fantasy boulez-ball

I sat about ten feet from Pierre Boulez at the Konzerthausorchester Berlin performance of his transfixing Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna. At intermission, I worked up the courage to talk to him (actually the second time I've done so--but the first was three years ago in Chicago, and I asked him some stupid question about Mahler).

Here is a very rough transcription of what I remember from that conversation:

Seated Ovation: (sweating, mumbling) Mr. Boulez, I'm a fan of your music and I just wanted to ask you a quick question. Is it true that you're working on a Godot opera?
Boulez: Well, that's what the papers say...it's for now an idea in my head.

Don't take that as a direct quote, but he said something along those lines. Anyway, you heard it here first: Boulez might write a Godot opera.

The second wave of speculation is: who would conduct? Who would direct? At what opera house? Here's what would be awesome: in March 2015, for Boulez's 90th birthday, a simultaneous premiere at the Met and Staatskapelle Berlin, both productions directed by Patrice Chereau. The line-up of conductors: Barenboim and Peter Eötvös sharing honors at the Staatskapelle, and David Robertson and James Levine splitting it at the Met. The same month, Alan Gilbert conducts the New York Phil in Messiaen's Saint Francis at the Park Avenue Armory as part of a four-week festival organized by Lincoln Center, which also includes a joint Met-Boston Symphony Orchestra performance of Gruppen (led by Levine*, or whoever's subbing for him). Robertson leads the Juilliard Orchestra in the complete orchestral works of Boulez over the course of two weeks. And to top it off, Boulez conducts the Ensemble Intercontemporain at Alice Tully on the eve of his 90th birthday. After the concert, a party on Governor's Island DJed by Tristan Murail and members of IRCAM.

*Does Jimmy conduct Stockhausen?

constructions and games

Saturday, September 11 2010

Berlin Philharmonic
Simon Rattle, conducting
Stella Doufexis, mezzo-soprano
Burkhard Ulrich, tenor
Ildegrando D'Arcangelo, bass
Rundfunk Chor Berlin

Luciano Berio, Coro
Stravinsky, Pulcinella

I cannot promise it will be an easy thing for me to review the Berlin Philharmonic. No orchestra is flawless, but for me the Berlin Phil composes the perfect storm of orchestra: brilliant musicianship, a strong and dedicated music director, intelligent and progressive programming, an amazing concert hall, great online presence, and outreach which seems to work. So if I tend to gush when writing about their concerts, that's probably because I was gushing when listening to them.

This year's musikfest, to which Saturday's performance belonged, explores the triangle of Berio-Stravinsky-Boulez. A thoughtful and well-researched program brochure with essays by Paul Griffiths and others elucidates Berio's and Boulez's different stances on their groundbreaking predecessor. Theoretically, these positions will be made clear by the music. I have now heard Berio and Stravinsky in this program as well as the Rundfunk-Sinfonie's concert of Berio's Voci, Stravinsky's Agon, and a completely forgettable Strauss suite. After this week of concerts, which will encompass all three composers, I should have a better assessment of the festival's programming successes.

----

The more music I hear by Berio, the more confused I get about his general reception and role in the canon. Most music history courses teach Berio as the author of the third movement of the Sinfonia and the creator of the Sequenzas--post-modern, intellectual, cerebral. But in reality, his music is more unabashedly neo-Romantic than any of his European contemporaries besides Henze. With the exception of the Sequenzas, nearly every work brims over with tonal or quasi-tonal splendor, Ravel-esque colors, and incredible lushness. This is a composer who should be as equally celebrated and embraced by conservative audiences as sappy, actual neo-Romantics like Tan Dun and Richard Danielpour.

Descriptions of works like the Sinfonia, Coro, and Folk Songs do not do justice to the pieces themselves. We get the idea of Berio as a deconstructionist, breaking down the notions of symphony and choral work, nitpicking at forms of grandeur and creating postmodern commentary. But if anything, Berio is a constructionist: he builds rich, detailed canvasses of sound. Coro deconstructs the notion of a choral/orchestral piece while at the same time building a massive paean to poetic love. It's beautiful in a very conventional way; ignore the composer's name and program notes, and you might mistake it at times for John Adams.

In Simon Rattle's and the Berlin Philharmonic's hands, Coro was something truly extraordinary. Berio assembles his chorus out of solo voices, mixed together with the smallish orchestra on-stage. It begins with a solo soprano singing a Sioux poem, "Today is mine," accompanied by an ambiguous, quasi-Expressionist piano line. Gradually, other orchestral and vocal parts enter, creating a wave of sound and intoning the first line of the Pablo Neruda poem which forms the basis of the work. A section from the long poem "Residencia en la Tierra" acts as a kind of motto statement throughout the piece; it returns in different forms between almost every text (which range from Peruvian dance tunes to The Song of Songs).

Each reprise is set to the same gorgeous, pulsating chord. Early on, it is a violent shriek of timbre, but it acquires a different significance in each repetition: sometimes it glows with light; sometimes it feels carved in stone. It's a testament to Berio's miraculous gifts of orchestration, which produce a composite chorus/orchestra texture in which individual voices cannot be separated from an organic whole, as well as the Philharmonic's remarkable balance.

With 31 short, continuous sections and nearly as many different poems, it might seem that Berio was attempting something pluralistic or fragmented, but it is the opposite. Coro feels almost overly unified, progressing from dark art-song to exotic primitiveness without skipping a beat. The orchestra sounded resplendent and the singers of the Rundfunkchor Berlin were fantastic both as soloists and as ensemble despite Berio's excessive vocal demands. Rattle paid careful attention to not only timbral blend but also the over-arching drama of the work, forming a sustained narrative over its fifty minutes.

---

Reading anything Stravinsky says is like gazing into a hall of mirrors. Why did the 1920s cosmopolitan public think poorly of Beethoven? Because Stravinsky said so. Why did Stravinsky say so? Because he thought that was what the 1920s cosmopolitan public wanted to hear. It's an endless maze of puzzles and masks, lies about lies, further complicated by confidante Robert Craft's dabbling . Stravinsky fed the Zeitgeist and the Zeitgeist fed Stravinsky. No other composer has tried so hard to fit in while simultaneously defining the culture into which he tried to fit.

And then, the music says something entirely different. Stravinsky hid behind a veneer of neo-classicism, proclaiming "Music expresses nothing but itself" while couching that very music in some of most outwardly expressive of forms. Pulcinella embodies that aesthetic: at times, it is almost painstakingly sensitive, wonderfully evocative, direct and immediate in its musical affect and rhetoric. But by declaring it a kind of game, a musical "object," Stravinsky set the tone for how the piece would be perceived--and more importantly (and more unfortunately), how the entire musical epoch from which the piece originated would be perceived. There is nothing emotionally stagnant about Pergolesi or his contemporaries. No period of musical history is inherently more "expressive" than another.

Today, most performers of Stravinsky see through his comments and take the music on its own terms. Rattle crafted a genial, loving interpretation of Pulcinella. From the opening gesture of the bouncy overture, the Philharmonic played with heft and character entirely appropriate to Stravinsky's Commedia dell'arte. Each of the three soloists--tenor Burkhard Ulrich, mezzo Stella Doufexis, and bass Ilderando D'Arcangelo--played his part, singing the Italian texts with crisp diction and careful attention to their rhythmic games. The individual members of the Philharmonic were sensational, with great violin solos from concertmaster Daishin Kashimoto and inhuman flute and trumpet virtuosity from Emmanuel Pahud and Gábor Tarkövi.

The final vocal number, an understated, majestic minuet, gleamed with the sterling sound of the orchestra. Each of the soloists sang with hushed intensity. Then, as if to shrug off the emotions of music, Stravinsky ends with a brisk, brusque finale. It's too late; objectivity has already been stolen away but the relentlessly expressive music.

in good company

At the Philharmonie, two copies of The Rest is Noise, German edition.
Side-by-side with Kleiber, Mahler, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn.

your correspondent in berlin

I went the Pergamon today, which I missed on my first visit to the city two summers ago. Nico posted a few weeks back about the museum's most jarring exhibit: Colorful Gods, a series of statues painted as they might have been in their time of creation. The Pergamon is entirely devoted to relics of antiquity; they've got almost two entire temples crammed in there, along with a ton of other stuff from various pre-Christian cultures. It reminded me of the Metropolitan Museum's ruins--actually, it reminded me more of Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum, but that's another story.

As Nico mentioned, there is something unsettling about seeing Greek statues covered in such outlandish colors. Assuming that the painting done by the museum's curators and scientists is authentic to the original designs, why does this this "restoration"/"modernization" seems so odd?

Take Bach, or Handel. Every Christmas and Easter, some provincial music critic inevitably writes an editorial bemoaning the hiring of HIP conductors for their St. Matthew Passion or Messiah. "Why can't we have 200 choristers? Where's my Wagnerian-size orchestra? Why isn't Thomas Beecham still alive?" What they really seek, though, is the old aesthetic of the great Klemperer and Walter and Furtwangler recordings of Bach: heavy, deep, all-embracing, profound. When confronted with something fleet, brisk, and lively, they recoil. It's not what Bach's supposed to be!

That is the same problem I found when gazing on this.
It just feels wrong, somehow. It looks straight out of Legoland, it seems too shiny and new. Which is what the period-instrument-haters usually hate on--they want their old aesthetic back. But what is tied up with our view of ancient ruins (whether Byzantine, Roman, Greek, Assyrian), is the idea that they are ruins. The aesthetic is so dependent on the idea of the civilizations as dead that to breathe life into them seems sacrilegious. We like our statues gray-scale to historicize them and set the old civilizations apart from ourselves. There, isn't this better?


The old aesthetic, the pre-HIP and pre-Colored Gods aesthetic, puts these past civilizations on a pedestal. We make the art bigger than ourselves: we consider the statues and the music the way they considered their gods. The St. Matthew Passion, rather than Jesus, is the thing we worship. And there's not anything really wrong with that--elevating art to religion has produced some incredible art.

Back to Bach. The first audaciously-HIP recording I remember hearing was Rinaldo Alesandrini's Brandenburg Concerti with his Concerto Italiano. The only other Brandenburg recording I knew were the rather average rendition by Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. Marriner's is a modern instrument affair with light orchestration, quick tempos, and star soloists. The opening of Brandenburg No. 1 sounds entirely perfunctory, bouncing merrily along in the way of the Bach of WQXR and The Teaching Company. Here's the Concerto Italiano:

Those horns hit you like a punch to the face. It's wild, it's scrappy, it's alive. Alessandrini, and his greatest contemporaries, consider Bach a living reference point rather than a holy shrine--they interact with him rather than worshiping at his feet. Obviously, not all Bach should be this fun. But we should try not to take the artists more seriously than they took themselves (improvised vs. fixed cadenzas is the classic example).

In historicizing the statues of antiquity, the dominant emotion is melancholy. The act of observing the art becomes one of mourning lost civilizations: the lack of color and the fractured limbs of the figures is almost more important to us than what the completed statues might have looked like at their time. I cannot imagine that all the artifacts of these civilizations were meant to observed so bleakly.

Here is a lion:
It looks like how you'd expect an ancient lion to look: regal, maybe even a little woeful.

Now here's another lion:
The colors make it almost cartoonish. What the lion might lose in nobility, though, it gains in a sense of the visceral. Nearly all ancient sculpture looks sedentary, but with these fierce colors it finally moves, and savagely so. Tthe crazy difference between the unpainted and painted lions throws our entire view of these civilizations into question. How did they view their lions?

Apparently, color was as essential to these sculptures as it is to any painting today. In Euripides' play Helen of Troy, the title character weeps:

My life and fortunes are a monstrosity,
Partly because of Hera, partly because of my beauty.
If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect
The way you would wipe color off a statue.*

Taking away the color, for the ancient Greeks, stole the beauty from their creations. We seek out these placid, colorless statues in order to distance ourselves from this society, in order to view their relics as art in the modern sense. We used to clothe Bach in the garb of Wagner, which was fine for some of it, but definitely not okay for all of it. What you hear in that Brandenburg recording is one of the most vital things about the HIP movement--the restoration of color to Baroque and earlier music. Klemperer's sweeping B-minor Mass and Stokowski's overpowering Toccata & Fugue in D minor are driven not by color or texture but by drama--the same values they ascribed to Wagner and Mahler. Bach should certainly have drama, but newer performers show that the music can breathe with exotic textures, bizarre quirks, and glimmering colors. If we lose just a smidgen of nobility in favor of immediacy, as does the lion, maybe it's worth it.

-----

*this excerpt was in the museum, and can also be found in Matthew Gurewitsch's Smithsonian article, which describes ancient ruins, in a brilliant analogy, as "frozen Beethoven." I read the article after writing my blog post, and it says basically the same thing, but with a bit more eloquence and a few more facts.

philharmonie

ankunft

The view out my window in Prenzlauer Berg

orbiting schoenberg

Sunday, August 29
Austrian Cultural Forum

Argento Chamber Ensemble
Michael Galante, conductor

Heinz Holliger, Eisenblumen
Phillipp Blume, S, M, L, XL
Ives, Movement 1 from String Quartet No. 1
Eric Lyon, Sacred Amnesia
Strauss, Metamorphosen
Schoenberg, fragments

The thirty-person audience at Sunday's Argento Ensemble concert was clearly one of connoisseurs. There was the man in the Schoenberg t-shirt reading Style and Idea, the teenager with a book on conducting, and a smattering of other aficionados (and, weirdly enough, a crying baby). I couldn't imagine a better setting to hear this bizarre variety of works, which conductor Michael Galanate grouped under the auspices of a preview concert for the ensemble's Pierrot-centered fall season.

Almost all the music bore some relation to that grand saga of the Austro-German musical lineage, to which Arnold Schoenberg proclaimed himself heir and prophet. With Schoenberg's ghost hovering over the proceedings, it wasn't too much of a stretch to see the connections between the founder of the Second Viennese School and the various works the ensemble performed.

Holliger's Eisblumen plays out a Bach chorale at a glacial pace so that each individual harmony becomes a prism of instrumental colors and effects. The celestial sound of detuned string septet, with each instrument hovering over the wisps of Bach's notes, produced a kind of skeleton chorale. Like Schoenberg in his neo-Baroque works, Holliger creates a dialogue with the past, with antique harmonies gradually coming in and out of focus, updated with extended, icy string techniques.

In the cleverly-titled S, M, L, XL, Phillipp Blume employs a hyper-modern string techniques worthy of Lachenmann in dense layers of polyphony. Individual gestures--a thudding bass slap, a whiplash pizzicato--form an immediate sense of foreground and background, with motives trickling in and out of the opaque fabric. In the end, the music coalesces into something rather pretty: tiny glimmers of tonality float to the surface. These quasi-tonal utterances allowed for a pleasant transition to the first movement from Ives' first quartet, a soulful fugue which has more in common with Dvorak than Schoenberg. Biting dissonances occasionally crop up (Ives wouldn't have it any other way), but the work is mostly genial, and very out-of-place in a series exploring Pierrot Lunaire. That said, the four members of Argento played it with a round and polished sound, fully embracing the radiant ending.

In his 2001 tape experiment Sacred Amnesia, Eric Lyon juxtaposes Wagner and Sousa in a socio-musical commentary which falls flat. Lyon subjects a heated passage from Act II of Parsifal (in which Parsifal cries "Amfortas! Die Wunde!" after kissing Kundry) to a haze of electronic effects, filtered into a weird, half-comprehensible mush; it feels silly, especially when immediately followed by an excerpt from The Stars and Stripes Forever. Lyon's own program notes mis-identify the Wagner as "the opening passage from Parsifal," and it doesn't really feel like he has a solid grasp on the materials he's quoting---pastiche without purpose. The few nice moments, like a held, glowing note and an intriguing metallic buzz, are overwhelmed by the silliness of an auto-tuned Pierrot quote and a Speak & Spell voice describing his income. Lyon would have been better off working with the abstract waves of sound he seems comfortable in rather than mis-representing Schoenberg, Wagner, and Sousa.

In his program notes, Galante makes sure to put down the famous Strauss-was-a-revolutionary Schoenberg quotation, but Metamorphosen is not the work of a revolutionary. It is the art of a man resigned to bid farewell to a half-century of German culture and horror, a man who often overlooked the horror in favor of the culture. It is an epitaph to the idea that great art breeds great people, proven desperately wrong in the twelve years of Nazi Germany. Metamorphosen sags with the weight of solace sought but not found. Strauss looks back to the Beethoven of the Eroica Symphony for his mourning: the entombed hero is not Napoleon, but Germany itself.

The seven-string version of Metamorphosen allows for a greater sense for Strauss's intricate counterpoint as well as a greater freedom for the performers. String unisons become solos, like the richly-hued, weeping cello melody of the funeral march. With twenty-three or seven players, the piece moves like molasses, each moment heartwrenching and inevitable. The strings scale immense heights, stirring up throes of passion which echo the intensity of the Act II love-duet in Tristan. The music comes to a sudden, groaning stop, returning to painful slowness of the funeral rites. Strauss recalls the end of Beethoven's Fifth with the incessant final chords, but they are hollow instead of triumphant: a Doctor Faustus-esque inversion of heroic victory. Argento produced a lush, fleecy sound with incredible intonation; I'm not sure how necessary a conductor was, but Galante gave it a worthy interpretation.

And, finally, Schoenberg. The two string septet fragments, from very disparate parts of his career, were definitely worth hearing. The untitled septet from 1918 evokes the Chamber Symphony, saturated with hard-edged, angular polyphony. Toter Winkel (1899) is like an outtake from Verklarte Nacht, haunting though brief.

Argento's fall season is really remarkable, with a ton of great Austrian modernism you won't get anywhere else in New York. I'm looking forward to Thursday's Haas concert, which I will hopefully review if I have time before heading off to Berlin on Sunday.

quote of the day

"These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationary store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like 'the Cleveland Chicken,' sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are."

-John Cheever, preface to The Stories of John Cheever