Ligeti:
Lontano
Lutosławski:
Cello Concerto
Schnittke:
Symphony No.1
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Johannes Moser (vc), Michail
Jurowski (cond.), Royal Festival Hall, London, 30.10.13
Ligeti,
Lutosławski, Schnittke – that’s not exactly a crowd-pleasing programme, and yet
the gargantuan Festival Hall was almost full. How to explain the intense
interest? Discount student tickets seem to have played a part, and then there’s
the fabled “Rest is Noise Effect”, conferring mass appeal status on anything it
touches. But whatever tricks were pulled to draw the audience, they liked what
they got. This wasn’t an easy programme by any means, and seemed to get more
intense as it went on, but the audience sat in rapt attention throughout, and conversations
during the interval seemed to be about little other than the music of the first
half.
The
theme of the concert was “behind the Iron Curtain”, but thankfully the most
clichéd programming choices were sidestepped. The concert began with Ligeti,
but rather than Atmosphères, the usual
choice from his 60s scores, we got the got instead Lontano, and from the sonorist school we got the Lutosławski Cello
Concerto, were lazier programmers would automatically have turned to Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima.
And in the second half, Schnittke’s First Symphony, a work of some notoriety,
and certainly of great historical significance, but a difficult listen by any
standards.
This
evening’s conductor, Michail Jurowski is the father of Vladimir, and a
respected figure in his own right. He is physically frail, though, and his
technique is based on economic gestures. He doesn’t project the sense of
visceral energy that characterises his son’s performances, but his more
measured approach has its benefits too,
his patience, combined with the high standard of orchestral playing, bringing
clarity and poise to this often knotty music.
Ligeti’s
Lontano was written in West Germany
in 1967, ten years after the composer had defected from communist Hungary: very
much music from in front of the Iron Curtain then. Still, it uses techniques
and harmonies developed in Warsaw in the 50s (Schnittke uses them too in his
First Symphony; he called them his “Polish Techniques”) so qualifies on a
technicality. The music here is all chromatic clusters, intense and shimmering,
even at the quietest dynamics. The performance really benefited from the
quality of the LPO’s string tone, all dark, glowing colours that added an extra
dimension to Ligeti’s inscrutable sounds. It was all a bit dry though, formulaic
and even stilted at times. This isn’t the sort of music that benefits from
rubato, but a bit more passion from the players for music’s admittedly
introverted energy wouldn’t go amiss.
The
Lutoslawkski Cello Concerto was a similar case. Cellist Johannes Moser has an
approach to the work that works better in its individual moments than in its
overall conception. He emphasises the distinctions between the basic material,
the repeated notes and the continuous held textures, all of which he plays
without drama and often without colour, and the wildly gesticulating outbursts,
which he exaggerates, sometimes to the point of parody. His physical gestures
don’t help either, gurning at the orchestra when their interjections cut him
off, and big surprise faces to the audience when the music suddenly changes
direction. Technically, the performance wasn’t bad, but the music’s gravity and
pathos were brushed over in favour of gesture and effect.
As
if to compensate, Jurowski took the exact opposite approach with Schnittke’s
First Symphony. Although the basic harmonic language of the work is based on
clusters and dense atonal harmonies (the “Polish Techniques”) the work is filled
with quotations and allusions, usually to lighter music. In other hands, these
can offer levity from the intellectual rigour. But Jurowski sees it
differently. For him, context is all, and each of these allusions is given a
sinister dimension through its placement in the narrative. The excellent
orchestral playing helped him to make his point, the calculated precision of
the woodwind ensembles, the dark colouring to each of the horn and trumpet
solos. Even the improvised violin and piano duet in the second movement,
usually presented as a lighthearted jazz break, was substituted with a passage
from Schnittke’s worthy but equally serious First Violin Sonata.
The
context in which the Symphony was presented helped to highlight many historically
significant aspects of the work. The Ligeti and Lutosławski in the first half
demonstrated the Modernist culture, even behind the Iron Curtain, that
Schnittke was seeking to diversify with his postmodern tricks. Last Friday’s
performance here of the Berio Sinfonia offered another instructive parallel.
Schnittke did not know Berio’s work when he wrote his First Symphony, and the
differences outweigh the similarities. Berio’s stylistic mashup is all about
lightness and grace, to which the intrinsic humour is crucial. Jurowski tonight
demonstrated that Schnittke had a different message to convey, not deeper necessarily,
but certainly darker: the modern world as chaos with any notions of redemption,
or even of order, fleeting and illusory. But there is room in this piece for
levity too, and Jurowski could have presented a more comprehensive picture, not
to mention a more audience-friendly one, for the sake of a few more laughs.
This concert was broadcast live by BBC Radio 3 and it available to listen on demand until 6 November at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03f8c83
No comments:
Post a Comment