daniel Barenboim has rightly chided those who speak only of the context to this orchestra and not of its musical accomplishments. One cannot and should not forget the former, but the greatness of the enterprise shows in the extraordinary artistic results; disentangling the two is a fool’s game, and never more so than in a work such as this. I am delighted therefore to report that the expectations built up from the previous night’s two Proms (see here and here) were more than fulfilled. Indeed, the orchestral playing had a greater edge than it had during the first half of the first of those concerts. The strings once again demonstrated a depth that would be the envy of many a professional orchestra – at least it would, were the absurd authenticist fashion not to decry such tone. Occasionally the woodwind might have proved fallible, but so what? One does not expect Klemperer’s Philharmonia, astonishing in a different way. This work is about humanity, warts and all: just, in fact, what Beethoven is about. There were in any case ample compensations in the Harmoniemusik blend. The timpanist, a star from the previous night, once again shone brightly. The brass was often magnificent, nowhere more so than in those treacherous horn parts in Leonore’s first-act aria. They were not outshone by Waltraud Meier, which is saying something. And then, of course, there was that trumpet call. The thoughts and associations that rushed through one’s mind at that point were myriad, but I can certainly report that it brought tears to my eyes.
Barenboim’s direction was vigorous, unfailingly engaged, attentive to singers and orchestra, without ever letting concerns for the possible detract from the necessity of the utopian. Some of the overture – unwisely, I thought, Leonore III – was impetuous rather than climactic in a Furtwänglerian sense. (The performance these musicians gave of the overture ‘as itself’ in Salzburg two years ago was manifestly superior.) But his remained a signal achievement, not least in terms of orchestral training, discipline, and of course inspiration. The other cavil I should register is with the version of the score employed. Messing about with Fidelio seems to be all the rage at the moment. The Paris Opéra recently commissioned new dialogue and re-ordered the opening sequence, beginning moreover with Leonore I. Barenboim did something similar, in eschewing almost all of the dialogue – is it really that bad? – and putting Marzelline’s aria before her duet with Jaquino (without, moreover, the tonal justification for this put forward by Sylvain Cambreling in Paris). But then, I realise that I was speaking above about confounding of expectations, so perhaps I am just lacking in imagination myself. There was, in any case, a reason for replacement of the dialogue, since it was replaced by Edward Said’s English narration for Leonore. On this of all occasions, to do so was quite understandable and it certainly provides a genuinely interesting and in some respects disquieting perspective upon the work. Hearing Leonore recount what had taken place from a chronological distance, and with clear implications that her hopes had since been dashed or at least significantly tempered, warns us against any move towards easy non-solutions. Don Fernando could never have put everything right.
Waltraud Meier, mostly recorded but also partly live, presented the narration vividly, in delightfully accented English. However, it was her vocal-dramatic performance that stole the show. She is of course a true stage animal; this shone through in her facial expressions, her gestures, as well as her voice. Yet, even though this was a concert performance, her performance was certainly notout of place. She actually brought us into the most important theatre of all, that of the imagination. And her account of Abscheulicher! ... Komm, Hoffnung was simply spellbinding. Simon O’Neill was an excellent Florestan. He could not efface memories of Jonas Kaufmann in that Paris performance last December, but to have hoped for that would have been entirely unreasonable. O’Neill proved himself fully capable of the testing demands of this cruel role and even brought the odd hint, if only a hint, of Jon Vickers to his timbre and projection. Gerd Grochowski was a late replacement for Peter Mattei as Pizarro. I have recently heard him both in Berlin and London as Telramund, and this performance was rather similar, evincing commendable attention to musical and verbal text, but remaining underpowered. This was undoubtedly exacerbated by the presence of Sir John Tomlinson as Wotan, sorry, Rocco. Tomlinson’s voice might be showing its age on occasion, but this is as nothing compared to the dramatic truth and commitment he shows. It was, however, somewhat unfortunate that Rocco should from the outset be so much more powerful a presence than Pizarro. Evil might or might not be banal, but we need to believe in the very real power this wicked man wields. The other parts were decently taken, Adriana Kučerová showing to good effect a beautiful voice, of which I should be more than happy to hear more. And it would be unforgivable not to mention the truly outstanding singing from the combined forces of the BBC Singers and the Geoffrey Mitchell Choir. Every note, every word, was audible, but just as immediate was the dramatic effect, whether of imprisonment, of hope, or of jubilation. The legendary Wilhelm Pitz’s Philharmonia Chorus for Klemperer is the gold standard here, but these musicians, if not so great in number – or at least that is how it sounds – have little to fear from such a comparison.
Wagner was doubtless right to prefer the Ninth Symphony for the laying of the foundation stone at Bayreuth. Yet the Ring, the sometime artwork of the future, is not the only nineteenth-century work that speaks immediately to our present condition. Fidelio does too (which is not, of course, to say that many other works do not). And so, still more so, does a performance of Fidelio such as this. Barenboim seems to me both right and wrong to say that when this orchestra comes together, politics disappear, since everyone must concentrate exclusively upon the music. For that coming together in the service of something far greater is unavoidably political. It shames those who create division and worse; it holds up an alternative. Such, after all, was the original intention of Barenboim and Said. To the orchestra, mere congratulations upon a tenth anniversary few, least of all its founders, could ever have anticipated, seem pitifully inadequate. And to Blair, Bush, Olmert, Ahmedinejad, Mugabe, Putin, et al., one wants, indeed needs, to say once again, with Horace, ‘Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur’ (‘Change but the name, and the tale is told of you’). Even if we cannot quite bring ourselves to believe that present-day tyrants and war criminals will be brought to justice, we must hope – and hope that at least some of their victims will be rescued. Beethoven and these inspirational young musicians help us do that. Komm, Hoffnung...
Sunday, 23 August 2009
Prom 49: M.Barenboim/Said/Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Barenboim - Mendelssohn and Berg, 21 August 2009
Royal Albert Hall
Mendelssohn – Octet
Berg – Chamber Concerto
Michael Barenboim (violin)
Karim Said (piano)
Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
The Prom earlier this evening had been very good, especially the performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. However, this chamber Prom, with members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, was better still, in many respects outstanding.
Mendelssohn’s Octet is, of course, straightforwardly chamber music, so Daniel Barenboim was not on hand to conduct. However, the players seemed to heed Mendelssohn’s instruction that it ‘must be played by all the instruments in symphonic orchestral style.’ I was surprised how quickly my ears adjusted to chamber scale in the expanses of the Royal Albert Hall; in fact, it is often orchestral works of more modest proportions that fare least well here. The performance clearly led by returning, sweet-toned Guy Braunstein, this was nevertheless an opportunity, well taken, for all eight players to shine. Impressive cello playing not only underpinned the harmony but propelled the rhythms too. There was a winning richness to the inner viola writing too. There was an aching, though never exaggerated, Schubertian quality to the lovely first subject of the first movement, especially when that echt-Mendelssohnian moment of developmental exhaustion had been reached, announcing arrival and intensification. This movement really put a smile on my face, though the ensuing applause did not. (The BBC needs to sort this out once and for all. There is no ‘debate’ to be had concerning applause between movements and pointing to the practice of audiences in entirely different historical contexts is disingenuous.)
In the ensuing Andante, I fancied that I heard that very same melancholy Mendelssohn in a letter of 1838 ascribed to Haydn’s Farewell Symphony. Each of the eight parts made a valued and crucial contribution to a movement further characterised by pulsating tension and sweet lyricism (Schubert again). There was a longing that convinced, for it was never excessively romanticised. The celebrated scherzo was just as it should be: elfin and fantastical – though, quite rightly, not in the sense familiar from the Berlioz symphony heard earlier in the evening. It was feather-light, yet imbued with a strong rhythmic sense: again, just as it should be. I very much liked the way the finale was treated as a fugal continuation of the scherzo’s figuration, albeit with a degree of greater vigour. The players proved themselves virtuosic, yet always at the service of the music. Here was a real sense of music being tossed between the players and returned with interest: a gift, or perhaps dividend, for one and all. They revelled in musical invention as impressive as that of Haydn himself.
To combine the Mendelssohn Octet with Berg’s Chamber Concerto was an excellent way to involve a large number of the Divan players in (quasi-)chamber music. First it had been the strings’ turn, now the wind – plus Michael Barenboim and Karim Said. This is a work in which Barenboim père has a distinguished record, having recorded the work not just once but twice under Pierre Boulez. Such experience could only reap benefits when switching to the role of conductor, and so it proved. It was interesting, moreover, to note how much this proved to be chamber music; often the conductor was confident enough in his players simply to set the framework within which they would perform, though there were times when, quite rightly, the piece was very much conducted. The first movement scherzo and variations opened with a splendid sense of following on, intensification even, as we heard first piano, then violin (thereafter silent until the Adagio), then wind. Suddenly the work was in full flow, the Bergian labyrinth revealed, and what a labyrinth this is! Said seemed very much to have the measure of Berg’s ambivalent – or should that be dialectical – style, his position between late Romanticism and modernity. There was some truly magnificent trombone playing: proof that a fine player of a relatively unusual chamber instrument has nothing whatsoever to fear from comparison with what are likely to be more seasoned colleagues. The pair of clarinets took one back to Wozzeck and forward to Lulu, in a highly dramatic, rhythmically charged reading to which Daniel Barenboim’s operatic experience must have contributed. Fine piccolo playing suggested a homage to Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony; indeed, I do not think I have heard the lineage so clearly traced in this fiftieth-birthday tribute to Berg’s beloved teacher. (And surely the Schoenberg is a work these players now should tackle!)
The violin entry in the second movement announced Michael Barenboim’s late Romantic lyricism, with attendant sinuous quick vibrato. Berg’s sonority of violin and wind immediately summoned to mind the chorale to come from the violin concerto, though sometimes violent trombone interjections aptly reminded one that this is a very different piece. Here the intensity of the performance was such that I often forget that this was not ‘full’ orchestral music, pointing to a paradox, or rather dialectical outcome, that chamber performance might reap orchestral rewards, or vice versa. The wind band once again helped to evoke the shadow and/or inspiration of Schoenberg, this time in the guise of the Wind Quintet, op.26, and the Suite, op.29 (pre-emptively in the latter case). In the final movement, we could at last hear the two soloists together: this made me wish Berg had composed a sonata for violin and piano. Barenboim fils tackled the tricky harmonics – and tricky everything-else – with great aplomb, expressive as well as virtuosic, and there were interesting hints of Debussy from Said. Daniel Barenboim ensured that the ghostly shadows of Mahler’s dance rhythms shone through. (He really ought to conduct Lulu!) All players then led us once more into the labyrinth, if indeed we had ever escaped – not that we should wish to... These young, extraordinary talented musicians made one realise the myriad of possibilities Berg presents and alerted us to the decisions he then makes. Everything becomes inevitable, but only in retrospect; or, as Hegel so memorably put it, the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk. But spread its wings it did, and spread their wings these musicians did. This was Berg performance of the highest order.
Mendelssohn – Octet
Berg – Chamber Concerto
Michael Barenboim (violin)
Karim Said (piano)
Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
The Prom earlier this evening had been very good, especially the performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. However, this chamber Prom, with members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, was better still, in many respects outstanding.
Mendelssohn’s Octet is, of course, straightforwardly chamber music, so Daniel Barenboim was not on hand to conduct. However, the players seemed to heed Mendelssohn’s instruction that it ‘must be played by all the instruments in symphonic orchestral style.’ I was surprised how quickly my ears adjusted to chamber scale in the expanses of the Royal Albert Hall; in fact, it is often orchestral works of more modest proportions that fare least well here. The performance clearly led by returning, sweet-toned Guy Braunstein, this was nevertheless an opportunity, well taken, for all eight players to shine. Impressive cello playing not only underpinned the harmony but propelled the rhythms too. There was a winning richness to the inner viola writing too. There was an aching, though never exaggerated, Schubertian quality to the lovely first subject of the first movement, especially when that echt-Mendelssohnian moment of developmental exhaustion had been reached, announcing arrival and intensification. This movement really put a smile on my face, though the ensuing applause did not. (The BBC needs to sort this out once and for all. There is no ‘debate’ to be had concerning applause between movements and pointing to the practice of audiences in entirely different historical contexts is disingenuous.)
In the ensuing Andante, I fancied that I heard that very same melancholy Mendelssohn in a letter of 1838 ascribed to Haydn’s Farewell Symphony. Each of the eight parts made a valued and crucial contribution to a movement further characterised by pulsating tension and sweet lyricism (Schubert again). There was a longing that convinced, for it was never excessively romanticised. The celebrated scherzo was just as it should be: elfin and fantastical – though, quite rightly, not in the sense familiar from the Berlioz symphony heard earlier in the evening. It was feather-light, yet imbued with a strong rhythmic sense: again, just as it should be. I very much liked the way the finale was treated as a fugal continuation of the scherzo’s figuration, albeit with a degree of greater vigour. The players proved themselves virtuosic, yet always at the service of the music. Here was a real sense of music being tossed between the players and returned with interest: a gift, or perhaps dividend, for one and all. They revelled in musical invention as impressive as that of Haydn himself.
To combine the Mendelssohn Octet with Berg’s Chamber Concerto was an excellent way to involve a large number of the Divan players in (quasi-)chamber music. First it had been the strings’ turn, now the wind – plus Michael Barenboim and Karim Said. This is a work in which Barenboim père has a distinguished record, having recorded the work not just once but twice under Pierre Boulez. Such experience could only reap benefits when switching to the role of conductor, and so it proved. It was interesting, moreover, to note how much this proved to be chamber music; often the conductor was confident enough in his players simply to set the framework within which they would perform, though there were times when, quite rightly, the piece was very much conducted. The first movement scherzo and variations opened with a splendid sense of following on, intensification even, as we heard first piano, then violin (thereafter silent until the Adagio), then wind. Suddenly the work was in full flow, the Bergian labyrinth revealed, and what a labyrinth this is! Said seemed very much to have the measure of Berg’s ambivalent – or should that be dialectical – style, his position between late Romanticism and modernity. There was some truly magnificent trombone playing: proof that a fine player of a relatively unusual chamber instrument has nothing whatsoever to fear from comparison with what are likely to be more seasoned colleagues. The pair of clarinets took one back to Wozzeck and forward to Lulu, in a highly dramatic, rhythmically charged reading to which Daniel Barenboim’s operatic experience must have contributed. Fine piccolo playing suggested a homage to Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony; indeed, I do not think I have heard the lineage so clearly traced in this fiftieth-birthday tribute to Berg’s beloved teacher. (And surely the Schoenberg is a work these players now should tackle!)
The violin entry in the second movement announced Michael Barenboim’s late Romantic lyricism, with attendant sinuous quick vibrato. Berg’s sonority of violin and wind immediately summoned to mind the chorale to come from the violin concerto, though sometimes violent trombone interjections aptly reminded one that this is a very different piece. Here the intensity of the performance was such that I often forget that this was not ‘full’ orchestral music, pointing to a paradox, or rather dialectical outcome, that chamber performance might reap orchestral rewards, or vice versa. The wind band once again helped to evoke the shadow and/or inspiration of Schoenberg, this time in the guise of the Wind Quintet, op.26, and the Suite, op.29 (pre-emptively in the latter case). In the final movement, we could at last hear the two soloists together: this made me wish Berg had composed a sonata for violin and piano. Barenboim fils tackled the tricky harmonics – and tricky everything-else – with great aplomb, expressive as well as virtuosic, and there were interesting hints of Debussy from Said. Daniel Barenboim ensured that the ghostly shadows of Mahler’s dance rhythms shone through. (He really ought to conduct Lulu!) All players then led us once more into the labyrinth, if indeed we had ever escaped – not that we should wish to... These young, extraordinary talented musicians made one realise the myriad of possibilities Berg presents and alerted us to the decisions he then makes. Everything becomes inevitable, but only in retrospect; or, as Hegel so memorably put it, the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk. But spread its wings it did, and spread their wings these musicians did. This was Berg performance of the highest order.
Prom 48: West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Barenboim - Liszt, Wagner, and Berlioz, 21 August 2009
Royal Albert Hall
Liszt – Les préludes
Wagner – Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act I and Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’
Berlioz – Symphonie fantastique
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
This year, astonishingly, marks the tenth anniversary of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said for the celebrations marking Weimar’s year as European City of Culture, and which has proved to be a longer-lasting cultural contribution than anyone would have dared believe. It therefore seems fitting that this concert should comprise works of three ‘New German’ composers, all with strong links to the Weimar silver age of Liszt’s tenure. As well as composing his cycle of twelve symphonic poems and a host of other works there, Liszt gave performances of Lohengrin (the first) and Benvenuto Cellini.
I was astonished to see that Les préludes had not been performed at the Proms since 1963, all the more so since it was performed forty times between 1896 and 1940, on all but two of those occasions conducted by the indefatigable Sir Henry Wood. The recent and perhaps past fortunes of Liszt’s other symphonic poems will, I suspect, have been more ill-starred still. Following the astonishing warmth of the initial applause – one of the few good things a noisy, ill-behaved audience, or section thereof, contributed – I was immediately impressed by the non-clinical precision of the opening pizzicato. Barenboim imparted fluidity from the outset; yet though there was, thankfully, nothing rigid about this performance, there were times when it veered a little close to the rhapsodic. Not all of Furtwängler’s lessons had been learned on this occasion. There remained much to enjoy, not least the depth of the string tone: somewhere between old German and Russian – revealing hints of Tchaikovsky – in its quality. Moreover, there were some marvellous moments of rapt stillness from strings, including the harps, whilst, on occasion, the woodwind could have leaped straight out of Siegfried. If the brass section could not entirely escape vulgarity, that is Liszt’s responsibility; this was certainly a far more refined performance than the truly dreadful recording made by Sir Georg Solti in Chicago. The timpanist – sadly, none of the players can be named – was especially worthy of note, intensely musical here and elsewhere in the programme.
The Prelude and ‘Liebestod’ – Liszt’s term, not Wagner’s – evinced a truly remarkable opening, that initial A emerging ex nihilo. A wonderfully rich vibrato from the cellos contributed to the magic of these opening bars, though incessant audience coughing proved a significant handicap. Sometimes, I thought Barenboim’s reading a little on the brisk side. Whilst there were occasions when the tempo led to a real sense of surge, there were others when it was just hard-driven. That bass clarinet sounded wonderful though. The almost imperceptible move into the transfiguration was disgracefully disrupted by fulsome bronchial commentary. Later on there was an unusually prominent part for opening of a fizzy drink; clearly the BBC’s hiking of ticket prices did nothing to attract a more attentive, or just decent, audience. It was interesting, insofar as one could hear, to note thereafter how the shimmering of the strings made Wagner’s original sound surprisingly close to Liszt’s piano transcription. Barenboim’s control of line here was absolute, contrasting with Les préludes. It seemed over very quickly, though metaphysical depths had not been plumbed on this occasion. The problem I have often had, and did so again here, with accounts of these two excerpts is that, even if one can overlook the tonal difficulties of yanking them together, the pay-off does not seem hard-won enough, without experiencing what must come in between.
Barenboim has considerable form in Berlioz, his repertoire in that composer’s music extending significantly beyond that of many conductors. Here, however, it was the turn of the Symphonie fantastique, indubitably Berlioz’s most celebrated, even notorious, work. It was the WEDO strings I noticed immediately, on this occasion the extremely well-judged portamento, both in the first movement introduction and later. Even the introduction exhibited considerable contrasts, proving at times quite excitable: nothing wrong with that. There followed one of the most convincing transitions to the exposition I have heard. Berlioz’s nervous energy and the strangeness of his scoring came through very well. Un bal was taken without a break, not that this stopped the coughers from marking the new movement in dubious style. There was a notable sense of dramatic and nervous continuity, both within the movement and in relation to the first. Here, as elsewhere, Barenboim’s twin operatic and symphonic experience was apparent, providing excitement in the approach to the climax. The scene in the fields brought an opening duet for two shepherds (oboe and English horn) and bronchial chorus (in something akin to quadraphonic sound). Still more unforgivable was the subsequent intervention of a mobile telephone. Otherwise, the music flowed without ever sounding pushed. Echoes of the Pastoral Symphony were to the fore, before and during the thunder. There was a truly magnificent clarinet solo; how I wish I could name the player. In a less than excellent performance, I can tend to become restless during this movement. There was no chance of that here; indeed, I was captivated. And the thunder brought intriguing premonitions of the following March to the Scaffold.
That movement received an equally fine, characterful performance. Barenboim gave unusual prominence to the bassoon, whose player truly shone. Brass came to the fore but not too much. One could hear a great deal of often overlooked detail and there was a splendid sense of onward propulsion to the whole of the march. In the final movement, the sheer weirdness of Berlioz’s virtuosic orchestration was immediately apparent, the idée fixe a splendid self-parody on E-flat clarinet. And the bells! I have never heard them sound so ‘real’; I do not know how this was achieved, but we really could fancy ourselves in a churchyard. Contrast that with the pitiful – and expensive – bell sound achieved by ENO for its recent Boris Godunov. We were thus properly led into the Dies irae, rather than having it sound, as sometimes it can, as though it has emerged from nowhere. This, then, was one of the most vividly pictorial accounts – one could really see the composer’s strange otherworldly creatures – I can recall of Berlioz’s extraordinary work, yet without any loss to structural cohesiveness. The two facets indeed were strengthened by one another, proving the ultimate pointlessness of debates opposing programme and ‘absolute’ music. A splendid romp at the end rounded off a very fine performance. Yet, as Barenboim eventually announced, there would be no encores as such; instead there would be an additional late-night concert, on which details will now follow.
Liszt – Les préludes
Wagner – Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act I and Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’
Berlioz – Symphonie fantastique
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
This year, astonishingly, marks the tenth anniversary of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said for the celebrations marking Weimar’s year as European City of Culture, and which has proved to be a longer-lasting cultural contribution than anyone would have dared believe. It therefore seems fitting that this concert should comprise works of three ‘New German’ composers, all with strong links to the Weimar silver age of Liszt’s tenure. As well as composing his cycle of twelve symphonic poems and a host of other works there, Liszt gave performances of Lohengrin (the first) and Benvenuto Cellini.
I was astonished to see that Les préludes had not been performed at the Proms since 1963, all the more so since it was performed forty times between 1896 and 1940, on all but two of those occasions conducted by the indefatigable Sir Henry Wood. The recent and perhaps past fortunes of Liszt’s other symphonic poems will, I suspect, have been more ill-starred still. Following the astonishing warmth of the initial applause – one of the few good things a noisy, ill-behaved audience, or section thereof, contributed – I was immediately impressed by the non-clinical precision of the opening pizzicato. Barenboim imparted fluidity from the outset; yet though there was, thankfully, nothing rigid about this performance, there were times when it veered a little close to the rhapsodic. Not all of Furtwängler’s lessons had been learned on this occasion. There remained much to enjoy, not least the depth of the string tone: somewhere between old German and Russian – revealing hints of Tchaikovsky – in its quality. Moreover, there were some marvellous moments of rapt stillness from strings, including the harps, whilst, on occasion, the woodwind could have leaped straight out of Siegfried. If the brass section could not entirely escape vulgarity, that is Liszt’s responsibility; this was certainly a far more refined performance than the truly dreadful recording made by Sir Georg Solti in Chicago. The timpanist – sadly, none of the players can be named – was especially worthy of note, intensely musical here and elsewhere in the programme.
The Prelude and ‘Liebestod’ – Liszt’s term, not Wagner’s – evinced a truly remarkable opening, that initial A emerging ex nihilo. A wonderfully rich vibrato from the cellos contributed to the magic of these opening bars, though incessant audience coughing proved a significant handicap. Sometimes, I thought Barenboim’s reading a little on the brisk side. Whilst there were occasions when the tempo led to a real sense of surge, there were others when it was just hard-driven. That bass clarinet sounded wonderful though. The almost imperceptible move into the transfiguration was disgracefully disrupted by fulsome bronchial commentary. Later on there was an unusually prominent part for opening of a fizzy drink; clearly the BBC’s hiking of ticket prices did nothing to attract a more attentive, or just decent, audience. It was interesting, insofar as one could hear, to note thereafter how the shimmering of the strings made Wagner’s original sound surprisingly close to Liszt’s piano transcription. Barenboim’s control of line here was absolute, contrasting with Les préludes. It seemed over very quickly, though metaphysical depths had not been plumbed on this occasion. The problem I have often had, and did so again here, with accounts of these two excerpts is that, even if one can overlook the tonal difficulties of yanking them together, the pay-off does not seem hard-won enough, without experiencing what must come in between.
Barenboim has considerable form in Berlioz, his repertoire in that composer’s music extending significantly beyond that of many conductors. Here, however, it was the turn of the Symphonie fantastique, indubitably Berlioz’s most celebrated, even notorious, work. It was the WEDO strings I noticed immediately, on this occasion the extremely well-judged portamento, both in the first movement introduction and later. Even the introduction exhibited considerable contrasts, proving at times quite excitable: nothing wrong with that. There followed one of the most convincing transitions to the exposition I have heard. Berlioz’s nervous energy and the strangeness of his scoring came through very well. Un bal was taken without a break, not that this stopped the coughers from marking the new movement in dubious style. There was a notable sense of dramatic and nervous continuity, both within the movement and in relation to the first. Here, as elsewhere, Barenboim’s twin operatic and symphonic experience was apparent, providing excitement in the approach to the climax. The scene in the fields brought an opening duet for two shepherds (oboe and English horn) and bronchial chorus (in something akin to quadraphonic sound). Still more unforgivable was the subsequent intervention of a mobile telephone. Otherwise, the music flowed without ever sounding pushed. Echoes of the Pastoral Symphony were to the fore, before and during the thunder. There was a truly magnificent clarinet solo; how I wish I could name the player. In a less than excellent performance, I can tend to become restless during this movement. There was no chance of that here; indeed, I was captivated. And the thunder brought intriguing premonitions of the following March to the Scaffold.
That movement received an equally fine, characterful performance. Barenboim gave unusual prominence to the bassoon, whose player truly shone. Brass came to the fore but not too much. One could hear a great deal of often overlooked detail and there was a splendid sense of onward propulsion to the whole of the march. In the final movement, the sheer weirdness of Berlioz’s virtuosic orchestration was immediately apparent, the idée fixe a splendid self-parody on E-flat clarinet. And the bells! I have never heard them sound so ‘real’; I do not know how this was achieved, but we really could fancy ourselves in a churchyard. Contrast that with the pitiful – and expensive – bell sound achieved by ENO for its recent Boris Godunov. We were thus properly led into the Dies irae, rather than having it sound, as sometimes it can, as though it has emerged from nowhere. This, then, was one of the most vividly pictorial accounts – one could really see the composer’s strange otherworldly creatures – I can recall of Berlioz’s extraordinary work, yet without any loss to structural cohesiveness. The two facets indeed were strengthened by one another, proving the ultimate pointlessness of debates opposing programme and ‘absolute’ music. A splendid romp at the end rounded off a very fine performance. Yet, as Barenboim eventually announced, there would be no encores as such; instead there would be an additional late-night concert, on which details will now follow.
Sunday, 16 August 2009
Interview with Irvine Arditti
The Arditti Quartet will be giving two recitals at the Edinburgh Festival, both of which I shall be reviewing. I was privileged to interview Irvine Arditti, who was kind enough to take time off from his holiday in Spain, in order to discuss the programmes and the thinking behind them. The music performed will be as follows:
Beethoven - String Quartet in F minor, op. 95
Berg - String Quartet, op.3
Nigel Osborne - Tiree (world premiere, EIF commission)
Ligeti - String Quartet no.2
Beethoven - String Quartet in B-flat major, op.133, 'Grosse Fuge'
Dutilleux - String Quartet: 'Ainsi la nuit'
Webern - Six Bagatelles for string quartet, op.9
Schoenberg String Quartet no.2
MB: Thank you very much for agreeing to speak to me. I thought it would make sense first to consider the two programmes the Arditti Quartet will be performing at the Edinburgh Festival. One thing I noticed immediately was the presence of Beethoven in both. Admittedly, the works in question are late and what one might describe as ‘almost late’ Beethoven, music that often seems more shocking in its modernity than much twentieth or twenty-first repertoire. But is the presence of Beethoven in your quartet’s repertoire as unusual as it might seem?
IA: Well, I think it’s a double-edged sword really. In a way, Beethoven is there, for one reason, to make the programmes a little more attractive for the non-contemporary music aficionado: people interested in hearing string quartets but who are not exactly contemporary music specialists. This is the sort of programme we do in many places that are not venues for contemporary music festivals, and which have a chamber music series, so there is a definite desire to make the programmes attractive to people who are not going to come for the modern pieces and who will listen to them. But also late Beethoven is something that the Arditti Quartet has done – a select few pieces. It’s always been my desire to put the Grosse Fuge at the beginning of a programme and continue with contemporary music, rather as a statement to living composers, like: ‘This is what Beethoven did; now let’s see what you can do.’ This is such an extraordinary piece.
MB: Yes, I can see that makes a great deal of sense. Have you ever gone further back, say to Haydn, or even to music one might perform with a string quartet, such as Bach or Purcell? Or is Beethoven pretty much as far back as you would go?
IA: Bach’s Ricercata [from the Musical Offering] in sextet arrangement and we did a special project with members of the Alban Berg Quartet, which included Brahms sextets, but we’ve never really seriously played Classical music such as Haydn and Beethoven. We once played a Haydn quartet, but it was a very special request. But it’s not really the repertoire of the Arditti Quartet and it’s not really necessary for us to play Classical music, because we’re so busy doing other things.
MB: No, I can understand that; it’s not as if there is a shortage of other things for you to play.
IA: You wouldn’t expect a quartet like the Mosaïques to play Zemlinsky, or Schoenberg, or even more contemporary pieces, so why should we be playing Classical music when we have a wealth of repertoire from the beginning of the twentieth century until today?
MB: Yes, absolutely, so would you tend broadly to see the quartet’s repertoire as starting with Schoenberg, perhaps going a little further back, and that being the starting-point for a century or more’s further music?
IA: Yes, starting with the Second Viennese School. Our classics were the Second Viennese School and Bartók and going back to Beethoven came later, but it’s very important for us to add more classical quartets to our repertoire. We have played Ravel and Janáček quartets and I think it’s very important to communicate to audiences with these pieces. And, as I said two minutes ago, we need to communicate to audiences who don’t know so much about contemporary music, but enjoy coming to listen to the string quartet, and we try not to frighten them away, but attract them.
MB: The matter of audiences puts me in mind of something else. On the one hand, as you say, there will be audiences very interested in quartet, and perhaps more broadly chamber, music, who might be enticed to come along to hear more contemporary music. Do you find, though, that perhaps the audiences more interested in contemporary music are sometimes less interested in chamber, and indeed more specifically quartet, music? Or is that not really an issue?
IA: I think there are different sorts of audiences. A lot of the people that like contemporary music do not come from the classical music repertoire. There are a lot of people that enjoy listening to Ligeti and Xenakis, or whatever, who come from another listening point of view. Some of them come from classical music, sure, but some of them come from jazz and other alternative music. But it’s nice to appeal to lots of different sorts of people and each country, each town, has its own story. That to me is a very interesting point, having travelled now so extensively. Who is educating their audience in each venue is extremely important too, for what kind of audience will come and be prepared to listen. I’m not saying that one country is necessarily different from another but the towns could be different. One could do an interesting survey on this: who comes to listen to what? But that’s going off our point, I think.
MB: It’s an additional, very interesting point nevertheless. Going back to the programmes you are presenting, each member of the Second Viennese School is featured: Berg in the first programme, Webern and Schoenberg in the second. We have become accustomed, in reading and speaking about them, to certain broad generalisations concerning these composers and their modes of expression: Berg is portrayed as the most nostalgic, Webern the most fearsomely radical, and Schoenberg the great revolutionary traditionalist, or even traditionalist revolutionary. (Much depends on how one regards the influence of Brahms.) What I wanted to ask, however, is what similarities and differences you as string players notice between these composers, and how one might relate their quartet writing to broader conceptions of their style.
IA: That’s a very good question: it’s still very challenging. I’d say that Berg and Schoenberg were more classically friendly to traditional string techniques. The parts are written very coherently and sometimes virtuosically but always within the framework of what is possible. Webern is somehow a little more aloof. It’s difficult to know how to deal with the lines; it’s difficult to know how expressively to play Webern. We come backwards to Webern, people have always said that, whereas most people go from Classical music and late-Romantic music to the Second Viennese School. So perhaps our interpretations are affected by knowing Boulez and Ferneyhough. We certainly knew them quite well when we were learning the pieces by Webern. But I think it’s a difficult question to answer, because we would approach those composers in a very classically-oriented way, from the concept of sound and everything. Berg is very challenging, because almost everything is written down...
MB: Like Mahler and Strauss...
IA: In a sense over-marked, so you have to deal with the concept that perhaps Berg was very frustrated with the performers of the day and felt he had to over-notate everything, so perhaps there is some degree of over-notation in the phrasing, but one follows and understands what the composer wants, I think. But this is still very challenging music for us to play and never boring. This is repertoire that is constantly challenging: the two quartets of Berg, the four of Schoenberg, and the Webern pieces. I think as a core basis for our repertoire, it’s very stimulating to have that and, as in these Edinburgh programmes, to kind of bounce off that with some contemporary pieces. The idea was to have some pieces from the twentieth century, plus the Beethoven, which would be a kind of overview of the Arditti’s repertoire. In fact, the director at Edinburgh, Jonathan Mills, engaged us before at both Brisbane and Melbourne festivals in Australia. At Melbourne, we did something even more adventurous; we did six concerts. We had music from the Second Viennese School, from Bartók, from Janáček, and quite a lot of new music, plus a new commission in each concert, so we have a snippet from that in the two concerts we’re doing this year at Edinburgh
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MB: I was thinking about Schoenberg’s preface to Webern’s Bagatelles, which has now become almost as celebrated a text as the work itself. For the benefit of our readers I shall quote it:
Consider what moderation is required to express oneself so briefly. Each glance can be extended into a poem, each sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, a joy in a single indrawn breath, such concentration is only found where self-pity is absent. These pieces, as, indeed, Webern’s music in general, will only be understood by those who believe that through sound something that can only be expressed in sound can be said.
Schoenberg there seems to be saying, amongst other things, that this is absolute music, in a Romantic sense as would have been understood by, say, Wagner or even Mendelssohn. Is that how you understand Webern?
IA: Well, I think there is that clarity in Webern; he says it all with one single stroke. I’m not sure what you were meaning about the Romantic element.
MB: Insofar as Schoenberg is saying that this is absolute music, which needs no reference to anything else, only what can be expressed in sound can be expressed here, this seems quite a Romantic view of music as an art in itself.
IA: I think Webern was able to do something quite different to Schoenberg, to reduce things to that level and to express things in that, not simple but transparent way. I think it’s not a Romantic gesture but it’s real admiration from Schoenberg and, when performing their music, you can sometimes see that Schoenberg takes a very much longer way round to get to things. He’s a different sort of composer. But it’s amazing that Berg and Webern were from this school and attached to Schoenberg. Yes, for me, Webern is the most interesting of the three composers in many respects. Of course, Webern was responsible for influencing a lot of the music that came after: the vast core repertoire from, let’s say, the ’50s onwards: the core Arditti repertoire. There is this attachment to simplicity.
MB: It’s interesting in a way that from such simplicity, for so many of the composers Webern has influenced, leads to a path of great complexity.
IA: They all do that, yes. Webern started them off and is the purest example of all. One can look back now and, historically, people like Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen: they all went in their different directions but all were very much looking back to Webern from their early pieces.
MB: Are there any potential dangers in viewing Webern in this ‘pure’ way? Pure seems to be an obvious word to describe it. Might one lose anything in doing so? Are there other ways in which one might consider this music?
IA: I think pure only in comparison to his two Viennese colleagues. I was mentioning that just a little earlier, in that other, more classical string quartets, or those who tend to play mostly classical music, would approach Webern with a little more Romanticism, a little more vibrato, shall we say, in the sound, and perhaps we come back[wards]. I remember rehearsing Boulez’s Livre and discussing the type of sound Boulez wanted for this piece and thinking that, yes, this type of sound, a very precise and not-too-involved sound, with regard to the left hand on the instruments, would be perfect for interpreting Webern. And I tend not to like a more indulgent interpretation, but that’s just the way I think. I don’t impose. In the quartet, we are a mixture of four individuals, and there is a mean, which will be the end result of any quartet sound, but of course, I influence it from my experiences.
MB: Of course. Moving to Schoenberg, in Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, we hear a progression from tonality to atonality, detest the term though Schoenberg did. Is that a particular challenge to performance? How much should we hear, or rather have in mind, the ‘air of another planet’ at the opening? Or should one milk the late, even over-ripe Romanticism for all it is worth and then find a sea-change as the work goes on?
IA: I think, with this piece, one doesn’t ever think in a non-Romantic way. Of course, the first two movements are very Classical in concept, but also, I think that, by the nature of the poem and the nature of the writing in the third and fourth movements, one would play it in the same way. You wouldn’t suddenly change your style in the middle of a piece. Of course, the quartet has to be more controlled when the singer is involved, in the latter two movements. And I think it’s a very Romantic piece: we see it as such. It’s a very Classical piece for us.
MB: With Ligeti, we find ourselves in another world again. How would you characterise Ligeti’s quartet writing? And how does it stand in relation to any of the other figures we have mentioned?
IA: Well, I think it stands out as something quite different. Ligeti is part of the avant-garde of the ’60s and ’70s. I think one has to think in a completely different way when performing this music, almost to obliterate or forget classical ways of playing. This is what he wanted.
MB: Shades of Boulez’s necessary amnesia?
IA: Yes. This is absolutely the impression I had when we played this piece early on in the Arditti Quartet and when working with the composer on numerous occasions: understanding what he wanted and the concept of sound, knowing his other music, knowing pieces like the Poem for 100 Metronomes, knowing orchestral pieces where clusters of sound were really important. And the second quartet is an extremely gestural work also, And the second quartet is an extremely gestural work also. Knowing Ligeti’s other music and other composers' music for that period helps one understand a little bit more about how to play this second quartet.
MB: Henri Dutilleux is a lone Frenchman in these programmes. How would you place him with respect to the other composers?
IA: I don’t tend to think of nationalities, more internationalities. In the quartet, we have four members who are all of different nationalities, and so on. We are an international group and Dutilleux is French, very much so. Ainsi la nuit is a very important piece, which follows a more classical tradition and represents French style in the later part of the twentieth century. It’s one of the pieces that we have played a lot and I think it fits very well into more classical programmes. How old is the piece now? It’s from the late ’70s, I think.
MB: Yes, 1976.
IA: So it’s thirty years old, but I think it’s basically a classical language we’re still playing in. It’s not at all like Ligeti, though I think it sits very well in his presence. One perhaps thinks of Ravel and Debussy when deciding how one is going to interpret the piece. There’s quite an amount of velocity and direction in the piece; it’s just a very good piece. It works in a classical way, the way the movements unfold. There’s a certain amount of energy sounded towards almost the end of the piece and then you have a return to the first movement, the slow part of the music. It’s a very well-written piece for strings; everything lies very well in the hands.
MB: I suppose we should certainly mention the new work you will be performing, by Nigel Osborne. Could you say something about what the audience should expect?
IA: They can expect a music that is very approachable, a music that is not going to frighten anybody. It’s based on some folk songs and it seems to have an obsession with the sound of a stone, which is actually projected towards the end of the piece. But the harmony and the music in the piece begins with a Gaelic folk song and Osborne introduces this pitch of the stone during the piece and I hope that, at Edinburgh, we’re actually going to have the sound of the stone projected live at the very end of the piece. It’s like a loop: I suppose we give way to the stone sound at the end of the piece. I hope I’ve been coherent: it’s a little difficult to describe.
MB: Of course.
IA: Well, it’s some sort of introduction anyway.
MB: Do you think a way into the work might be to consider it as some sort of programme music?
IA: Well, programme music in the sense that it’s using folk songs and they are literally played; there is not much transformation in them. It’s difficult. I think describing music, particularly before it’s been performed – we’ve certainly rehearsed it thoroughly – it’s difficult to say what sort of piece it is. It’s certainly a very beautiful piece and Nigel has an excellent voice. In music today, he doesn’t form part of any category of whatever; he has his own individual style. And it’s quite refreshing to work with him, and come across his music. We played a short piece of his twenty years ago but didn’t really get to know him, a very short piece in 1990, so this is the first major piece he’s written for the Arditti Quartet and it’s very nice to be in his world. We try to get into each composer’s world, and his is quite original.
MB: I came across a quotation from him, saying that music making should be ‘physically and mentally liberating ... optimistic in spirit and even capable ... of giving its strength to a weakened society.’ Do you see this conception expressed in the work that you are playing?
IA: Well, I think I do, but I also think these comments are coming as much from the man as the composer. We rehearsed with him and he’s that sort of person; he’s a giving person and it’s all part of his other activities, [such as] looking after people in less-developed countries. And he’s always going and helping in places such as Bosnia, and other places, and the whole spirit of the man: you can’t play a person’s music without being involved with the person. I think that’s a really important thing. That’s something we’ve done, tried to do, throughout the Arditti Quartet’s existence: to know the composers, to know how they want their music played. And I think that’s very relevant to Nigel Osborne, because he’s a very special character. He tries to help people; he’s a giver in the world, shall we say, he’s giving, and I think you can hear that in a way in the simplicity and coherence of his music. I think you, or we, feel that knowing him, and I hope we can convey that across to the audience. That’s our responsibility.
MB: It sounds very interesting. Going back to the broader conception of the programming, I remember hearing Pierre Boulez, quite rightly in my view, disparage programmes that appeared simply to be thrown together. ‘Like a shopping list’ was, I think, his description. How do you actually go about constructing programmes, getting the ideas and the logic behind them to come together?
IA: I think we see what pieces fit well with other pieces, over the years, when you’re programming things – and which don’t. You can be making a programme of music that is very contrasted; you can have something making a theme and perhaps that is not so well-contrasted, but complementary; textural music; you can think about relationships, how a piece works in one respect. You could say that in some ways Ligeti’s second quartet was textural and might sit very well with the Ravel quartet or you could make a stark contrast with Beethoven. There are numerous ways of doing it and I very much respect Mr Boulez’s comments, but I think sometimes it’s interesting to have very stark contrasts for the audience and not have a coherency in the way that he often makes programmes.
MB: Yes, one could often say that contrasts, almost despite themselves, lend their own coherence. You might not need a single idea; works can often react off and against each other, I’d have thought.
IA: Yes, Boulez is making programmes with Ravel, Debussy, the Second Viennese School, and his music, but I used to love bringing people like Carter and Cage together: very stark contrasts, people who didn’t see eye to eye musically. Stylistically very different, but sitting together very well by virtue of the contrast, and I think one can make programmes like that also. I don’t think there any stark problems with our Edinburgh programmes.
MB: No, far from it.
IA: What follows the Grosse Fuge? You’ll have to tell me, if you have the programme there.
MB: The Dutilleux.
IA: Well, yes, it’s always a difficult decision to follow the Grosse Fuge. Conlon Nancarrow, a composer who’s no longer with us, was very obsessed with our performance of this piece and, when we heard that we were recording the Grosse Fuge and his third string quartet, he was very happy and insisted that his piece carried on immediately after the Beethoven. The rhythmic complexities of the Beethoven really set up the rhythms in his piece and it was absolutely perfect. Of course, we choose something else, something completely different from the Beethoven, something much less rhythmically insistent and a different sort of music.
MB: Yes, quite. Having mentioned Boulez, I was wondering whether there was any chance of you being tempted to tempt him to write anything more for the string quartet. Or is that the end of a line?
IA (laughs): It’s funny you should say that, because I’ve spent about twenty or twenty-five years trying to persuade him to complete the work, Livre, which he wrote, I think, in 1948 or 1949. Livre now exists without its fourth movement, published by Heugel. The fourth movement is unfinished, it exists without marks of expression. You can see it in the Sacher Stiftung. We played for the first time the movements, of course excluding number four, and we rehearsed with him many years ago in London at my house, and at that point started to try to persuade him to complete the movement, but he felt very remote from the piece at the time. But we’ve been having discussions recently, actually in the last month. I saw him several times at concerts, and we’ve been speaking about the reality of him doing that, because I believe, next year or 2011, he’s going to have a sabbatical, so he may be able to complete that work. Of course, whether he would ever think about writing a new work for string quartet, I doubt at this stage.* I hope he will actually complete Livre.
MB: That would be enough for many of us. Are there any particular contemporary composers with whom you have never worked, whether as a quartet player or as a soloist, but with whom you would be very keen to do so?
IA: Well, that’s a very difficult question, because we’ve worked with so many. I think not. I don’t want to be rude to anyone who hasn’t worked with us. Maybe we’ve left out a few people; I can’t think. We rather hoped some years ago that Hans Werner Henze might perhaps write us a quartet. We played his five quartets many years ago, but they were not written for the Arditti Quartet. He hasn’t felt the desire to write a string quartet for many years and probably it’s too late now. There are composers who promised us pieces that never happened, but they’re people that we have close relationships with. We were discussing for many years a third quartet with Ligeti, a second quartet with Nono, and another quartet with Stockhausen, but, of course, none of those things came to fruition. And I think other composers – you never know what composers are going to do, and people that I don’t know so well might suddenly write a string quartet that’s marvellous. And I would then say, ‘Why didn’t I say to you on this Sunday morning, why didn’t I mention their name?’ Off the top of my head, there’s not really anybody that I can think of, that is not actively involved in writing us pieces or has written pieces.
MB: Thank you very much. It’s really been a pleasure to speak to you, most enlightening. I’m certainly very much looking forward to hearing the concerts when I go up to Edinburgh. I suppose that’s the most important thing.
IA: Yes, the music rather than talking about it, absolutely. Do come and say hello.
MB: Thank you. I certainly will.
* The Arditti Quartet met with Pierre Boulez in Lucerne a few days before their appearance in Edinburgh and he confirmed that he had no plans to write a new string quartet.
Beethoven - String Quartet in F minor, op. 95
Berg - String Quartet, op.3
Nigel Osborne - Tiree (world premiere, EIF commission)
Ligeti - String Quartet no.2
Beethoven - String Quartet in B-flat major, op.133, 'Grosse Fuge'
Dutilleux - String Quartet: 'Ainsi la nuit'
Webern - Six Bagatelles for string quartet, op.9
Schoenberg String Quartet no.2
MB: Thank you very much for agreeing to speak to me. I thought it would make sense first to consider the two programmes the Arditti Quartet will be performing at the Edinburgh Festival. One thing I noticed immediately was the presence of Beethoven in both. Admittedly, the works in question are late and what one might describe as ‘almost late’ Beethoven, music that often seems more shocking in its modernity than much twentieth or twenty-first repertoire. But is the presence of Beethoven in your quartet’s repertoire as unusual as it might seem?
IA: Well, I think it’s a double-edged sword really. In a way, Beethoven is there, for one reason, to make the programmes a little more attractive for the non-contemporary music aficionado: people interested in hearing string quartets but who are not exactly contemporary music specialists. This is the sort of programme we do in many places that are not venues for contemporary music festivals, and which have a chamber music series, so there is a definite desire to make the programmes attractive to people who are not going to come for the modern pieces and who will listen to them. But also late Beethoven is something that the Arditti Quartet has done – a select few pieces. It’s always been my desire to put the Grosse Fuge at the beginning of a programme and continue with contemporary music, rather as a statement to living composers, like: ‘This is what Beethoven did; now let’s see what you can do.’ This is such an extraordinary piece.
MB: Yes, I can see that makes a great deal of sense. Have you ever gone further back, say to Haydn, or even to music one might perform with a string quartet, such as Bach or Purcell? Or is Beethoven pretty much as far back as you would go?
IA: Bach’s Ricercata [from the Musical Offering] in sextet arrangement and we did a special project with members of the Alban Berg Quartet, which included Brahms sextets, but we’ve never really seriously played Classical music such as Haydn and Beethoven. We once played a Haydn quartet, but it was a very special request. But it’s not really the repertoire of the Arditti Quartet and it’s not really necessary for us to play Classical music, because we’re so busy doing other things.
MB: No, I can understand that; it’s not as if there is a shortage of other things for you to play.
IA: You wouldn’t expect a quartet like the Mosaïques to play Zemlinsky, or Schoenberg, or even more contemporary pieces, so why should we be playing Classical music when we have a wealth of repertoire from the beginning of the twentieth century until today?
MB: Yes, absolutely, so would you tend broadly to see the quartet’s repertoire as starting with Schoenberg, perhaps going a little further back, and that being the starting-point for a century or more’s further music?
IA: Yes, starting with the Second Viennese School. Our classics were the Second Viennese School and Bartók and going back to Beethoven came later, but it’s very important for us to add more classical quartets to our repertoire. We have played Ravel and Janáček quartets and I think it’s very important to communicate to audiences with these pieces. And, as I said two minutes ago, we need to communicate to audiences who don’t know so much about contemporary music, but enjoy coming to listen to the string quartet, and we try not to frighten them away, but attract them.
MB: The matter of audiences puts me in mind of something else. On the one hand, as you say, there will be audiences very interested in quartet, and perhaps more broadly chamber, music, who might be enticed to come along to hear more contemporary music. Do you find, though, that perhaps the audiences more interested in contemporary music are sometimes less interested in chamber, and indeed more specifically quartet, music? Or is that not really an issue?
IA: I think there are different sorts of audiences. A lot of the people that like contemporary music do not come from the classical music repertoire. There are a lot of people that enjoy listening to Ligeti and Xenakis, or whatever, who come from another listening point of view. Some of them come from classical music, sure, but some of them come from jazz and other alternative music. But it’s nice to appeal to lots of different sorts of people and each country, each town, has its own story. That to me is a very interesting point, having travelled now so extensively. Who is educating their audience in each venue is extremely important too, for what kind of audience will come and be prepared to listen. I’m not saying that one country is necessarily different from another but the towns could be different. One could do an interesting survey on this: who comes to listen to what? But that’s going off our point, I think.
MB: It’s an additional, very interesting point nevertheless. Going back to the programmes you are presenting, each member of the Second Viennese School is featured: Berg in the first programme, Webern and Schoenberg in the second. We have become accustomed, in reading and speaking about them, to certain broad generalisations concerning these composers and their modes of expression: Berg is portrayed as the most nostalgic, Webern the most fearsomely radical, and Schoenberg the great revolutionary traditionalist, or even traditionalist revolutionary. (Much depends on how one regards the influence of Brahms.) What I wanted to ask, however, is what similarities and differences you as string players notice between these composers, and how one might relate their quartet writing to broader conceptions of their style.
IA: That’s a very good question: it’s still very challenging. I’d say that Berg and Schoenberg were more classically friendly to traditional string techniques. The parts are written very coherently and sometimes virtuosically but always within the framework of what is possible. Webern is somehow a little more aloof. It’s difficult to know how to deal with the lines; it’s difficult to know how expressively to play Webern. We come backwards to Webern, people have always said that, whereas most people go from Classical music and late-Romantic music to the Second Viennese School. So perhaps our interpretations are affected by knowing Boulez and Ferneyhough. We certainly knew them quite well when we were learning the pieces by Webern. But I think it’s a difficult question to answer, because we would approach those composers in a very classically-oriented way, from the concept of sound and everything. Berg is very challenging, because almost everything is written down...
MB: Like Mahler and Strauss...
IA: In a sense over-marked, so you have to deal with the concept that perhaps Berg was very frustrated with the performers of the day and felt he had to over-notate everything, so perhaps there is some degree of over-notation in the phrasing, but one follows and understands what the composer wants, I think. But this is still very challenging music for us to play and never boring. This is repertoire that is constantly challenging: the two quartets of Berg, the four of Schoenberg, and the Webern pieces. I think as a core basis for our repertoire, it’s very stimulating to have that and, as in these Edinburgh programmes, to kind of bounce off that with some contemporary pieces. The idea was to have some pieces from the twentieth century, plus the Beethoven, which would be a kind of overview of the Arditti’s repertoire. In fact, the director at Edinburgh, Jonathan Mills, engaged us before at both Brisbane and Melbourne festivals in Australia. At Melbourne, we did something even more adventurous; we did six concerts. We had music from the Second Viennese School, from Bartók, from Janáček, and quite a lot of new music, plus a new commission in each concert, so we have a snippet from that in the two concerts we’re doing this year at Edinburgh
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MB: I was thinking about Schoenberg’s preface to Webern’s Bagatelles, which has now become almost as celebrated a text as the work itself. For the benefit of our readers I shall quote it:
Consider what moderation is required to express oneself so briefly. Each glance can be extended into a poem, each sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, a joy in a single indrawn breath, such concentration is only found where self-pity is absent. These pieces, as, indeed, Webern’s music in general, will only be understood by those who believe that through sound something that can only be expressed in sound can be said.
Schoenberg there seems to be saying, amongst other things, that this is absolute music, in a Romantic sense as would have been understood by, say, Wagner or even Mendelssohn. Is that how you understand Webern?
IA: Well, I think there is that clarity in Webern; he says it all with one single stroke. I’m not sure what you were meaning about the Romantic element.
MB: Insofar as Schoenberg is saying that this is absolute music, which needs no reference to anything else, only what can be expressed in sound can be expressed here, this seems quite a Romantic view of music as an art in itself.
IA: I think Webern was able to do something quite different to Schoenberg, to reduce things to that level and to express things in that, not simple but transparent way. I think it’s not a Romantic gesture but it’s real admiration from Schoenberg and, when performing their music, you can sometimes see that Schoenberg takes a very much longer way round to get to things. He’s a different sort of composer. But it’s amazing that Berg and Webern were from this school and attached to Schoenberg. Yes, for me, Webern is the most interesting of the three composers in many respects. Of course, Webern was responsible for influencing a lot of the music that came after: the vast core repertoire from, let’s say, the ’50s onwards: the core Arditti repertoire. There is this attachment to simplicity.
MB: It’s interesting in a way that from such simplicity, for so many of the composers Webern has influenced, leads to a path of great complexity.
IA: They all do that, yes. Webern started them off and is the purest example of all. One can look back now and, historically, people like Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen: they all went in their different directions but all were very much looking back to Webern from their early pieces.
MB: Are there any potential dangers in viewing Webern in this ‘pure’ way? Pure seems to be an obvious word to describe it. Might one lose anything in doing so? Are there other ways in which one might consider this music?
IA: I think pure only in comparison to his two Viennese colleagues. I was mentioning that just a little earlier, in that other, more classical string quartets, or those who tend to play mostly classical music, would approach Webern with a little more Romanticism, a little more vibrato, shall we say, in the sound, and perhaps we come back[wards]. I remember rehearsing Boulez’s Livre and discussing the type of sound Boulez wanted for this piece and thinking that, yes, this type of sound, a very precise and not-too-involved sound, with regard to the left hand on the instruments, would be perfect for interpreting Webern. And I tend not to like a more indulgent interpretation, but that’s just the way I think. I don’t impose. In the quartet, we are a mixture of four individuals, and there is a mean, which will be the end result of any quartet sound, but of course, I influence it from my experiences.
MB: Of course. Moving to Schoenberg, in Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, we hear a progression from tonality to atonality, detest the term though Schoenberg did. Is that a particular challenge to performance? How much should we hear, or rather have in mind, the ‘air of another planet’ at the opening? Or should one milk the late, even over-ripe Romanticism for all it is worth and then find a sea-change as the work goes on?
IA: I think, with this piece, one doesn’t ever think in a non-Romantic way. Of course, the first two movements are very Classical in concept, but also, I think that, by the nature of the poem and the nature of the writing in the third and fourth movements, one would play it in the same way. You wouldn’t suddenly change your style in the middle of a piece. Of course, the quartet has to be more controlled when the singer is involved, in the latter two movements. And I think it’s a very Romantic piece: we see it as such. It’s a very Classical piece for us.
MB: With Ligeti, we find ourselves in another world again. How would you characterise Ligeti’s quartet writing? And how does it stand in relation to any of the other figures we have mentioned?
IA: Well, I think it stands out as something quite different. Ligeti is part of the avant-garde of the ’60s and ’70s. I think one has to think in a completely different way when performing this music, almost to obliterate or forget classical ways of playing. This is what he wanted.
MB: Shades of Boulez’s necessary amnesia?
IA: Yes. This is absolutely the impression I had when we played this piece early on in the Arditti Quartet and when working with the composer on numerous occasions: understanding what he wanted and the concept of sound, knowing his other music, knowing pieces like the Poem for 100 Metronomes, knowing orchestral pieces where clusters of sound were really important. And the second quartet is an extremely gestural work also, And the second quartet is an extremely gestural work also. Knowing Ligeti’s other music and other composers' music for that period helps one understand a little bit more about how to play this second quartet.
MB: Henri Dutilleux is a lone Frenchman in these programmes. How would you place him with respect to the other composers?
IA: I don’t tend to think of nationalities, more internationalities. In the quartet, we have four members who are all of different nationalities, and so on. We are an international group and Dutilleux is French, very much so. Ainsi la nuit is a very important piece, which follows a more classical tradition and represents French style in the later part of the twentieth century. It’s one of the pieces that we have played a lot and I think it fits very well into more classical programmes. How old is the piece now? It’s from the late ’70s, I think.
MB: Yes, 1976.
IA: So it’s thirty years old, but I think it’s basically a classical language we’re still playing in. It’s not at all like Ligeti, though I think it sits very well in his presence. One perhaps thinks of Ravel and Debussy when deciding how one is going to interpret the piece. There’s quite an amount of velocity and direction in the piece; it’s just a very good piece. It works in a classical way, the way the movements unfold. There’s a certain amount of energy sounded towards almost the end of the piece and then you have a return to the first movement, the slow part of the music. It’s a very well-written piece for strings; everything lies very well in the hands.
MB: I suppose we should certainly mention the new work you will be performing, by Nigel Osborne. Could you say something about what the audience should expect?
IA: They can expect a music that is very approachable, a music that is not going to frighten anybody. It’s based on some folk songs and it seems to have an obsession with the sound of a stone, which is actually projected towards the end of the piece. But the harmony and the music in the piece begins with a Gaelic folk song and Osborne introduces this pitch of the stone during the piece and I hope that, at Edinburgh, we’re actually going to have the sound of the stone projected live at the very end of the piece. It’s like a loop: I suppose we give way to the stone sound at the end of the piece. I hope I’ve been coherent: it’s a little difficult to describe.
MB: Of course.
IA: Well, it’s some sort of introduction anyway.
MB: Do you think a way into the work might be to consider it as some sort of programme music?
IA: Well, programme music in the sense that it’s using folk songs and they are literally played; there is not much transformation in them. It’s difficult. I think describing music, particularly before it’s been performed – we’ve certainly rehearsed it thoroughly – it’s difficult to say what sort of piece it is. It’s certainly a very beautiful piece and Nigel has an excellent voice. In music today, he doesn’t form part of any category of whatever; he has his own individual style. And it’s quite refreshing to work with him, and come across his music. We played a short piece of his twenty years ago but didn’t really get to know him, a very short piece in 1990, so this is the first major piece he’s written for the Arditti Quartet and it’s very nice to be in his world. We try to get into each composer’s world, and his is quite original.
MB: I came across a quotation from him, saying that music making should be ‘physically and mentally liberating ... optimistic in spirit and even capable ... of giving its strength to a weakened society.’ Do you see this conception expressed in the work that you are playing?
IA: Well, I think I do, but I also think these comments are coming as much from the man as the composer. We rehearsed with him and he’s that sort of person; he’s a giving person and it’s all part of his other activities, [such as] looking after people in less-developed countries. And he’s always going and helping in places such as Bosnia, and other places, and the whole spirit of the man: you can’t play a person’s music without being involved with the person. I think that’s a really important thing. That’s something we’ve done, tried to do, throughout the Arditti Quartet’s existence: to know the composers, to know how they want their music played. And I think that’s very relevant to Nigel Osborne, because he’s a very special character. He tries to help people; he’s a giver in the world, shall we say, he’s giving, and I think you can hear that in a way in the simplicity and coherence of his music. I think you, or we, feel that knowing him, and I hope we can convey that across to the audience. That’s our responsibility.
MB: It sounds very interesting. Going back to the broader conception of the programming, I remember hearing Pierre Boulez, quite rightly in my view, disparage programmes that appeared simply to be thrown together. ‘Like a shopping list’ was, I think, his description. How do you actually go about constructing programmes, getting the ideas and the logic behind them to come together?
IA: I think we see what pieces fit well with other pieces, over the years, when you’re programming things – and which don’t. You can be making a programme of music that is very contrasted; you can have something making a theme and perhaps that is not so well-contrasted, but complementary; textural music; you can think about relationships, how a piece works in one respect. You could say that in some ways Ligeti’s second quartet was textural and might sit very well with the Ravel quartet or you could make a stark contrast with Beethoven. There are numerous ways of doing it and I very much respect Mr Boulez’s comments, but I think sometimes it’s interesting to have very stark contrasts for the audience and not have a coherency in the way that he often makes programmes.
MB: Yes, one could often say that contrasts, almost despite themselves, lend their own coherence. You might not need a single idea; works can often react off and against each other, I’d have thought.
IA: Yes, Boulez is making programmes with Ravel, Debussy, the Second Viennese School, and his music, but I used to love bringing people like Carter and Cage together: very stark contrasts, people who didn’t see eye to eye musically. Stylistically very different, but sitting together very well by virtue of the contrast, and I think one can make programmes like that also. I don’t think there any stark problems with our Edinburgh programmes.
MB: No, far from it.
IA: What follows the Grosse Fuge? You’ll have to tell me, if you have the programme there.
MB: The Dutilleux.
IA: Well, yes, it’s always a difficult decision to follow the Grosse Fuge. Conlon Nancarrow, a composer who’s no longer with us, was very obsessed with our performance of this piece and, when we heard that we were recording the Grosse Fuge and his third string quartet, he was very happy and insisted that his piece carried on immediately after the Beethoven. The rhythmic complexities of the Beethoven really set up the rhythms in his piece and it was absolutely perfect. Of course, we choose something else, something completely different from the Beethoven, something much less rhythmically insistent and a different sort of music.
MB: Yes, quite. Having mentioned Boulez, I was wondering whether there was any chance of you being tempted to tempt him to write anything more for the string quartet. Or is that the end of a line?
IA (laughs): It’s funny you should say that, because I’ve spent about twenty or twenty-five years trying to persuade him to complete the work, Livre, which he wrote, I think, in 1948 or 1949. Livre now exists without its fourth movement, published by Heugel. The fourth movement is unfinished, it exists without marks of expression. You can see it in the Sacher Stiftung. We played for the first time the movements, of course excluding number four, and we rehearsed with him many years ago in London at my house, and at that point started to try to persuade him to complete the movement, but he felt very remote from the piece at the time. But we’ve been having discussions recently, actually in the last month. I saw him several times at concerts, and we’ve been speaking about the reality of him doing that, because I believe, next year or 2011, he’s going to have a sabbatical, so he may be able to complete that work. Of course, whether he would ever think about writing a new work for string quartet, I doubt at this stage.* I hope he will actually complete Livre.
MB: That would be enough for many of us. Are there any particular contemporary composers with whom you have never worked, whether as a quartet player or as a soloist, but with whom you would be very keen to do so?
IA: Well, that’s a very difficult question, because we’ve worked with so many. I think not. I don’t want to be rude to anyone who hasn’t worked with us. Maybe we’ve left out a few people; I can’t think. We rather hoped some years ago that Hans Werner Henze might perhaps write us a quartet. We played his five quartets many years ago, but they were not written for the Arditti Quartet. He hasn’t felt the desire to write a string quartet for many years and probably it’s too late now. There are composers who promised us pieces that never happened, but they’re people that we have close relationships with. We were discussing for many years a third quartet with Ligeti, a second quartet with Nono, and another quartet with Stockhausen, but, of course, none of those things came to fruition. And I think other composers – you never know what composers are going to do, and people that I don’t know so well might suddenly write a string quartet that’s marvellous. And I would then say, ‘Why didn’t I say to you on this Sunday morning, why didn’t I mention their name?’ Off the top of my head, there’s not really anybody that I can think of, that is not actively involved in writing us pieces or has written pieces.
MB: Thank you very much. It’s really been a pleasure to speak to you, most enlightening. I’m certainly very much looking forward to hearing the concerts when I go up to Edinburgh. I suppose that’s the most important thing.
IA: Yes, the music rather than talking about it, absolutely. Do come and say hello.
MB: Thank you. I certainly will.
* The Arditti Quartet met with Pierre Boulez in Lucerne a few days before their appearance in Edinburgh and he confirmed that he had no plans to write a new string quartet.
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