Developing Variation: From Wagner to Boulez

 

(This essay was originally published as a programme note for the Salzburg Festival, 2015, for a concert given by members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and Daniel Barenboim. How I wish I had gone, rather than suffering Claus Guth's Fidelio!)

 

RICHARD WAGNER • Siegfried-Idyll for Chamber Orchestra, WWV 103

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG • Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E for 15 Solo Instruments, Op. 9
PIERRE BOULEZ • sur Incises (1996/1998/2006) pour 3 pianos, 3 harpes et 3 percussions-claviers

Gwyneth Jones and Peter Hofmann in the 'Centenary' Ring, conducted by Boulez

 

Wagner-Schoenberg-Boulez: it is a teleology worthy of any of those three, highly teleologically-minded composers. Both Wagner and Schoenberg are composers who have featured heavily in Pierre Boulez’s conducting, compositional, and polemical life; all three are crucial figures to Daniel Barenboim too, and indeed to the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. In this programme, however, we can hear not only inspiration but also the need to go beyond, even to disavow. ‘Schoenberg est mort,’ was Boulez’s celebrated, if, in all but the most literal sense, premature claim in 1951. Parricide, though, has long been a guiding principle of the Western ‘classical’ tradition.

 

Wagner had declared both his lineage in Beethoven’s example and the necessity of its overcoming by positing his music dramas as the successors, perhaps even the only successors, to the symphonies of his revered predecessor. An early, C major Symphony (1832), is a better work than detractors, or mediocre performances, permit, but is ultimately too imitative to stand entirely on its own two feet. There is also a fragmentary E major Symphony from two years later, and there are various sonata-form works for piano. The Siegfried-Idyll, however, remains in a different class. Moreover, for all Wagner’s ongoing worship of Beethoven, it is not an especially Beethovenian, or even sonata-principled work – and is probably all the stronger for that.

 

Thematic material is taken from the final scene of the third act of Siegfried, often considered the ‘scherzo’ – Beethovenian terms die hard – of the Ring. Composed in late 1870, the Tribschen Idyll with Fidi – the present title seems not to have been used until 1877, coined for a performance in Meiningen – is subtitled, on the autograph score, ‘Birdsong and Orange Sunrise, presented as a Symphonic Birthday Greeting to his Cosima by her Richard, 1870’. Which is what happened on Christmas Day, in gratitude, as a short poem makes clear, for the birth of Siegfried Wagner the previous year. Beethovenian dialectics are largely eschewed in favour of a formal conception of development rooted in Wagner’s own musico-dramatic ‘endless melody’, albeit without words. If anything, it is Liszt’s symphonic poems – Liszt being Cosima’s father – that come to mind as progenitors, a poetic ‘idea’ made manifest in music.

Not only does this lullaby of peace, joy and world-inheritance, to employ conventional leitmotif references from the opera, present a (hopeless) spur to our imagination with respect to the post-Parsifal ‘symphonies’ Wagner often envisaged, yet was never granted time to write. It also shows how Wagner’s mature compositional method could, despite the claims of detractors and some admirers alike, adapt and even renew later-nineteenth-century symphonic form. Carl Dahlhaus, writing of Wagner’s music dramas, admirably described the composer’s leitmotif technique as ‘the binding together of a music drama through a dense web of motivic connections from within’. Such, in place of Beethoven’s symphonic goal-orientation, viewed by many modernists with suspicion, offered the prospect, subtly realised here, of instrumental music founded upon similar principles. Indeed, a gradual, if far from complete loosening of association between concrete objects and motifs in the music dramas – the Ring the high water-mark, Tristan and Parsifal freer in association – had already done part of Wagner’s work for him. Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg would be two of his, and Liszt’s, most important successors. Moreover, what Schoenberg would analyse in earlier music, particularly but far from exclusively that of Brahms, as ‘developing variation’ is certainly present in Wagner’s expansion – prophetic also for Boulez’s technique of ‘proliferation’ – of his opening motivic material.

Liszt, Wagner, Strauss, and Brahms certainly vie, most productively, for attention in Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, one of the composer’s sunniest, indeed life-affirming works. It follows the sonata-form example of Liszt’s Sonata in B minor for piano, radically integrating the traditional multi-movement sonata/symphony structure – Sonata Allegro-Scherzo-Slow Movement-Finale – into the traditional structure of a single sonata-form movement: Exposition-Development-Recapitulation. Another important predecessor is Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, which Liszt edited, re-wrote, and transcribed (both for piano and orchestra, and for two pianos). Equally important as such formal considerations, which undoubtedly help account for its exhilarating concision, are instrumentation and harmony. In the more commonly-played original version for fifteen solo instruments – Schoenberg would later arrange the work for full orchestra, as Wagner had intended to do with his Idyll – there is a significant shift away from the string-saturated, or at least string-founded, textures of the Romantic symphony (Brahms) or late Romantic symphonic poem (Strauss). At the same time, that technique of developing variation, which Schoenberg avowedly derived from Brahms, but which was also present in his Wagnerian inheritance, and an almost-but-not-quite Expressionist tinge upon Strauss’s harmonies contributes to the historical and formal struggle. The opening horn calls signal to the possibility of constructing harmonies upon the interval of a fourth: present in late Liszt in Mephistophelian guise, but perhaps more commonly associated with subsequent experiments by Bartók. 

And yet, a symphony this undoubtedly remains, far more so than Wagner’s Idyll. Schoenberg was always as much conservative as radical; indeed, it was, he would claim, to maintain the supremacy of German ‘tradition’ that he would soon feel compelled by historical necessity to take the fateful steps he did, first renouncing tonality (although he would, not unreasonably, reject the term ‘atonality’), and then developing his twelve-note method. We are not there yet; the tonality of E major remains a guiding principle, as do modulation and key relationships. Op.9 offers as inventive a solution to the problem of the twentieth-century symphony as Haydn had to a genre he may not have invented, but which he surely transformed into the force with which Beethoven, Wagner, and ultimately Schoenberg would have to reckon. With the Second String Quartet, op.10, however, Schoenberg – and we – would feel the air of another planet.

Boulez’s relationship towards much of Schoenberg has long been ambivalent, even prior to that article of 1951. That despite the fact that few, if any, performers can have consistently, persistently done so much for his music; perhaps Boulez’s only rival in that respect would be Schoenberg’s son-in-law, Michael Gielen. It is, Boulez has long insisted, a short period in Schoenberg’s œuvre, that of so-called ‘free atonality’, prior to the composer’s turn to dodecaphony, which most interests him; and yet, he has continued to perform, in most cases, highly persuasively, later as well as earlier works, remaining the only conductor to have recorded Moses und Aron twice. Brahmsian influence is, at bottom and somewhat to simplify, what most concerns Boulez in the work of the later Schoenberg. For him, at least, it is Wagnerian tendencies that remain more fruitful – hardly surprisingly, given the preponderance of Wagner in Boulez’s operatic repertoire, and the importance of both Wagner and Mahler for later works such as the orchestral Notations.

sur Incises, like many of Boulez’s works, has its seeds in an earlier work. Just as Wagner would take problems, whether musical, philosophical, or both, which had arisen in previous works as starting-points for subsequent explorations – and indeed, just as he used material from Siegfried for the Siegfried-Idyll – so Boulez has, sometimes repeatedly, returned both to material presented in earlier works, and in some cases, to earlier works themselves, in order to expand them. This exploration falls into the former category. Incises is a piano piece written (1994, revised 2001) for the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition (with which Maurizio Pollini, long an advocate of Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata, had a strong association), is a brilliant, toccata-like work, written with typical éclat. Boulez first intended, as he explained in an interview of 1998, to ‘transform this piece into a longer one for Pollini and a group of instrumentalists, a kind of piano concerto although without reference to the traditional form. … Therefore, I produced a piece for three pianos, assuming that there already exists enough interesting literature for two pianos and ensembles, especially in the modern age – take for example Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. (In my opinion, everybody would have been reminded of this world if I had also written a piece for two pianos.) I have also considered the possibility of four pianos as this constellation is very attractive and provides a good balance.’ Then, however, the siren call of Stravinsky – that great anti-Wagnerian, long also considered Schoenberg’s antipode – and especially Les Noces suggested another path. As Boulez remarked more recently, in 2010, ‘This is the reason why I ended up with three pianos - incidentally three pianists are part of our ensemble [Intercontemporain].’ There were likewise three percussionists in the ensemble, and subsequently, the idea of adding three harps occurred to him, an idea rendered more attractive by his use of the instrument in Répons.

It would be possible to say much more about its genesis, and indeed its different versions, but the work itself, even as work-in-progress – Boulez’s conception of serialism as ever-expanding, open-ended, means that many of his works remain in this state – requires more immanent attention. The spatial element is crucial: we hear solo lines but also different groups: three groups, considered vertically, each of percussion, harp, and piano, and, considered horizontally, the three percussionists, the three harpists, and the three pianists. A startling aspect of the latter formations is to hear passages transferring spatially across, say, the three pianos, whilst remaining in a sense part of the one giant piano, played, as it were, by the conductor. It is as if Boulez plays with a musical magical square, three rows and columns constantly shifting, and yet always adding up to the required total, even if we do not know what that should be. Then there are the beguiling sonorities: Boulez offers harmonies of Debussyan – again, one might say, post-Wagnerian – sumptuousness. Listen also for the Romantic tinge to the piano writing; Boulez has long admired the expansion of the instrument’s capabilities by composers such as Liszt and Chopin. A kinetic, rhythmic energy brings to mind Stravinsky and Bartók. Indeed, that distancing from the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion notwithstanding, Bartók’s ghost seems present in some of the piano writing, contagious for the other instrumentalists. Despite the sense – and, perhaps for some of us, the desire – that this universe might continue expanding forever, its material in perpetual proliferation, the conclusion, whose surprise I shall not reveal, proves decisive. At least for now.

‘Austro-German’ Symphonism and ‘National Style’: Synthesis and Originality

Holy Roman Empire, 1789

(This essay was first published as a programme note for the Salzburg Festival, 2015)

FRANZ SCHUBERT • Overture “in the Italian Style” in D, D. 590

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART • Symphony No. 38 in D, K. 504, “Prague” Symphony
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN • Symphony No. 2 in D, Op. 36

Bright open strings, trumpets, drums: such are the stereotypical associations of orchestral works in D major, perhaps especially during the Baroque and Classical periods. Schubert’s D major Overture was the first of two such works he composed ‘in the Italian style’, although that tag was not Schubert’s own, added after the event by his brother, Ferdinand. At any rate, the influence of Rossini – also to be felt in the composer’s Sixth Symphony, on which he began work in 1817, the same year that he wrote these overtures – is the reason, although such influence can readily be exaggerated, and often has. There is certainly a Rossinian surface to the work, especially in its orchestral crescendo, doubtless inspired by the first performances of Rossini operas in Vienna the previous year; nevertheless, form remains typical of ‘early’ Schubert. Both he and Rossini, of course, owed a good deal to Mozart. If the prominence of the woodwind might suggest Rossini, it might equally be a nod to Mozartian Harmoniemusik, or it might simply be characteristic of Schubert. Likewise, one might hear Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in the transitional repeated notes between opening Adagio and the main Allegro giusto, or one might simply think of the way paved for Schubert’s later symphonies. There is certainly much ‘Viennese’ charm, not so characteristic of either Rossini or Beethoven, and a good deal to compare with Schubert’s later writing, not least his music for Rosamunde. Accented notes are characteristic; so are the introduction’s modulations. The coda, moreover, may be heard to offer presentiments of the ‘Great’ C major Symphony. Whether ‘Italian’, ‘Austrian’, or simply Schubert, the Overture is a splendid curtain-raiser – fully worthy of hearing, especially in an age such as ours, in which concert overtures have become strangely unfashionable.

‘Nationality’ is, according to inclination, either a fraught or a supremely irrelevant issue for Mozart and his music. Was he ‘Austrian’? Only in an anachronistic sense, for Salzburg would not become part of Austria until 1805, and then initially only for four years. ‘German’? That is how he tended to describe himself, as did many others within the Holy Roman Empire: in many respects, more a (frustratingly slow) legal system than a state, whose crown Joseph II declared only to be worthwhile on account of the troops it brought him. Prague was generally considered just as much a ‘German’ city as Vienna, and it was, famously, a source of great happiness to Mozart. But there was nothing narrowly nationalistic to his works for that city or elsewhere; Don Giovanni and the ‘Prague’ Symphony owed a great deal to Italianate models too. Indeed, a hallmark of eighteenth-century German cultural identity was its proud, cosmopolitan receptiveness to varied styles; and Vienna remained a celebrated haven for Italian musicians. Prague itself offered early performances of Die Zauberflöte in German in 1792, and in 1794, both in Czech and Italian. The symphony itself, however ‘German’ it was to become, derived from the Italianate opera sinfonia.

But let us return specifically to the Prague Symphony. It has been suggested, for instance by Daniel E. Freeman, that the lack of a minuet and trio, and thus the symphony’s three-movement form, was a nod to Prague; it is certainly at odds both with Mozart’s and Vienna’s practice, and the symphonies of Mozart’s friend, Josef Mysliveček, are all in three movements. Charles Rosen, in his book, Sonata Forms, described it as ‘Mozart’s most massive achievement in the symphonic genre – a work which unites grandeur and lyricism as no other.’ Prague’s enthusiasm for Mozart’s music has often and not without reason contrasted with Vienna’s often lukewarm reception. The warmth of its reception for Le nozze di Figaro may have emboldened the composer, as it certainly would in the case of Don Giovanni, to write one of his more complex, profound creations. We do not know specifically ‘why’ it was written, but intention for Prague is a harmless and possibly revealing myth. Completed in December 1786, the symphony was taken with him on his visit early the following year to the German-Bohemian city, in which he conducted a performance of Figaro as well as the premiere of this work. The world of opera buffa, albeit Mozart’s own dramatically heightened and darkened opera buffa, or soon-to-come Giovanni-esque dramma giocoso, haunts its pages. Mozart certainly took advantage of the renowned talents of the Prague woodwind players, his writing for that section seductively euphonious even by his own exalted standards. One of the composer’s earliest biographers, Franz Xaver Niemetschek, always proud to point to Bohemia’s affinity with the Salzburger and vice versa, pointed to Mozart having ‘judged with extreme accuracy’ in this work ‘the nature and range of all instruments … the exact time and place to make his effect,’ resulting in ‘the admiration of all experts’.

A lengthy slow introduction to the first movement signals its weight: child to the Sturm und Drang and father to Beethoven’s ‘expansion’ of symphonic form. Mozart’s own symphonic sonata form is arguably deepened further by its incorporation of elements of the ritornello form familiar from the composer’s piano concertos. Counterpoint and harmony, as so often in mature Mozart, stand in a relationship which, often depending on performance style, may suggest either the most perfect balance or the most daring dialectic – or both. It is counterpoint, born both of Mozart’s recent immersion in works by Bach and Handel and of his experience of earlier, ‘Austrian’ composers such as Fux, which holds the key to connection between the profusion of melodic figures, unusual even by Mozart’s standards. They appear first in turn in the exposition, like characters in an opera, then entwine, Figaro-like, in ensemble, always, as in his symphonies and operas alike, under the benign, dynamic goal-orientation of his tonal choices. Combinations present themselves anew, answering to the musico-dramatic requirements of the moment: ever-fresh, ever-surprising, ever-convincing. As H.C. Robbins Landon once observed, truthfully if with exaggeration, Haydn surprises us with the unexpected; Mozart surprises us with the expected.

The slow movement is, typically for Mozart, written in the subdominant, G major. Its compound duple (6/8) meter permits all manner of sinuous chromatic deepening, both melodic and harmonic. Quicksilver shifts, here and in the finale, between major and minor, remind us once again of Mozart’s operatic stage and his ability to smile through tears. The finale may have been written first of all; some scholars believe it was originally intended as a replacement finale for the Paris Symphony, KV 297/300a. Mozart’s world of dramma giocoso returns, woodwind once again cast their magic spell, busy Presto syncopations hurtling towards the joyous final affirmation of D major. Darker worlds, darker forces, have been summoned up during the Andante and cannot be forgotten, but Classical tonality will still permit cheerful, though certainly not blithe or uncaring, resolution.

If the Prague Symphony marked significant expansion of symphonic scope and form, so too of course did Beethoven’s symphonic arrival – and not just in his Third Symphony, the so-called Eroica. It is understandable that his first two symphonies are often compared to Mozart and Haydn, but they have their own character, and could certainly not be mistaken for the work of anyone else. They too have their elements of international ‘synthesis’, although by this stage in musical history, we are, rightly or wrongly, far more likely to think of compositional ‘originality’ – a Romantic concept of ‘genius’ if ever there were one – rather than ‘influence’ upon its creator. Interestingly, Rosen mentions the work with the utmost brevity in Sonata Forms, simply in terms of its influence upon Schubert, and not at all in The Classical Style. Yet, as Sir Donald Tovey remarked, ‘Beethoven’s Second Symphony was evidently larger and more brilliant than any that had been heard up to 1801.’

The first movement also opens with a slow introduction, but it tends more towards Haydn’s example than Mozart’s; as Tovey again noted, ‘it is Haydn’s way to begin his introduction, after a good coup d’archet with a broad melody fit for an independent slow movement.’ Duly imposing chords, such as we have heard from both Schubert and Mozart, are responded to in melting – ‘feminine’, to employ the idiom of nineteenth-century musical criticism – fashion. If we remain in the mood for ‘influence’, then we might also find Haydn’s in the first theme of the exposition proper. It is certainly no melody ‘in the Italian style’ but a typically ‘Germanic’ motivic building-block, yet one whose various components may be taken apart, expanded, in a word ‘developed’. Both tonal world and motivic material, then, are ripe for exploration; so is the young, although not so very young, Beethoven. The eruption of the coda certainly looks forward to any number of Romantic successors, though Beethoven not so much obscures as renders sublimely irrelevant the dualism of ‘Classical or Romantic’.

The Larghetto, according to Tovey, ‘one of the most luxurious slow movements in the world,’ offers warmth and soulfulness with an Innigkeit that seems, at least in retrospect, as ‘German’ as the composer from Bonn who yet settled in Vienna. Chamber music writ large pays homage to the Classical divertimento, so does Beethoven’s unusually Mozartian profligacy of melodic material. The scherzo, the very idea of such a movement not the least of Beethoven’s innovations, is small, yet utterly typical in its concision and tension, and downright explosive quality. Its trio may relax, yet it offers dialectical struggle too: not least between post-Mozartian Harmoniemusik – of a very different variety from Schubert’s, yet doubtless with that common root – and a dazzling whirlwind vortex of proto-Romantic string-writing. The rondo finale has Beethoven’s gruff humour propelled by that ‘goal orientation’ which has been the hallmark of symphonism, and, in its denial, anti-symphonism ever since. Not for nothing did Stravinsky, perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest foe of the Classical-Romantic German ‘synthesis’, construct his æsthetic upon denial of Beethoven and Wagner; not for nothing, however, did he re-admit Beethoven to his pantheon when composing his Symphony in C.

‘Dialectical Games’: The Piano Music of Pierre Boulez

(This essay was first published as a programme note for the Salzburg Festival, 2015. The works in question were performed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich.) 

PIERRE BOULEZ

Notations

Sonata for piano, no.1
Sonata for piano, no.2
Sonata for piano, no.3

·         Constellation-Miroir

·         Trope

Incises
une page d’éphéméride
Structures for two pianos: Livre II

Notations is the earliest of Boulez’s piano works to have been published and thus acknowledged. Written during his time in Messiaen’s composition class, the Notations were given to Boulez’s fellow pupil and friend, Serge Nigg, and long thought lost. Their polemical intent is certainly a harbinger of things to come. Already impatient with ‘orthodox’ dodecaphony, as personified in Paris by René Leibowitz, a pupil of Webern, Boulez decided to satirise what he – interestingly, not entirely unlike Stravinsky – saw as a ‘mania for twelves’. And so, he composed twelve piano pieces, each based upon a twelve note-row, each twelve bars long.

Satire aside, much engages the ear. One hears ‘influences’, to be sure, but also the beginnings of paths that were not to be taken up, and also, most intriguingly, hints of things to come – which may fruitfully be pursed in a concert such as this, in which we hear the published œuvre. Readily apparent is the delight in the music of Debussy (no.8 might almost be a mini-Prélude composed by a Debussy returned from the dead in the 1940s), that of Bartók (no.7 in particular), and, in the nature of the piano writing, the Schoenberg of the op.11 Three Pieces. There is a crucial tension already to be heard between freedom and determinism, here most strongly in contrasts between individual pieces, for instance between the post-Debussyan ‘vagueness’ of no.9 (‘Lointain – calme’) and the  mechanisation of no.10 (‘Mécanique et très sec’). The stillness of the ninth offers, at least in retrospect, a foretaste in miniature, of the slow movement of the Second Sonata, its air as rare and bracing as that of a mountain lake.

The First Sonata came first though, a two-movement work written in 1946, roughly contemporary with the Sonatine for flute and piano. As with the Notations, one hears small, musical cells, readily grasped by the ear even on a first hearing, but there is greater scope for development. ‘Dialectical games’ – a telling description Pierre-Laurent Aimard has employed – between different types of material thrill and beguile, often simultaneously. ‘Freedom’ is always relative, indeed controlled, in Boulez’s music, even in subsequent, ‘aleatory’ form, such as we shall hear in the Third Sonata. Nevertheless, freer material comes into musical, productive conflict with a toccata-like strand in the composer’s piano writing we shall hear further unleashed in Incises. The second movement offers sinuous serial process, perhaps already pointing, if ambivalently, to Boulez’s later attraction towards the music of Berg – whose desire for ‘reconciliation’, especially in late works such as the Violin Concerto and Lulu, the young composer, ‘like a lion who has been flayed alive’ (Messiaen) still suspected of reactionary backsliding. Anger towards such tendencies is still, however, more apparent, than reconciliation. The final six bars alone offer a perpetuo moto across almost the entirety of the keyboard, stretching dynamically from pp to ff to fff with further violent accents, to a long pause, followed by a relatively rare five-note final chord, marked ‘arpèger très brutal et très sec’. This is not music for the fainthearted.

Nor, by any standards, is the Second Sonata, still Boulez’s most celebrated work for the instrument. Completed in 1948, it is a still angrier, still more ambitious, still more ‘achieved’ work – and a ‘work’ it is in the most emphatic sense. Confronting not only his more immediate forebears, but the example of Beethoven himself in his Hammerklavier Sonata, op.106, Boulez’s task is to destroy the very idea of the Classical sonata. Not the least of his reproaches for the twelve-note Schoenberg was the Austrian composer’s recourse to old forms, furthered by his increasing closeness to Brahms, never a figure of whom Boulez has thought especially fondly, despite occasional performances of his music. Yet perspective changes over time; new generations of performers can hear things that others did not think were there – and perhaps were not, at the time. It is ironic, then, that, according to one distinguished contemporary exponent of the sonata, the pianist and conductor, Michael Wendeberg, ‘the second sonata is to the first, you could say, as Brahms is to Mozart. The piano score is richer, using the entire pitch range; furthermore, the rhythmical structures are decidedly more complex, and the polyphony is more clearly brought out.’

Heard immediately after the First Sonata, the first movement can impart a sense of continuing, deepening exploration. Aspiration to – and at the same time, dialectial denial of – post-Messiaenesque melody is integrated into a structure of disintegrating Beethovenian sonata form. Freedom and mechanism: that dialectic apparent between Notations is here present within, indeed propels, the progress of a single movement. The close is both confirmation and as surprise. In the slow movement, Boulez’s parenthetical method, still more crucial to the Third Sonata, comes to the fore, an almost Wagnerian conception of ‘endless melody’, itself of course a conception reliant upon Romantic reception of Beethoven, increasingly disrupted, even annulled, by lengthening interjections and eruptions.  The third movement might justly be considered the work’s scherzo; ‘presque vif’, (almost lively) cautions against too straightforward a Beethovenian understanding. Disintegration, even Terror, is the post-Robespierrian order of the day in the finale. The Hammerklavier’s all-encompassing fugue may or may not be deliberately parodied, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the sparks sent flying by furious piling up of post-Webern shards are not part of the crossfire as Boulez’s own, slower, perhaps underlying fugue meets its very different fate. The post-war avant-garde’s insistence upon a ‘Year Zero’ following the horrors of the Second World War may have been unhistorical, impossible, but it helps account for the rage we so often discover in its earlier works. An almost Bergian synthesis seems briefly within reach, yet is never achieved. If the final, slow section cannot reconcile, in a fine performance, it will speak, even sing: the song of aftershock.

Boulez’s Third Sonata remains, like a good number of his works, a work-in-progress. Work began in 1955. The premiere was given by the composer at Darmstadt in 1957. Boulez outlines the intended circular structure of the work – four ‘Formants’, of which ‘Trope’ is the only one to have been published, encircling a central ‘Constellation’, also to be mirrored (‘Constellation-miroir)’ – in an article whose title knowingly echoes Fontenelle’s celebrated question, ‘Sonate, que me veux-tu?’ (Sonata, what do you want of me?) The two movements heard this evening were published in 1962 and 1963; there are numerous sketches for what may follow at the Paul Sacher Foundation. As Peter O’Hagan has pointed out, in his 1998 consideration of the materials, ‘A central concern is the integration of serial organisation on a local level with large-scale structure.’ ‘Trope’, when performed as here, with ‘Constellation-miroir’, will follow it; it would precede ‘Constellation’.

Reconstruction, then, following the scorched earth of the Second Sonata? Yes, although certainly not reversion. The pianist must make choices concerning the very ordering of the music, Boulez here attracted by the idea of a maze or labyrinth, a matter of finding one’s way in the heat of the moment – although the chosen path through the labyrinth and, by extension, even the moment itself, must, by virtue of the work’s complexity, actually be prepared beforehand. A linear path, a vertical one, something else? (Ideally, then, one would hear at least two different performances back-to-back. Ideally, though, we might have the ‘complete work’ too!) The ‘openness’ of Boulez’s Mallarmé- and Joyce-inspired ‘Livre’ faces dialectical assault from a post-pontillistic style still acknowledging the early 1950s’ high-watermark of total serialism. Even, perhaps particularly, as a work-in-progress, Boulez certainly achieves his desire to ‘jettison the concept of a work as a simple journey starting with a departure and ending with an arrival’. It also reflects upon itself as a musical work, as Joyce’s two great novels reflect upon themselves as novels – and it does that not simply as part of the composer’s ‘intention’. In a 1988 interview with Peter McCallum, Boulez avowed: ‘Yes … I will finish it, certainly one of these days, because I conceived it as a total, global architecture, and now there are only two doors instead of five. I feel obliged to make a complete five movements.’

If most of Boulez’s solo piano works come from the earlier part of his career, then Incises and une page d’éphéméride qualify as ‘late’ works. At a safer distance, the composer seems more willing – and able – to offer a rapprochement to the sonorities and perhaps even to the harmonies of twentieth-century composers: not only Debussy and Ravel (Gaspard, surely, in Incises) but even Schoenberg too. Once more, the toccata is the thing, as is a taste for decoration, for ornamentation, even for proliferation, we might even trace back to earlier French composers such as Couperin and Rameau – whose music Boulez has occasionally conducted. The material of Incises is derived from Répons, whose antiphonal structure it also shares, slow sections punctuating the toccata material. une page d’éphéméride seems perhaps to open a new path, which may or may not be taken up, its bell-like tones at the same time harking back to one of the Notations; at any rate, it was intended as the first piece in a new cycle for piano.

Finally, Structures. Boulez had partly intended to teach Messiaen a total ‘serialist’ lesson in the first chapter of the first book, which the two composers performed together. The second book is already a considerably ‘freer’ work. Indeed, it is, perhaps above all, high drama, which reconstitutes, reworks material from the earlier work. Artaud-like frenzy, familiar from the Second Sonata in particular, remains, extends; decision-making from the Third is also with us. Watch – and listen – for decisions signalled by one player to another and then responded to (or not). These, again, are ‘dialectical games’. The music incorporates rather than moves beyond earlier serialism; at the same time, its shows something new. Perhaps most intriguingly of all, we know that the free and determined are doing battle, but are unsure which is which. Identity, perhaps, is not the point. To quote Andrew Infanti, ‘fixity becomes a governing principle frequently attacked by the musical matter it devises to control.’ An ever-expanding universe of serial possibilities – and clashes – is musically and visually dramatised.

Proms Saturday Matinée 4: London Sinfonietta/Fischer - Boulez, Grime, and Mason, 29 August 2015

Cadogan Hall

Boulez – Mémoriale (‘…explosante-fixe…’ Originel)

Helen Grime – A Cold Spring

Boulez – Domaines

Christian Mason – Open to Infinity: A Grain of Sand (United Kingdom premiere)

Boulez – Eclats/Multiples

Michael Cox (flute)

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

London Sinfonietta

Thierry Fischer (conductor)

 

And so, the Proms celebration of Pierre Boulez’s music drew to a close. I have previously lamented the lack of Répons, but otherwise, we have much for which to be grateful. Here, three of Boulez’s works were interspersed with works by two admiring young British composers, Helen Grime and Christian Mason.

First up was Mémoriale, hot on the heels of the Albert Hall performance of …explosante-fixe.... It was interesting to hear the two works in close succession, not least since that experience offered a reminder that the ear can sometimes play tricks: is one hearing electronic sounds or not? Clearly not on this occasion, but I might have guessed so, had I not known otherwise. The flute’s trills, the general contours: all were quite familiar by now; yet of course, they sounded different in a different performance (Michael Cox first among London Sinfonietta equals) and in a very different acoustic, that of Cadogan Hall. The ensemble here seemed to offer something of an aural shadow, reminiscent perhaps of Dialogue de l’ombre double. Boulez’s short piece sounded somewhere in between, or rather somewhere beyond, Debussy and Stravinsky, mediated by hints of the Bergian labyrinth. The horns’ final dying away into nothingness was not the least magical moment.

Helen Grime, in conversation with Tom Service, said how struck she had been, even at music college, by Boulez’s ear for harmony and colour. Her ear is formidable too, in no sense replicating, but happy to admit inspiration. The three movements of A Cold Spring (after a poem by Elizabeth Bishop) offer highly virtuosic writing, each having a featured solo instrument or pair of soloists. The first opens teeming with melody, as if paying updated homage to The Rite of Spring, albeit very much in its own voice. I thought also of Schoenberg – a work such as the First Chamber Symphony – in its melodic profusion, although I am unsure whether such associations are merely my affair. The stiller, second movement (‘Calmo’) brought to me a colouristic hint or two of Birtwistle, perhaps a hint too of a melancholy not entirely dissimilar to his. Dark bass lines (cello and double bass) seem to colour the invention above. Calmness is transformed into something else, prior to a final enchantment, blessed, so it seemed, by all instruments, but perhaps especially the harp. The transition to the third movement is led by the double bass, that movement itself sounding very much as a development of what has gone before, not least in its darkness – melody and harmony, as well as its instrumentation.

In Domaines, the number six is prevalent: the clarinettist, here the excellent Mark van de Wiel, plays from six different stands, each with an original page and a ‘mirror’ thereof, each of those twelve pages having six musical fragments, thus totalling seventy-two in all, ranging in length from forty seconds or so to – temporally speaking, at least – little more than the twinkling of an eye. The collision, navigated by the performer, between ritual theatre and a single instrument’s kaleidoscopic array of colours is not the least of the piece’s claims to drama. And that particular instrument, the clarinet, perhaps inevitably has one listen – and, indeed, watch – mindful of kinship with Birtwistle. Indeed, I could not help but think there was something, whether coincidental or otherwise, of Punch and Judy, albeit suaver, to this performance. One would certainly never have guessed the textual complexity of this assemblage of ‘single’ lines in a performance of such  mesmerising musical theatre. Was Boulez’s aspiration – sorry, not in the Liz Kendall sense – to unendliche Melodie even at this stage perhaps born of Wagner (Parsifal at Bayreuth)? And/or Pelléas? Every so often, there seemed also to be an instrumental, even melodic, reminder of Webern. At any rate, score and performance seemed endlessly generative. The idea of ‘mirrors’ offered other, French resonances, whether with respect to Ravel or even old, Baroque ‘doubles’. One could hear, or fancy one heard, such connections, but this was above all Boulez’s own path, the performer’s, and the listener’s.

Open to Infinity: A Grain of Sand (the title, I assume, inspired by Blake) is the second of Christian Mason’s works dedicated to Boulez, and intended as a tribute. As Mason put it, all three movements were as yet at the ‘grain of sand’ stage, but were open to expansion: a highly Boulezian conception. (Boulez acted as mentor to him at Lucerne.) Another nod to Boulez lies in the use by all fourteen players of crotales, intended as a reference to Le Visage nuptial. In each movement, one can hear, even in a first encounter, the varied working out of the same pitch material (almost Berg-like in its audible presence).  The éclat of the first, ‘In a Grain of Sand’, though it could not be mistaken for Boulez, could certainly be heard as homage. The second, ‘In a Wild Flower’, has almost jazzy inflections: perhaps a touch, dare I suggest it, of Boulez’s would-be antipode, Henze? Whatever the truth of that, there is certainly revealed a keen ear for colour and its relationship to rhythm (which, I admit, could equally be inspired by the orchestral Notations: pure speculation on my part). Dramatically insistent figures characterise the third, ‘In the Palm of Your Hand’, with the London Sinfonietta offering, in a true array of colours, all the performative commitment one would expect.

Eclats/Multiples depends upon split-second decisions from the conductor, not the first and certainly not the last of Boulez’s insistence on the importance of performance. It certainly received a splendid performance from the Sinfonietta and Thierry Fischer. The opening piano éclat announced its Messiaenic inheritance; hearing John Constable, one could almost imagine the ghost of Yvonne Loriod. Such resonances, even echoes, again began to make their own way, however: to construct, perhaps even to destroy, and to suggest further creative-destructive connections (whether thinking of the Second Piano Sonata or the endlessly misquoted interview with Der Spiegel). The illusion and the construction of line familiar from Domaines took on new life in ensemble. The ‘pointillism’ of 1950s serialism has generally been exaggerated, give or take an odd Stockhausen piece; this seemed an object lesson in compositional and performative constructivism from the following decade. (Just, one might say, as in Boulez’s conducting of Webern.) It was a joy to meet in new garb old aural friends from the world of Le Marteau sans maître: to know, with hindsight, where they might lead – or not. Why is this wonderful work not more often performed?

 

Prom 57: Pires/COE/Haitink - Schubert and Mozart, 28 August 2015

Royal Albert Hall

Schubert – Overture in C major, ‘in the Italian Style’, D 591

Mozart – Piano Concerto no.23 in A major, KV 488
Schubert – Symphony no.9 in C major, ‘Great’, D 944

Maria João Pires (piano)

Chamber Orchestra of Europe

Bernard Haitink (conductor)

Images: Copyright BBC/Chris Christoudoulou

 

 

Bernard Haitink and the Chamber Orchestra presented what will surely be remembered as one of this season’s finest Proms. Not perfect, although it certainly was not far off in the second half, but an experience of such unforced and unshowy, wise and lively musicianship that only someone predisposed not to do so would not have come away buoyed by that experience.

 

Schubert’s C major ‘Italian’ Overture – there are two, the other in D major – is not amongst his finest works, but it has enough that is characteristic and indeed enough that is fun to merit the occasional outing. Above all, it is what it says: an overture, a genre which seems to have become strangely unfashionable. (In part, that is a consequence of a welcome rediscovery of other ways to programme an orchestral concert than overture-concerto-symphony; that seems, however, to have left some with the idea, triumphantly refuted in this concert, that overture-concerto-symphony is no longer an option, or is somehow intrinsically unimaginative.) The introduction took us quickly from Mozart to Rossini (well, sort of: that can be exaggerated) to Schubert. Ersatz Rossini reinstated in the exposition proper reminded me of the work of both Claudio Abbado and Maurizio Pollini with this wonderful orchestra in its early years, although, especially in Haitink’s hands, Schubert could not help but shine through. Harmonies, key relationships, even rhythm (looking forward to the ‘Great’ C major Symphony) announced kinship clearly, an not only with the composer’s ‘Italianate’ Sixth Symphony. The COE proved spruce, vernal; woodwind playing, unsurprisingly, offered many highlights. And yes, there was more of a sense of the theatre than one tends to find in Schubert’s own opera overtures.

 

Haitink opted for a very small orchestra for Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto: eight first violins down to three double basses. Especially during a slightly bland first movement, I could not help but wish for a little more, not least given the notorious acoustic of the Royal Albert Hall. Occasional ‘period’ mannerisms intruded, but only slightly: over-emphatic slurring of quavers from the violins, for instance. Compared to most of what we must put up with nowadays, it was almost nothing, but it seemed a pity, allied to slightly thin string tone in the opening tutti. The orchestra sounded fuller following the entry of Maria João Pires. She offered beautifully shaded playing: never fussy, let alone mannered. There was great clarity too, not least, crucially, when it came to her left-hand. And yet, beautiful though this was, the performance, in this movement anyway, never quite seemed to engage with Mozart’s greatest emotional depths, all of which are where. It was not all surface, by any means; but nor did it move to tears, at least in my case.

 

 

Mozart’s unfathomable depths are perhaps still more readily apparent in the slow movement. Here, both soloist and orchestra were much readier to explore them. The COE’s Harmoniemusik was exquisite, with the lightest direction – yet one imagined it made all the difference – from Haitink. Pires treated the music as if it were an aria, that ‘as if’ crucial: a singer can hardly sing an aria as if it were one, but a pianist can suggest with her playing, and did. Her evenness of tone was a thing of wonder. So were, for example, the bassoon duets which, more than once, caught my ears. Ineffable sadness, lightly worn, characterised the close. Papapeno put in a guest appearance, as he must, in the finale. Again, the COE woodwind were simply ravishing. That treacherous bassoon line at the opening – I remember a bassoonist in my college orchestra unsuccessfully pleading with me, as soloist, to take the movement even a little slower – was despatched as if the easiest thing in the world. Mozart must never, but never, sound difficult. Episodes had their own character and were seamlessly integrated, as if without effort. There were, perhaps, times when a little greater dynamic range would not have gone amiss, but this was otherwise quite delightful.

 

I was fortunate enough to hear a great Schubert ‘Great’ from the Vienna Philharmonic and Daniel Barenboim earlier this year. Ultimately, if I had to choose, I should opt to experience that again, but that is more a matter of Furtwänglerian personal taste than of æsthetic judgement. I can safely say that I have been privileged to hear two great performances in 2015, that art is not, thank God, yet subject to ‘league tables, and that I should thus count myself doubly fortunate. Whereas Barenboim had opened in unforgettable, darkly Wagnerian fashion, Haitink’s first movement introduction – more to the point, perhaps, his first horn, Chris Parkes – had no hint of the portentous; indeed, that opening was almost, but not quite, fragile. The COE, as one would have expected, fielded a smallish orchestra, albeit larger than that for the Mozart: strings, I think, 12:10:8:6:4. This was a performance which certainly did not avoid the darker corners of Schubert’s score, but nor did it dwell upon them. Balance was perhaps the watchword, offering a conception of the composer which perhaps placed him, rather than Beethoven, as Mozart’s most obvious heir – or rather, the most obvious heir of a particular conception of Mozart, such as we had heard earlier. The life we heard in the inner parts was reason enough to celebrate such a conception; brass gently yet unmistakeably reminded us that life necessarily entails death. And, wonder of wonders in these ‘authenticke’ times, although Haitink’s initial tempo had been on the fast side, there was an accelerando to come to the exposition proper. (The idea of anything approaching ‘authenticity’ with respect to a work never performed during the composer’s lifetime is more than usually absurd, but let us leave such irrelevances where they deserve to be left.) Having made that Mozartian comparison, I should add that there were differences too. The strings were far more willing, rather as I wish they had been earlier, really to dig in, often belying their numbers, whilst retaining the transparency those numbers probably aided. Haitink’s development section was fresh with the spirit of adventure, always so keen with this orchestra, and, in the quieter passages, harmonic mystery too. The recapitulation sounded, quite rightly, as exploratory as if it were formally a second development. The coda did not – could not – have the cataclysmic import Barenboim and the VPO had brought to it, but proved triumphant in its own, more modest, way.

 

 

The slow movement – yes, I know some people do not like it to be called that, but who cares? – was as fresh as expected, without downplaying stern intrusions, which truly exuded menace. The world of melancholic song was never far away either. Indeed, as mentioned, above, balance, in an almost Abbado-like way, seemed to be Haitink’s watchword. Lengths were truly heavenly; I wished it might have gone on forever. Style, vigour and, yes, song characterised the scherzo, equally well balanced between such apparently competing tendencies. There was a sense of conversation between the musicians such as one might have expected from a great string quartet. By the same token, the movement’s stature, which one almost inevitably, however misleadingly, is tempted to call Beethovenian, shone through. So, however, did feather-light, yet equally goal-orientated Mendelssohnian presentiments. We could dream, even after Midsummer. The sheer scale naturally also had one think of Bruckner, although Bruckner could surely never have summoned up such lightness and ease. The trio was just as lovingly detailed, very much with its own character, all too easily categorised as ‘rustic’. Not that there was nothing ‘Austrian’ to it, but it should not, could not, be reduced to the realm of the Heuriger, however inviting. Haitink unfailingly shaped and communicated the contours of the finale, having one almost believe that the music was speaking ‘for itself’; as ever, art concealed art. There was much that so poignant in melody and harmony, perhaps all the more so for the lack of heavy underlining. That pair of oboes brought a tear to my eye, as did moments of Mendelssohnian magic – put to other ends. The final blaze of glory was, again, quite different in character, as it had to be, from that which Barenboim had engendered. There was, of course, no need to choose. Magnificent!    

The Medium/The Wanton Sublime, Grimeborn Festival, 27 August 2015

Studio 2, Arcola Theatre

Hai-Ting Chinn (mezzo-soprano)

Orpheus Sinfonia

Andrew Griffiths (conductor)

Robert Shaw (director)

Gillian Argo (designs)
Tom White (lighting)

What an evening for Hai-Ting Chinn, taking the starring and indeed only role not only in Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Medium but also in Tarik O’Regan’s The Wanton Sublime, here receiving its first European performances! She must have been on stage for not far short of an hour and a half, singing for most of that time. I was a little surprised to hear her described as a mezzo; to my ears, she sounded much more of a soprano. What was not in doubt, however, was her accomplishment as a singing actress; nor, indeed, her accomplishment as a vocalist, not least in the unaccompanied Medium, written for Jane Manning. Called upon to alternate between Sprechgesang, rapid coloratura, hymn singing, and much else besides, Chinn managed both to remain in control and to convey meaning. A more ‘conventionally’ sung part in O’Regan’s work nevertheless offered plenty of opportunity for development, within its relatively short duration; much was made, capitalising upon Gillian Argo’s necessarily spare yet telling designs, of the conflict between different aspects of Mary’s – yes, the Virgin’s: ‘I am a virgin’ – character.

Davies’s work, if perhaps a little over-extended, presents a welcome continuation, albeit from a female standpoint, of some of the preoccupations of the slightly earlier The Lighthouse. Theology, religious fanaticism, fraudulent representation and self-representation, even some of the downright insanity of the composer’s earlier work: they co-exist, conflict, even fuse in a largely compelling three-quarters of an hour. The voices in the medium’s head whose urgings she feels compelled to act out, almost to give birth to, offer an intriguing ‘period’ lace introduction to the contemporary – New York, I presume – reimagining of Mary as Virgin in an equally uncomprehending world of The Wanton Sublime. Undressing and re-dressing (in what, before its obliteration before over-use and misuse, one might once have called ‘iconic’ blue), more of a sexual being than she is generally given credit for, this Mary has much to intrigue, although Anna Rabinowitz’s libretto perhaps tries a little too hard to be ‘streetwise’. O’Regan’s score, expertly played by the Orpheus Sinfonia (violin, viola, cello, double bass, flute/piccolo, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, two on percussion) under Andrew Griffiths, progresses alternately by angular, but not too angular, action passages and frozen, more melismatic passages of reflection. There is thus perhaps something filmic to what we hear as well as to what we see. Recorded voices – Mary’s own – surface too: largely confirming, but perhaps also questioning. Much to ponder, then, from a fascinating evening at the Grimeborn Festival.

 

Prom 55: SWR SO Baden-Baden and Freiburg/Roth - Boulez, Ligeti, and Bartók, 26 August 2015

Royal Albert Hall

Boulez – …explosante-fixe…

Ligeti – Lontano
Bartók – Concerto for Orchestra

Sophie Cherrier (flute)

SWR Experimental Studio (live electronics)

SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg

François-Xavier Roth (conductor) 

 

First, …explosante-fixe…, one of the Boulez works I had yet to hear this anniversary year, although I have heard its Originel seed more than once, and shall do again this weekend at a Proms Matinée. Sophie Cherrier, whom I had most recently heard in stunning Salzburg Festival performances of Répons, joined SWR forces, including flautists Dagmar Becker and Anne Romeis, under François-Xavier Roth. Cherrier proved as commanding and as malleable a soloist as one would have expected, her flautist supporters just as impressive. It is an exquisite work(-in-progress) and received an exquisite performance from all concerned, certainly not forgetting the SWR Experimental Studio. If I felt slightly dissatisfied, it was that my seat – too far to one side? – did not really permit the electronics to resound, to incite as they might have done. Rather to my surprise, the Royal Albert Hall seemed to work less well than the Queen Elizabeth Hall had in 2011 for a mesmerising performance from John Cox, the London Sinfonietta, and Péter Eötvös. Still, the ‘exquisite labyrinth’, to borrow from the title given to that South Bank series, of Boulez’s music retained its fascination, its post-Debussyan seduction, and the intangible yet surely present ‘modern classicism’ Arnold Whittall has identified as a key component of Boulez’s later style. Form created itself just as sonorities seemed to do so; if only the setting had been a little more ideal.

 

Ligeti’s Lontano was given its first performance by this orchestra at Donaueschingen in 1967. A beautifully judged performance from an orchestra of at least Mahlerian forces was notable for its subtle transformations; more than once, the word Klangfarbenmelodie came to mind, without Ligeti’s procedures being reducible to the practice of either Schoenberg or Webern. Indeed, as something equating to a tone poem, the work – and performance – offered sepulchral brass with more than a hint of Wagner and Strauss. Harmonics suggested electronic means that were not present, even perhaps an organ (such as might also have been suggested in …explosante-fixe…). Swarming violins reminded us of the Ligeti of the previous decade, whilst also making clear the development in his style. That (almost) imperceptible polyphony to which Ligeti himself drew attention did its wondrous work: ‘its harmonic effect represents the intrinsic musical action: what is on the page is polyphony, but what is heard is harmony.’ Hell, however, is too good for the person who took a telephone call as the piece drew to its close, music shading into silence.

 

Roth’s way – and the orchestra’s – with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra gave one of the most intriguing performances I have heard of the work, perhaps the most intriguing, at least since I last heard Boulez conduct it. The opening of the first movement stated its affinity with Bluebeard’s Castle as strongly and yet, quite properly, as ambiguously as I can recall. Both the bass line and those shivering, trembling lines above made that connection and also reminded us of Lontano. Throughout, this was a performance one might file under ‘modernist’, but that description raises more questions than it asks. It was more mysterious than Boulez, more internationalist than the stereotypical ‘Hungarian’ performances one often hears. Above all, it told its own story with its own means. Subtle inflections, be they of instrumental colour, texture, or rhythm, were to the fore. One was drawn in rather than the victim of a Solti scream. Even at the louder end of the dynamic spectrum, employed relatively sparingly, gradations were subtle, meaningful. Bartók’s startling formal ingenuity spoke for itself; or such was the illusion, as art concealed art.

 

The second movement delighted in its ‘pair play’, woodwind duetting – and other ensemble work – colourful and ever ambiguous. This was detailed, without a hint of pedantry: delightful indeed! The grave opening of the ‘Elegia’ was ‘elegiac’ indeed. Woodwind reminded us of the opening of the work and thus again of Bluebeard’s Castle, but the path taken was to be very different. This was a world of defiant passion. And how those massed strings dug in! For the anguish was undeniably musical, not something cheaply applied. One was beguiled – and unsettled. The fourth movement began very much as a counterpart to the scherzando second movement, yet just as important, announced and celebrated its own character and concerns. A brief Mahlerian moment underscored Bartók’s seriousness, providing retrospective bite to his unanswerable despatch of the banalities of Lehár and Shostakovich alike. Excitement was certainly a crucial quality to the performance of the finale, but again this was an eminently musical excitement: one was compelled to listen, to delight in an invention that is almost Haydnesque, and to admire a not entirely dissimilar humanism. The players sounded well-nigh phantasmagorical in their transformation of material and process; Roth ensured there was no breaking of musical line.

 

How sad, then, that this, the orchestra’s first performance at the Proms, a veritable triumph, will also be its last. Following reprieves in which we had foolishly placed our trust, the unforgivable forced merger with its Stuttgart sister-orchestra is to go ahead after all. Roth spoke at just the right time, many in the audience clearly unaware, but it was a forlorn announcement. Schubert, in Rosamunde guise, sounded all the more poignant as an encore.