It is extraordinary to think
that Helmut Lachenmann’s Tanzsuite mit
Deutschlandlied, written in 1979 and 1980, is now almost forty years old; or
perhaps, on reflection, it is not. When one considers how much Lachenmann,
still considered dangerously outré by many fifteen or twenty years ago, is now not
only accepted but welcomed and even loved as a grand old man of German music,
and indeed the world’s, it makes a good deal of sense. (It happens to them
all.) The play between familiar material – a brief spoken and musical
introduction involving the composer will have rendered it so to all – and what
we, in the midst of its disintegration and reintegreation, might consider its
pasts and futures is not, Lachenmann advised, comical (komisch) but rather cheerful (heiter).
The distinction can be a fine one, most likely lost in my attempt at
translation. It was not, however, lost in this excellent performance from the
JACK Quartet, the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, and Jonathan Nott. Nor was
Lachenmann’s opening, Stravinskian acknowledgement: ‘Wir Komponisten sind
Parasiten’ (‘We composers are parasites’), referring not only to his use of Deutschlandlieder (Haydn, Bach, and
others) but his remodelling of Morton Feldman’s The Viola in My Life into a version of his own ‘the music in my
[German, bourgeois] life’. Indeed, he proceeded to acknowledge the Christmas Oratorio’s ‘Pastoral Symphony’
as a song not only of his Existenz
but his Heimat. (Think Edgar Reitz
and Hermann Simon, if you will…)
A classic, then, of musique concrète instrumentale and of
German music’s self-reckoning received a performance worthy of such classical
status, without losing any of its immediacy and excitement. The quartet’s
opening play with material from Haydn’s imperial hymn left open the question of
deconstruction or reconstruction: why not have both, and more? It also,
crucially, bade us listen intently, as if pre-empting the late music of
Lachenmann’s teacher, Luigi Nono. So too did the full orchestra, when employed,
its make-up at any one time constantly changing, yet never quite rejection the
concerto grosso-ish line-up. Webern’s example was surely heard in the expert
(both in work and performance) passing of lines between instruments, although
the outcome rightly felt very different. Metrical transformations and
restatements proved just as important as those of melody or harmony; this is,
after all, a dance suite. Indeed, one had the impression almost of melodic
lines rushing to grasp hold of metres, being carried forward upon them,
transformed and yet also restated by them. When music from the gigues of two Bach
French Suites is given the Lachenmann
treatment, is it the gigue (an acknowledged dance in the ninth of the work’s seventeenth
parts) or Bach’s notes that will endure? Does that question even make any
sense? Even if it does, should one be asking it at that time? It was quite a
ride, both immediate and mediated.
Lachenmann’s enthusiasm for
Strauss’s Alpine Symphony is well
known. I do not know what he thinks of Ein
Heldenleben, but it made for a fascinating companion-piece: a
self-reckoning of its own, of course, often bizarrely misunderstood as mere
egotism. Nott seemed especially keen to emphasis the piece’s symphonic
qualities, the opening section ‘Der Held’, perhaps slightly slower, even
sturdier, than often one hears, insistent in its grounding of the E-flat major
to which it will, to which it must, return. Like Lachenmann in its way, it bade
me listen. Not that there was any want of colour from the excellent young players,
but this was clearly not intended as an orchestral showpiece. The opening of ‘Des
Helden Widersacher’ was in turn quicker than is typically heard, affording
greater contrast that yet had clearly evolved, even if one could not quite say
how, from preceding material. ‘Wir
Komponisten sind Parasiten’; wir Kritiker
auch… An organised chaos of carping woodwind melodies seemed almost to
prefigure the birdsong of Messiaen, albeit with considerably more negative intent.
Throughout these and other contrasts, Nott ensured continuity of line and sound,
which is not to say unexciting, communication of fundamental harmonic rhythm,
which far too often can be lost in performances of this music.
The concertmaster’s solo in ‘Des
Helden Gefährtin’ showed both dramatic flair and eminently musical phrasing: in
a sense, emblematic of the performance as a whole. So too was the depth of
orchestral string tone, which yet never overwhelmed nor came close to doing so.
That was not the point – and the musicians, Nott certainly included, knew it.
For there was similar depth to his conception of the piece overall: not
necessarily without irony, but understanding that irony will better be
expressed through underlying seriousness of purpose. The closing sections
brought both a symphonic sense of arrival and, very much in Beethoven’s Eroica footsteps, further development.
Indeed, Strauss’s invention here registered with uncommon skill; too often,
this music finds itself unwittingly belittled as mere winding down or tailpiece.
A dignified, close, nothing exaggerated, furthered poignancy that arose from
the notes and the connections between them, affording apt comparison and contrast with the thinking, writing,
and performance of Lachenmann.
Berlin Radio Chorus (chorus master: Gijs Leenaars)
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Daniel Harding (conductor)
It is perhaps unavoidable, if
nonetheless undesirable, that, on going to Berlioz
performances, I still find myself thinking of Sir Colin Davis and how what I am about to hear will
likely fail to match up. (I do the same for Mozart too, perhaps with greater
reason.) Unavoidable or no, there was no need to worry on this particular
occasion, for Daniel Harding’s Roméo et
Juliette with the Berlin Philharmonic proved a wonderful, in many respects
outstanding, performance from beginning to end. Harding’s understanding and
communication of that understanding spoke throughout, without ever drawing
attention to itself; so too did his rapport with the Berlin musicians, and
their evident delight in this often miraculous score.
The first movement started as
it meant to go on, imbued with exhilarating energy, with a nervous physicality
to the string playing that had one feel rosin fly from the bows. During the
introduction, as indeed the movement and work as wholes, the instruments truly ‘spoke’,
as truly as any words, recitativo
accompagnato transformed into the symphonic. The Prologue brought bubbly woodwind and
beautifully balanced choral singing to the fore, narrative, verbal or
otherwise, as keen as commentary, insofar as the two may be distinguished. Kate
Lindsey’s velvety mezzo proved a perfect foil for the small choir (the larger
choral complement still waiting in the wings). So too, in the ‘scherzetto’
section, fully reprising yet never merely repeating the energy of the opening, did
Andrew Staples’s brief, yet valued, contribution. This is Berlioz’s doing, of course, yet it
still requires performance: the excellent sense of the composer’s metanarrative
to Shakespeare came across as clearly and as meaningfully as I can recall. The
movement closed with all the neo-Gluckian dignity one could ask for – and then
some. ‘Montagus, domptés par les douleurs, se rapprochent enfin pour abjurer la
haine, qui fit verser tant de sang et de pleurs.’
The purely orchestral drama of
the second movement fared just as well. Its opening yearning, ‘Roméo seul’, fully
justified Wagner’s enthusiasm and admission of its influence upon Tristan. Here, as elsewhere, Berlioz’s legacy
to his colleague – it was never an easy relationship, which reflects upon both
composers – was shown to be far more than the ‘mechanical means’ of which
Wagner wrote, somewhat damning with restricted praise, in Oper und Drama. This was poignant, deeply moving. The Capulet ball
naturally echoed its counterpart in the Symphonie
fantastique, as well as declaring kinship with the soundworld of Benvenuto Cellini, but there was no
doubting the particularity of these events, their own character and momentum;
nor was there any doubt of the players enjoying themselves, dancing
metaphorically. The ‘nuit sereine’ that followed first offered a suggestive instance
of spatial drama, the orchestra in the foreground, departing revellers
offstage. The celebrated ‘Scène d’amour’ was as ardent as any I have heard, the
wonder of young love palpable surely even to the most hardened of cynics. (Not
I, Your Honour.) Harding’s control of dramatic pace and reflection was once
again noteworthy for never drawing attention to itself, apparently presenting the
score ‘as is’. I could not help but think Sir Colin would have admired it.
The Queen Mab scherzo benefited
– it almost goes without saying, yet should not – from the greatest technical
excellence, a welcome opportunity to revel in Berlioz’s mastery of
orchestration; yet its musicodramatic function is just as important, and proved
just as impressively communicated. The fifth movement’s processional and
commentary were held in fine balance, so too the musical presence of Juliet’s
light that (may) have been extinguished. Its successor, ‘Roméo au tombeau des
Capulets’, took us through its various stages, ‘Invocation-Réveil de
Juliette-Joie délirante, désespoir, dernières angoisses et mort des deux amants’,
with the keenest of imagination, almost as if the story and its retelling were
new to us. The finale revealed in Shenyang a Friar Laurence of impeccable
diction, dark-hued and often thrilling delivery, and great musical sensitivity.
His air, ‘Pauvres enfants’ was direct, unfussy, an excellent foil for the
orchestra around him. For Harding and the Berlin Philharmonic conveyed the
movement’s twists and turns with quicksilver response, the brass as imposing as
the bass soloist when required. A magnificent close, the chorus at full
strength, set the seal on a delightful evening. Berlioz does not always emerge
the better for performers’ struggles with his work; on this occasion, he
unquestionably did.
A fascinating pairing of
Schubert and Lachenmann from Pierre-Laurent Aimard and, in the latter, Yuko
Kakuta. In some ways, roles, at least roles as might popularly be assumed, were
reversed. What we heard was plain-spoken, even austere, day I say modernist,
Schubert, followed by vividly dramatic, accessible, perhaps even Romantic
Lachenmann. Such labels doubtless beg more questions than they answer, but then
so, quite properly, do such performances. At any rate, Aimard provoked us in
the best way: not out of some desire to épater
les bourgeois, but to make us listen, to think, and most likely to
reconsider our lazy assumptions, bourgeois or otherwise.
Basic pulse and metre were
established right from the start of the G major Piano Sonata, D 894. You might
think that obvious, yet it is far from a given. Aimard’s account of the
first movement flowed, and was flexible, but never lost sight (or hearing) of
that fundamental pulse. Thematic groups remained distinct but also emerged from
one another, in a performance anything but maudlin, imbued with a fine sense of
fresh discovery, indispensable in such (over-)familiar repertoire. Aimard
captured both the deception and the simplicity in its deceptive simplicity, not
least in a vigorous, determined development section. The Andante was similarly direct and without predetermined framework,
performance seemingly arising from the notes rather than vice versa. Every note likewise told in the minuet, sometimes as
gruffly as in Beethoven, though never sounding remotely like him. There were no
easy answers – or even easy questions. A slower tempo for the trio came across
less as relaxation than as strange intensification, whose mysteries seemed to
foreshadow the Chopin of the mazurkas. The finale, likewise, was rendered
strange in a way that compelled one to listen. Modulations, almost always key
to Schubert’s music, surprised, even shocked. Modernist Schubert? I suppose so,
but ultimately this seemed less a matter of such a broad aesthetic, still less
such an aesthetic applied, than of Aimard’s Schubert.
Lachenmann’s GOT LOST takes its name from one of its
three verbal sources, a note in the lift of a Grunewald apartment block used by
Fellows of the Wissenschaftkolleg zu Berlin: ‘Today my laundry basket got lost.
It was last since standing in front of the dryer. Since it is pretty difficult to
carry the laundry without it I’d be most happy to get it back.’ The other two
texts employed are an extract from Nietzsche’s Gay Science, its Wanderer message full of association for anyone
vaguely acquainted with German Romanticism, and a poem by Fernando Pesso (under
the pseudonym, Álvaro de
Campos),’ ‘Todas as cartas de amor são ridículas’ (‘All love-letters are
ridiculous’). According to the composer, these are ‘three only seemingly incompatible texts’. ‘Stripped of their
pathos-laden, poetic and profane diction,’ they are despatched by:
… the same sound-source – a soprano voice singing ‘in
whatever way’ – into a intervallically ever-changing field of sound,
reverberation and movement. Calling out, playfully, ‘warbling’ and lamenting
arioso: they interrupt and pervade one another, thus marking out a space that
ultimately remains foreign to them, and in which – as in all my compositions –
music reflects upon itself with ‘expression’ -less joviality, thus showing its
awareness of the transcendent, god-less message of ‘ridicolas’ that unifies
these three texts.
Un-Romantic, even anti-Romantic, then? Yes and no. The idea
of music in itself, shorn of ‘expression’ has all manner of associations, many
of them at least heirs to the Romanticism Lachenmann has long deconstructed and
perhaps, just perhaps, even reconstructed. A post-Nietzschean revaluation of
values, if we like, does not perhaps change those values, whether in work or
performance, as much as we might suspect. Transcendence, after all, remains –
and what could be more Romantic, even Wagnerian, than that?
For performance will always play its part, even when,
sometimes especially when, that outcome is guarded against. So it did here, in
superlative performances from Aimard and Kakuta, performances I find it
impossible to imagine bettered. (And what would be the point of such
imagination?) Every note, every articulation, every connection between notes,
articulations, and so much more, to the whole, remains crucial; or, at least,
so the illusion holds. Romantic ghosts? Perhaps. But are not those ghosts
actually more performances of earlier music, such as Schubert’s? Monteverdi,
perhaps the ultimate source, known or unknown, acknowledged or acknowledged,
for all ‘modern’ music in the Western tradition, seemed once again reborn in
this scena for the twenty-first
century (2007-8). Music theatre? Again, perhaps, but like so many such
concepts, it seemed more an historical reference than anything else. Perhaps
Joycean music would be more to the point, at least for me, even the Mahlerian
conception of the symphony as a world. In reality, we shall act differently,
although surely all with the joviality of which Lachenmann spoke. Kakuta sang
into the piano, only for the piano’s resonances to sing back to her, to us;
Aimard responded in all manner of ways, instrumental and extra-instrumental. The
term ‘extended techniques’, whether for voice or piano, seemed so beside the
point as to suggest that, at long last, it should be dropped. These are surely ‘just’
techniques, ‘just’ music. The final climax, when it came, might even have
seemed conventional, yet no less extraordinary for that. Whatever we may wish
to label, to say, to think, this was a performance no one there would likely
ever forget. Outstanding.
Charlie Chaplin, Gertrud and Arnold Schoenberg, Los Angeles, 1935
(Photographer: Max Munn Autrey)
Arnold
Schoenberg was the twentieth century’s most violently controversial composer;
he remains so for us. Was he its greatest? Perhaps, perhaps not: there will
always be several other deserving pretenders to the title; it is scarcely a
title worth bothering about. Is his music the most performed, the most listened
to? Certainly not. Indeed part of his ‘greatness’, certainly of his
controversy, lies in confrontation with a world that often will not listen,
sometimes does not even know. Schoenberg’s is in many ways a tragic story that
yet awaits its true catharsis. Like Beethoven, the degree of Schoenberg’s
influence dwarfs that of any other twentieth-century composer, Stravinsky
included. The latter’s Rite of Spring,
Les Noces, Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and so on undoubtedly changed the
face of twentieth-century music; yet Schoenberg’s break with the tonal universe
within which Western art music had operated for roughly three centuries and his
subsequent adoption of the ‘method of composing with twelve notes related only
to one another’ utterly transformed its course. That transformation extended
far beyond mere ‘influence’. When the soprano in Schoenberg’s Second String
Quartet sings that she feels the ‘air of another planet’, not only do we feel
it too; we know that, having breathed that air, nothing will ever quite be the
same again – even if, perhaps especially if, we elect to return to tonality, be
it that of earlier or later music.
Schoenberg
remains the great modernist composer,
forbidding and heroic, in life and
work a standing, intransigent rebuke to the commercialist imperatives of his
time and ours. He was, however, much more than that too. He was also a Viennese
Jew who converted to Lutheranism and back again. He lived his life largely
between Vienna and Berlin; then, following the Nazi seizure of power, he lost
his job, his bearings, his life, and became an exile, settling far from the
Central European culture in which he had grown up, in Los Angeles. Born in the vanished
world – a world always with us in its art and in its history too – of
Austria-Hungary, an anti-Semite on every street corner, Schoenberg died, not
only having lived through the trauma, which he had long foreseen, of the
Holocaust, but having witnessed the creation of the State of Israel, a Zionist
project to which he felt and voiced the strongest yet most difficult of
connections.
This
is a story I have recently been trying to tell, not least through the music
that lies at its very heart. For if we never listen, how shall we know? If I
have one piece of advice, however, it would be to forget, at least for now, the
disputes surrounding this music, whether ‘for’ or ‘against’. Listen to this
music as part of an œuvre that has more in common, both with itself and with
the great Austro-German tradition with which Schoenberg so proudly identified
himself, than many would ever admit; by all means listen to it too as a
harbinger of the musical world to come, of Boulez and Stockhausen, of Henze and
Nono. Above all, however, listen to Schoenberg’s music as music, and let its hyper-expressivity speak to you as might that
of Wagner and Brahms, of Bach and Mozart, of Beethoven and Mahler.
Verklärte
Nacht
It
would be well-nigh inconceivable not to start with the string sextet, Verklärte Nacht (‘Transfigured Night’),
one of Schoenberg’s earliest essays in the art of reconciling Wagnerian
harmonic development with Brahmsian motivic writing. One can think of it,
listen to it, that way if one likes, or one can listen to it as a response to
Richard Dehmel’s erotic poem, whose narrative structure it follows closely, the
latter’s five stanzas reflected, even transfigured in five contrasted musical
sections; with Schoenberg, it is rarely a matter of either/or. Odd-numbered sections present the forest:
there is sepulchral darkness to the opening, as our (aural) eyes adjust, but
also the sense of a gateway to something unknown, dangerous perhaps, yet also
exciting. The second and fourth sections present Dehmel’s words of woman and
man respectively. The woman confesses that she had married a man she did not
love; she had therefore yielded to another, a stranger, whose child she now
bears. Transfiguration is effected through the man’s nobility of soul,
manifested not in a self-denying act of charity, but in a violin and cello duet
of love. ‘Two people walk through the high, bright night.’The
1950 Hollywood Quartet recording, for which Schoenberg himself wrote a programme note, may
have been matched, but it has never been surpassed.
Gurrelieder
If Tristan
und Isolde haunts the pages of Verklärte
Nacht, how much more so does it the gargantuan tale of love, betrayal, and
catharsis, Gurrelieder. Götterdämmerung does too, not least in
the parallel vassals’ chorus. One may readily forget, given the accomplishment
of his orchestral writing here, that Schoenberg had never previously written a
completed work calling for full, let alone such gargantuan, orchestra. (He had
to order special manuscript paper for the number of staves required; none such
existed.) Listen to its course, however, and you will hear the change in
Schoenberg’s orchestral writing over the period of its orchestration, long put
to one side for financial reasons. Harmony and melody remain, but the final
part speaks of a world that had known the first fruits of ‘atonality’. Claudio Abbado and
massed Berlin forces, many artists the same as in his commercial Vienna Philharmonic recording, capture
the work’s late Romanticism and modernity to a tee.
String
Quartet no.2
How could one not include this fabled quartet? In
many ways, it is an ‘easier’ listen than Schoenberg’s first numbered essay in
this genre. The journey from tonality to atonality provides a narrative of its
own, Schoenberg’s compositional journey more generally telescoped into a drama
first without and then with words. Ghosts of Vienna past are, typically
for Schoenberg, ever present. Listen to the second violin’s singing of a line
from the Viennese popular song ‘Ach du lieber Augustin’, suggestive of something
afoot: ‘It’s all over, it’s all over.’ Soon: ‘Ich fühle luft von anderem
planeten.’ (‘I feel the air of another planet.’) Gravity, tonal or planetary,
loses its pull: ‘I lose myself in tones, circling, weaving … I feel I am above
the last cloud.’ The final ‘resolution’, such as it is, turning to F-sharp
major, the quartet having opened in F-sharp minor, sounds surprising, even perverse. This,
to quote the title of a lecture Schoenberg would give in exile, is ‘How one
becomes lonely’ – or is it how one becomes free, becomes ultimately reconciled
with a new world? Are they one and the same, as Brahms (frei aber froh) might have counselled him? Here are
the New Vienna Quartet from 1967:
Erwartung
The
Second String Quartet, written in 1908, prepared the way for a ‘miracle year’,
1909, in Schoenberg’s output, comparable to that of Schubert in 1815 or
Schumann in 1840. How to choose but one work from this highpoint of ‘free
atonality’? Answers, perhaps, on one of the many postcards Schoenberg,
sometimes affectionate, sometimes playful, sometimes angry, loved to send. His
one-act opera (a ‘monodrama’, with a single character), Erwartung has at least as great a claim as any. It remains one of
the astounding musical accomplishments of the twentieth century. The libretto
was written by a dermatologist, Marie Pappenheim, later an important figure in
the German sexual liberation movement: she offered a clinical understanding of
hysteria as the context for the extraordinary outpouring we hear – and feel. ‘The
aim,’ Schoenberg would explain in 1929, ‘is to represent in slow motion everything that occurs
during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to
half an hour.’ The single event, the Woman’s stumbling over the corpse of her
lover, essentially expands itself, both forwards and backwards, over time. Verklärte Nacht, then, is sped up,
magnified, subverted, perhaps even reversed. Anja Silja, the Vienna
Philharmonic, and Christoph von Dohnányi judge the work’s competing
demands at least as well as any other artists, in a recording deservedly
considered a classic.
Pierrot
lunaire
If
Erwartung is impossible for humans to
perform to perfection, the very conception of Pierrot lunaire seems designed to preclude the possibility of
reconciling so many competing forces. Is it a work of cabaret? Assuredly, yet
not only that. Is it an instrumental masterpiece, as Stravinsky averred? Ditto.
Again, best to listen, enjoy, and take it for what it is in any particular
performance on any particular occasion. Recommendations do not come higher than
Christine
Schäfter, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and that most legendary yet
ambivalent of Schoenbergians, Pierre Boulez. Herewith a film made with their recording:
Suite, op.25
Let
us move ahead to the Roaring Twenties, to the world of the new twelve-note
method. Always a method, Schoenberg insisted: never a system. The chronology of
Schoenberg’s first works and sections of works written according to the new
method – much of which he had been working towards earlier, even in Pierrot – is complex; we need not bother
with it here. Instead, once again, only listen: here to the first work in its
entirety written as such. The neo-Baroque Suite for Piano, op.25 will ideally performed
with dazzling Bauhaus surface gleam that yet reveals an eminently Bösendorfer sensibility
beneath. No one comes closer to that ideal for me than Maurizio Pollini (first movement), but Florent Boffard's recording offers an estimable alternative:
Moses
und Aron
In
Moses und Aron,the fourth and last of his operas, left incomplete – perhaps
uncompletable – at his death, Schoenberg wrestled with so many of the themes of
his music and life. It is a work about difficulty, about communication, about
the relationship between genius and the public, between God and man.
Ferociously difficult to perform, above all for the chorus, called upon to
perform dodecaphonic Bach whilst performing an ‘erotic orgy’ around the Golden
Calf, it is, however, anything but difficult to listen to: so long as one
grants it due attention. Michael Gielen and Boulez, especially in his second,
Concertgebouw recording of this searing drama, made in the wake of
staged performance, penetrate to its heart as few others do. However, there remains something special indeed about the first performance, conducted by Hans Rosbaud, who told in a 1961 interview of a 'very dramatic moment in my career':
One night, perhaps at one
o’clock, … the telephone rang furiously; the radio station of Hamburg … asked
me if I could conduct the world premiere of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. The regular conductor [Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt] had
[had] an accident and could not conduct the performance, for which the radio
station had invited many important people …, among other guests, Mrs Schoenberg
and her daughter Nuria … I asked, ‘When will this first performance take
place?’ And they answered, ‘Exactly in one week … Mr Rosbaud, do come, you must come, you cannot abandon us in this desperate situation!
Violin Concerto
Schoenberg’s
inability to complete Moses, no
performance imaginable in exile, did not preclude composition and completion of
a host of American works. Alleged unplayability – for the soloist, Jascha
Heifetz having declared it so – long contributed to a mystique that did not
help it be loved, or even listened to. However, the greatest difficulty seems
to have been musical rather than technical. If the concertos of Beethoven and
Brahms had proved notably ‘symphonic’ when compared with ‘easier’ works in the
repertoire; Schoenberg’s, by contrast, seems to have rejoiced in mischievous
play between the apparently contrasting demands of traditional virtuosity
intensified and the twelve-note method. Yet there beats a traditional, even
traditionalist, heart within, its three movements as expected, both in number
and in type: sonata form-Andante grazioso-marching
finale. Ultimately, this is a work of hyper-Romanticism, deserving both to be
played and listened to as such. Zvi Zeitlin
understood that well, here in a beautifully comprehending performance with
Rafael Kubelík and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. As ever, the trick is
to treat music as music: all else will follow.
A
Survivor from Warsaw
Always
inclined or rather destined to bear witness, Schoenberg became, if anything,
still more so, once the Holocaust he had long foreseen came into barbaric
being. ‘It means at first,’ he wrote, insistent both
upon his faith and his status as a creative, not documentary, artist: ‘a
warning to all Jews, never to forget what has been done to us, never to forget
that even people who did not do it themselves, agreed with them and many of
them found it necessary to treat us this way. … The main thing is, that I saw
it in my imagination.’ The words, Schoenberg’s own, were derived from accounts
by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto. The gas chamber awaiting, they spontaneously
erupt into a rendition, triumphant, defiant, indescribably harrowing, of the
ancient Hebrew song, ‘Shema Yisroel’. Abbado and the VPO, alert to the work’s Mahlerian ghosts as well as to its
Adornian challenge, prove superlative guides in this, our final stop for now.
For fuller recording recommendations, not restricted to YouTube, and indeed more on Schoenberg generally, please see my book, Arnold Schoenberg, published by Reaktion Books, distributed in the Americas by Chicago University Press.
Written for Barbara Hannigan
and the Berlin Philharmonic, Hans Abrahamsen’s song-cycle, let me tell you, has garnered plentiful plaudits, including the
2016 Grawemeyer Prize. On a first hearing, it was not difficult to understand
why, even if – a matter of taste, no more than that – its neoromanticism became
for me at times a little wearing. For underlying a musical foreground whose somewhat
saccharine language verges on the reactionary, structure and finely honed
compositional craft are present and meaningful. The verbal text, drawn by the
composer from a novella by Paul Griffiths whose vocabulary is restricted to the
words spoken by Hamlet’s Ophelia,
serves its purpose well as a springboard for song, though I cannot say that makes
me eager to read the novella itself. There is, moreover, no doubting the work’s
vocal qualities, ranging from intriguing reinvention of the Monteverdian genere concitato to a genuinely
extraordinary relationship between soprano and instruments of similar or still
higher range, in which colours echo, pierce, and fuse. Hannigan’s response was
predictably outstanding, likewise the interplay between her voice and the LSO
players, especially woodwind, tuned percussion, and violins, wisely guided by
Simon Rattle. If I found a slight tentativeness to some of the playing in the
very first song, that was soon forgotten – and may have been more a matter of
adjustment to an acoustic very different from and far superior to the orchestra’s
Barbican home. This was a performance, as it was a work, amounting to
considerably more than the sum of its parts. And whilst I had my doubts during
the performance, evidently not shared by an enthusiastic audience, on
reflection I think the audience may well have been right.
It was Messiaen’s Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà that had been the
real attraction for me, though, and a fine performance indeed it turned out to
be. Even if I sometimes found myself missing the particular colours a French
orchestra might have brought to this music – the Paris Opéra orchestra on Myung
Whun Chung’s recording, for instance – there was again no doubting the all-round
excellence of the LSO here. If the work has ever been treated to superior
playing from massed flutes and percussion, I should be astonished; I doubt even
that any performance will have matched those players here. Certainly the LSO
wind brooked no dissent in the implacable, mystical opening ‘Apparition du
Christ glorieux’. One could imagine the music transcribed for organ, yet never
did the instruments imitate Messiaen’s beloved instrument; composer and
performers alike were far too skilled for that. Rattle handled the twin
imperatives of continuity and contrast in the ensuing ‘La constellation du
Sagittaire’ with palpable understanding, paving the way surely for the surprises,
even when one ‘knew’, of flute birdsong, superlatively despatched; mysterious
violin harmonics; and Indian rhythms. If I found ‘L’Oiseau-Lyre et la
Ville-Fiancée’ a little hard-driven – pretty much my sole cavil – it was
rhythmically tight and vivid throughout, percussion of all varieties typically
incisive. The apocalyptic cacophony of ‘Les élus marqués du sceau’ proved as
mysterious, as inscrutable, as anything in Stockhausen.
Inscrutable in a very different
way was the fifth movement, ‘Demeurer dans l’Amour’, the sweet ecstasy of its
violins, Turangalîla and indeed Tristan reimagined, an object lesson in communication
of sentiment without sentimentality. I was, moreover, fascinated to hear so
clear an invitation from Messiaen, harmony notwithstanding, to listen
intervallically: just as keen, just as meaningful as in the music of some forty
years earlier. There was no doubting that this was the true heart, in more than
one sense, of the work, balanced as it was by apocalyptic fervour on its other
side, in ‘Les sept Anges aus sept trompettes’. Gareth Davies’s flute solo in ‘Et
Dieu essuiera toute larme de leurs yeux’ was, to put it simply, perfectly
judged.
Then came ‘Les étoiles et la
Gloire’: the apocalypse once again, terrifying in that this might have been truly
be the work of God or the Devil – and how could we know? Three sets of tubular
bells (and three players), xylophone, glockenspiel, marimba, and so much else:
a second heart, perhaps, to the work, even a heart of darkness. This listener emerged
from it awestruck, as, in quite a different way, he did from the veritable dawn
chorus of ‘Plusieus oiseaux des arbres de Vie’, woodwind onstage and beyond (au-delà?)
There was no need for visibility in ‘Le chemin d I’Invisible’ when music
rendered whoever He was so palpably present. The sense of completion, not just
of this work, but (almost) of Messiaen’s musical life was keen in ‘Le Christ,
lumière du Paradis’. Its kinship, from the opening chord, with the final
movement of the early L’Ascension, ‘Prière
du Christ montant vers son Père’, was clear, as was the reality that this was a
different, if related, path to be taken. There was surely much theology as well
as music in that thought – and prayer – alone. This was unquestionably –
Messiaen tends no more to questioning than does Bach – a blessed, luminous, and
in every sense sweet assurance.
Beethoven:
Sonata for horn and piano
in F major, op.17
Bartók:
Sonata for two pianos and
percussion, Sz 100
Boulez:
sur
Incises
Radek Baborák (French horn)
Karim Said, Denis Kozhukhin,
Michael Wendeberg (piano)
Aline Khouri, Susanne Kabalan,
Stephen Fitzpatrick (harp)
Lev Loftus, Dominic Oelze,
Pedro Torrejón Gonzáles (percussion)
Daniel Barenboim (piano, conductor)
Two-and-a-half years after the opening
of Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, in a
programme climaxing in Pierre Boulez’s sur
Incises, the hall’s resident Boulez Ensemble, drawn from members of the
Staatskapelle Berlin and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, returned, neither for
the first time, nor, I suspect, for the last, to a work that seems almost to
define not only the performing space, not only its memories, but just as much
its potentialities. In that, it takes its leave from Boulez’s own method of
proliferation, his own pattern of works-in-progress, his own incomparable, endlessly
proliferating legacy for all musicians and music-lovers, and indeed for all
those interested in reimagination of performing spaces in the line of Boulez’s
cherished concept of the salle modulable.
First, however, came two other
Bs: Beethoven and Bartok; and a third, that other presiding musical presence of
the Boulez Saal: Barenboim. What a joy it was not only to hear Beethoven’s Horn
Sonata, op.17, but to hear it in such an enlightened performance, from Radek
Baborák and Daniel Barenboim. A horn call as forthright as it was perfectly
judged of tone seemed the perfect way to open a new season: rooted not only in
the Austro-German musical past, but in Beethoven, a prelude to next year’s
anniversary. (And if people do not like that prospect, they should, quite
frankly, stop their childish posturing and grow up.) Barenboim’s melting,
post-Mozartian response reminded us why he stands as one of the very few great
Beethovenians alive (indeed the only one, as conductor). A few first movement
exposition smudges, of interest only to carpers, were banished upon the repeat.
What mattered was Beethoven’s spirit, revealed in a performance of perfect
balance and tempo, the latter flexible, yet never drawing attention to itself
in the subtlety of that flexibility. It was, above all, a performance grounded
in harmonic understanding, without which all else will be in vain (and more
than often is, in contemporary Beethoven performance). The recapitulation
brought a fine sense of return, and some magically soft playing, Baborák’s
phrasing, here and elsewhere, to die for. A gravely beautiful, properly vocal Poco adagio quasi andante led to a
finale that proved, again, quite perfectly judged in its post-Mozartian spirit.
Darker passages told, albeit without exaggeration, in an account both poignant
and ebullient.
It was a welcome occasion indeed
to hear Bartók’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion: not only as precursor to
sur Incises, but also in relation to Peter Eötvös’s Sonata per sei, heard
the previous day at the Berlin Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal. The first
movement’s opening, imbued with suspense, erupted in well-nigh Boulezian éclat; and again, although quite
rightly, differently. This was to be a performance that surprised, even when
one ‘knew’: that is to say, it was to be a performance in the emphatic sense,
pianists, Michael Wendeberg and Denis Kozhukhin, and percussionists, Dominic
Oelze and Lev Loftus, alike revelling in the potentialities of live thinking
and communication. Bartók’s music was made strange in the best sense, these
fine musicians riding a defiantly untamed tiger and (more than) living to tell
the tale. How inevitably. The score unfolded, grew, developed, taking in
predecessors such as Beethoven and Bach in a sense extending far beyond the
relative banality of ‘influence’. Its spatial element, prophetic for Boulez
among others, felt especially immediate in this space. Inevitability – not in
the sense of dullness, but a ‘rightness’ that, in retrospect, could not have been other – characterised the slow
movement too, percussion processional joined by Wendeberg, then by Kozhukhin,
in playing of almost Mozartian perfection (not only the pianists!) Form
dramatically revealed itself; so too did the wildest, most compelling of night
music. As in the Beethoven sonata, the final movement proved in every sense a
finale, almost as fascinating to watch – for instance, how the percussionists,
sometimes unexpectedly, shared their load – as to hear. Counterpoint lived and
thrilled in a performance that was not remotely safe, and was all the better
for that, culminating in a splendidly witty and beguiling close.
sur Incises has many roots: most obviously in the solo
piano piece, Incises (written originally
for the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition,
with which Maurizio Pollini had a strong association). Boulez’s first
intention, as he explained in a 1998 interview, was 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.’ Other ghosts
reared their head, though, such as Bartók’s Sonata and Stravinsky’s Les Noces. In this context,
unsuprisingly, Bartók offered a strong point of departure – opening similarly,
yet differently, de profundis – yet,
as with so much of Boulez’s music, it was his conception of serialism as open-ended,
ever-expanding, that dazzled. The spatial element is, of
course, crucial. Here, again, it was greatly assisted by the hall and its
acoustic, enabling us not only to hear but truly to feel the interplay between the
ensemble as a whole (a giant reinvention of the piano, one might say), solo
lines, and differently constituted groups within: three groups, considered
vertically, each of percussion, harp, and piano, and, horizontally, the three
percussionists, the three harpists, and the three pianists. Here, in the line
of Boulez’s – and Barenboim’s – beloved Parsifal,
not only did space become time, both became music. The way a trill passed
across all three piano keyboards, Wendeberg and Kozhukhin joined by the equally
excellent Karim Said, would offer but one case in point. Magic squares sensual,
musical, conceptual, above all thrilling played themselves out and reinvented
themselves before our eyes and ears (the ‘thinking ear’, as the hall’s motto
has it). Whatever the antecendents, it was vividly clear that Boulez’s own proliferating
method of generation actually had little in common with either Beethoven or
Bartók; likewise his, and Barenboim’s, control of liminal suspense and propulsive
release. The work, like the two that had preceded it, passed as if in no time,
whetting the appetite for more, much more, in the weeks, months, years to come.
This hall and the events within, then, continue as a work-in-progress, very
much in Boulez’s sense.
Varèse:
Amériques (performing version of the 1922 manuscript,
by Chou Wen-chung)
Isabelle Faust (violin)
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Peter Eötvös (conductor)
Hot on the heels of two Peter Eötvös ensemble works at the Kammermusiksaal, many in the audience made their
way to the larger hall of the Philharmonie proper, for the second German
performance of his Third Violin Concerto, ‘Alhambra’, the local premiere having
taken place the night before. Opening, as it closes, with solo violin (Isabelle
Faust), it is perhaps surprisingly evocative of the colours and music of
southern Spain. This is a walk around the Alhambra’s gardens with antecedents,
suggested if never explicit, in Falla, Ravel, and Debussy, as well, perhaps, as
Mussorgsky’s promenading. Eötvös employs the orchestra sparingly, hints of a
Szymanowskian tapestry or something harder-edged, even Stravinskian, in the
air, yet never quite determining the climate. Other solo strings come to the
fore: violins, double bass, and mandolin; but so do woodwind and brass,
clarinettist Andreas Ottensamer’s arabesquing especially noteworthy. Bells are
both suggested and heard, the latter thereby well prepared as music rather than
effect. There is something, perhaps inevitably, of Berg to certain, more innig passages, but also to repeated
chains of intervals. Ciphers of ‘Alhambra’, ‘Isabelle’, and ‘Faust’ are,
apparently concealed, but I should need to listen again, and/or to consult the
score, to have them revealed to me. That, on the basis of this performance, I
should happily undertake. (I should also like to know, if anyone can oblige,
what Faust’s encore was.)
Xenakis’s Shaar, for string orchestra, made a truly elemental impression, its
opening lines as striking as any unison in Bruckner, the feelings of awe
engendered, maintained, and transformed actually not so very different as some
might expect from those inspired by the latter composer. Not that the music really
has anything in common, of course; it is what it is, proudly, starkly so – and so
it sounded in this Berlin Philharmonic performance under Eötvös, its granitic drama,
both earthly and unearthly, inviting comparison with a Hebraic past summoned in
the title. Clusters, swarms, ritual; imbued with an implacable sense of rightness,
yet never predictable: work and performance alike brooked no dissent. The BPO
had never played the work before; it should do so again soon. More Xenakis everywhere,
please!
There was likewise no doubting
the distinction of the Berliners’ performance of Varèse’s Amériques, Eötvös doing much to highlight the work’s musical
interest, not least its debts – some might put it more strongly than that, especially
in this first version – to Stravinsky, and to The Rite of Spring in particular. Innovation with timbre
notwithstanding, I wish I found the work itself more convincing. Leaving aside its
frankly irritating whistles and sirens, the form of what Eötvös ably delineated
as a twentieth-century tone poem continues to elude me. The sheer volume and
exuberance of Amériques remain quite
a thing, of course, but it does go on a bit. Perhaps its placing after the iron
discipline of Xenakis was the problem.
