Sonatas: in F, Kk.296; in F, Kk.297; in F minor, Kk.466; in F
sharp minor, Kk.25; in G minor, Kk.12; in C minor, Kk.11; in F,
Kk.6; in F minor, Kk.19; in F, Kk.106; in F, Kk.107; in D
minor, Kk.552; in D minor, Kk.553; in C minor, Kk.116; in G,
Kk.470; in G, Kk.471; in E minor, Kk.263; in E, Kk.264; in
A, Kk.24; in D minor, Kk.32
Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord)
One of the first professional concerts I heard—it
may even have been the first—was of Scarlatti sonatas on the harpsichord, at
the suggestion of my childhood piano teacher, with whom I learned a good few
along the way. I cannot now remember who the harpsichordist was and am not even
sure of the venue; oddly, I think it may have been Rotherham’s Civic Theatre
rather than the Arts Centre (part of a wonderful brutalist complex, since
demolished, that included the town’s Central Library from where I borrowed many
of my first books and, later, first musical cassettes and scores). Scarlatti
loomed relatively large in the early repertoire I was occasionally allowed to
try out on my teacher’s spinet. As soon, though, as I started organ lessons in
my teens, my adoration for Bach somewhat crowded out contemporaries. Not that I
have or had no interest in Scarlatti, Handel, Rameau, Couperin, and many
others, but I am reasonably sure I have never been to an all-Scarlatti recital
since. I have no idea how I might react today to what I heard as a schoolboy in
Rotherham—I assume I am not imagining the whole thing—but I can say that this
immersive experience from Mahan Esfahani, performed without an interval, much
of it without as much as a break between pieces, was quite a journey on which
to be taken.
Over ninety minutes or so, with a couple of
bonus D minor sonatas as encores, Esfahani’s selection covered a broad range,
whilst still of course only encompassing a small proportion of Scarlatti’s
output in this genre. (One might reasonably go so far as to call the Scarlatti
sonata close to a genre in itself. It does not spring out of nowhere, nor does
it lead to nowhere, but few if any binary forms are quite like it.) From the
outset, we knew that this was music internalised, so that these performances,
without a hint of the wilful, could in a positive sense be like no others.
Freedom was not licence; rather, it offered a guiding thread that enabled a
particular sequence of works to emerge in a particular way, with fresh
performances that would have been otherwise in a different order, let alone a
different day. For instance, in the first pair of works, in F major, harmonic
rhythm that was allied to, yet never dictated by, metre was the frame for a
relish in the composer’s obstinacy and graciousness alike: aristocratic in the
best sense. As the recital progressed, repeated figures, sequences scales,
ornaments and other building blocks emerged as characteristic, yet varied,
nothing so mundane as a cliché. The illusion of dynamic contrast was conjured—except,
of course, that it was not always an illusion.
A fascinating sequence of minor-key works communicated
a proper sense of Affekt, quite distinct from later tonal understandings,
associative or otherwise. Where I as a teenager had been tempted to the
maudlin, here this music was brought to life, without any of the irritating, nonsensical
reductionism of many so-called ‘Baroque’ musicians who would claim all music of
the period is a dance. This is a world with as many options as ours, and so too
it sounded here, whilst making the sum of those options more than the sum of
its parts. Continuities and discontinuities, and the way they fit together,
offered here and elsewhere courtly dignity and allure, and a fine sense of
caprice. Crossing of hands, leaning appoggiaturas, agogic accents, fanfares
that spoke of a world beyond the keyboard, and magical moments of suspense
expertly punctured led towards a final sequence of sonatas that built in
gravity and abandon, tempting us to think each one the last, until a successor twisted
the screw a little further. Something darker, mysteriously Mediterranean
characterised the final programmed work, the perfect response to its predecessor’s
abandon. Programming and performance worked as one.
Oliver Leith:Grinding bust turning (2018) Juta Pranulytė:Harmonic Islands (2022, world premiere) Zoltán Jeney: El Silencio (1986, UK premiere) Scott McLaughlin:Natura Naturans II (2022, world premiere) Jack Sheen:Solo for cello (2021)
Josephine Stephenson (soprano)
Heather Roche (clarinet)
Kerry Yong (piano)
Gordon Mackay, Mira Benjamin (violins)
Bridget Carey, Reiad Chibah (violas)
Colin Alexander, Anton Lukoszevieze (cellos)
Humans often like to classify. Aristotelians
certainly do. There is nothing wrong with that, up to a point; it helps us make
sense of the world, recognise affinities and connections, suggests how we might
explain them, and so on. At the same time, categories and labels can take on a
life of their own, alienated, even reified. So far, so uncontroversial, I imagine;
so why mention it? Because, I think, those thoughts chimed with some of my
experience here. In none of these cases did I have much idea what to expect
from the music I was about to hear: always an exciting prospect, especially
when one has to write about it. I fumbled, initially, with labels to try to
express an unquestionable affinity—unquestionable to my ears, anyway—between the
music heard, but in the end thought them unhelpful, preferring instead to try
to address the substance rather than a preconceived idea.
If I had read the programme note
beforehand, I should have been helped by Apartment House artistic director Anton
Lukoszevieze’s title for the evening, ‘Harmonic Fields’. But perhaps it was
better that I did not until later, maintaining the innocence of my ear. In
fact, what Lukoszevieze went on to outline was somewhat different from what I
heard. He pointed to ‘the works all inhabit[ing] different areas or “fields” of
harmonic activity,’ continuing: ‘at this stage in the 21st century
there do not appear to be any dominant styles or aesthetic movements. We seem
to be wading through a delta of different types of composition, resulting in
many rivers of confluence.’ The first statement, regarding different areas or
fields was undoubtedly the case, though I heard in each case a particular
attachment to particular fields: not that they did not change; most did indeed
transform, but in general they transformed slowly, or (not, I hope, an
abdication of listening, since I mean to imply some separation between ‘reality’
and impression) gave the impression of doing so. However, regarding the second
point, whilst I should broadly agree; the owl of Minerva tends, as we all know,
only to spread its wings at dusk. We may now think of Brahms and Wagner, even
Schoenberg and Stravinsky, as having as much in common as they do things that
separate them, but they and most of their contemporaries did not—and often with
good reason. What did strike me, though, was that these particular pieces, all
but one written in the past four years, seemed very much to do so, in the sense
of all moving, in various senses, slowly; that ‘slowly’ important, but so,
equally, is the ‘moving’.
Oliver Leith’s Grinding bust turning
presented, in Lukoszevieze’s admirable description, a pairing of his own ‘cello
and clarinet [Heather Roche] as a dissolute couple, bonded but not united, pitch-wise,
both playing material in unison but tuned microtonally apart’. Such sounds our
ears have become ready to accept over the past few decades, some listeners
actually relishing the lack of perfection in ‘period’ ensembles that go more
readily out of tune than, say, the Berlin Philharmonic ever would, but also of
course through intentional compositional use of microtones. The lack of cello
vibrato, though, also brought to my mind a sort of ‘school orchestra’ sound.
Repetition and what Lukoszevieze described as a ‘grating’ quality drew one in
to listen, Kerry Yong’s piano seemingly doing its own thing, though that own
thing certainly had its own tendencies too. A jest, or something more serious?
Perhaps it was both. Not for nothing did Lukoszevieze refer to Satie.
Juta Pranulytė’s Harmonic Islands,
for the same forces, and Zoltán Jeney’s El Silencio (from 1986, yet
receiving its UK premiere) for soprano, two violins, two violas and cellos ha
din common an expansive, extensive quality. The former seemed more obviously to
be in transition, though that was, I think, partly a matter of appearance. It
certainly offered considerable contrast with the sound of what had gone before,
the cello’s vibrato now suggesting a different instrument; often the writing
for clarinet and piano did too. The method of engineering—or, as it seemed,
painting—harmonic change through movement such as glissando in one part (cello
or clarinet) against constant piano was very much to the fore. Yet so too were
aural tricks, or to put it another way, the deception of my ears; the cello
might sound as a clarinet echo, or the piano strings as an intensification of their
cousins on the cello. The world of Schoenberg’s ‘Farben’ was not, perhaps,
entirely done with, all these years on.
Jeney’s piece, moving towards a slow
setting of words from Lorca, although it took some while for the soprano, Josephine
Stevenson, to enter, offered a different variety of string non vibrato
to Leith’s piece: glassier, closer to a more typical ‘new music’ variety.
Taking its time again seemed to be a good deal of the point, microtones perhaps
paradoxically (although not unlike in Leith) as much delimiting the field as
opening it up. All music has its boundaries, its constraints.
Scott McLaughlin’s Natura NaturansII, for clarinet, two violins, two violas, and two cellos, takes its name from
Schelling’s term, to quote the composer, ‘for the continuous “productivity” of
nature: nothing is fixed, instead it is constantly “becoming” as it cycles
through stable, unstable, and “metastable” manifestations.’ That is very much
what we heard here, testament to the excellence of performance, no doubt, as
well as to the work itself. Clarinet summoned strings and responded to them, or
so it seemed, the relationship soon being revealed as more complex than that. This
was music ever becoming, never familiar, with an almost visual quality to it. As
with everything heard in this concert, these seemed to be decidedly northern
skies. I recall then asking myself ‘why did you think of skies?’ Perhaps there
is something to that description, or perhaps it simply says something about me.
Might these have been waters instead? I am not sure.
Finally, with the period after the interval
to itself, came Jack Sheen’s Solo for Cello, played by Lukoszevieze with
fixed audio, in what seemed to be another masterly performance, fully in
control of the material, fully at ease with necessary modes of expression. Opening
harmonic arpeggios soon had one’s ears picking up the slightest (as well as
greater) differences, whether in pitch, rhythm, tempo, or other aspects of
figuration. Change was often slow, yet unmistakeable, from time to time not
slow at all. Lukoszevieze’s description of ‘a kind of flickering, glitchy and incessant
“moto perpetuo”,’ again captured the music as well as his performance. I
thought at one point of flecks in a woollen garment, the points of restricted
proliferation—although all proliferation has its constraints, surely. Circling,
dancing, singing, repeating, changing, slowing, speeding: much changed in
irregular (I think) patterns. A mysterious silence that was not,
allowing the audio its solo moment, heralded the close. Sheen’s score seemed
quietly to question itself.
O-Mega; Palimpsest; Echange; Thalleïn for ensemble
Concret PH; Kottos; Rebonds A, Rebonds
B
Psappha; Ikhoor; Tetras; Mikka and Mikka ‘S’;
Pléïades
Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)
Philip Howard (piano)
Tim Gill (cello)
Oliver Lowe, Colin Currie (percussion)
London Sinfonietta
Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)
JACK Quartet
Colin Currie Group
Iannis Xenakis’s music does not age. It is
an ahistorical cliché to say so, likewise to say how stark, elemental,
uncompromising, visceral, mysterious, unique, and so on it is. Those
descriptions retain their force, whilst remaining open to exception and to
broader questioning. But they came to many listeners’ mind, judging by the
general conversation at the Queen Elizabeth Hall throughout this Xenakis Day,
seeming to lodge themselves in a sort of collective consciousness through which
works and performances could be heard. I did not, alas, hear all of the day’s
events, but I attended the two principal concerts in the hall itself, hearing
also three of the works on offer in the foyer in between. It was, I think, enough—although
the way the closing Pléïades left one aurally bludgeoned was less on
account of the astounding performances from the Colin Corrie Group of six
percussionists than the unsuitability of the hall: a pity, one necessarily
felt, whilst recognising that the Southbank Centre had done what it could.
The first works I heard were four from the
London Sinfonietta and Geoffrey Paterson, in performances like everything here
that seemed quite beyond reproach. (If you are going to play Xenakis, you tend
to do it well.) O-Mega, for percussion and ensemble, made for a splendid
opener; after that, his final work, we could only go back, at least temporally.
Oliver Lowe’s opening bongo tattoo, a call to something, it seemed, met with
implacable wind response, a hieratic ritual initiated in a theatre of music
that might always have been, except it had not. Moving from 1997 to 1979, Palimpsest,
for eleven instruments, offered piano (and other) scales reinvented before our
ears, its lines unmistakeably architectural, even engineered—to borrow a little
too readily from the composer’s other callings. Sawmill strings, wind fractals
in which one could see as well as hear the geometry, virtuoso drumming and so
much more: this was not easy listening, nor was it supposed to be. It was quite
a journey to final, mesmerising piano-and-drum-led climax.
Échange, for bass clarinet (Mark van de Wiel) and ensemble, was
similarly yet entirely differently primal. Again, it sounded unmistakeably that
‘this was how it must be’, in a world of violence (like our own) quite unconcealed.
How can we continue so blithely, it seemed to ask, in a world imperilled by
nuclear attack? Xenakis must have asked the same thing, or so we fancied. And
yet, life in all its physicality, all its mental wonder, continued. The bass
clarinet, somewhere between priest and Pierrot, bade new sounds emerge at will,
though that will was again sometimes no mean effort. The ensemble could,
though, and did respond. The startling weirdness of an E-flat major chord could
hardly have sounded more alien: a signal, it seemed, from yet another planet.
Thalleïn, the Sinfonietta’s first commission (1984) from Xenakis, was
as implacable as anything yet heard, perhaps still more so.
Siren-like—ambulance, not temptress—its opening had us browbeaten, and thereby
strangely receptive to proliferating subtleties to come, even to the point of
finding them inviting. Masses of sound continued to confront us to exhilarating
effect. Ascending and descending scales led both ways, so it seemed, to hell,
their mockery a deeply serious business. Piccolo pierced our consciousness, at
times painfully, like a moment of alarm on an intensive care unit screen. There
was blood-letting aplenty, the final string swarms, punctuated by percussion,
as far as ever from consolation.
Concret PH, like most, possibly all, musique
concrete actually did seem to have aged—though even that is dependent on
our knowing the unknowable Rankean ‘how it really was’, and how can we? Even if
we had been there, in the 1958 Expo Philips Pavilion Xenakis as Le Corbusier’s
assistant designed, memory would play its tricks. There is no ‘authenticity’;
there never was; and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool or a charlatan. How
admirably full of integrity Xenakis and his fellow avant-gardists seem contrasted
with those snake-oil-salesmen to come. No, you cannot hear the St Matthew
Passion as if you had never heard Xenakis; more to the point, why would you
wish to? Or is that just to invest my own fantasy of postwar ‘inauthenticity’
as super- or supra-authenticity? There was, at any rate, room for fantasy here,
if one closed one’s eyes and listened. Here was another world: inaccessible,
perhaps, like that of Bach’s Leipzig, yet an idea not without its own seduction.
Tim Gill’s performance of Kottos for
cello really deserved the main hall, as did Lowe’s Rebonds A and Rebonds
B. They were mightily fine accounts, though, wherever one heard them, the
first’s evocation of the horrible hundred-armed creature, progeny of Uranus and
Gaia, a song both fragile and stark: deeply rooted, if hardly in the
conventional harmonic sense. Or perhaps it was, for I felt the implication at
least of a harmonic language, even if I could never know it, even if it were in
fact unknowable. There was whimsy in the asides, even as the ‘creature’ gained
strength. And the music reached something akin to ecstasy, doubtless more
effortful than that of Messiaen, yet no less genuine for that. The state of
frenzy reached was a liberation of sorts, not least amidst the hell of our
current existence. Both Rebonds pieces, A in particular,
invoked—even if we knew not what (that inscrutability again). One was drawn in,
less hypnotised than converted, in powerfully cumulative, remarkably different
experiences of control and abandon.
In the evening, Colin Currie’s Psappha
seemed almost designed to cement our growing sense of structure as fundamental
in an emphatic, again quasi-engineered sense to Xenakis’s work. The
extraordinary musicianship on show never threatened to take on a life of its
own; structure remained paramount. There seemed no other way. And the silences:
they might almost have been from Bruckner. Here, again, was a summoning both
archaic and not. Pléïades, here ordered ‘Metaux’, ‘Claviers’, ‘Peaux’,
‘Mélanges’, suffered, as I said, from an ear-splitting quality that made it,
for me at least, too difficult to take, the sixxens too rarely emerging, to
quote Xenakis, as ‘clouds, nebulas, and galaxies of the fragmented dust of
beats’. Even here, though, ‘the idea of periodicity, repetition, duplication,
faithful, pseudo-faithful,’ and above all ‘unfaithful copy’ shone through.
‘Claviers’ came closer to polyphony, its ripples even a little Boulezian,
though I am not sure either composer would have approved of the comparison. Its
patterns emerged as if on multiple screens before our ears. Drummed hypnosis in
‘Peaux’ prepared the way for less a synthesis or recapitulation than a gigantic
rehearing, even rewriting when all instruments united in ‘Mélanges’. It was
ear-splitting, again, at times, but in quite an aural landscape, at times
almost dreamed.
Rhythm, its problems and opportunities, had
haunted much of the string music in between, especially Ikhoor for
string trio and Tetras for string quartet, both given by the JACK
Quartet. Vivid, fiercely directed narratives marked out both, as did superhuman
unanimity of purpose. Tetras seemed somehow both stranger and familiar,
the strangeness heightened by sounds I might have sworn had emerged from
electronics, did I not know otherwise. Voices, of whatever sort, bore witness,
as if from Luigi Nono’s long-estranged cousin. Two works for violin solo, Mikka
and Mikka ‘S’, were given by the quartet member absent for the trio,
Austin Wulliman. Measured swarming, control in dilemma, line tracked as if in a
real-time graph: throughout one ‘felt’ the mathematics, or imagined one did. As
in every performance here, there was a rightness that left one knowing, like
this music or not, it deserved as well as demanded to be heard.
Bach:Aria variata alla maniera italiana, BWV 989 Messiaen:Préludes: ‘Chant d’extase dans un paysage triste’ Bach:Three-part Inventions: Sinfonia no.9 in F minor, BWV 795 Rameau:Pièces de clavecin: ‘L’entretien des muses’ Messiaen:Catalogue d’oiseaux: ‘Le courlis cendré’; Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus: ‘Regard des anges’, ‘Première communion de la Vierge’ Rameau:Pièces de clavecin: ‘Les cyclopes’; Nouvelles suites de pièces de clavecin: ‘La poule’ Messiaen:Catalogue d’oiseaux: ‘L’alouette calandrelle’ Bach: Three-part Inventions: ‘Sinfonia no.15 in B minor, BWV 801 Messiaen:Vingt regards: ‘La parole toute puissante’, ‘Noël’; Cantéyodjayâ
Tamara Stefanovich (piano)
I had found myself reflecting recently how
sad it was that Olivier Messiaen’s music had somewhat gone out of fashion. It does
not go unheard, but like that of many composers, the number of works regularly
performed is not so great. There are advocates, of course, though perhaps fewer
than would be ideal. The loss of Pierre Boulez continues to hit the cause of
twentieth-century music hard and this is surely a case in point. Sometimes an
anniversary offers an opportunity; alas, nothing significant is approaching. As
Messiaen, then, finds himself in the doldrums, alongside figures such as
Hindemith (how much longer?!) and Tippett, it was refreshing indeed to find his
music so thoughtfully programmed and brilliantly performed as here by Tamara
Stefanovich in the opening programme of this year’s London Piano Festival.
Bach, though not at his most familiar, began
the recital: the Aria variata. Stefanovich’s rich-toned, deeply
considered reading showed, should there have been any doubters, that performance
with great insight into contemporary (to Bach) language and practice is
perfectly possible on the piano. I fancied I heard her a little, or more than a
little, of her stated admiration for Nikolaus Harnoncourt here. ‘French’
rhythms were strongly to the fore, already pointing the way not only to Rameau
but, perhaps more strongly still, to Messiaen. With command of Bach’s rhetoric,
Stefanovich employed variation form and the changes of perspective it wrought
to fashion a powerful cumulative statement. Freedom and form were unmistakeably
two sides of the same coin.
Youthful Bach (c.1709) gave way to
still more youthful Messiaen. The ‘Chant d’extase dans un paysage triste’ from
his early Préludes captured the spirit of its poetic title with just the
right sort of post-Debussyan voice. Ecstasy, as in much of what was to come,
offered liberation in its ordered delirium; or was that an exquisite cage? Perhaps
there was no need to choose. Nor was there, returning to Bach, in the darkly chromatic
yearning of the F minor Sinfonia, a ‘black pearl’ of its own. Rameau offered a
staging post in between, though with its own character. The difference of his
conception of harmony—recall Emanuel Bach’s self-portrayal as ‘anti-Rameau’—and
indeed of ornamentation seemed in some ways closer to Messiaen, though these
are not perhaps composers we most readily consider bedfellows. ‘L’entretien des
muses’ was similarly well-shaped, dynamic contrasts very much part of that
shaping. Two Messiaen pieces closed the first half: from Catalogue d’oiseaux:
‘Le courlis cendré’, and from Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus: ‘Regard
des anges’. Playful violence across the keyboard, not unlike a swerving cat, took
us from deep chords and high birdsong to a further sweep of carolling colours
and contrasts.
The second half opened with another ‘regard’,
‘Première communion de la Vierge’, which brought further heavenly ecstasy. Rock-solid
rhythm enabled fantastic melodic arabesques to work their magic above; so too
did harmony, Rameau’s ghost included. Two more of Rameau’s keyboard pieces, ‘Les
cyclopes’ and ‘La poule’ followed, the former unfolding with grace and not
entirely dissimilar fantasy, the former a study in pictorial caprice and obstinacy
suggestive of another harpsichordist contemporary, Domenico Scarlatti. Indeed,
great Scarlatti pianists came to my mind in the display and relish we heard for
score and instrument alike. Repeated notes offered a strange yet convincing rainbow
bridge between this and the next Messiaen piece, the second Bach Sinfonia in
context effecting an almost Apollonian restoration of order.
Almost mocking in its apocalyptic vision, cutting
us mere mortals down to size, ‘La parole toute puissante’ more than lived up to
its name. This final Messiaen sequence, culminating in the extraordinary
rhythms—and manifold implications—of Cantéyodjayâ, unleashed a
torrential force of pianistic yet above all musical bravura. Weird, wonderful,
above all unanswerable, this was music that played by—and was played with—its own
rules, a crazy world of mysteries in itself that confirmed beyond doubt how
much richer our own world is with the music of Messiaen.
Chopin: Nocturne in C minor, op.48 no.1, Ballade no.1 in G minor, op.23, Piano Sonata no.3 in B minor, op.58 Tristan Murail:Impression, soleil levant Beethoven: Piano Sonata no.32 in C minor, op.111
François-Frédéric Guy (piano)
In this Wigmore Hall recital, François-Frédéric
Guy took a fresh look at well-known piano masterpieces, and presented a work new
this year, written for him by Tristan Murail. Dedicated to the memory of two
close friends, Nicholas Angelich and Lars Vogt, it was an interesting concert
in the best sense, with nothing taken as read and much to have one think.
The first half was dedicated to Chopin,
opening with the C minor Nocturne, op.48 no.1. Guy married harmony to rhythm in
its first section, immediately conveying a sense of the inexorable. Dignified,
never remotely sentimental, it both prepared the way for and necessitated
contrast in an ever-broadening middle section, which in turn resulted in a
modified return that evoked the spirit rather than the letter of synthesis. The
G minor Ballade, both grandly rhetorical and intimate in its whispered
confidences, evinced kinship with the Nocturne, whilst emerging free of evident
relation to any particular pianistic tradition. Again, it was resolutely sentimental,
even to the point at which I should not have minded a little old world charm;
but this was not an old world performance, and why should it be? It spoke and increasingly
sang with an integrity, fire, and miraculous concision that were its own: more
important than being note-perfect.
The B minor Sonata began with a directness
difficult not to think of as ‘Beethovenian’, though naturally soon proceeded in
a different direction. The first movement reminded me at times of Liszt, and
not only (I think) on account of the key. Not that it was especially seductive;
this was, if anything, a performance notable for its lack of perfume. Paradoxically,
one had to listen for its lyricism; yet, when one did, it was there. Likewise
in the scherzo, though perhaps less surprisingly there: it sounded as if a
piece of post-impressionist play with light on water—sometimes quite troubled
water. A forthright ‘Largo’ led to a marauder icy even in heat of a finale.
Much was unexpected, yet never did it sound unreasonable. Guy had one listen.
Murail’s Impression, soleil levant
seemed, especially in the context of such performances, more preoccupied with
the nature of sound: in general, and piano sound in particular. More flexible,
even melting, both inside the piano and on its keys, it nonetheless had melodic
lines sound as if taken from Chopin and placed in radically new harmonic context.
Occasionally, the ghost of Debussy rattled its chains, but the way of hearing encouraged
was different. This seemed to me a commanding performance, even on a first
hearing (for me) presenting the work as it should.
Finally, we heard Beethoven’s last piano
sonata, op.111, a work greatly admired by Chopin (amongst many others!) Its
opening diminished seventh leaps sounded as if on loan from Chopin or Liszt
(the B minor Sonata in particular), offering a fine sense of transition to
Beethoven’s world: steeped here as much in the fantasias, especially that also
in C minor, of Mozart as in the Romanticism of Beethoven’s own century (by
now). Whatever the antecedents or successors, that fantasia-like quality and
recognisably Beethovenian fury were strongly to the fore in the first movement.
Phrases melted, to be sure, yet within that initially constructed frame.
Flashes across the canvas—striking clarity of counterpoint in the development,
extraordinary harmonic twists in the recapitulation—had me once more imagining
I was hearing this music for the first time. The Arietta that opens the second
and final movement sang with just the right sort of quiet dignity. Guy’s ear
(and fingers) for telling detail ensured that, again, this corresponded only to
a new vision, or so it seemed, beholden to no particular view from the past.
The first variation continued and intensified; its successor worked magic that
sounded, for all its familiarity, once more new, the third variation still more
so. And so, the wondrous voyage continued, neither entirely familiar nor
unfamiliar. Through a gossamer filigree extending already, so it seemed, beyond
Mendelssohn, a snow-like brilliance on the white keys, a rapt sublimity that
could never be mistaken for anyone else’s, and so much more, there was no doubt
this was Beethoven—the cruel loss of whom in the pandemic year of 2020 some of
us still feel and perhaps always will. Yet this was not pious or precious Beethoven;
it lived and breathed in a way that rightly took nothing for granted.
Brahms, arr. Busoni: Chorale Preludes, BV B 50 Fred Hersch: Variations on a Folk Song Wagner, arr. Kocsis: Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act I Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor, S.178
Igor Levit (piano)
A typically thoughtful programme,
brilliantly performed, from Igor Levit: the second half reprising that of his
Salzburg recital in August, the first quite different, yet forming an equally
coherent whole. First we heard the six of Brahms’s eleven late organ chorale
preludes Busoni arranged for piano in 1902. The first, ‘Herzlich tut mich
erfreuen’, rightly announced itself paradoxically, or better dialectically,
both emphatically as piano music and yet also as ‘letting the music speak for
itself’, in that most necessary of clichés. Musical processes behind and
beneath the melody revealed two—sorry, three—great minds at work. Brahms’s
arpeggiated half-lights emerged, as if from his own piano music; they were
never imposed. That attentiveness to material—a sort of dual authenticity, though
not in the debased sense the later twentieth century made all too current—marked
out ‘Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele’ as more yielding, yet similarly
straightforward, and the ineffably lovely ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’ as
differently inward, Levit relishing Busoni’s modest interventions. The two preludes
on ‘Herzlich tut mich verlangen’ were properly contrasted, the first speaking
with a richness of tone apt for a more overtly Romantic outpouring (from both
Brahms and Busoni), the second acting with ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’ both to
encase that passion, and coming closest to the Passions of Bach. It was deeply
moving in its modesty, patience, and depth. Levit took his time, rather
beautifully, with the heartbreaking ‘O Welt, ich muß dich lassen’. His dignified
performance spoke with a distilled wisdom, like Brahms’s, that seemed to say
all that need, perhaps all that could, be said.
Fred Hersch’s 2021 Variations on a Folk
Song followed. An initial statement of a time-honoured theme, here ‘Oh
Shenandoah’, provided a connection rather than kinship with Brahms, but enough
to have one think. Twenty variations followed. Harmonic recolouring came first
to the fore, followed in what I think may have been the third variation by a
change of mood to something less ruminative, more extrovert. A wide variety of
treatments ensued, one (mostly) for the left hand standing out in dark,
muscular fashion, as an heir to Romantic tradition, another insistent and ardent,
perhaps a little after Liszt (to come). Others were more inward or floating. This
was evidently music Levit had internalised, just as it this clearly represented
a tribute from one pianist to another pianist—and vice versa. The
principal language may have been forged in the jazz world, but it was generous
in its frame of reference—and that generosity extended to spirit too.
Zoltán Kocsis’s transcription of the
Prelude to Act I of Tristan was strenuous, big-boned, virtuosic, the
emphasis placed very much on struggle, on becoming. Always directed to a goal
that was never reached, its oppressive lack of resolution (in more than one
sense) led us directly into a performance of Liszt’s B minor Sonata perhaps
still more fiery, still more coherent than that I had admired a month earlier
in Salzburg. It was similarly bold and questing, and of course more
unremittingly virtuosic, virtuosity and rhetoric always means to an end rather
than ends in themselves. Post-Beethovenian goal-direction was equally apparent,
through rather than despite flexibility. Bringing us to the recapitulation, for
instance, Levit triumphantly banished the false dawn of the preceding fugato to
the fiery furnace. Form was a living, breathing, even diabolical thing. Liszt
here was, quite rightly, both highly integrated and far-flung, Liszt’s essence grasped
and communicated.
Detail mattered too: the return of those strange descending scales told us
beyond any doubt that, were a single note in them to be changed, so too would the
rest of the work. Never, not for one moment, could one doubt our guide knew
where he was leading us. For Levit’s command of line, which one might well
consider ‘Wagnerian’ in terms of unendliche Melodie, was not the least tool
in communicating a pianistic sorcery on Liszt’s part that under the right hands
is anything but rhapsodic. As for hands, had I not witnessed the performance
with my own eyes as well as ears, I might have sworn there were four at work. This
is a masterpiece of musical thought, of course, but it is equally piano
music, and sounded as such, reminding me of Donald Tovey’s observation that
Liszt’s piano music was that of someone who could not fail to make a beautiful
sound when touching the keys. Beauty takes many guises, of course, but Liszt
never, ever writes against the instrument. Nor, so it seems, does Levit ever
play against it. A beatific close seemed, at least in retrospect, to
necessitate the lovely yet plain-spoken encore, (as in Salzburg) Schumann’s ‘Der
Dichter spricht’.
Waldemar – David Butt Philip Tove – Lise Lindstrom Wood-dove – Karen Cargill Klaus-Narr – Robert Murray Peasant – James Creswell Speaker – Alex Jennings
London Philharmonic Choir (chorus director: Neville Creed)
London Symphony Chorus (chorus director: Simon Halsey)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Edward Gardner (conductor)
Image: London Philharmonic Orchestra
The pandemic is not over. But I remember
thinking, when some sort of minimal concert life was intermittently starting up
again—socially distanced concerts at St Martin-in-the-Fields with a maximum
audience of thirty, the first and second series of Spotlight Chamber Concerts
at St John’s Waterloo, and so on—what resumption of a full range of musical
life would entail for me. I chose three examples, which have remained in my
mind ever since: a large-scale work by Richard Strauss, a full staging of Die
Meistersinger, and a performance of Gurrelieder. Strauss came a
little while ago, in a performance of the Alpine Symphony—though I await
a Frau ohne Schatten. Meistersinger is yet to come. On this
Wagner-and-Strauss-starved island, we should probably not hold our collective
breath. Nevertheless, even if accompanied by precious little other Schoenberg, Gurrelieder
has returned.
It was, if truth be told, a somewhat mixed
performance we heard from Edward Gardner and the LPO: well sung and played, Gardner’s
conducting more variable yet growing in stature, with one major, well-nigh
catastrophic miscalculation for the closing melodrama. The Royal Festival Hall
is far from ideal for this work, yet Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Philharmonia
performances in 2009
and 2018
had seemed far more at home. Contrast was glaring in the opening bars. Both Salonen
and Gardner achieved great clarity; whatever the Festival Hall’s shortcomings,
it probably helped in that respect. Gardner and the LPO, however, sounded oddly
mechanical, as opposed to pointillistic; the strange impression was of oddly
balanced strings and flutes out of sync, even when they were not. And even once
the music had settled, Gardner imparted an oddly regimented quality to it,
moving bar-to-bar rather than via paragraph. There were, though, some inviting,
dangerous, Tristan-esque sounds from the LPO that prepared the way
splendidly for David Butt Philip’s first entry.
Butt Philip showed himself, without
exaggeration, to be one of the finest Waldemars I have heard. His way with
words and shaping of vocal lines were beyond reproach. As the first part
progressed, his emotional range widened to encompass, as does the work, the impetuous,
the angry, and also greater dynamic range. The ardent lyricism as he told of Waldemar’s
pride, likened unto that of Christ seated once more next to His father, was an
object lesson in dramatic delivery that yet retained a Lieder-singer’s
attention to detail. Lindstrom offered a womanly Tove with Nordic steel: no
false purity, and again a performance that took its leave from the verse. The
LPO generally sounded gorgeous. Earlier on, Gardner might have lingered to
advantage. Greater flexibility did come, though, whether in the coital
stillness of Tove’s response or the ghostly, again Tristan-like brass of
‘unsel’ger Geschlechter’ foretold, developing via frightening double basses
into something more ominous. Waldemar’s words ‘Unsere Zeit ist um’ offered
ecstatic contradiction, already tinged with irony concerning fate and the
future. Yet the sweetness of the interlude introducing Tove’s last words
consoled, as it should. Could Lindstrom’s delivery here have been more lyrical?
Probably. Her care for verbal expression nonetheless offered compensation enough,
and the climax on ‘Kuß’, her final word, sent shivers down the spine, with
credit due to all concerned: soloist, conductor, and orchestra.
The Wood-dove’s song was, quite simply,
outstanding. Karen Cargill’s deep, rich tone furthered an interpretation once
more unquestionably rooted in the text. Rising out of the orchestra, this was a
forest messenger one knew one could trust, however much one wanted her words
not to be true. Gardner here captured to a tee the crucial role of rhythm, not
least in relation to harmony. It made for a gripping conclusion to the first part,
the strange decision to break for an interval all the more regrettable.
That said, the brief Part Two plunged us,
orchestrally and vocally, straight back into the action. Butt Philip showed
anger, increasingly blasphemous, without hectoring. Crucially, he continued to
sing, never shouting, and in highly variegated fashion too. Gardner
communicated well the fulfilment of those early ghostly sounds in the opening
of Part Three, Butt Philip and the LPO audibly responding by taking us on a
journey to new, more bracingly modernist sounds, though the direction of travel
rightly remained unclear, a veritable Götterdämmerung Hallowe’en from
male chorus and James Creswell’s Peasant alike highly impressive. Robert Murray’s
Klaus-Narr was nicely animated, communicating like Cargill’s Wood-dove with
evident sincerity and truthfulness. Again, this was music that was sung, here
in Straussian fashion, albeit more grateful for the tenor. Meistersinger-ish
tendencies in the orchestra were welcome and revealing, preparing the way for
that extraordinary experience in the prelude to the Speaker’s appearance of
material transformed before our ears, almost against our (even Schoenberg’s?)
will. History’s demand, the material’s, or the drama’s? Why choose?
And then, talk about spoiling the ship for
a ha’p’orth of tar. The Speaker entered, perversely miked, and in English
translation. One can perform Gurrelieder in English, I suppose, but then
it should surely be the whole thing. The ‘effect’ was alienating in quite the
wrong way, exacerbated by laboured, ac-tor-ly delivery on the part of Alex Jennings.
The idea, it seems, was Gardner’s own; someone should have dissuaded him. For however
sardonic, at times even vicious, the LPO sounded, this was a conceptual miscalculation
that torpedoed the performance as a whole. How I longed for the inimitable
Barbara Sukowa, icing on the cake for both of Salonen’s performances (as well
as Claudio Abbado’s Vienna recording). Even the strange, choral climax, sincere
in its way yet knowing that such tonal sounds can no longer truly convince, failed
through no fault of the chorus to salvage matters. A great pity indeed.
Narraboth – Thomas Atkins Page of Herodias – Annika Schlicht First Soldier – Simon Shibambu Second Soldier – Simon Wilding Jokanaan – Jordan Shanahan Cappadocian – John Cunningham Salome – Elena Stikhina Slave – Sarah Dufresne Herod – John Daszak Herodias – Katarina Dalayman First Jew – Paul Curievici Second Jew – Michael J. Scott Third Jew – Aled Hall Fourth Jew – Alasdair Elliott Fifth Jew – Jeremy White First Nazarene – James Platt Second Nazarene – Chuma Sijeqa Naaman – Duncan Meadows
David McVicar (director) Bárbara Lluch (revival director) Es Devlin (designs) Wolfgang Göbbel (lighting) Andrew George (choreography, movement) Emily Piercy (revival choreography) 59 Productions (video)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House Alexander Soddy (conductor)
This was a Salome best remembered
for its singing, at least once beyond the absurdity of prefacing it with ‘God
save the King’. (The production might have been adapted, I suppose, to have
Herod come onstage to receive his tribute, but that was not to be.) Stepping in
for Malin Byström, Elena Stikhina acquitted herself very well in the title
role, short notice or not. One more or less has to forgive a lack of consonants
from time to time in this role; so long as that could be agreed upon, this was an
involving, increasingly commanding performance, to which Stikhina clearly gave
her all. Thomas Atkins’s heartfelt lyricism heightened rather than detracted
from dramatic portrayal of Narraboth: another definite highlight. John Daszak
and Katarina Dalayman convinced as Herod and Herodias, both very much stage
animals, though there were times when insensitive conducting had one struggle
to hear the latter’s words. Jordan Shanahan’s thoughtful Jokaanan had the great
virtue of leading one to concentrate on words rather than aura, though I would
not have minded a little more in the latter sense too. A fine supporting cast,
assembled from depth, was another signal virtue; as, doubtless, was its
direction. For trying to identify precisely who is responsible for what is
often a fool’s errand; opera is, or should be, a team effort to which all
contribute.
Sadly, in that respect, this performance
was sorely let down by the conducting of Alexander Soddy. That side of things improved
somewhat, though even the final scene turned out at best Kapellmeister-ish:
a reasonable sense of how it should go, yet little beyond. Earlier on, though, it
was a depressing account, for which the orchestra should probably bear some responsibility
too. (Who knows, though, what havoc recent ‘events’ may have wrought with rehearsal
schedules?) The first scene was all over the place, stage and pit unsynchronised
and plagued by balance issues that marked the entire performance. Various
orchestral lines went unheard, bludgeoned by shattering insensitivity. Even
when together, Strauss sounded like a poor-to-stolid Wagner imitator, the
phantasmagorical magic of his orchestration going for nothing in as
non-transparent a reading of his music as I have ever heard. The aestheticism
that marks not only Salome’s subject matter but the score itself,
Strauss’s Nietzscheanism triumphantly rejecting, even mocking, Wagner and Schopenhauer
alike was disturbingly absent, replaced not with an alternative view but merely
an effort to progress from one bar to the next. Strangely pronounced bass lines
neither grounded nor propelled the harmony; they were just strangely
pronounced. Some passages—rarely anything longer than that—were better, but really
this was playing unworthy of a major international house.
That aestheticism was, however, touched
upon in the fourth revival of David McVicar’s production, here renewed by
Bárbara Llano. My response to McVicar’s staging has varied over the years, increasingly
suspecting that its ‘house of horrors’ approach threw too many bags into the
same basket. It is also, if we are honest, looking a little tired by now. That
said, I was grateful not only for the sheer professionalism at work, but all
the more so for ideas—my fault, I am sure—that had barely registered with me
previously. Gore is still present, most memorably in the bloodstained emergence
of the naked executioner Naaman, fresh from his deed. Whether one considers
that gratuitous will probably remain a matter of taste, but it seemed to me
clear, indeed far clearer than before, that this was a comment not only on an
interwar world of militarised, fascist violence, but also, more importantly, on
the dangers and joys of an aestheticism passed from Wilde to Strauss, via
Pasolini’s Salò and Sade himself to McVicar and to us. Politics and
aesthetics are not to be disentangled, however much characters onstage and
audience offstage might wish them to be. Nor can we forget the past; a
harrowing retelling of abuse during the Dance of the Seven Veils makes that clear.
There are doubtless lessons to be learned there, but no one, least of all
Salome, will do so: itself, of course, an important further lesson.
In a 1958 article on Luciano Berio for the Darmstadt Summer School’s house journal Die Reihe, Piero Santi outlined the post-war Italian avant-garde’s guiding principles:
Everybody’s purpose is authentic organization of the world of sound, which is finally to be freed from […] external compulsion […]. Thus, in the years after World War II, new Italian music, too, had a role marked out. Naturally, it profited from study of hitherto unavailable [modernist] works, and from insights gained elsewhere, but the natural reaction was against our most recent past. To put it more bluntly: there was a reaction against ‘expression at all costs’, against rhetoric (veiled to a greater or lesser degree), against sentimentality which no longer dared to express itself melodramatically, unreservedly.
Politics and aesthetics are interrelated, even identified, more strongly than might have been the case in Germany or France, although everywhere the fiction of a 1945 ‘Zero Hour’, sharply distinguishing post-war endeavour from a world culminating in Auschwitz (and Hiroshima) proved persuasive. In contrast to Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy had in any case remained strikingly open to modernism. Berg’s Wozzeck received its Italian premiere in 1942; and at the Venice Conservatory from 1941 to 1945, Nono had been introduced to music by the Second Viennese School, Stravinsky, Bartók and others.
In Nono’s case, a further imperative was political engagement. He took A Survivor from Warsaw by Schoenberg, his posthumous father-in-law, as emblematic for what composition might accomplish. We might also ask to what extent it is meaningful to consider Nono, very much a Venetian as well as an internationalist, as an ‘Italian composer’ at all. In any case, no more than Schoenberg was Nono inclined to lack of ‘expression’; their music rather tends towards hyper-expressivity in which not only every note but also the network of relationships between each note is loaded with significance. The problem, rather, was perceived of sentimentality. In a lecture Nono gave on Schoenberg’s Survivor, ‘the musical-aesthetic manifesto of our era’, he located it in the line of Jean-Paul Sartre’s question ‘why write?’ and Sartre’s response:
And if I am presented with this world and its injustices, then I should not look at it coldly, but [...] with indignation, that I might expose it and create it in its nature as injustice and abuse.’ […]
And further, should someone refuse to recognise Schoenberg’s docere and movere, […] he should know that the words which the nineteen-year-old student, Giacomo Levi, wrote in his last letter before execution by the Fascists in Modena in 1942, are also addressed to him: ‘Do not say that you no longer wish to know anything about it. Consider this, that all that has happened is because you no longer wished to know anything more about it.'
Nono found such a ‘provocation’ necessary for artistic creation. ‘The genesis of any of my works is always to be found in a human provocation (provocazione umana): an event, an experience, a test in our lives, which provokes my instinct and my consciousness, as man and musician, to bear witness.’
Expressing the inexpressive
Emblematic even among the death camps, Auschwitz was more than a ‘provocation’, however severe. If the word seems blasphemously insufficient, so does all else, save the imperative to bear witness. Theodor Adorno’s celebrated, often misquoted 1955 claim, made roughly halfway between ‘liberation’ and Nono’s work, retains its sting even after neutering by the culture industry Adorno (and Nono) justly loathed: ‘Cultural criticism finds itself confronting the last stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and this also gnaws at the realization that expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today.’ Adorno presented a problem, not a prohibition; the creative imperative remained.
In 1965, Erwin Piscator asked Nono to provide music for his staging of Peter Weiss’s new play on the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, Die Ermittlung (The Investigation), at West Berlin’s Freie Volksbühne. Nono recalled that Piscator had been ‘right’ with respect to ‘the relationship between music and theatre: what neither words nor scenes could express and represent, music must’. The following year, Nono reworked the musical material at Milan’s Studio di Fonologia della Radio into a stand-alone work for tape. Material from the children’s choir of Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, sounds and phonemes provided by the Polish soprano Stefania Woytowitz, and orchestral and choral material produced electronically in the Studio from earlier Nono works were combined and elaborated, so as to focus on and give expression to the human voice, while liberating it from the need to ‘set’ or to ‘express’ a pre-existing text, be it verbal (e.g. Weiss) or theatrical (e.g. Piscator). For voices, not words, Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz (Remember what they did to you in Auschwitz), its title inspired by Alberto Nirenstein’s Ricorda cosa ti ha fatto Amalek, a reconstruction of Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere in Poland, was the latest of Nono’s memorials with a contemporary imperative.
That attempt was grounded in a technical-aesthetic as well as a socio-political quest; arguably the two were for him the same. Nono’s interest lay less in an attempt to express what cannot be expressed – Auschwitz ‘itself’, say, or the Warsaw Ghetto of Schoenberg or Nirenstein – but in what might never have been considered ‘expressive’ in the first place. One can fancy here, for instance, that one hears a marching band or a chill wind, but the sound is almost certainly not intended to represent or to express that; more likely, it may express the dread force we feel to lie behind such representations of destruction. Violent and raucous, tender and sweet within a few seconds: those swings are doubtless part of a continuum of experience, but also seem to be opposing forces, one might even suggest of good and evil. Sound lies within an ominously contained band, beyond which is the uncanny realm of memory, Nono’s own included. His choice of self-quotations was instructive: Composizione per orchestra no.2: Diario polacco ’58, in which he had previously memorialized his visit to Auschwitz; Cori di Didone, in some sense expressing, if hardly representing, the atmosphere of death; and La fabbrica illuminata, whose ‘virtual sonic theatre’ of industrial sound and workers’ voices took on a still more ominous and deadly exposition of factory conditions in its new setting. This was an industrial and capitalist as well as racial genocide.
And yet, Nono’s longstanding fascination with voices solo and polyphonic, their embodiment and our spatial experience of them endures. As his friend Claudio Abbado attested, Nono ‘never lost the deep-rooted ties to the long tradition of Venetian music, as demonstrated by his unerring feeling for the relation of sound and space, recalling the music [Giovanni] Gabrieli wrote for the church of San Marco. Gigi’s sense of an espressivo or cantabile line also stems from this tradition.’ Here a voice that cries, that laments, that exults, is a voice, albeit mediated; yet no more than in Fidelio or Nono’s own Prometeo is it only a voice. It can express, if not represent, something of humanity, of resistance, however tragic and unspeakable its fate. There is no utopian liberation to be heard; the work is not concerned with survival or redemption. Yet perhaps freedom lies nonetheless in truth, witness and action.
.
Return (or not) to Poland
Nono’s 1958 Polish visit and musical ‘diary’, ‘in memory of my Polish friends and of that country’, was followed almost a quarter of a century later by a Diario polacco No.2. This witnessed a non-visit to the Warsaw Autumn festival of contemporary music – for there was no 1982 festival, on account of General Jaruzelski’s declaration of martial law. Nono dedicated Quando stanno morendo (When they are dying) to those who had invited and commissioned him in 1981, yet from whom he had heard no more: ‘To my Polish friends and comrades who, in exile, in hiding, in prison, at work, continue to resist and hope even in despair, to believe even in disbelief.’ Or, as we read in Nono’s own ‘Appeal for Solidarnosc’ combining specific, Polish resistance and universal, socialist humanism:
Condemnation of […] [the] coup no longer suffices. Condemnation of the military’s repression of the union movement, of independent Polish political bodies, no longer suffices. Nor is the simple denunciation of oppressive Soviet intervention or the concrete support given to the authoritarian regime in Warsaw by the USSR any longer sufficient. Every democratic, political, trade union and cultural body must now take advantage of every opportunity to give life to a mass movement in concrete solidarity with the Polish people and their freedom of expression.
Resistance and organization, like human activity in general, were complex, not simple. Art was no mere protest; nor was solidarity.
Nono’s friend and comrade, the philosopher Massimo Cacciari, assembled the written texts from verse by Czesław Miłosz (1980 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature), Endre Ady and Alexander Blok (Part I); Velemir Chlebnikov (Part II); and Boris Pasternak, Miłosz and Chlebnikov (Part III). Voices are to the fore in the first (initially, quasi-monodic) and third parts; instruments in the second, where text-setting is at first less fragmentary, more immediately comprehensible, until instruments and electronics do their invasive, even corrosive work. ‘The music “contracts”’, to quote Jürg Stenzl, although an a cappella close offers greater prospect of hope than had been permitted by the Auschwitz work. Where sound and music then had been constrained, now they look – listen, and enable us to listen – outwards. The world of Prometeo, Nono’s third and final opera and another Cacciari collaboration, beckons. As Nono and Cacciari explained: ‘we shall still be able to make “daylight” by refusing the death now coming to us. […] it will never be Death, so long as these voices speak.’
Renaissance polyphony and Venetian madrigalism meet a post-Webern present in which the qualities of every note and the connections between each one of them – intervals and other parameters – take upon themselves expressive force, moral and political as well as aesthetic, pointing in solidarity toward the future. Nono shadows and extends the horizons of voices (four female) and instruments (cello and bass flute) with live electronics, technological advances having enabled greater openness in every sense. He even declared that the score would ‘be born after the Venice “premiere”’. He did in fact produce a score beforehand, albeit one explicitly marked as ‘non-definitive’, pending eventual publication with greater information achieved in the light of performance.
The day before the premiere, Nono gave an interview to the Communist newspaper L’Unità, entitled ‘Electronic Solidarnosc’. In it, he declared that today, more than ever, ‘the artist has the responsibility to avoid conclusive, finalized results. He must understand that (as [Robert] Musil says): “it is not important what is, but rather what might have been.” This does away with all Manichaeism, all sectarianism, and all intellectual rigidity.’ Right up until the last moment, Nono insisted, his new work remained ‘open to all possible transformations’. The owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk, leaving the future open through understanding and empathy with present, past and alternative paths not yet taken but that might be. ‘When they die, men sing …’ concludes the final line of Chlebnikov’s verse. Therein lie hope and freedom of a kind.
(This essay was first published as a programme note for the 2022 Salzburg Festival.)
1 Sonata I 2 ‘Tristis est anima mea’ 3 Sonata II 4 ‘Ecce vidimus cum non habentem speciem’ 5 Sonata III 6 ‘Velum templi scissum est’ 7 Sonata IV 8 ‘Tenebrae factae sunt’ 9 Sonata V 10 ‘Caligaverunt oculi mei a fletu meo’ 11 Sonata VI 12 ‘Recessit pastor noster 13 Sonata VII 14 ‘Aestimatus sum cum descendentibus in lacum’ 15 ‘Miserere’
Joseph Haydn (1732–1809):
Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers
am Kreuze, in the string quartet arrangement
1 Introduzione: Maestoso ed adagio 2 Sonata I: ‘Pater, dimitte illis, non
enim sciunt, quid faciunt’: Largo 3 Sonata II: ‘Amen, dico tibi: hodium
mecum eris in paradiso’: Grave e cantabile 4 Sonata III ‘Mulier, ecce filius tuus, et
tu, ecce mater tua!’: Grave 5 Sonata IV: ‘Eli, eli lama sabachthani’:
Largo 6 Sonata V: ‘Sitio’: Adagio 7 Sonata VI: ‘Consummatum est!’: Lento 8 Sonata VII: ‘Pater! In manus tuas
commendo spiritum meum’: Largo 9 ‘Il terremoto’: Presto e con tutta la
forza
Haydn, Rihm, and connecting threads
‘Concerts
as we know them are organized so that one piece follows another, sometimes like
alien substances,’ wrote Wolfgang Rihm in a 2005 programme note, adding ‘there
is always a secret thread linking our artificial arrangements, from which
questions and replies will arise.’ One can understand why he might have said
that concerning a programme of Haydn’s Symphony No.95 and the world premiere of
his own Two Other Movements, alongside
Ravel’s Boléro, Ernest Chausson’s Poème op.25 and Saint-Saëns’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso.
In
the present case, works by Rihm and Haydn are more obviously connected, yet
that too requires a warning. One thread may be evident, but our ears should not
rule out the possibility of a secret labyrinth too. Haydn is programmed more
often than one might expect with Rihm, a composer fascinated by reckoning with the
Classical-Romantic tradition at whose head Haydn in many respects stands. Indeed,
one recent book on the piano trio is subtitled ‘from Joseph Haydn to Wolfgang
Rihm’. Instrumental, chamber, orchestral and even sacred music – for some now
itself a ghost at the musical feast – offer connecting threads, questions and
replies both secret and revealed.
Rihm: Sonata, vigil, and plea for mercy
If
six has often been thought a good number for instrumental collections (Haydn’s
string quartets and even his symphonies), Jewish, Christian and other religious
traditions have long considered the prime seven a ‘perfect’ number. Scripture
takes us from the seven days of Creation, through seven days of Passover, to
the seven last words or sayings of Christ on the Cross and, beyond, to seven
seals in the Book of Revelation. Christian tradition presents seven gifts of
the Holy Spirit, seven heavenly virtues, seven deadly sins, seven sacraments,
and more. Rihm initially composed movements of his Seven Passion Texts between 2001 and 2006, one by one lightening
the darkness of Holy Week vigils, knowingly in the venerable responsorial
tradition (for six vocal parts) of Carlo Gesualdo. At the premieres of the sixth
and seventh texts, he presented them as part of a larger work, Vigilia, now with preceding instrumental
‘Sonatas’, and a closing ‘Miserere’.
Easter
is coming, albeit not yet. There will be greater darkness, the greatest of all,
entailing God’s death on the Cross and sojourn in Hell. Hence the vigils (the
nocturnal hours of watching until Easter morning itself), their texts either
straightforwardly depicting, referring to (Peter 1), or foretelling (Isaiah,
Lamentations, Jeremiah, Psalms) the four Gospel accounts of the
Crucifixion. A sense of uncertainty even in direction seems to hold particular
appeal for Rihm, who in 2006 described himself as ‘one who does not pray, but speaks with God’.
This stance we hear reflected and developed in Vigilia.
Sonatas precede motets, but are no mere preludes.
Rather they introduce the text from Scripture and respond to it with a
subjectivity rarely if at all present in the motet to come. Clarinet and horn
stand apart from the rest of the ensemble (perhaps an updated version of an
ancient, largely tenebrous consort): two trombones, tuba, percussion, organ,
viola, cello and double bass. There is musical violence here, to counterpoint,
if not necessarily straightforwardly to depict, the agonies of Christ on the
Cross. This is nowhere more striking than in the antiphonal organ and brass
exchanges, mediated by percussion, of Sonata V; likewise from the organ and
percussion at the opening of the final Sonata, where horn and clarinet respond
as if from the other side of the void. Stinging dynamic contrasts and
dissonance – the idea remains just about operative – contrast in turn with less
‘extreme’, more contemplative vocal liturgies, whose melody, rhythm and even
harmony owe much to the mediating role of memory in reimagination of ‘early
music’. Even a marking of ‘calmo’ (Sonata IV) seems to pertain more to volume and,
latterly, to a Stravinskian coolness that is anything but without tension.
The opening of the first Sonata with its
leading brace of trombones has something about it of the late Renaissance,
reimagined through time and paving the way for something more overtly modernist
in timbre and gesture. Intervallic construction suggests Webern – and perhaps
the early polyphony Webern avidly studied. (Seek and ye shall find, perhaps.)
At any rate, the first of seven motets – notwithstanding its text ‘Tristis est
anima mea’ – offers seraphic contrast. Likewise in Sonata III, first from brass
and then from strings, agitato ghosts
of Webern and Stockhausen joust in a musical drama denied the ensuing verbal
setting of the temple rent in twain. Pesante
octaves of two trombones and tuba in Sonata VI suggest distilled Bruckner, and woodblock
intervention a modernist, even Messiaen-esque intervention, heralding the motet
to follow. A lack of dynamic contrasts and markings in the motets as a whole
speaks of an unmistakeably modern conception of non-subjective, even
‘expressionless’ early music. The accents of ‘Recessit pastor noster’ correct
that even on its own terms, but it remains a contrast worth noting. At any
rate, here is apparently timeless liturgy: a
cappella other than low-key appearances of strings in this motet and
percussion in ‘Tenebrae factae sunt’.
Peter Bannister’s comparison of Rihm to the
Catholic-Marxist philosopher Gianni Vattimo is revealing. Bannister suggests
that Rihm’s harmonic idiom in these pieces may be heard analogously ‘to
Vattimo’s “weak thought”’, the thought of a ‘self-confessed “half-believer”’,
in that Rihm’s ‘language suggests directionality and simultaneously subverts it
at every stage, hinting at “strong structures” but scrupulously avoiding them’.
In the ‘Miserere’, more than three times the length of the lengthiest motet, a
productive yet provisional synthesis peters out (‘Tunc … tunc…’ – not entirely
unlike the ‘ewig … ewig’ of Mahler’s Das
Lied von der Erde) into alternation between voices and instruments, further
suggesting the productive scepticism of Vattimo’s ‘half-believer’. Liturgy has
become personally expressive after all, in a plea for forgiveness to which a response
from beyond these nights of darkness remains as yet uncertain.
Haydn:
Vigil in sonata, and earthquake
Rihm’s
works for string quartet, dating from an unnumbered work of 1966 to the 2015 Geste zu Vedova, run throughout his
career. So too do Haydn’s. If not quite the genre’s inventor, he was its first
master. The Sieben
letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze (Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross) was
first composed in 1786 for orchestra, with arrangements for string quartet and
piano coming the next year (eventually joined by an oratorio version in 1796,
with an additional piece of Harmoniemusik).
The quartet version is now the best known. This is doubtless in part due to an
economy of pragmatism concerning performing forces – but chamber conversation imparts
intimacy and immediacy, with very much their own dramatic strength.
The
so-called seven last words (ultima septem
verba) – more properly ‘sayings’ since, though brief, they are more than
single words – of Christ on the Cross have been a focus of Christian Lenten
devotion since the early 16th century. They come from the four canonical
Gospels, though none is found in all; they have proved equally popular in
Catholic, Protestant and other Christian traditions. The traditional order has
been words of forgiveness, salvation, relationship, abandonment, distress,
triumph (of a sort) and reunion. Musical settings and responses have ranged from Heinrich Schütz’s Die sieben Worte Jesu Christi am Kreuz, through choral works by César Franck and Charles Gounod, to more recent works by Sofia Gubaidulina (cello, bayan, string orchestra) and Tristan Murail (orchestra, chorus, electronics).
Haydn
recalled his commission when dictating, 15 years later, a foreword to the score
of the oratorio for Breitkopf & Härtel:
About fifteen years ago I was requested
by a canon of Cádiz to compose instrumental music on The Seven Last Words of
Our Saviour on the Cross. It was customary at the Cathedral of Cádiz to produce
an oratorio every year during Lent ... . The walls, windows, and pillars of the
church were hung with black cloth, and only one large lamp hanging from the
centre of the roof broke the solemn darkness. At midday, the doors were closed
and the ceremony began. After a short service the bishop ascended the pulpit, pronounced
the first of the seven words (or sentences) and delivered a discourse thereon.
This ended, he left the pulpit, and prostrated himself before the altar. The
interval was filled by music. The bishop then in like manner pronounced the
second word, then the third, and so on, the orchestra following on the
conclusion of each discourse. My composition was subject to these conditions,
and it was no easy task to compose seven adagios lasting ten minutes each, and
to succeed one another without fatiguing the listeners; indeed, I found it
quite impossible to confine myself to the appointed limits.
Haydn
asked the Abbé Stadler for his thoughts. ‘I answered’, Stadler relates in his
autobiography, ‘that it seemed to me advisable that over the words an
appropriate melody should be fitted, which afterwards should be performed only
by instruments’, though he did not know whether that had always been Haydn’s
intention. Haydn requested permission from the Bishop of Cádiz to exceed the ten-minute
limit for his ‘sonatas’ – the same term as Rihm – if necessary, and received it:
the Bishop responded that he would limit the length of his homilies to ten
minutes each, ensuring scope for musical overrun. The music, though, was
intended not for the Cathedral but for the subterranean Oratorio de la Santa
Cueva, whose reconditioning, completed in 1756, had been the project of the
priest José Saluz de Santamaria, original source of Haydn’s commission as communicated
by an intermediary, Don Francisco Micon.
A severe,
double-dotted D minor ‘Introduzione’ suggests with its angular melodies and
rhythms Crucifixion: late-Baroque iconography surely comprehensible to Haydn’s
audience-congregation in Cádiz. Sonata I (identical nomenclature as Rihm) turns
to relatively relaxed lyricism in related B flat major. (There is no overall
tonic, though surely there is iconography of Affekt.) Christ seeks forgiveness for his persecutors, ‘for they
know not what they do’. Haydn’s setting is unusually homophonic: if not quite a
necessary than a likely consequence of a string of Adagios. His setting of the
‘words’ is straightforwardly, unanswerably melodic, followed by musical
response, commentary and development. The second Sonata takes us from stern C
minor command – ‘Verily I say unto thee’ – to a promise of salvation with
arpeggiated, angelic accompaniment, in pure, heavenly C major: ‘Today shalt
thou be with me in Paradise’. E major maternal tenderness, inflected on
occasion by visions of surrounding darkness (Sonata III) leads to Christ’s
celebrated cry of anguish to His Father, in darkest, deepest F minor: ‘My God,
my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’
Through
agonising thirst, Johannine predestined accomplishment (‘it is finished’), and
final commendation into God’s hands in the literally muted (con sordino)consolation of E flat major (Sonata VII), Haydn concludes with a
brief, terrible C minor earthquake. Its sudden eruption, more fulfilment than
contrast or release, leaves us in wait, as with Rihm or with the Passions of
Bach. For now, our lot is to contemplate, grief-stricken yet in hope of
something redemptive from beyond.
(This essay was first published as a programme note for the 2022 Salzburg Festival.)
George Walker:Lilacs Beethoven: Symphony no.9 in D minor, op.125
Nicole Cabell (soprano)
Raehann Bryce-Davis (mezzo-soprano)
Zwakele Tshabalala (tenor)
Ryan Speedo Green (baritone)
Chineke! Voices (chorus master: Simon Halsey)
Chineke! Orchestra
Kevin John Edusei (conductor)
Very much a concert of two (unequal)
halves, I am afraid. The first Proms performance of George Walker’s 1995 Lilacs
promised and delivered much. However, the following performance of Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony, though loudly acclaimed by much of the audience, exposed yet
another contemporary conductor’s inability or unwillingness to do much more
than skate over and harry this unluckiest of scores.
Walker’s piece, for voice (Nicole Cabell)
and orchestra offered many connections, even correspondences, with other music.
What music, after all, does not? It could never, however, be reduced to those
correspondences, speaking very much with its own voice and in its own way:
direct yet rich, purposeful, yet (unlike poor Beethoven) with plenty of space.
The opening horn solo and uneasy, gorgeous post-Romantic harmonies brought
Henze to my mind. Certainly, when the voice entered in the first of the four
movements, each setting a stanza from Walt Whitman, it was a post-Bergian world
the grateful vocal line announced. Well-shaped, alluring, satisfyingly
coherent: one might say the same for work as for performance, and for each of
those four movements. Each was characterised by an arresting opening, low
angular brass answered by strings at the outset of the second; a wandering
flute line, then oboe, preparing the way for the voice in the third; and a
clockwork, ghost-in-the-machine introduction announcing the fourth, answered by
exultant vocal freedom from Cabell. ‘Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird…’.
The lingering postlude found the Chineke! Orchestra, as elsewhere, very much in
its element, sensitively directed by Kevin John Edusei.
I shall try not to linger describing the
Ninth. I desperately wanted to like, to respond positively to a performance of
such enthusiasm from the young players. Edusei’s conception, conducted from
memory, seemed to me so perverse, though, that I can only wish I had left at
the interval. The first movement I have never heard taken at such a speed; not
only that, but its short-breathed quality (repeated, alas, throughout the
symphony) robbed it of line, consequence, more or less any possibility of
musical meaning. Such hyper-urgency worked a little better in the development,
but what should have been the wildness of the return sounded far too controlled
to register for much. The coda had a little more fire, yet was so brittle it
might have snapped. Edusei’s approach was more suited to the scherzo, and there
was no gainsaying the admirable clarity of the orchestral playing. The trio was
similarly athletic, not relaxing a jot. The Adagio flowed, as they say;
it was at first amiable enough. We can talk all we like about how constructed
German ideas of musical ‘depth’ may be; of course they are. But really, was
that it? Apparently so.
As for the finale, that must have been the
most underwhelming I have heard its opening. It went on its way, finely
articulated, something akin perhaps to ‘designer Beethoven’. Matters picked up
with the advent of the voice, Ryan Speedo Green truly using words and music to
communicate Schiller as well as Beethoven. The chorus and other soloists
responded in lively fashion. It was all extremely regimented. Without space to
breathe or anything much in the sense of harmonic development, though, this came
across more as a musical patchwork, with various incidental pleasures to be
heard in the quality of singing and playing. I could not help but think of
Daniel Barenboim conducting this same work here with the West-Eastern Divan
Orchestra ten years earlier. That, for me, had been air from another planet,
but I should repeat that many in the hall appeared to respond with similar
enthusiasm here.
Wagner:Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act I and ‘Liebestod’ Messiaen:Turangalîla-Symphonie
Yuja Wang (piano)
Cécile Lartigau (ondes martenot)
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)
A little morning light music by Wagner and
Messiaen proved a fine way to round off my visit to this year’s Salzburg
Festival. Esa-Pekka Salonen is by now quite an experienced Wagnerian,
especially for one not so associated with the opera house. His association with
Tristan und Isolde goes back many years by now; I have heard him conduct
it both in Paris and (in concert) in London. This performance of the first-act Prelude
and so-called ‘Liebestod’—Wagner’s ‘Verklärung’ is surely closer to the mark—spoke
with the wisdom of long acquaintance, yet not the slightest hint of staleness.
The same, of course, could be said of the Vienna Philharmonic—Wagner’s abortive
planned Vienna premiere notwithstanding. Indeed, both conductor and orchestra
took care to ensure that there was much more to the sound than string-saturated
‘voluptuousness of hell’ (Nietzsche); the Viennese woodwind in particular had
considerable bite. Salonen’s ears seemed focused on the century to come, whilst
remaining rooted in Wagner’s own. Taking all the time that was needed, the performance
nonetheless always moved, always evolved. Climaxes shattered and thrilled. One
could lose oneself, but it would have been a pity to have done so.
The Prelude’s after-glow or -shock proved especially
inviting, ushering in Isolde’s transfiguration as if it were telescoping the
action in between. It appeared as if out of a dream, a neat solution to what
remains tonally a problematic non-connection between the two movements. Under
Salonen, the music truly teemed with life; it was not done for yet. The VPO
shimmered, almost as if it were Liszt’s piano. And what a final climax ir proved
to be.
Messiaen’s vast Turangalîla-Symphonie
followed without a break. Two apparently affronted audience members left within
a minute or two; I wonder what they had been expecting. Whatever divine and/or
diabolical force was at work in the Introduction, it certainly made its
immanence felt. As did Yuja Wang, whether solo or as part of the ensemble, for instance
in dizzying duet with xylophone. The crazy imagination of Olivier Messiaen—almost
as crazy as that of Richard Wagner—had been unleashed: awe-inspiring.
It did not take long before the two ‘Chants
d’amour’ revealed Tristan-esque yearning and languor. Cécile Lartigau’s
ondes martenot worked its weird and wonderful magic, slightly beyond yet never
dissociated. Wang’s piano glistened and shuddered. This is not subtle music,
and why should it be? In between, though, lay something far more inscrutable,
the beguiling, even forbidding ‘Turangalîla 1’. It seemed, to return to
Nietzsche, to lie beyond good and evil, beyond morality; it simply ‘was’.
A duly wacky ‘Joie du sang des étoiles’
fully embraced its big-heartedness, the whole of Creation seemingly in motion. Its
successor, the ‘Jardin du sommeil d’amour’ offered a welcome, even necessary
change of piece. The ‘rightness’ of Salonen’s tempi almost had one fail to
notice them; on that account, it is all the more important to recognise them. There
were darker, or at least less sweet, undercurrents, but undercurrents they
remained. ‘Turangalîla 2’ in turn offered relief and contrast, before a ‘Developpement
de l’amour’ designed to test the limits. Dynamic contrasts and moods of introversion
and extroversion (albeit biased towards the latter) pushed each climax further.
Apart from anything else, it was quite a noise. The close sounded, even tasted,
as if an antidote we suspected might actually be a variant of the same witches’
brew.
‘Turangalîla 3’ extended the ambiguity of
that close, erupting in hieratic, hypnotic mystery, as if aurally tasting—that sense
again—a Boulezian sorbet. Hand on heart, I sometimes wish more of the work were
like that; but then, it would be a different work. The final movement certainly
functioned as such, motivically and in mood. It did not just happen to be last;
it culminated.
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