Critic’s Notebook: Manfred Honeck Scintillating with the VSO; Kavakos brooding in Korngold

Also published in Die Presse: Dirigent Manfred Honeck ließ im Musikverein die Funken sprühen

E.W.Korngold (& Barber) Violin Concerto(s) Gil Shaham / A.Previn / LSO DG (1994) US | UK | DE

L.v.Beethoven Symphonies 5 & 7 M.Honeck / Pittsburg SO Reference SACD (2015) US | UK | DE

Exuberance and Musical Joy with Manfred Honeck

The Vienna Symphony Orchestra, inspired-sounding, under the West-Austrian maestro from Pittsburgh

There aren’t many conductors who make you think: No matter what, where, or with whom – I need to be there and hear them. Manfred Honeck – who, over the past 17 years, has turned the fine Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra into one of the world’s most interesting ensembles – is one of them. Saturday night’s concert with the Vienna Symphony at the Musikverein offered ample reasons why.

Perhaps not quite yet in the Austrian premiere of Lera Auerbach’s Frozen Dreams, a joint commission by Pittsburgh, the Vienna Symphony, and the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (alias dictus Musikverein) – where one’s ears were primarily busy just taking in the new music. Soundscapes (a bowed gong, singing glasses, eventually the string sections) gently crept forward, pushing against the rustling restlessness of the hall. A wry smile, recalling Alfred Schnittke, underlies the piece when Auerbach lets familiar-sounding tunes dart through the abstract tectonics of her musical landscape – or when she just brusquely wipes away those friendly gestures with a broad orchestral swipe.

Perhaps also still not quite in Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto: Not here, simply because the soloist, Leonidas Kavakos, was squarely at the center of it all. It’s pretty safe to say that this concerto has arrived in the repertoire: this was already the fourth time it’s been heard in Vienna this season, and thrice with major performers. In February with the Tonkünstler and Simone Lamsma and in May with the VSO (!) and Renaud Capuçon.

Kavakos, by nature not a grandstanding, overwrought kind of soloist, is perfectly suited to this music that straddles the concert hall and Hollywood. Full-bodied and penetrating, charged with inner tension, and – despite a surprisingly broad and heavy vibrato – never soupy, he set the tone for the performance. That even an intonation-animal like him brushes up against the limits of ambiguity in the tricky Andante shows that Korngold offers his performers beauty, but not ease. (Capuçon and Lamsma were cleaner, more distict here, though neither brought anything like his expressiveness to the work.) The finale buzzed and hummed with energy. After that, his encore – the Bach "Loure" from Partita No.3 in E major, abstract and played right at the edge – felt like a glass of ice water.

Finally, in the Beethoven, Honeck’s influence came into focus. There was so much to discover and enjoy in this Seventh Symphony, for all its familiarity. It started with the fundamentals: articulation, phrasing. The crescendos were organic. Even at breakneck speed, there was never haste; never panic over bungled notes. Never lost in minutiae, he kept the momentum flowing just right. Sparks flew with intensity.

P.S.: This merits a little rant: The VSO is bloody lucky to have Honeck return to them regularly (he will be back in October with Anne-Sofie Mutter!); the Vienna Phil insane for not trying to tie him to the orchestra of which he was a violist-member for ten years. Is it, because his brother Rainer is their concert-master? Something is decidedly amiss when the Vienna Phil evidently avoids a conductor who, on paper, would be a perfect fit, one who is among the best regarded, most exciting maestros of our time, and who has such ample feeling for the 'Viennese style'. He should have been conducting the bloody New Year's concert oodles of times by now, instead the orchestras he has conducted at the Musikverein include the Pittsburgh and Munich Philharmonics, the Vienna Symphony, the Webern SO, a bloody student orchestra, the Jeunesse Youth Orchestra, the Swedish RSO, the MDRSO, and the ORF-RSO... but not the Vienna Phil. Anyone suggesting that anything but politicking and shady Viennese machinations are the reson for this, does not know this snake-put of a town well enough, methinks.
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Critic’s Notebook: Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Orchestre Métropolitain visit Vienna

C.Saint-Saëns, Piano Concertos 1 & 2 Alexandre Kantorow, J.J.Kantorow, Tapiola Sinfonietta BIS SACD

C.Saint-Saëns, Piano Concertos 3-5 Alexandre Kantorow, J.J.Kantorow, Tapiola Sinfonietta BIS SACD

Montreal’s Orchestre Métropolitain on European Tour, showing off its symbiosis with Yannick Nézet-Séguin

As the second orchestra in Montreal, the Orchestre Métropolitain hasn’t got it easy. Few North American cities have two prominent orchestras; fewer still have two fine concert orchestras. But the music director who started his grand career with this band has remained loyal to his first love – and now they get to punch above their weight and fill (with a little help from the presenters) large halls on their European tour, hitting Brussels, Paris, Vienna, Hamburg, and Baden-Baden. To put this into European terms: It’s as if Christian Thielemann had always also remained at the helm of the Nuremberg State Philharmonic and now took them on a grand pan-Asian Richard Strauss Tour.

It’s heartening, really, and it makes you want to root for that 25-year collaboration that resulted, some six years ago, in a lifetime contract for Yannick Nézet-Séguin. And with that quantum of kindness in your heart, you might find that the buttery phrasing and the lavish touch in Maurice Ravel’s La valse do have a certain appeal, making the music (including much of the rest) sound a bit like those orchestras you seem to remember from old black and white movies. Nothing is overly subtle with Nézet-Séguin – even, paradoxically, the many finer points he has the orchestra perform aren’t. And therein lies much of what makes performances with the compact, energetic little man – 70% torso and 90% charisma – so consistently compelling in concert. So if you can live with music-as-entertainment, heart-on-sleeve emoting, and signaling emotional turns like a semaphore on amphetamines, what’s not to love?!

Of course, you could always revert to sneering quietly: “That’s not how it’s supposed to go.” And even though it might be tough to coherently argue what “supposed to” means, in this context, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Certainly not when it comes to the Tchaikovsky Pathétique, which was programmed for the second half. Firstly, there’s something old-school brazen and populist to that sort of programming. Perhaps that makes it cool again; in any case, it’s certainly effective. A Charles Ives Symphony might have looked smarter on paper – but it wouldn’t have gotten as many asses into the seats of the Wiener Konzerthaus on Wednesday night, nor out of them, again, when it came to jubilation. Taking the symphony by its nickname, YNS conducted it as his red-soled, Swarovski-encrusted buckled loafers might have suggested he would: To the hilt. Slow was very slow, fast was very fast. Empathic and emphatic, the opening was Tristanesque to the hesitant max and the opening of the third movement filled with a nice, nervous energy (if a bit unclean). Along with the rest, it was a perfect cliché of the composer, for better or worse – much depending on how the listener responds to Tchaikovsky in the first place. The critic-colleague for Die Presse on duty that night had his grimmest face on, as he read along in the score, but he was betrayed by vigorously tapping his feet along to the rambunctious music. Incidentally, his review pulled most punches, focusing on the highlight.

That had occurred in the first half. It wasn’t, unsurprisingly, Barbara Assiginaak’s 2021 orchestral work, a percussion-heavy, endearing-sounding, whispering, hissing, howling work of nature-sounds in the broadest sense, filled with tonal connective tissue and prominent woodwinds. It comes with all the charming, ecologically correct and naïve messaging that you would expect from a piece titled Eko-Bmijwang – As Long in Time As the River Flows… and it amounts to something of a land acknowledgment manifest in music: A pleasant gesture and harmless.

It was, however, the Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No.2, performed by the rising star pianist Alexandre Kantorow (most recently heard at the Konzerthaus in Chopin’s F minor concerto). The big, bold cadenza works its way from Bach to Mozart (when the Orchestra enters) to full-blown French romanticism. Saint-Saëns runs in Kantorow’s family (his father Jean-Jacques has recorded pretty much all Saint-Saëns there is for orchestra, as a conductor and as a violinist, plus chamber music, and later re-recorded the piano concertos with his son) and he knows how to navigate the part with panache, staying clear of the pitfalls that would have the work sound frivolous and frilly. You’ll still have forgotten everything about it a day later, but while it lasts, it’s a marvelous piece and great fun and the pleasantly unfussy way of Alexandre Kantorow’s with it, romantic but never emoting, had a lot to do with that. That the orchestra was in support-mode didn’t hurt, either.

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From the House of the Mad: Klangforum puts on a "concertante-performative Meta-Opera"

AMOPERA - a dystopian ballad

In a dead-serious context, even the dumbest joke is funny. Klangforum Wien combined high-concept avant-garde with a staging that makes the Hangover-films look like Schiller tragedies.


On Sunday evening, Klangforum lured audiences into the Great Hall for an ambitious season finale. A “concertante-performative meta-opera” was on the program. Already the descriptor “Amoper” (opera for the evening) came with a warning: words like “meta” and “performative” are often codes—either promising an audience something detached from the subject and physically involving in its own peculiar way, or, to the less inclined, something pseudo-intellectual and embarrassing. One must decide for oneself which camp one belongs to when exposed to the Belgian Needcompany.

A musician enters. He stands at the front of the stage. Silence. He dies—loudly, like Hamlet in provincial theater. No, he lives; puts on a clown nose. The rest of the musicians and two “performers” join him. They start running around the stage in circles, all of them oozing significance and wearing colorful socks. It reeks of amateur improv class at the local community center. Still no music. This goes on for what feels like five minutes, until some musicians finally dare touch their instruments and begin to intone Salvatore Sciarrino: “I begin to breathe again” from Luci mie traditrici—delicate, breathy, skewed whistling. Sciarrino in purified avant-garde form. The rest of the group keeps jogging. Theatrical garnish: musicians occasionally stand up, pull faces, and sit down again. The “performers” gradually shed their upper garments. In the background, two musicians do jumping jacks. When the musicians just pretend to play their instruments for a while, or exchange instruments among each other (to predictably modest effect), much laughter ensues. Because this is funny.

Beat Furrer’s soundscapes from die helle nacht rise from the central group of ridiculously, admirably dedicated musicians. More facial contortions. Holger Falk sounds stunning—whether miked, half-naked, or wrapped in a purple cloak. No matter how difficult or abstract the music, he delivers. A velvet brushstroke amid all the sonic thorns. Then: loosening-up exercises. Barefoot. Heavy breathing. Screaming. Percussion outbursts. The music comes from the ash-heap of the avant-garde (Xenakis) and its modern epigones (Sara Glojnarić, Michael Wertmüller, Rebecca Saunders, Bernhard Lang). At least Berio is enjoyable—because he mocks himself (For Cathy). A bass flute comes running. But only breathes through the thing. Wait, it is turning into Saunders' "O Yes & I". One of the pieces sounds like Sepultura-goes-Bohemian-Rhapsodie.

Soprano Sarah Maria Sun is no less impressive than Falk and hurls herself admirably into every role. Around her: more group contortions. Buttocks rubbing against one another. Finally, a cut: Zemlinsky—glorious. Lulu fragments—brilliant. Sciarrino (via Gesualdo)—touching. Britten—tender. A telling contrast.

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© Carlos Suarez/Wiener Konzerthaus

Notes from the 2024 Salzburg Festival ( 1 ) Overture Spirituelle • Koma & Le noir de l'étoile

Koma • Georg Friedrich Haas • Klangforum Wien

Also reviewed for Die Presse: Haas und Grisey: Hier spielen kollabierte Sterne die Musik

ABOVE PICTURES (DETAILS) COURTESY SALZBURG FESTIVAL, © Marco Borrelli. CLICK FOR THE WHOLE PICTURE.

Blackout

As my colleague was stuck somewhere in northern Franconia, trying to experience opera in the dark, with only the German Railway between him and Bayreuth, I had made my way to the Salzburg Festival – back after ten years – to experience opera in the-even-darker. Because what Wagner achieved with Tristan 140 years ago, Georg Friedrich Haas has managed now with Koma, his opera that premiered 2016 in Schwetzingen. And pitch-black it really was, in the Great Hall of the Mozarteum, because the bureaucracy played ball and, in exchange for personal at every door, allowed the Festival to tape over the emergency exit signs. You could see the faintest outlines of light ions creeping through the cracks around some of the doors, but not your own hand before your face. You could turn to your seat neighbor and poke your tongue out and no one would have been the wiser for it. Barring a bad case of halitosis, that is, because with the visual sense gone, all other senses were heightened. That said, you wouldn’t need Haas’ music to attain that effect – I reckon that a Mozart Requiem, Gesualdo Madrigals, or something by Philip Glass might work as well and better.

There was a sensual element to the music as it rose, gently at first: metallic clouds, pierced by piano and brass, a whaling accordion. The music sounded positively amplified, but nothing was – it all came from the way the timbres were mixed and the voices resonated in the fine acoustic. The brass would occasionally throw fanfares against the string clusters, that sounded like elephants in heat. The piano – and its out of tune upright companion – were prominent… and responsible for much of the beauty of the score, because Haas, while modern and complex enough to be on the good side of the journalist, musicologist, and academic coteries, is also non-ideological enough to step off the avant-garde pedal every so often, letting glimmers of humanity and consonance shimmer through.

He was much helped by the excellent performance of the Klangforum Wien which was led – during the brief lit and semi-lit moments, anyway, by Bas Wiegers. Not that you can strictly tell, but they sounded on point, sharp, and certainly good, as they played their way through the score – and most of it by heart. The same goes for the singers, who all somehow sounded uncommonly good, notably trading words between each other, even for simple, single sentences. Only Daniel Gloger couldn’t go for all-beauty, because his role as “Mother” (apart from “Alexander”) demanded a more grotesque take. Outstanding amid the general excellence were Pia Davila’s Jasmine (sister of the comatose protagonist, Michaela) and Peter Schöne’s Michael (husband of Michaela).

As for the story by Klaus Händl, Haas’ go-to librettist, there’s a Michaela and she’s in a coma. Given the constant darkness, you had better read the libretto before or after, because there was little to follow during the performance. She’s taken care of, it seems, every once in a while, she or her memory wails away from above in the back (Sarah Aristidou), hospital procedures are described, and there is a good deal of good old German Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Her mother is revealed to have been a Kostelnička-type (except cartoonish wicked, unlike the tortured and deeply moral original) – which gave intermittent cause if you can actually come to terms with your past, if you just make it out to have been evil, rather than trying to understand the “others’” point of view. But that might be perhaps asking for more than the libretto was ever willing to give, getting stuck on a reasonably harmless and superficial level.

By the time the creaking trombones announce the end of the opera, which drags itself from line to line to its end, it has overstayed its welcome by maybe half an hour. The lights-off-lights-on back and forth, which even if following a libretto had been possible, did not make obvious dramatic sense, was no longer as novel at this point, nor was the music. Still: the experience as such was one that is bound to stay with every attendee.

Le noir de l’étoile • Gérard Grisey • Motus Percussion

Messages from the Past

G.Grisey, Le noir de l’étoile Percussions de Strasbourg Harmonia Mundi

Having awoken from the coma, the schedule beckoned to the Collegiate Church for a 10PM performance of Gérard Grisey’s 1990 Le noir de l’étoile for six percussionists, tape, and electronics. Darkness reigned again, but since the emergency exit signs were not covered, this time, the white interior of the Kollegienkirche shone in eerie mint green. The six percussion sets, distributed equally around the church, were spotlit. The audience, facing the center, sat in the middle of all this.

Essentially, Le noir de l’étoile is an hour of drumming. If six drummers banging on for about an hour sounds eerily much like the final part of Rihm’s Tutuguri—Poème dansé (review of the 2010 Salzburg performance here), worry not. There are limits as to how far that sort of thing can go, granted. And the presumed idea of a pulse traveling around the listener, from one percussion station to another – a b it à la Gesang der Jünglinge, I imagine – didn’t quite work out, either, perhaps because the principally gorgeous acoustic of the church made matters a bit too diffuse for that. But there was a communal quality to the proceedings, listening to the acoustic soundprints of pulsars PSR B0329+54 and Velar flutter in through the speakers, as interludes. Cosmic signals from thousands of years ago; messages from collapsed stars, on which we can eavesdrop on earth and which can lead to our contemplation of human existence, the futility of our micro-second in this universe, unnoticed and utterly irrelevant, except to us.

These kinds of existential thoughts, fortunately, can be wiped away easy enough, with a sausage and a beer, courtesy “Heiße Kiste”, the much appreciated mobile late-night sausage stand on the other and of the “State Bridge” that will assist putting the humans at the proper center of their universe again.


Photo descriptions:

Picture No.1: Koma — Klangforum Wien · Wiegers 2024: Peter Schöne (Michael), Daniel Gloger (Alexander/Mutter), Pia Davila (Jasmin), Bas Wiegers (Musikalische Leitung), Susanne Gritschneder (Dr. Auer), Henriette Gödde (Dr. Schönbühl), Karl Huml (Pfleger Jonas), Benjamin Chamandy (Pfleger Nikos), Raphael Sigling (Pfleger Zdravko), Klangforum Wien

Picture No.2: Le Noir de l’Étoile — Sietzen & Motus Percussion 2024: Christoph Sietzen (Schlagwerk), Motus Percussion

In Memoriam Aribert Reimann: His Lear in Frankfurt (2008)

In memory of Aribert Reimann, who passed away on March 13th, nine days after his 88th birthday, I post this hitherto unpublished review of the 2008 Frankfurt Opera premiere of his most important stage work, Lear, in Keith Warner's production. Re-listening to Medea recently, I found myself taken aback by the sheer ugliness of Reimann's music, the "dead-on-arrival avant-garde hideousness", found it to be "joyless, deliberately ungainly music, 30-years behind its time when it premiered in 2010", and how it was "music to feel clever, by pretending to like it." Part of it will have been the lack of visible drama, which, as I suggest below, is important, possibly essential to make anything of this music at all. And, in Lear's defense, it came more than 30 years before Medea. This prompted a brief exchange with a colleague who thought (and wrote), already around the time of the premiere of Lear, that the opera was overrated - to which a critical outcry predictably followed promptly. True: Not all music that is difficult and first appears ungainly is The-Emperor's-New-Clothes-Music. And yet, there is a line, eventually, for each of us, that we would not cross for purely musical purposes. Where is that line and is it important? These are all thoughts that came back up, re-reading my 16-year old review, written with the milk of human kindness still sloshing liberally within me. Perhaps partly not to look the dunce. And partly because it's not like I didn't in enjoy the evening some way. Anyway, here it is.

Aribert Reimann, Lear Wolfgang Koch et al. Frankfurt Opera, S.Weigle Oehms

Aribert Reimann, Medea Frankfurt Opera, E.Nielsen Oehms

Aribert Reimann, Lear Fischer-Dieskaus et al. Bavarian State Opera, G.Albrecht DG

Reimann-Mendelssohn/Schumann, …und soll es Tod bedeuten Song arrangements & SQ4t#3 Petersen Quartet, C.Schäfer Capriccio

Gabor Halasz called Aribert Reimann’s 1978 opera Lear “the great music-theater achievement of the [70s], probably the most important opera since [Bernd Alois] Zimmermann’s The Soldiers. The work’s premiere in Munich – a Jean-Pierre Ponelle production, conducted by Gerd Albrecht and with the work’s initiator Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the title role and Dieskau’s wife Julia Varady as Cordelia – was a smashing success with critics and audiences alike – even conservative ears.

Dieskau first suggested the topic to Reimann in 1968 and nudged him to pursue it. What Reimann didn’t know until long after he finished his Lear, is that Dieskau also pitched the idea of a Lear-opera to Britten who, however, chose to compose Death in Venice, instead.

How much of Lear’s success depended on Dieskau’s participation and Ponelle’s inspired, beautiful production was once again, for the 21st time, put to the test in the Frankfurt Opera’s season-opening premiere of their Keith Warner production on September 28th. Not very much, as it turns out, as long as the theatrical direction is as extraordinary as it was in Frankfurt.

Lear's effectiveness is critically dependent on the theatrical element and makes a primarily theatrical impression – not unlike Henze’s Bassarids, but without the latter’s relatively luscious grand operatic musical moments. Lear is essentially theater music (a hint of Maurizio Kagel), and its considerable success abroad has undoubtedly been due to the use of the respective vernacular. Like the San Francisco production (where Thomas Stewart took the title role) which used the translation of Desmond Clayton.

The music alone is dense and difficult stuff; wild and loud plenty and even grating at times. Suppose you only read Claus H. Henneberg’s analysis of it: You’d have to imagine a series of shrieking vocal parts and jarring string and brass chord clusters, one piled upon another – interrupted only occasionally with the tone rows that represent Cordelia and Edgar, or the string quartet that accompanies the Fool’s simple songs.

What is true enough in theory gets a life of its own on stage. Even if the tone-rows don’t obviously reveal the relationship between Cordelia and Edgar as being the sole characters aiming at a common, noble goal, the semi-tone steps of their tone rows (Edgar’s is developed out of Cordelia’s by switching the first and last six-note sequences; see below) are in marked and notable contrast to the shrill sounds of Goneril and Regan. Clusters of sounds may dominate much of the score, but since the music works as support for the theatrical element and dramatizes the story with sound, it isn’t (necessarily) perceived as unnecessarily spiky and brutal. Indeed, it was astounding how vividly it depicted the various moods and actions on stage – madness, wistful longing, and of course wickedness and massive brutality. The 30-year-old music, still sounding more modern than much that is composed these days, doesn’t aim to make it easy for the audience, it aims to be true to

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Critic’s Notebook: "Gran Toccata" Receives its Belated Premiere in Vienna

Also reviewed for DiePresse: So entsteht ein „moderner Klassiker“

Dieter Ammann's Piano Concerto has unrelenting bite, but also what it takes to become a modern audience favorite.

Five years after it was meant to have been given its world premiere in Vienna, Dieter Ammann’s Piano Concerto Gran Toccata was finally given its first Austrian outing courtesy of the co-commissioning team of Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna’s Konzerthaus, last Tuesday. In the intermittent years, the concerto has made its way through the world’s concert halls, gotten a recording, and become something of a trademark work for its soloist, Andreas Haefliger, to perform. If anything might keep this work from becoming a modern classic, it’s perhaps the fiendishly difficult solo part that brought Haefliger – perhaps – to the brink of regretting ever having beseeched Ammann to write one in the first place.

D.Ammann Piano Concerto: Gran Toccata Andreas Haefliger, Susanna Mälkki, Helsinki Philharmonic BIS Records

Conducting the Vienna Symphony Orchestra was Susanna Mälkki, who is a also veteran of this concerto by now, who appears to have conducted every performance, except for the premiere at the BBC Proms, in 2019, including performances in Munich which I reviewed here. Toc-toc-toc: Like woodpecker and echo, Haefliger pecks at the piano to open the work, for the orchestra to respond in kind. The stage is set for a concerto that reminds us, that the piano is (also) a percussive instrument. In keeping with that percussive strain, the orchestral apparatus crackles and rustles like a mouth full of pop rocks. Lyrical beams of sunlight hit the general tumult at various points, daubing surprisingly lyrical patches onto the turbulent musical canvas. There’s no letting up for the soloist, nor for orchestra, except the former’s three extended cadenzas. A brass chorale makes the ears perk. Ditto a duet between piano and marimba. Sometimes it appears as if Haefliger was playing the orchestra as an extension, at times as if the orchestra was subsuming the soloist. There is an in and out of prominence, rather than a back and forth.

It’s a truism, that not the premiere of a work is the important event, but its tenth, fiftieth performance. It reveals different aspects of a work, enables a composition to come into its own, to grow up, even to slip away from its creator’s grasp. Not yet quite from Dieter Ammann’s, who was present and made sure that balances were more to his liking on the second night, but even with balances less to his liking, the performance sounded mightily impressive. At the German premiere, it had still made a much brasher, harsher, hyper-virtuosic impression. In Vienna, perhaps in part due to the increased aplomb of the performing protagonists, it sounded kinder, more colorful, warmer. There will be more opportunities, surely, to hear how it might adapt as it ages in future performances, the world over.

The Schubert Ninth Symphony – announced in central European musicologist fashion as the Eight – was an afterthought. It was performed well enough, a bit on the brash side, with an attempt on fleetness that didn’t quite take, and it couldn’t get out of the shadow of the concerto that had preceded it. If I could have had my way, I would have wanted to hear a Paris Symphony, instead, and before Gran Toccata, not afterward… and intermission-escapees be damned.

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Photo © Manuel Chemineau

Dip Your Ears: No. 266 (Thomas Larcher’s Great Symphony)

T.Larcher, Sy.2 "Kenotaph", Die Nacht der Verlorenen H.Lintu / FinnishRSO Ondine 1393

Thomas Larcher’s Great Symphony

The Rebirth Of Contemporary Classical Music?

When Thomas Larcher’s Second Symphony *Kenotaph* was premiered at Vienna’s venerable Musikverein, almost six years ago, it felt like contemporary music was back on track, even in continental Europe. It might be naïve to assume that it’ll ever be more than a cultural niche again, but there are heartening signs that modern classical music has shaken off the ideological shackles that had kept it for so long in its specialist echo chambers, performed before self-selecting crowds celebrating their own importance… and with the taxpayers, not the attendees, paying for most of the tickets. Moreover, the habitually conservative audiences are beginning to respond to it. The “modern” piece of the dreaded education concert sandwich is not as feared anymore; sometimes it even takes center stage, and recordings on non-specialist labels are issued. Dieter Ammann’s Piano Concerto *Gran Toccata* is one example, *Kenotaph*, which is now out on Ondine with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra performing live under Hannu Lintu, is another. (A planned release of the Vienna Philharmonic performance on DG never happened.)

The effect of this music is not quite the same on record as in the concert hall, where all the crackle and cackle explodes vividly across a stage sprawling with musicians. But we listen to Mahler on record, about whose music the same could be said, so the complaint seems churlish and the music is too interesting to ignore. *Kenotaph* opens a bit like Ravel’s Piano Concerto, with a whack of the clapper (sounding more like a timpani thud here) that spurs the orchestra into metallic spurts of activity. Repeated mini-climaxes take turns with lacunae of Zbigniew Preisner-like string solemnity. The rhythms are catchy, the noises make sense, the tones have perceivable sequences, the violence of it keeps you awake, and the tenderness on tenterhooks.

After the Allegro-frenzy, the lyrical Adagio consoles with swaths cut perhaps from Mahler by way of Schnittke. There’s a fragile beauty in this, and a melodic phrase reminiscent of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony appears and re-appears throughout. Somewhere within the strings hides an accordion and adds its distinct color – and then the movement melts away as if taking leave. It hasn’t gone, however, and violently reminds of its continued presence only to fall back into its own, like an aborted soufflé, with the solo violin ushering the movement out with said Mahleresque phrase.

In the third movement, a “Scherzo; Molto allegro” with overtones of Prokofiev and Tim Burton films, the percussion group gets to try out every instrument they found in the storage rooms of the Finnish Broadcasting studios. A series of increasingly louder, marching chords – played by the foot-soldier-violins and a battery of percussion, deliciously primitive – ratchet up the tension before the clarinets sweetly pretend that nothing of that sort of thing had ever happened. Mischievous listeners might hear it as an allegory of Austrian history. Actually it’s an allusion to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s *Klavierstück No.9* with its 140 repeated chords, here equaled or just beaten.

The fourth movement marshals all the martial forces in contrasting blocks. The recipe still works, even 30, 35 minutes into the symphony, making *Kenotaph* a superbly entertaining symphonic tour de force… challenging and consoling, spikey and beautiful, and with that “Mahler-9” motif (if that’s what it is) coming back for a conciliatory ending. A kenotaph (or cenotaph) is an empty, symbolical tomb and the work was inspired by “the crisis of men, women, and children fleeing the clutches of war and mayhem.” In 2016 that was written with an eye towards the Middle East. So far, 2022 is seeing to it that the topic isn’t becoming any less pertinent.

*Die Nacht der Verlorenen*, a five-partite song cycle for baritone and orchestra, risks becoming an afterthought after *Kenotaph*, although it’s a substantial, half-hour work that shares much of the soundscape with the 8-year younger symphony. That might be good enough for enjoyment, but where Larcher really shines, is in his treatment of the human voice, which is perhaps the instrument that had suffered the most and for the longest, under a certain pervasive type of modernism… to the point where so much contemporary vocal music all sounded the gosh-darn same. But what Larcher writes makes sense to the ear, from Sprechgesang to lyrical, melodic lines. Nascent baritone star Andrè Schuen sings the Ingeborg Bachmann poems in neo-Diskauesque manner, slightly aloof, cerebrally, beautifully, and smooth like the oily crema on a great espresso. My only question mark: was the persistent violin-induced tinnitus-whistle in “Memorial” really necessary?

9/9

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Briefly Noted: The Knights and the Kreutzer

The Kreutzer Project (Beethoven, Janáček), The Knights, C. Jacobsen, E. Jacobsen (released on August 19, 2022) Avie AV2555 | 75'11"

The Knights bill themselves as an orchestral collective. Whether or not the future of orchestras is exclusively small and flexible, which we hope it is not, this New York-based group has shown a way forward. Violinist Colin Jacobsen and conductor (and occasionally cellist) Eric Jacobsen have woven together this disc from arrangements and new works based on the story of Beethoven's "Kreutzer" sonata.

Responding to an inscription in Beethoven's title ("scritta in uno stile molto concertante, quasi come d’un concerto"), Colin Jacobsen has arranged Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9 as a violin concerto for himself as soloist. The format retains the famous opening of the first movement, a sort of concerto cadenza out of place, in which the solo violin trades themes with the piano, now given life principally by the woodwinds. The chamber-sized group of fifteen strings plus single woodwinds and brass (except for a pair of horns) reveal many new dimensions to this familiar work.

Leoš Janáček wrote his first string quartet in reaction to Leo Tolstoy's novella "The Kreutzer Sonata," in which Beethoven's virtuosic music represents illicit sexual passion, with tragic consequences. A jealous husband discovers his wife in the arms of a violinist with whom she had played Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” sonata. The husband recalls hearing them play the first movement for the first time: “As for my wife, never had I seen her as she was that night. Those brilliant eyes, that severity and majestic expression while she was playing, and then that utter languor, that weak, pitiable, and happy smile after she had finished.” Although the violinist escapes, the husband stabs his wife to death with a dagger.

Michael P. Atkinson, one of the ensemble's horn players, has orchestrated Janáček's score for the same compact orchestral ensemble, with some arrangement completed by Eric Jacobsen. The piece is not even half as long as Beethoven's monumental sonata, but the arrangement amps up the turbulent nature of the music, including some atmospheric touches for harp.

Between these bookends are two new works. In a bizarre twist, French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer never played the sonata Beethoven dedicated to him (in fact, the composer wrote it for George Hightower, an Afro-British violinist). In Colin Jacobsen's Kreutzings, instrumental phrases alternate with drum kit, and hints of Richard Strauss glimmer in the harmony and orchestration. String players will recognize the homage to Kreutzer's meticulous Etude No. 2, a bugbear for bow training. Shorthand, a string sextet by Anna Clyne, puts Knights cellist Karen Ouzounian in a solo role, with Eric Jacobsen taking up the other cello part. The title comes from a line in Tolstoy's novella, and Clyne takes motifs and ideas from both Beethoven and Janáček, with some exotic melodic elements, rather gorgeous.

The Knights will perform a slightly modified version of this program to open the 50th anniversary season of the Candlelight Concert Society 4 p.m. September 11, at the presenter's home base, the Horowitz Center in Columbia, Md.

Briefly Noted: Gabriela Lena Frank Songs

Gabriela Lena Frank / Dmitri Shostakovich, Songs, A. Garland, J. Abreu, J. Reger (released on August 5, 2022) Art Song Colorado DASP005 | 68'31"

Gabriela Lena Frank has been on my radar since she was composer-in-residence with the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra a decade ago. Her music draws on her family's rich tapestry of cultural backgrounds: Peruvian/Chinese ancestry on one side and Lithuanian/Jewish on the other. Like Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, she is a sort of musical anthropologist, mining folk traditions to enrich her musical style, which is varied, expansive, and sui generis. From Art Song Colorado this month comes this new disc by baritone Andrew Garland and pianist Jeremy Reger, containing world premiere recordings of some of the composer's songs.

The song cycle Cantos de Cifar y el Mar Dulce (Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea) is a work completed in multiple versions. The eight songs for baritone recorded here, premiered in 2004 and 2007, were expanded into a half-hour duet with soprano, subsequently elaborated into a version with chorus and orchestra. The texts are by Nicaraguan poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra (1912–2002), who drew on his youth sailing on Lake Nicaragua to create the character of the mystical sailor Cifar. Frank's use of the baritone voice ranges widely, including feminine falsetto, folk techniques, and speech, with the enigmatic keyboard part often in imitation of the Nicaraguan marimba and other folk instruments. Both Garland and Reger respond to these demands with daring vulnerability.

Tenor Javier Abreu joins for Las Cinco Lunas de Lorca, composed in 2016 on a hallucinatory text about the assassination of the Spanish poet, by playwright Nilo Cruz. The two voices, often singing simultaneously, weave a horrifying dream narrative. (Cruz is also the librettist of Frank's first opera, El último sueño de Frida y Diego, which will be premiered this October at San Diego Opera.) Garland rounds out the program with Frank's Cuatro Canciones Andinas (1999), a set of four poems translated from Quechua by the folklorist José María Arguedas, and Shostakovich's culture-crossing Spanish Songs.

Briefly Noted: Kafka-Fragments

György Kurtág, Kafka-Fragmente, Anna Prohaska, Isabelle Faust (released on August 19, 2022) Harmonia Mundi HMM902359 | 58'06"

György Kurtág composed the Kafka-Fragmente from 1985 to 1987, a song cycle on bits of text gleaned from Franz Kafka's diaries, letters, and unpublished stories. Like much of Kurtág's music, each of the forty movements is a dense, carefully thought out nugget of music. The piece grabs the ear from the first moment: in this new recording, as violinist Isabelle Faust plods along on an oscillating major second, soprano Anna Prohaska first joins her ("the good march in step") and then spirals around her in disjointed staccato dissonance ("unaware of them, the others dance around them the dances of time").

Some movements have the chaotic feel of Sprechstimme, à la Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire, while others are lushly melodic, such as the hypnotic "Berceuse I." The two performers are paired beautifully, both up to the virtuosic demands, extended techniques executed with perfect intonation. One of the longest movements, "Träumend hing die Blume" (The flower hung dreamily), is offered as an homage to Robert Schumann. Prohaska and Faust draw out its gorgeous lines beautifully, answered by the disconcerting shrieks of the movement that follows it, "Nichts dergleichen" (Nothing of the kind), which is embedded below.

Faust and Prohaska made this recording in May 2020 in a Berlin studio, which must have been surreal given the circumstances. Der wahre Weg, the longest piece in the set at almost seven minutes, is a drawn-out drone of sorts, addressed as an homage/message to Pierre Boulez. Its text, by chance, captures some of the sense of the lockdown year: "The true path goes by way of a rope that is suspended not high up, but rather just above the ground. Its purpose seems to be more to make one stumble than to be walked on." The same goes for a text that appears twice in the cycle, as Fragments 11 and 25: "Slept, woke, slept, woke, miserable life." After living through the coronavirus lockdown, the sentiments of this complicated piece now strike me in new ways compared to previous years.

Briefly Noted: Carlos Simon Requiem

Carlos Simon, Requiem for the Enslaved, Marco Pavé, MK Zulu, Hub New Music, Carlos Simon (released on June 17, 2022) Decca 00028948529421 | 44'53"

In 1838, the Jesuit priests in charge of what was then Georgetown College paid off that institution's debts. The money came from the sale of 272 enslaved persons, including children as young as two months old, who were sent on ships to plantations in Louisiana. In 2016, Georgetown University undertook a reckoning with this terrible event in its past. In an attempt to right a historical wrong, the university offered a free college education to all verified descendants of these enslaved people. Georgetown University was not the only Jesuit or Catholic institution in the area, founded before slavery was made illegal, to revisit this sordid part of their past, including Gonzaga College High School and Georgetown Visitation Convent.

As part of its plans aiming at restitution, Georgetown University commissioned this Requiem for the Enslaved from rising American composer Carlos Simon. It is one of many such new works being commissioned and premiered in the last few years, in the wake of widespread anti-racism protests across the country, including Damien Geter's An African American Requiem and Simon's own An Elegy: A Cry from the Grave. In this work, alternately reflective and militantly angry, Simon interweaves the structure and texts of the Catholic Requiem Mass with new texts by Memphis-based rapper Marco Pavé.

From the first movement, Simon and Pavé focus on the enslaved people sold "down the river" (that familiar saying has chilling origins), as their names are intoned over and over. Also at the beginning, a soft flute introduces the tune of "In paradisum," the Gregorian chant traditionally sung at the end of the Requiem Mass, to accompany the body of the deceased to the place of burial. MK Zulu's trumpet riffs on this ancient tune with bends and blue-note inflections, and through other movements the chant becomes a sort of motto for the whole piece. Later other melodies are introduced, including the hymn "Oh when the saints go marching in," which shares the same opening motif as the chant (do-mi-fa-sol), something that had never occurred to me before.

Simon mans the piano himself, with Hub New Music, a flute-clarinet-violin-cello quartet from Boston. Yet more tunes are woven into the tapestry, including the spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" in the movement "Light everlasting interlude." Pop riffs pierce the aura of solemnity at times, including the pulsing piano chords in "Interlude (Isaac ran away)," reminiscent of the Foreigner song "Cold as Ice," at least to my ears. The disc, on the short side in terms of timing, is rounded out with alternate versions of three movements, for piano and for chamber ensemble alone.