BBC SSO Volkov Takemitsu Ligeti RFH 28.11.13

Takemitsu: Green, Marginalia, I Hear the Water Dreaming
Ligeti: San Francisco Polyphony, Violin Concerto
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ilya Gringolts (violin), Ilan Volkov (cond)

Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra have long been a powerhouse combination for Modernist music. Some petty politics, now long forgotten (hopefully), led to his standing down from the top job with the orchestra in 2009, and he is now their Principal Guest Conductor. That has made concerts like this one rarer, which is a shame, because they are always worth catching. Volkov and the BBC SSO seem to revel in the sheer complexity of the music he presents them with. The chemistry between him and the players is ideal, and although he clearly rehearses and coordinates with discipline and rigour, they are still able to make the results sound spontaneous. Even more impressively, the orchestra plays this music like they mean it. Not so long ago, most symphony orchestras playing Modernist music did so with the attitude “We just play this, it’s not our fault how it sounds.” These days such performances are rare, and the engagement of rank and file players to the Modernist cause is due in no small part to the passion and commitment of conductors like Volkov.

The concert was devoted to Takemitsu and Ligeti, an indulgence that could only make sense in the context of a large-scale festival of 20^th-century music. The works were well chosen, most on the borderline between the familiar and the obscure: Volkov was clearly keen to give some of the more neglected works by the two composers an airing. He was wise though to place Takemitsu first, as the Japanese composer’s contribution would have paled into insignificance if heard after the Ligeti, especially the latter’s Violin Concerto, the one undisputable masterpiece here.

The three Takemitsu works came from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and offered an outline of his stylistic development over those decades. Green, composed in 1967, finds the young composer in the process of reconciling his engagement with Japanese music with his love for Debussy. It’s a frustratingly short work – even at this early date his discourse is expansive – but the snapshot that this six minutes of music gives is a clear indicator of what was to come.

Of the three Takemitsu works, the most distinctive and the most accomplished was the 1976 Marginalia. Takemitsu is now committed to exploring the traditional music of his homeland, and more confident about referencing Debussy in his textures. The allusions to traditional Japanese instruments is particularly interesting, temple gongs from the percussion section and shakuhachis from the flutes. And how does Takemitsu get the two harps to sound like shamisens? Metallic objects against the strings must surely be the answer; a technique borrowed from Berio, but a sound that comes straight from the Japanese imperial court.

I Hear the Water Dreaming is a piece for flute and orchestra, the soloist here Adam Walker. His tone is sweet but focussed and his musical manner unimposing, which is ideal, as Takemitsu is never in the business of writing bravura concertos. Finely balanced orchestral textures helped this work to achieve its desired effect. Given the time and effort that the following Ligeti scores clearly required in rehearsal, it is difficult to tell how much attention the Takemitsu received. Volkov’s conducting style was quite stiff, and he seemed always to be focussing on the beat and on synchronising the parts. In fact, one or two entries sounded frayed, so perhaps he was right to keep the orchestra on a short leash.

Even by Ligeti’s standards San Francisco Polyphony is an intense experience. As the title suggests, the sheer amount of material that is presented simultaneously makes this a piece that you need to take in several different ways at once. In fact, the complexities stretch beyond the counterpoint and into the timbre and orchestration. The polyphony comes in waves and the more layered passages are interpolated by homophonic “refrains”. Here, the basic texture is a dry, brittle string sound, harmonically complex, and involving multiple harmonic effects. The large string section of the BBC SSO totally nailed these passages, and they were the key to the performance being as successful as it was. Few orchestras or conductors have the nerve to programme San Francisco Polyphony, such are the difficulties it poses, but Volkov and his BBC SSO players demonstrated this evening that they’ve got what it takes.

Ligeti’s Violin Concerto poses the additional problem of finding a soloist willing to take on what must be one the most demanding solo parts in the repertoire. In fact, many violinists have been willing to accept the challenge since the work was completed in 1993. As a result, the work has generated a diverse performance tradition over its 20 years in the repertoire, with some violinists stressing work’s Classical/Modernist austerity and others delving deeper into the Romanticism of its Hungarian folk roots. Ilya Gringolts is in the former category, but that’s not to say that his interpretation lacks colour or imagination. He’s got all the notes under his fingers, and that’s no mean feat in itself. But he’s more interested in the complex artificial harmonic passages of the outer movements than he is, say, in the folk song of the second. The orchestra again rose to the many challenges Ligeti posed. The small ensemble was arranged into two arcs around the soloist, the stings (tuned to a range of pitch standards and conventions) on the inside and the winds outside. The woodwinds really shone in the concerto. Flautist Rosemary Eliot has a rounder, warmer tone than Walker, the better to complement the gritty focus of the violin sound. Like her colleagues, she was also required to play other instruments, in her case the recorder and ocarina. The ocarina chorales in the second movement could have been more carefully tuned (seriously!), but the balance in the ocarina and recorder playing, which can’t have been easy for anybody, was very finely judged.

With this concert, The Rest is Noise has done its duty by Toru Takemitsu, an important if marginal figure in the history of 20^th-century music, and one whose contribution was appropriately acknowledged through the half a concert he was devoted. Ligeti, on the other hand, would seem to deserve more, and even with the LPO’s Lontano a few weeks back and the Philharmonia’s 2001 live screening before that, it is easy to still feel that his towering influence has been neglected. In fact, he’s just one of many Modern masters who must vie for precious space in programmes as the festival progresses, and there are surely many figures, just as worthy and notable as him, who will get even less of the attention they deserve. Just goes to show – it was one hell of a century.

This performance was recorded by BBC Radio 3 and will be broadcast on 18 January and 8 February 2014.

London Philharmonic, Michail Jurowski: Ligeti, Lutosławski, Schnittke. RFH 30 October 2013

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 

Day One at Kings Place

Attending the opening day of a major new venue is a fascinating experience. Everything works, more or less, but every activity is taking place for the first time, and nothing runs smoothly. Visitors are not sure where they are going and are greeted by an army of guiders on entering the building. No one has quite worked out how to use the touch screen systems on the cash registers or the volume controls for the public announcements. And the pretence that the construction work has been completed on schedule is soon dispelled by the sound of hammering and sawing from the floor above.
Teething troubles only, no doubt, but there is a sense at Kings Place that everyone is out to impress. This is the first day of a week-long opening extravaganza for the venue, with its two halls hosting 100 concerts running morning, noon and night. Those who have made it in early for the first, a 9.30 am concert by the London-based Endymion Ensemble, are in a receptive mood and are ready to forgive the minor inconveniences.
The opening of Kings Place is a significant event in London’s musical life. It is the first purpose built classical music venue to open in the city since the Barbican Centre in 1982. Its business model is markedly different to those of other venues. The project is privately financed, and the venue will be expected to pay its own way, without the government subsidies that keep most of the UK’s classical music afloat. The visual and performing arts part of the Kings Place project is intended as the welcoming public face of a building that will otherwise accommodate smart offices. Which is not to say that the music venues will rely on the office rents for subsidy. Peter Millican, the CEO and driving force behind the project is confident that conference and business events hosted in the halls themselves will provide the funding they require.
One variable in this equation is the future prosperity of the area. Kings Place is located just behind Kings Cross station to the north of the city centre. The location is central enough to prosper, and the public transport links offered by the twin stations of Kings Cross and St Pancras are among the best in London, with suburban, national, and even international trains (from the channel tunnel) terminating here. Besides Kings Place, the major development prospect for the area is a project called Kings Cross Central, a housing, shopping and entertainment complex planned for a site on the opposite side of the road. But work has yet to begin there, and for now Kings Place stands in splendid isolation with its elegant modern facade of rippling blue glass set against a background of dilapidated housing blocks, various rail sheds and a petrol station.
The first impression on entering the building (after having been copiously greeted and directed) is of a distinctly corporate environment. Not surprising considering this is the foyer of an office block. The ground floor is given over to cafes, a restaurant, a small gallery facing onto the street and a very small box office. (Online ticket buying is encouraged, with airline style dynamic pricing to encourage early booking with lower prices.) Escalators at the far end descend into the basement arts space. No Nibelheim this, but rather a well lit atrium consisting of an art gallery spread across two floors and doubling as a foyer space for the two concert halls. The upper floor of the gallery is a balcony stretching around the four walls, wide enough to be considered a mezzanine but leaving enough headroom for the lower floor to be considered grand. Each day of the opening week begins with a performance of Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes, with its clockwork performers lined up around the edge of the balcony. In this context, the work is more installation art than music, as the metronomes are virtually inaudible over the ambient foyer noise.
The metronomes could be considered a statement of artistic intent, but only in that they demonstrate the diversity of the music on offer. Another unusual feature of the Kings Place project is that no single artistic director has been appointed. Short concert series will be staged with relative artistic independence, each running to just a handful of performances. The hope is that, rather than being seen to lack artistic focus, the venue will gain a reputation for diversity and appeal to multiple audience groups. Western classical music will be the core element of the programming, but jazz, world music, dance events and the spoken word will all appear on the schedules. The initial programming matches this diversity with an impressive quantity of events, suggesting that the aim of this first season is to find a foothold for the venture in as many cultural sectors as possible.
The combination of diversity and quantity is also reflected in the use of the available space. The main hall has only 400 seats, but there is also a second hall of 200 seats and a variety of other rehearsal, education and, of course, conference spaces. Hall two is effectively a studio space and has been designed with diversity of use in mind; the seating is movable and the acoustics tailored for various forms of amplified sound.
But the excitement in London leading up to the opening of the venue has been generated by hall one and the acoustic it offers. There has long been a feeling in London that the city’s classical music is poorly served by the concert halls in which it is performed. There is a hope that Kings Place may go some way to putting this to rights.
Stepping into the hall, the first aural impression is of leaving the ambience of the resonant atrium behind. In fact, the hall sits on rubber feet to shield it from the inevitable vibrations from the major transport hub next door. The hall is a classic shoebox, making the acoustic easier to model and control. The walls are panelled with oak with a variety of angled surfaces in rectangular recesses to texture the sound. The seating is slightly raked, providing excellent sight lines, and a balcony around all four walls also offers a range of fine vantage points. The upper third or so of the hall in linded with large rectangular arcades, and the resonance can be controlled with movable curtains behind. The sound is both warm and clear, proximity to the performers being an obvious advantage of the small scale. Inevitably, the sound varies according to position, but for my money the front of the stalls and the side balconies offer the greatest transparency. The concerts scheduled for the opening day, ten in all, included chamber instrumental works in the morning, lieder recitals in the afternoon and 18th century opera excerpts in the evening. In the instrumental works, the detail of the sound is the most impressive feature. Even the keys of the new Steinway rising to their resting positions are audible. In the vocal music, the florid resonance was the key feature, not overbearing but rich and satisfying.
Kings Place is primarily a chamber music venue, so the natural comparison is with the Wigmore Hall, the undisputed home of chamber music in London. Thankfully, the Kings Place acoustic offers a very different sound. It’s certainly clearer and warmer, but the Wigmore’s dryer, more traditional sound is likely to remain the preference of many. Whichever way, the Wigmore Hall’s status as the centre of all things chamber music in London seems secure.
But unless the new venue draws audiences away from existing halls, it is difficult to see how it can remain viable. Discussion of Kings Place in the UK media has been split fairly evenly between praise for the acoustic in its main hall and concern over its business model. The audience base for classical music in London is estimated to be around 30,000, and many are of the opinion that existing venues can more than meet this demand. To succeed, Kings Place will have to either poach business from other venues or expand this core audience through innovative programming and marketing. The evidence so far is that they are planning to do both.
The odds may be stacked against the long-term viability of Kings Place as a music venue, but Millican and his colleagues have brought sound business sense to the project, with a number of impressive supporting strands weighing in its favour. The Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment and the London Sinfonietta, the UKs leading period instrument ensemble and contemporary music group respectively have moved their offices to Kings Place, and each has been given a prime office space at a peppercorn rent. Both ensembles are now officially resident in the hall. This will bring excellent publicity, especially given how well the acoustic will match their respective sounds. Another cultural coup has been to sign up the Guardian and Observer newspapers as the first commercial tenants, papers with a reputation for thorough and enthusiastic performing arts coverage.
Kings Place is a venue with a distinctly corporate atmosphere, an arts project based on a venture capital business model. Peter Millican himself admits to having virtually no experience of arts management, but his track record with major business ventures is enviable. He is not expecting the Kings Place concert halls to make a profit, but he is expecting them to break even. Today’s financial climate makes any talk of long-term stability seem optimistic, and Millican is clearly an optimist. But he has shrewd business sense and creative ideas about how the project can work. The fine acoustic of his concert hall combined with the diversity and quality of the music he has planned for it make the venue a major asset for London. With any luck the books will balance and Kings Place will become a mainstay for classical music in capital for years to come.