Tallis Scholars/Phillips - Taverner, Cornysh, Browne, Tallis, and Sheppard, 2 October 2018

Cadogan Hall

Taverner: Magnificat a 6

Cornysh: Ave Maria

Browne: Stabat Mater

Tallis: Te Deum ‘for meanes’

Cornysh: Gaude virgo mater Christi

Sheppard: Jesus salvator seculi; Gaude virgo Christiphera

The Tallis Scholars

Peter Phillips (director)

In their typical non-emphatic way, the Tallis Scholars under Peter Phillips presented here a selection of English sacred music from the Eton Choirbook to Tallis. There was little to ruffle anyone’s feathers here, little in the way of overt ‘interpretation’ – certainly in a modern sense – but ample opportunity to appreciate the mastery on offer in this music, its remoteness from many of our present concerns, and some fine singing.

The evening’s full complement of fourteen singers opened with John Taverner’s six-part Magnificat, ably, convincingly reconstructed from the parts that remain. Plainsong roots were evident – that is, after all, how it opens – as was the great musical flowering, both in work and performance, from that most fertile of soil. Melismatic duetting sopranos and tenors on ‘eius’, the whole choir likewise on ‘suo’: detail was attended to without exaggeration. The greater unfolding was, unsurprisingly, the thing, however. ‘Sound’ did not especially vary; textural variety spoke for itself, Taverner’s ornate doxology culminating in a radiant ‘Amen’.

William Cornysh’s Ave Maria – not the familiar text – perhaps sounds more ‘austere’ to our modern ears, closer to its mediæval past, not least in terms of harmonic relationships. Such would hardly be surprising, given its earlier date of composition. Yet it speaks – and here, in performance, spoke – just as clearly, if differently. Just as much ‘happens’, so long as one listens. John Brown’s Stabat Mater sounded, rightly or wrongly, somewhere in between: as much, I think, a matter of programming as of material. It flowed beautifully, sadness lying in the words rather than in any Romantic, ‘emotional’ sense. Antiphonal passages – such as that between soprano and bass parts, ‘Quis non potest contristari…’ – caught the ear and, more important, returned us to experience and contemplation of the celebrated poem. Nevertheless, the cries of ‘Crucifige, crucifige’, if hardly Bachian, seemed to echo through the ages with the accumulated weight of crucified tradition.

Tallis’s Te Deum ‘for meanes’, which opened the second half, immediately sounded very much of ‘our’ Anglican tradition, even thought that requires more than a little backdating. Its English text is one thing, of course, but its directness, its interplay between ‘dec’ and ‘can’ (the two sides of the choir’), its harmony, and much else had it sound more modern than perhaps it is. One drew parallels, of course, not least points of detail – false relations, for instance – with what had gone before, but it was a different church, a different Church too, brought forth in one’s visual as well as aural imagination. Might it have been performed with a little more drama? Yes. Should it have been? Perhaps. Again, however, there was much to glean from the gentle, informed respect with which these voices and their director brought it to life.

Cornysh’s Gaude virgo mater Christi seemed to offer merely in its notes something a little more – this is highly relative – of a lament. Our conceptions of what ‘fits’ a text, however, are not necessarily those of a fifteenth-century composer. It would be mightily strange if they were. The music once again drew us in to the text, another hymn of praise to the Virgin. Two works by John Sheppard concluded the concert. The Compline alternation of chant and polyphony founded upon it in Sheppard’s Jesu salvator saeculi yielded subtle secrets, not least in the surprising – so long as one listened! – final ‘Amen’. The Marian votive antiphon, Gaude virgo Cristiphera – according to James M. Potter’s helpful booklet note, the only example we have from Sheppard – took longer, considerably longer over its words, offering a radiant sense of culmination. This, one felt, was a world of wonders almost yet not quite vanished. The more we listened, the more we shared in it: quite right too.

The encore, Purcell’s Hear my Prayer, still sounds very much ‘with us’: too much so, some might argue, accusing us of sentimentalising. So be it; those grinding dissonances implored as few harmonies can. The English Orpheus will always be with us; so too will his predecessors – as, indeed, will his successors. Why choose?

Le nozze di Figaro, Semperoper Dresden, 30 September 2018

Count Almaviva – Sebastian Wartig

Countess Almaviva – Iulia Maria Dan

Susanna – Athanasia Zöhrer

Figaro – Martin-Jan Nijhof

Cherubino – Grace Durham

Marcellina – Sabine Brohm

Bartolo – Matthias Henneberg

Don Basilio – Aaron Pegram

Barbarina – Tahnee Niboro

Don Curzio – Gerald Hupacj

Antonio – Chao Deng

Bridesmaids – Beate Apitz, Heike Liebmann

Johannes Erath (director)

Katrin Connan (set designs)

Birgit Wensch (costumes)

Noëlle Blancpain (revival director, costumes)

Fabio Antoci (lighting)

Francis Hüsers (dramaturgy)

Dancers

Saxon State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Cornelius Volke)

Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden

Kristiina Poska (conductor)

Rarely can an opera house run on full cylinders night in, night out – especially when the night before has entailed a Moses und Aron premiere. One would not necessarily expect a starry Elektra or, indeed, a starry Figaro to follow. If the performative musical side of this Marriage of Figaro rarely scaled the heights, nor was there anything truly to complain about. Sebastian Wartig’s Count came close at times, often strangely underpowered, although he marshalled his forces well at the very close. Matthias Henneberg’s Doctor Bartolo, moreover, made a strangely reticent impression in his first-act aria, not helped by Kristiina Poska’s breathless tempo, surely more suited to Rossini than to Mozart. Otherwise, Iulia Maria Dan increasingly impressed as a graceful, gracious Countess, Athanasia Zöhrer’s Susanna likewise grew in communicative character, and Grace Durham’s Cherubino came up trumps. (When was the last time you heard a Cherubino who did not?) Nevertheless, when the most memorable singing came from the Barbarina (Tahnee Niboro) and the Antonio (Chao Deng) it can hardly be accounted a vintage night in vocal terms.

Poska’s tempi were not, thank goodness, universally fast, although a brutal Overture had had me fear the worst. Some, indeed, proved slower than one might have expected, never ponderous. Given what ghastly perversities we must often endure in Mozart performance today, there was much for which to be grateful, and it is always a pleasure to hear the Staatskapelle Dresden in this music, its woodwind section here especially fine. No, it was not Sir Colin Davis – ‘Der Sir’, as this orchestra lovingly used to call him, his bust not so far more from my seat, in the First Balcony foyer – but it was a more than competent account of one of the most cruelly unsparing, cruelly familiar works in the repertoire: Kapellmeisterei in a far from negative sense, and not, I suspect, with a great deal of rehearsal.  

The problem, however, really lay with Johannes Erath’s 2015 production. It was once the case that Figaro seemed relatively director-proof; more recently, however, it seems to have proved as difficult for large houses to pull off as that notorious directorial graveyard, Don Giovanni. It may sound as if I exaggerate when I say that most of the excellent Mozart opera I have heard over the past few years has come from conservatoires, but it is genuinely the case, the Royal Academy’s 2015 Figaro a case in point. I say this not, I hope, from a reactionary standpoint. The most searching, revelatory staging of this opera I have yet to see was Claus Guth’s Strindbergian reimagining of the work for Salzburg. (Alas, Salzburg’s record in Mozart since has struggled even to reach mixed; I was relieved not to have to write for this year’s intolerably vacuous Magic Flute.) Erath tries to do something with the work, which is surely only to be applauded; any putative prize for effort, however, is immediately and, moreover, increasingly obscured by condescension, disrespect, and such tone-deafness as to have one wonder that the director began his career as a violinist.

The concept, if one may call it that, seems to be to set the first act, the second and third acts, and the fourth in different theatrical periods, with nods to their styles (or rather to their hoariest of clichés as seen, not by them, but by directors of little imagination yet much talk). The first act thus seems to nod to origins in the commedia dell’arte, but that is really nothing more than a matter of stylised (twenty-first-century stylised) costumes. The rest is mostly silliness: Figaro singing whilst his face is up Susanna’s absurdly large dress and so on. For some reason – or none – Marcellina lip synches along to much of Bartolo’s vengeance aria until she, well, stops doing so. Cherubino, pointlessly, sits on an electronically elevated table rather than hiding as he normally would. (It really is not difficult to get that scene right, although arch-mediocrity Jean-Louis Martinoty in Vienna must take the palm for having got it catastrophically wrong.) There are some interventions from stagehands, here as elsewhere splendidly executed themselves by dancers. I think, though, we need a little more – or a little less – metatheatricality than that for it to be worth our while.

The second and third acts proceed in that all-purpose ‘pop-eighteenth-century’ look favoured by directors who have no idea what to do with eighteenth-century opera: wigs with an attitude that is far fainter than their perruquiers fancy. Keyboard continuo, in itself excellently played by Sebastian Engel, moves from harpsichord to fortepiano. As we move toward the fourth and final act, textual ‘interventions’ by the director become more and more irritating, until we endure interpolations of French popular song and the removal of all secco recitative in favour of his own dialogue. All, meanwhile, lounge around the stage – generally at great distance from one another – in pyjamas. For once, it was a relief to have the ‘traditional’ cuts observed. Mozart will survive, of course; so will Lorenzo Da Ponte. But why?

Moses und Aron, Semperoper Dresden, 29 September 2018

Moses – John Tomlinson

Aron – Lance Ryan

Young Maiden – Tahnee Niboro

Sick Woman – Christa Mayer

Young Man/Naked Youth – Simeon Esper

Another Man, Ephraimite – Matthias Henneberg

Priest – Magnis Piontek

Youth – Beomjin Kim

Six Solo Voices – Katerina von Bennigsen, Stepanka Pucalkova, Michal Doron, Aaron Pegram, Jiři Rajniš, Tillmann Rönnebeck

Solo Soprano – Kira Tabatschnik

Naked Virgins – Tania Lorenzo, Tahnee Niboro, Grace Durham, Constance Heller

Elders – Woo Ran Lim, Andreas Heinze, Norbert Klesse

Calixto Bieito (director)

Rebecca Ringst (set designs)

Ingo Krügler (costumes)

Michael Bauer (lighting)

Sarah Derendinger (video)

Johann Casimir Eule (dramaturgy)

Vocalconsort Berlin, Dresden Symphony Chorus, Dresden State Opera Chorus, Extra Chorus and Children’s Chorus (chorus master: Jörn Hinnerk Andersen)

Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden

Alan Gilbert (conductor)

Images: Ludwig Olah

There is no more emphatic modernist masterpiece than Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. It stays so true to its mission that it cannot, irrespective of ‘the composer’s intention’, be completed, the very quintessence of the modernist fragment, of the ‘difficult’ work about ‘difficulty’. Its concern with the hubris of the representation leads it to a series of antinomies unflinchingly confronted, quite without evasion. Yes and no, perhaps more yes than no – and yet, perhaps even in work as well as in performance, with an undeniable element of the two. The balance may be skewed, just as it is between Moses and Aron, between truth and communication, but it is never one or the other; such would not be bad dialectics, but rather no dialectics whatsoever, and what could be less Schoenbergian than that? One can rejoice in the antinomies in the impossibilities; one can take them further. Alternatively, one can try to make something complete out of them. One will probably do both. Here, however, in an extraordinary new production from Calixto Bieito and the Semperoper Dresden, we perhaps come closer than ever to the next dialectical stage by both honouring the two-act fragment – performed, without an interval, almost as if a single, unbroken span – and, as Bieito insists both in speech and, more important, in the art and craft of stagework, by rendering it an apparently ‘complete’ artwork.

Bieito has at heart – he is assuredly a director with a great heart – always been one not only to present but also to necessitate a message of humanism. Just like Schoenberg, one might say, and these are unquestionably a composer and work for whom he has the greatest, most productive respect. He plays Moses pretty straight, but then he has never been much of one for deconstruction. (For that route, take Peter Konwitschny’s staging, which I saw in Hamburg in 2004.) The first act, then, plays itself out much as it tends generally to do, but with such attention to the detail and meaning thereof concerning the interaction between Moses, Aron, and the chorus, the Children of Israel, that even those of us who imagine we know the work reasonably well discover much that is new, not only visually, but verbally, musically too. Likewise, perhaps still more so, with the relationships between individual, group within the chorus, and the chorus as a whole (when indeed it exists as such). Here, as throughout, we see a deeply musical staging – just as, I think, we hear a deeply dramatic and indeed scenic performance. With Bieito, one never doubts that one is seeing what one should be seeing, the craft of his blocking as impressive as the enabling generosity of his vision. These people, all of them, are human beings, not symbols, whatever the complexity of their dramatic roles. Aron’s visible crises of confidence – the man behind the communicative mask – intrigue and perhaps help explain part of his later desperation to please. That and, of course, the fact that his life and the lives of others might be in danger otherwise. He is a politician, to be sure, but we are led to understand the psychology, not just the deeds, of this politician.

Which brings us properly to the second act proper. What is idolatry to us, today? That is a question any conceivable production of this work will have to ask. ‘BE GOD’ announce the video images – images, be it noted – running at the back and sides of the stage, the arena or agon for the unfolding wilderness drama. (We certainly behold, metaphysically as much as physically, a wilderness, Die Israeliten in der Wüste, as CPE Bach’s oratorio has it. JS Bach and, to a lesser extent, Handel are the most obvious eighteenth-century progenitors here, yet there is always room for more at this party, even when attended by so colossal a chorus as here.) It grows in size and then becomes ‘BE GOD YOURSELF’. Again, all the while, different, flawed human beings play their roles individually and en masse. Not unlike notes, although music is never lazily to be considered a ‘language’, the letters become objects of aesthetic contemplation – Kant? – and soon, tellingly, suggest chains rather than deliverance. What is freedom without determinism? What is an orgy without sado-masochism? The participants excitedly don 3-D-style glasses. Will they see, understand better? Who knows? They think they will; they feel that they do.

This is a Blutopfer, of course: a blood sacrifice. Words having become images, images become other images. As human bestiality – we do not need camels to traipse onstage, for the beast is within us all – manifests itself in blood and violence, video turns to hardcore pornography. We see no full bodies, although occasionally we see faces to lure us in: faces that may or may not be attached to the hairless, barely human sexual organs and emotionless, purely mechanical acts performed, ‘performance’ being both the operative word and not. (For where, ultimately, is the form allegedly derived, created?) These are bodies or parts of bodies, not people. This is matter, not spirit. This is certainly not ‘love’; ‘sex’ seems too neutral a word. You can – you do – fill in the verbal, conceptual gaps. And then you ask yourself questions about those antinomies you have just delineated. Are they as much to make you feel better, as much a reassertion of your moral and cultural superiority, as anything approximating to truth content? Schoenberg, whisper it, can be wrong or at least limited in his vision too. Aron, part mastermind, part victim, emerges more than ever as a Pilate-like figure. He has helped provide, perhaps even create – is that not God’s task? – the materials. But are not his images, conjured up from a plastic bag of tricks, a diversion both from the truth, whatever that might be, as well as from what is actually going on before his eyes and ears? He has modelled an idol, but the Children of Israel have made themselves, not that idol, let alone Moses’ unrepresentable, unimaginable, ever-apophatic Idea of ‘One’, their own god(s). The manipulated collective - manipulated by what, by whom? - has fashioned a cybernetic idol. Moses, interestingly, seems less central than is generally the case. His tragic diagnosis of what he thinks has happened, more in sorrow perhaps than in anger, is, as much recent scholarship has acknowledged, quite deliberately wide of the mark itself. So it seems, in a related if not quite identical sense, here.

Such would go for nothing were it not for the many outstanding musical and dramatic performances. Alan Gilbert, leading the Staatskapelle Dresden, gave far and away the finest performance I have heard from him; I suppose you either conduct Moses und Aron or you do not. It was a performance as colourful as the op.16 Five Orchestral Pieces, as ‘dramatic’ as Wagner, as comprehending and communicative of the work’s ebb and flow as an excellent account of Beethoven, and as imbued with the spirit of the dance as Der Rosenkavalier. After all, many of us have often thought of Richard Strauss as Aron to Schoenberg’s Moses. This great orchestra could hardly boast of a greater Strauss pedigree: what a list of premieres, from Feuersnot to Daphne! Nor, of course, should one forget that this was the orchestra of none other than Kapellmeister Wagner. It certainly sounded like it here, but with a kaleidoscopic array of timbre that looked forward far into the twentieth century. As for the assembled choruses, again one might say that one either sings Moses or one does not, but that would be to take for granted a well-nigh incredible achievement. These musicians conveyed and lived the drama through words, notes, modes of sung or speech delivery, and of course stage action. Their contributions proved, quite rightly, still more crucial than those of John Tomlinson and Lance Ryan. If the former proved, at times, a little on the generalised side and the latter, ironically, more able with word and stage deed than with tone – twelve-note bel canto this was not – one could readily adapt such shortcomings into the greater narrative and its frame. Anyone feeling disappointed would have missed the point absurdly in the face of something so very much greater than the sum of its parts. Bieito’s – and, I think, Gilbert’s – uncompromisingly operatic view of the ‘complete’ work would win converts from all of those with eyes to see and ears to listen. ‘What third act?’ one might have asked, had the question so much as occurred.

And yet, in the afterlife of its experience, in the way we continue to think about what we have seen and heard long after that final orchestral tragic unison, the work opened up once again. In that, and not only in that, its serialism won out. In 1975, Dresden played host to the first East German performance of Moses und Aron, directed by none other than Harry Kupfer; in Bieito and his assembled forces, Kupfer has found a more than worthy successor. For ultimately – at least for now – the work has emerged more strongly than ever not only as a contest of ideas at its grandest but as an uncontested musical masterpiece. It is fashionable in certain quarters to denigrate the very idea. Schoenberg, thank God or at least Moses, never had truck with fashion, nor will he.

Der Freischütz, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 28 September 2018

Images: Katrin Ribbe

Ottokar – Roman Trekel

Kuno – Wolfgang Schöne

Agathe – Anna Samuil

Ännchen – Anna Prohaska

Kaspar – Falk Struckmann

Max – Peter Sonn

Hermit – Jan Martiník

Kilian – Adam Kutny

Samiel – Peter Moltzen

Bridesmaids – Verena Allertz, Regina Emersleben-Motz, Konstanze Löwe, Julia Mencke, Claudia Tuch

Michael Thalheimer (director)

Caroline Staunton (revival director)

Olaf Altmann (set designs)

Katrin Lea Tag (costumes)

Olaf Freese (lighting)

Berlin State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Thomas Guggeis (conductor)

Where it all began: well, not quite, but almost. It was in the newly opened Schauspielhaus no more than five minutes’ walk away on the Gendarmenmarkt that Der Freischütz received its 1821 premiere. Now Schinkel’s theatre serves as the Konzerthaus. Opera, however, continues to be the business of the older Linden house, which, following a somewhat bumpy reopening a year ago, seems now properly to have found its stride once again. Recent highlights for me have included Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Tristan and a revival of Claus Guth’s Frau ohne Schatten, of which I saw the dress rehearsal earlier in September, under the excellent – I should probably say ‘outstanding’ – revival direction of Caroline Staunton. This revival of Michael Thalheimer’s Freischütz stood also in her more than capable hands. Since this was my first viewing of this production, I cannot comment on any changes that might – or might not – have taken place. It stood very well indeed, however, on its own terms: a highly accomplished company performance.

In contrast, say, to Christian von Götz’s production for Leipzig, whose premiere I saw last year, this staging does not seem especially interested in the status of Weber’s opera as icon of German Romanticism. There is, whether we like it or no, darkness aplenty in such a concept for audiences today, just as there would be for this work’s lovechild, Siegfried, yet such is not the only possibility of darkness. This is more psychoanalytical – and again one can hardly help but think of the implications for that and many other of Wagner’s dramas. For, as Wagner, miserable, lonely, and close to starvation in Paris, wrote on seeing Der Freischütz there, the work ‘seems to be the poem of those Bohemian woods themselves, whose dark and solemn aspect permits us at once to grasp how the isolated man would believe himself, if not prey to a dæmonic power of Nature, then at least in eternal submission thereto.’

Here the action and those ‘woods themselves’ are seen and framed through the barrel of a gun. Sometimes, perhaps, a gun might just be a gun; it is certainly not here, no more than a forest is just a forest. Man, even men, are isolated; so too are woman and women. We look, as if the wrong way through a telescope to some source of light, perhaps even of life; or is it a nightmare? Nightmares certainly emerge from it; do they not always? Is this concerned with fear of or oppression of women? The either/or is irrelevant; we see, as the tale of a more or less bartered bride progresses, how it is both. We also see how her virginal white, hypocritically valued yet brutally blooded, is both ‘the story’ and anything but. Who dreams up Samiel, who plays a far more important role than usual, here? Wagner saw the work with Berlioz’s recitatives. Here the usual dialogue is rejected or modified in a different way, Thalheimer providing his own – convincing, I think, on its terms – to further and indeed to provoke the enhanced role of this ‘daemonic power’ (in Wagner’s words). Absurd – in a context of realism – stage directions, which seem quite to have confounded that first Berlin production, could therefore be reimagined, the forest and its spirit giving birth to a bestial array of animals without having a Wild Hunt embarrassingly traipse across stage.

Thomas Guggeis impressed me greatly this spring, standing in at the very last minute to make his house debut in Salome – and rightly receiving plaudits for having done so. On this occasion, it seems, he had a little longer if not so very long to prepare to replace another indisposed conductor. This was perhaps the sterner test, since he was more of a known quality and less of a hero of the moment. Whatever the truth of that, he once again emerged with great credit. For one so young – for one of any age – he seems instinctively, however much craft such ‘instinct’ might hide, to know how to ‘play’ this great orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin. It obliged with its statutory dark, ‘old German’ sound, apparently untouched by the ravages of Western orchestral homogenisation. It might have been the orchestra that played for Furtwängler – or, indeed, that does for Barenboim. There was no stiffness to Guggeis’s direction: quite the contrary. Difficult balances were always well struck: between the Romantically ‘organic’ and the needs of the number opera, of the moment too, between Mozartian inheritance  and Wagnerian future – clarinet solos standing out as much as horn calls – and between ‘French’ and ‘German’. We should never forget, however often German nationalists may have wished to do so, that the Huntsmen’s Chorus is based upon an eighteenth-century French street song, ‘Malbrouk [Marlborough] s’en va t’en guerre’.

Moreover, the grandeur and ambition of work, production, and orchestral performance notwithstanding, not to forget the work of the excellent chorus, there was something winningly intimate, in the opéra comique tradition to what we saw and heard from the singers on stage. That is not to suggest a lack of vocal scale, but simply to point to their convincing performances as characters on stage. If Roman Trekel and Wolfgang Schöne both proved somewhat dry and stiff, the rest of the cast more than compensated. Peter Sonn’s Max was fresh toned, enthusiastic, vulnerable, Falk Struckmann’s Kasper very much his dark, virile antagonist (even, in this context, alter ego?) Anna Samuil gave perhaps the strongest performance I have heard from her as Agathe, exhibiting a fine sense, scenic and vocal, of tragic catastrophe before the last. Anna Prohaska’s more colourful, spirited Ännchen, despatched words and coloratura not only with ease but with intent and meaning. Performed in this new ‘version’ without an interval, the work emerged, Goldilocks-like, just right: neither too short nor too long. That, however, should remain a dark fairy-tale for another day.

La Tragédie de Carmen, Pop-up Opera, 25 September 2018

Asylum Chapel, Peckham

Carmen (Chloe Latchmore)
Images: Ugo Soffientini

Carmen – Chloe Latchmore

Don José – Satriya Krisna

Micaëla – Alice Privett
Escamillo – James Corrigan

John Wilkie (director)
Anna Bonomelli (designs)
Mark Ruddick (movement)

Don José (Satriya Krisna)

Few companies are so worthy of our support than Pop-up Opera. Last time I reviewed one of their performances, they were giving a free-of-charge Mozart double-bill the morning after their props and equipment had been stolen from a van. Now they are offering Peter Brook’s barebones version of Carmen, as arranged by him, Marius Constant, and Jean-Claude Carrière. Not that director John Wilkie and his team are content to offer that ‘straight’; they approach it with the imagination and interrogation one would expect, if not always receive, of any repertoire work. There are losses, of course, and I am not entirely convinced that the updating to 1939 at the close of the Spanish Civil War fits quite so well with Brook’s version. Not only, however, has it made me think – and continue to think; there were on this first night, in Peckham’s wonderful Asylum Chapel, some fine performances to enjoy irrespective of such questions.

We have no chorus, just four principals; we have no orchestra, just a piano. The desire to recapture something of the work’s original opéra comique intimacy is a long-held one, quite valid. Even for the vast space of Salzburg’s Grosses Festspielhaus, Simon Rattle recently spoke and worked in such terms, albeit with decidedly mixed results. At any rate, surely no one would really wish to substitute those dreadful recitatives for the dialogue now. Brook’s determination to return to Mérimée is furthered – trumped? – here by the staging. At the dawn of Franco’s fascist new world, Don José is a disgraced, traumatised soldier, blood on his mind and on his hands. Having killed the cabaret performer Carmen on the street, having thus accomplished something similar to what his former Nationalist forces have done to the country as a whole, he now relives the experience in a series of flash backs. Much is cut; the whole performance lasts for eighty minutes. Film projections of war and its aftermath essentially take the place of the chorus, so that a sense of the social is retained. We gain perhaps an even stronger sense of Fate, not only from Don José standpoint but also from the cards’ foretelling.

 

Escamillo (James Corrigan)

Carmen is thus not decentred, as one might have expected; even in Dmitri Tcherniakov’s brilliant rethinking for Aix, her initial decentring paradoxically gave new birth to as character rather than icon. She is rarely off stage and becomes perhaps more than ever a progenitor of that ultimate operatic femme fatale, Berg’s Lulu. Problems persist: is she merely a projection of male violence? Yet our sympathy is engaged, which is surely the crucial thing. Chloe Latchmore’s performance here proved quite mesmerising, whether in vocal terms or stage-presence. Satriya Krisna, Alice Privett, and James Corrigan all proved deeply impressive, in both ‘traditional’ and ‘reimagined’ fashion. To be more than a caricature, Escamillo needs something. Here his return to war and parallel trauma certainly offered food for thought. Berrak Dyer’s musical direction from the piano proved duly heroic, offering a window onto what we might have heard, what we thought we remembered, as well as what we actually did. Which, in a way, is what La Tragédie de Carmen, both ‘in itself’ and in this further reinvention sought also to do.



Musikfest Berlin (4) and (5) - Aimard et al.: Stockhausen, 15 and 17 September 2018

Grosser Sendesaal des rbb and Kammermusiksaal

Telemusik (1966)
Refrain (1959)
Zyklus (1959)
Kontakte (1958-60)

Mantra (1970)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano, celesta)

Dirk Rothbrust (percussion)

Benjamin Kobler (piano)

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)

Marco Stroppa (electronics)

 

For two further concerts of music by Stockhausen we moved to the splendid Westend concert hall in Hans Poelzig’s Haus des Rundfunks for a varied programme of electronic and ensemble music, before returning to the Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal for Mantra. (Alas, I had to hurry back to London for a meeting and thus missed the final event, a performance of Inori.)

The purely electronic Telemusik opened the first concert. If I say that it sounds more than ever a work of its time, I do not mean that in a disparaging sense; it does not only sound as such. But there is something engagingly remote – just as there will be for Mozart – as well as close to us in hearing such a work; it is now, as indeed one might say of any of these works, a classic. The lights went off. A projected sun appeared above the stage. Who knows which? Our own, under which the languages and cultures of the world make hay before the end of days? Sirius? Some other? A generic light, even? We seemed to hear its rays, their light, their refraction, even perhaps reflection (in whatever sense you care). Songs of the world, of some other world, were heard, sung, chanted, reinvented. A world of music(s) was ours and yet was not; it was now of the past, almost as if we had visited it, as Stockhausen once had visited us. And with that, we made our own synthesis – even in, perhaps particularly in a work without visible ‘performance’. Make of that what you will; that, perhaps, is the point.

Refrain, for three performers (Benjamin Kobler on piano, Pierre-Laurent Aimard on celesta, and Dirk Rothbrust on percussion), came next. If Telemusik offered ritual of a sort both old and new, so too did this. I could not help but wonder whether Boulez had occasionally had it in mind as a precursor to his orchestral Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna. It was mesmerising to watch as well as to listen to; the distinction seemed perhaps unusually false. Serialist theatre, in which freedom and organisation were revealed as two sides of the same coin, revealed silence also to be as crucial as it would be to Bruckner (that despite the giggles of two audience members next to me). Those strange cries of – to? – another world seemed already to look forward to Mantra and the Inori I was fated not to hear.

What an array of instruments one sees and hears in Zyklus, for solo percussionist. I say that not simply, or even principally, in terms of quantity; anyone, given a budget, can offer a large number of instruments. But here the arrangement, the interrelationship, the unity in diversity and vice versa again suggested a form of serialist music theatre for all the senses. Rothbrust’s virtuosity was astounding, but it rightly never came across as mere virtuosity; this was a performance, an act of formal revelation. Variety of attack and reverberation struck as the work of a piano writ large: again, surely implications or at least parallels for later works by both Stockhausen and Boulez. Bells seemed to recall in context both previous works on the programme. Aimard and Kobler both crept into the hall to listen, their collegiality richly rewarded indeed.

After the interval, Aimard, Rothbrust, and Marco Stroppa (electronics) gave us another fine performance: this time of Kontakte. A spatial element always seems to bring out something very special in Stockhausen – and so it was here. So too does theatre, of whatever kind, the piece initiated by Aimard’s rising to sound – not necessarily in the way the innocent eye and ear might expect – the gong: a moment and sound with clear implications for what was to come. Electronic sounds enhanced, responded, developed, just as any other chamber music response, if we may call it that, would. Rothbrust and Stroppa reminded us that percussion and electronics the growth sections of twentieth-century music, perhaps not only Western art music. If anything, they – and Stockhausen – helped here to revive the fortunes of the piano. Not, of course, that an artists such as Aimard needs any such help, nor is his part restricted to the piano. His part at times seemed to take off where the clusters of the tenth Klavierstück had left off. What virtuosity there was to be heard here, both solo and ensemble: this was, as so often with Stockhausen, music both as we knew it and as we did not.

Transformation – to be traced back, if we wish, through Schoenberg and Liszt to Bach – was very much a key to that work’s unendliche Melodie, to borrow not entirely inappropriately from Wagner. So too it was for Mantra, at the Kammermusiksaal, in which Aimard and Stroppa were joined by Tamara Stefanovich. Stockhausen was quite clear that the unfolding of this work was not to be understood as variation form, whatever it might seem to have in common with such writing – and performance. For there is no variation as such, although there is much expansion and contraction: perhaps not unlike another star or how we see, feel, and think about it. So it was here, a fine, crucial line trod with care, understanding, and the keenest sense of drama. That drama here, as elsewhere, was architectonic, just as the architecture was dramatic. It was at times absurd: absurd in its seriousness and absurd in its child-like absurdity. These were players, these were outstanding performances in which we knew we were in the safest as well as the most thrilling of hands. We could therefore surrender to the telling of a story just as much as to the progression of a ritual. The more we listened, the more we watched too, the more we heard and experienced. Form – its importance can hardly be exaggerated here, both in itself and for so much later music – was once again revealed in and through performance. One marvelled in what Stockhausen elicited, what he re-invented, but above all in what he said, in what he sang. A staccato sounded, perhaps even signified as if it had never done so before, so too a tremolo, so even did an arpeggio. If Schoenberg had felt the air of another planet, perhaps this was indeed the sound of something that lay yet further beyond.

Musikfest Berlin (3) – Widmann/BPO/Roth - Stravinsky, Zimmermann, Debussy, and Ligeti, 14 September 2018

Philharmonie

Stravinsky: Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1947 version)

Zimmermann: Violin Concerto
Debussy: Images, interspersed with:
                 Ligeti: Lontano, Atmosphères

Carolin Widmann (violin)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

 

One could hardly go wrong with a programme and musicians such as this; I am delighted to report that expectations were at least confirmed and in many ways exceeded. I could moan, I suppose, about the decision to use the 1947 revision of Symphonies of Wind Instruments, both in itself and given what I took to be the implied tribute to Debussy, but even that had its advantages. Indeed, so puzzled was I by the difference in what I was hearing, without initially having known why, that I perhaps listened with still greater attention, making moreover connections to later works such as The Rake’s Progress and Cantata which I might otherwise not have done. There was certainly no doubting its opening spiky aggression, which in context of the festival as a whole – or at least that part of it I had heard – offered a thought-provoking follow-up to George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill. Chordal responses, in the liturgical sense, hinted as much at the Rake as the Rite; perhaps more than ever, this emerged as a threshold work. With the Berlin Philharmonic and François-Xavier Roth, it lost neither its violence nor its rare beauty; indeed, the two were strongly confirmed as two sides to the same coin.

 

How to follow that? With a violin concerto, of course, in this case Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s. The orchestra’s inheritance from Stravinsky remained clear, even if the soloist’s response was initially – this is far too protean a work for such generalisations to hold for long – closer to Berg. And so, Carolin Widmann, Roth, and the BPO took us on a thrilling, wayward journey, the first movement sardonic yet unquestionably ‘felt’, its final peroration earth-shattering. Piano incited, invited the violin’s central fantasia, that movement’s celesta enigmatic as ever. Orchestral depth in string unison resounded just as it might have done in Bruckner. Here as elsewhere, Roth’s expert, unassuming handling of climaxes proved second to none. It was rather as if late Prokofiev had taken a trip. Much the same might be said of the finale, although here it was an earlier Prokofiev of the Second Violin Concerto rather than Cinderella. The echoes – one might, uncharitably, put it a little more strongly – of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements came through loud and clear, but they were gone before one knew it, xylophone having launched into a solo Danse macabre for a new age that had not yet forgotten its pre-war roots. Bach too was to be heard, certainly in the cadenza. What an exhilarating, polystilistic mix!

 

The second half engagingly interspersed the three panels of Debussy’s Images, in the order ‘Gigues’, ‘Rondes de printemps’, and ‘Ibéria’, and two works by Ligeti: Lontano and Atmosphéres. ‘Gigues’ offered mystery that was clear and clear-eyed, rather in the line of Boulez’s Debussy, yet certainly not to be reduced to that. Roth struck a typically fine balance between what Boulez and his generation would call musical ‘parameters’: rhythm against – or with? – insidious harmonies, and so on. Lontano seemed to pick up with respect to pitch, timbre, and more; this was a Klangfarbenmelodie of sorts, with roots. Even a strange electronic interference – a hearing aid? – with the tuba seemed curiously apt, all the more so when I realised that it was in fact the violins! ‘Music of the spheres’ is a cliché, but here it seemed the right cliché. This was as well shaped, balanced, and played a performance as I have heard – at least.

 

What could not be changed by such listening (and performance)? ‘Rondes de printemps’ certainly seemed to have been. I found myself better able than ever to make connections with ‘Gigues’ too, perhaps especially with respect to relationships between harmony, rhythm, melody, timbre, and so on. Debussy here positively demanded to be heard with hindsight. And yet, his music remained as elusive as ever in a truly mesmerising performance; this is and was no zero-sum game. Atmosphéres again offered the challenge only to connect, its woodwind unquestionably Stravinskian, chords emerging that I could have sworn I recognised from Debussy. Did I? Does it matter? Swarming double basses suggested electronic viols. Transformations and contours were once again expertly shaped by Roth – and, of course, by this great orchestra. It closed with one of the most magical fadings a niente I have ever heard.

 

Not, of course that ‘Ibéria’ is nothing; this was definitely something. ‘Par les rues et par les chemins’ proved sly, sinuous, and razor sharp. That did not mean that lines could not blur, but there was no doubting the intent, the musical meaning behind such blurring. Much the same might be said of ‘Les Parfums de la nuit’, albeit with different colours, temperature, and of course languor. The precision of playing in this atmosphere was just as impressive as in Atmosphères. ‘Le Matin d’un jour de fête’ seemed to unite so many tendencies over the evening as whole: a true conclusion. It was never, however, anything other than itself. The subtle swagger of opposing forces that might confront each other or might dissolve, transmute proved a typical Debussian, yes painterly joy.