paul griffiths
Some "background listening" is provided below. Copyright holders are invited to write to paul@disgwylfa.com if they cannot permit this use for the short period until the lectures are over.
1: October 20
J.S. Bach: Contrapunctus XIV from The Art of Fugue
Grigory Sokolov (Opus 111)
Berio version: Riccardo Chailly (Decca)
Mozart: Requiem, K.626 + Haas: Sieben Klangräume
XIV. Domine Jesu
XV. Klangraum 6
XVI. Hostias
XVII. Klangraum 7
Salzburg Mozarteum/Ivor Bolton (Austrian radio)
Schubert: Symphony No.8 in B minor, D. "Unfinished"
II. Andante con moto
III. Allegro (fragment)
Bamberg Symphony/Jonathan Nott (Tudor)
2: October 22
C.P.E. Bach: Free Fantasy in F sharp minor
Alexei Lubimov (ECM)
3: October 23
Mahler: Symphony No.10 (Cooke version)
V. Finale
CBSO/Rattle (EMI)
Schoenberg: Die Jakobsleiter
7 How can music be so simple and so unmistakeable? On the latest of several ECM albums devoted to the music of Valentin Silvestrov (ECM 1988), the composer himself is heard playing the piano—or, rather, overheard, since he doesn’t so much perform as discover, test things out. Nor is this improvisation, for the music doesn’t at all sound as if it’s being made up on the spot; it’s music that’s always been there, or certainly has been there since Schubert, whom Silvestrov cites as a potent influence, or a presence.
In these thirteen Bagatelles, as he calls them—or fourteen, since one of them is presented in two different versions—Silvestrov settles himself within a calm, diatonic language and tries out little chord progressions, little song phrases, all of which sound like long resonances from the past, and yet from a past that is still with us, almost touchable (and touching), for almost every detail has the composer’s distinct imprint. A deep bass tritone in No.13 is just about the only hint—disturbing in this context—of a world outside.
Nothing is quite finished. The pieces come to rest without having arrived at any destination. In the same way, nothing is quite begun, for the starts always beem to be saying: ‘Remember this?’
How can music be so heavy with nostalgia and so floatingly pure? Yes, there is almost nothing in Silvestrov’s language that would have disturbed a listener of two centuries ago. And yes, this is a language that made its steady descent through minor masters to salon miniatures to teashop improvisers and so to the dustbin of history. Silvestrov doesn’t rescue that language. He forgets what happened, and summons us all into a blissful act of forgetting. (Is that it?)
It’s an exquisite and seductive world he conjures—so that even the attack of a string orchestra, beginning the next work on the disc, Elegie, comes with a shock and a sting. There are five pieces for strings here, performed by the Munich Chamber Orchestra under Christoph Poppen, and to some extent these compositions share the mood of the Bagatelles: slow, serene, echoing, melancholy. They are hard to resist (except in the case of an enlarged Der Bote, which in its original form is so strong a feature of Alexei Lubimov’s wonderful solo disc of the same title). The first movement of the triptych Stille Musik, ‘Waltz of the Moments’, is completely captivating. So why is resistance almost the first impulse? Probably because resistance, rejection, releases us from this music’s questions.
If we’ve heard it all before and yet heard nothing like it before, how much do we know of what we know? How much of our experience hasn’t made it into knowledge? And how much of our knowledge hasn’t yet been experienced?
6 Unlikely as it might seem, music can bring together the rough-cornered vehemence of Xenakis with the drifting clouds of Takemitsu and still leave room for particularly U.S. tones of elegy and buoyancy. It all happens in the orchestral music of Roger Reynolds, which seems to show us a composer more personal in his expression, and certainly often more melancholy, than he presents himself in his better known work for smaller groupings and soloists. A recent release (Mode 183) offers three works: Symphony[Myths] of 1990, Whispers Out of Time, a string orchestra piece of 1988, and Symphony[Vertigo], dating from 1987. There is another symphony, Symphony[The Stages of Life], written in 1991-2 for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Reynolds wrote a big work with voices for the 1997 Proms, The Red Act Arias, but he appears to have been quiet on the orchestral front since then.
All three works on the record are based on poetic images, or even directly on poetry, in the case of Whispers, woven around John Ashbery. But the expressive resolve is forcibly musical, and does not engage with common sonic metaphors. For instance, Harvey Sollberger, in his excellent notes (he also conducts Symphony[Vertigo], which may be one reason for the special power that work has over the other two), tells us that Symphony[Myths] is based on stories told about a rock formation in the waters off Japan and also on Jason’s outwitting of those other marine rocks, Scylla and Charybdis. Yet this is nothing like sea music—except possibly in the short, more delicately scored middle movement, where instrumental solos, rise, glide and flutter like birds over broad surfaces of sustained tone—and violence is subsumed in moods that are contemplative and observant. Whispers, in six movements, winds itself up for a grand lament, and so in form has more in common with Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde than with his Ninth Symphony, which apparently was in Reynolds’s mind (along with Beethoven’s ‘Les Adieux’ sonata). Symphony[Vertigo] is the only one of these works to use electronics, in the form of a recording of a pianist, transformed. In concert the effect of a gigantic but absent concerto soloist must be spectacular; there is even a cadenza in the first movement. But the drama in the recording is all in the sound, and it is plentiful—not least when orchestral and electronic sounds are in combat (here, more than in the other symphony, are the clashing rocks), but also when they finger one another tentatively. And in the finale comes the most beautiful of Reynolds’s threnodies, in a solo for cor anglais. 5 The second disc in a planned complete recording of Kurtág’s Játékok (BMC CD 139) is very much like the first—which is a strong recommendation. Gábor Csalog is again the principal pianist, instantaneously alert to matters of weight, direction and colour as these intensely tiny pieces demand. Many of them are over in half a minute, and Csalog shows how that is enough for a whole drama to unfold, to a point of disintegration, explosion or shrug. He makes the piano speak, often speak in dialogue. Or rather, he lets the music make the piano speak, for the voices—which will most often be either insistent or withdrawn, more rarely (but then wonderfully) just songful—seem to come straight from it.
Again as before, Csalog generously invites colleagues for guest turns. András Kemenes, who memorably unleashed the cascading glissandos of Perpetuum mobile (objet trouvé) at the composer’s eightieth-birthday festival in Budapest a couple of years ago, repeats the piece, in a recording that is much more distant than is the album’s norm. Aliz Asztalos performs the scary Fundamentals (1) for vocalizing pianist, almost a miniature What is the Word. Yet another link with the first instalment is the inclusion of tracks recorded by the composer and his wife, whose presence is important not only in itself but also for the imprimatur it conveys. The Kurtágs perform as usual on an upright piano, and are recorded so close that, listening over headphones, you almost feel your head is on the keyboard, dodging their fingers. In A Flower to Márta, heard in two very similar performances, the composer’s fingers are there only to release wafts of beautiful resonance, and one wonders if the piece was written (in 1997) after the Kurtágs had experienced performing with amplification. The composer also has the last word, in Consolation sereine, another relatively late arrival, dating from 2004, and made of pianississimo melody on the edges of folksong and plainchant (which is also where the melody of A Flower to Márta resides)—breathtaking. There is only one duet item, but it is a momentous one: In memoriam György SebÅk, a dirge for a colleague who became a distinguished piano teacher at Indiana University, ending with the muted earthquake of what sounds like an extreme bass note stopped with a finger on the string. As before, the tracks are listed in two ‘parts’, encouraging one to listen to the record as a recital with an interval. It works well that way. The programming is expertly done: two different performances of Gallop, from the first book, for instance, place it in sympathetic contexts. (One glitch in the track listing: 39 does not repeat the piece recorded on 28). On the other hand, so much is packed into these gill pots that one could easily imagine them heard over a much longer period, one at a time. There is an excellent booklet essay by Miklós Dolinszky, translated by Richard Robinson. 4 In a poem saluting Morandi, Giovanni Testori speaks of ‘the shadow of the vases / that make no noise’. If those two short lines do in fact evoke a noise, for it is impossible to write of silence silentlly, their sound—the vases shimmering into or out of existence, their shadows grey on grey—could easily be that of the music of Salvatore Sciarrino, who sets Testori’s poem, among other texts, in his Quaderno di strada (Street Notebook), recorded by the musicians for whom it was written: the baritone Otto Katzameier and Klangforum Wien (Kairos 0012482 KAI).
Kairos have been responsible for putting some important Sciarrino works into circulation, notably Luci mie tradici and Infinito nero. Quaderno di strada is perhaps not quite on the same level, but it is delicate and haunting, a sequence of fragile suggestions of songs half-forgotten, songs the singer and the instrumentalists are on the edge of remembering, songs that are always on the tip of this music’s tongue. Tiny motifs and flutterings will be repeated, passed from voice to instrument and back again, testing the memories in an attempt to stabilize them.
The texts for the thirteen numbers are various—words the composer found recently on a wall in Perugia, literary fragments, quotations from letters—and the same musical images echo through them all, even though some have distinct and striking atmospheres of their own: darkness and a stark tolling of complex chords for a piece relating how Christian monks killed the last mathematician of Alexandria in the year 410, pianissimo spurts and breaths when the (unattributed) words say how ‘at the violin’s string / vibrates the flame / image of the sound’. The twelfth piece, setting verses from a 17th-century Javanese song, seems to draw the earlier traces and remnants into a continuity at last, the baritone now transformed into a counter-tenor.
Is this the destination? The final proverb casts doubt: ‘Two things in the world I cannot have: to be beautiful and to know how to sing.’ But who can the ‘I’ be here? Not the singer, of course, but also not the work, which is indeed beautiful and sings, if sings in its own edgy, hesitant way.
3 In the process of chromatography a spot of something, perhaps an ink or a plant extract, is placed on a piece of absorbent paper, upon which, as some clear liquid gently flows along the fibres, different compounds are stretched out as faint blotches of colour. This is something of how Isabel Mundry’s music feels, on a recording from the always exceptional ensemble recherche (Kairos 0012642 KAI). There are two original works here, both from a continuing group having a string trio as the constant and central element. In Traces des moments the others—though not distinguished as others: it is as if string-trioishness spreads and brings them into being—are a clarinet and an accordion. In Sandschleifen (‘Sand-rubbing’) the added instruments, rather more exterior, are piano and percussion.
Traces des moments is the star turn. Notes slowly echo among the instruments until they can an almost palpable presence and stability—so much so that a descending gesture (and this delicately melancholic music has a lot of descending gestures) can sound not like a departure from the note but like a falling or deflation of the note itself. There are three movements, all slow and quite short (three to four and a half minutes), the last a little more active. The scoring is exquisite, the accordion opening at times in radiance.Sandschleifen, which plays continuously for around the same total duration, is right away busier, but soon it settles and softens—or hardens, perhaps, in terms of the tension evoked—into Mundry’s music of echo and listening.
Tension is less in a sequence of seven arrangements of songs by Dufay, again for small ensemble. Mundry has the music lightly snagging as it comes forward into our age, abrading with a string effect, or touched with a cymbal stroke or drum roll, and her instrumentations avoid the usual swagger of Renaissance updatings. But Dufay’s music has its own stories to tell, and it doesn’t listen too well to Mundry’s.
2 Georg Friedrich Haas’s productivity goes on. Just in the last two years his output has included not only a full-length opera, Melancholia, but also four big orchestral pieces—concertos for piano and baritone sax, Hyperion and Bruchstück (Fragment)—as well as other things. First to appear on record is Hyperion, a forty-minute orchestral score that shared a concert at the 2006 Donaueschingen Festival with a piece by Jürg Widmann, the two still together on an album (Neos 10725) from the outfit formerly responsible for col legno records.
Hyperion has a lot to do with Haas’s earlier music. It takes its title from the Hölderlin novel from which Haas drew material for his first opera, Nacht, and which he quoted in naming at least two pieces of the nineties: Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich... (Who, when I cry out, hears me...) for percussion and ensemble, and ‘...Einklang freier Wesen...’ (‘...unison of free beings...’) for ten players (both available on Kairos 0012352KAI, a record well worth hearing for Haas’s music of this period). Hyperion also has a lot of musical qualities in common with Wer, wenn ich schriee and other works, notably the classic in vain for small orchestra (on Kairos 0012332KAI, and essential): the sonorities that come from out of the shadows of spectralism, the quasi-unison melodies that sound elemental, but elemental from another planet, and the fascination with diminished fifths, with or without microtonal smudging.
Yet another fully Haasian feature of Hyperion—not so audible, of course, on the record—is the play with levels of illumination. Haas’s third quartet (2001) has to be performed in total darkness; in vain has passages where darkness descends; and Hyperion has its large orchestral forces guided not by a conductor but by a light show. The magical and perhaps also sinister effect of towering sonorities vibrating in tune with colour, or of gargantuan melodies being led by changes in illumination, can only be imagined, and perhaps Haas was leaving some space in this ‘concerto for light and orchestra’ for his collaborator (the light artist rosalie at the first performance, of which images can be seen here and here), since Hyperion lacks the spectacular subtlety of in vain. There must be some loss, too, in not hearing the piece within the ambience Haas intended, the orchestra divided into four groups around the audience.
Of course, since the musicians are bound to be less familiar with light cues than with a conductor’s beat, Haas has to set out his music in gross: in long chords and textures of uncoordinated ostinatos, or in melodies of primitive rhythm. However, initiated by a thunder-crack involving three differently tuned pianos, the piece proceeds with inexorable, sometimes almost frightening power. Its long rumblings, distant bellows and fanfares similarly from afar are telling us something about the world we live in.
The Widmann piece—Zweites Labyrinth, also for widely spaced groups—is cheeky.
1 Helmut Lachenmann is out there by himself. Perhaps this is one definition of what it means to be a modernist. Or perhaps it is what he himself means by the ‘authenticity’ of which he speaks in his notes for the Arditti Quartet’s recording of his three string quartets (Kairos 0012662 KAI). Or perhaps these things, modernism and authenticity, are the same. In any event, Lachenmann being out there by no means sounds lonely. The impression given in particular by this disc is instead generous, full, fully realized, fully self-realized. You feel yourself in the presence of something—and, yes, welcomed.
Gran Torso, the oldest of these pieces, is nearly four decades old, and yet its cornucopia of beautiful noises—indeed beautiful in this performance—sounds actual. In many ways nothing much has changed since the early seventies, and that has been one of this composer’s problems, to move on without being able to move forward—a problem we can encounter being intriguingly assailed in the two later quartets. Lachenmann spoke of his music at the time of Gran Torso in a phrase that has become familiar, ‘instrumental musique concrète’, but one might make the association not so much with the products of the French studio as with what was coming out of Cologne. In its opening tear, the work seems to repeat the initiating gesture of one of the most lauded Cologne pieces, Stockhausen’s Kontakte, and it goes on exploring how an electronic soundscape can be addressed by instruments, even by the four instruments of such a venerable formation.
It is the voluntary giving up of so much that went with that formation—ideals of tone and texture, harmonic-contrapuntal progress, a whole history of companionly ways among the instruments—that makes for the out-thereness. Lachenmann abandons all this and yet still creates persuasive form. When so much has gone, there would be the danger of noises rattling at one another, crying out, bickering. Lachenmann keeps that in check. What looms through—and how does he do it?—is an astonishing sense of impendingness, in Gran Torso and in the pieces that followed: Reigen seliger Geister (1988-9) and Grido (2001-2). Much of the former is made of whisper-thin high harmonics and rumblings, shakings down below. Grido, perhaps less tentative, introduces the occasional note of humour. The three works hardly make a triptych or any kind of progression. Each is itself, and abundantly worth hearing.