Nick Daniel & Friends at the Aldeburgh Festival, plus the best of June’s classical concerts
Nick Daniel & Friends/Cbso/Aldeburgh Festival ★★★★☆
One of the things that makes the Aldeburgh Festival special is the way the mysterious flat landscape, the festival’s history and the musical programme all partake of the same spirit. Key to that spirit is the festival’s founder Benjamin Britten, whose image as always crops up in this year’s programme book. Also pictured there is another musician who is now part of Aldeburgh’s history - Oliver Knussen, the famed composer and conductor and lynch-pin of the Britten-Pears Foundation’s Summer Schools, who died last year.
Both of these beneficent shades were paid a generous homage in the wonderful concert on Saturday from oboist Nick Daniel and four long-standing musical colleagues. Britten was represented by his drily witty Phantasy Quartet, and we also heard two amazingly refined and sophisticated early pieces from Knussen, composed in his teens in the late 1960s, plus the Cantata for oboe and three string players, completed in 1975, the year of Britten’s death. The tender closing section of this piece, where the music seems to rock itself to sleep, was so beautifully played one wanted it go on for ever. Amongst these older pieces was something brand-new; a witty piece entitled “Among the Unlimitless Etha”, which is a line from the comic strip Krazy Kat. Its composer Joanna Lee was a protegée of Knussen, and her piece had his delicacy of ear but also a refreshingly guileless directness which was a million miles from the master’s intricate obliqueness.
Lee’s piece was a good deal more rewarding than the other new(ish) piece of the weekend, the Cello Concerto Ouroboros by Austrian composer Thomas Larcher. Its musical material was diaphanously beautiful but paper-thin – tiny sighing gestures coalescing like fallen leaves, warm chords emerging from acoustic fog. Nothing wrong with simple material, of course, but to compensate the form and pacing have to be super-sharp, whereas here they seemed slack and indulgent – despite the best efforts of the soloist Alisa Weilerstein, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and conductor Edward Gardner. Thank goodness this puff-pastry was preceded and followed by more nourishing dishes: a rapturous performance of Michael Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra, and a rendition by Stephen Hough of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto that was surprisingly (and convincingly) impassioned. Finally we had a tremendous performance of the Suite from Bartók’s ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, which laid bare the moon-struck tenderness as well as the violence of this urban nightmare. IH
Hear the concert by Nick Daniel and friends on “Radio 3 in Concert” on 3rd July and for 30 days thereafter via the BBC Radio 3 website www.bbc.co.uk/radio3
Barbara Hannigan, Aldeburgh Festival (First concert: ★★★☆☆ second concert: ★★★★☆)
Being a top-flight soprano who brings the most difficult roles in contemporary opera to life would, you might think, be achievement enough for one person. Yet the Canadian Barbara Hannigan somehow combines that with a flourishing international conducting career and running a foundation for young singers.
That makes her an ideal guest at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival, which has invited a number of performers and composers to curate their own mini-series within the programme. Hannigan’s was easily the most ambitious, and the results in the two concerts I saw over the weekend were, in terms of sheer achievement, jaw-dropping.
In terms of enjoyment they were more mixed. The second featured three of the young singers Hannigan is nurturing, together with the brilliant young Ludwig Orchestra from Holland. Her pride in all of them was palpable, as was the talent of the singers – the humour and wit of the tenor James Way in Stravinsky’s delicious Cubist-Italian-Baroque ballet Pulcinella was especially winning. But some of the ballet’s more dancing movements seemed excessively hard-driven, as did the Allegro di Molto of Haydn’s darkly tragic 49th Symphony.
As for Hannigan’s under-powered and over-wrought singing of three songs from Gershwin’s Girl Crazy while conducting them, I was reminded of Dr Johnson’s remark about seeing a dog walk on its hind legs – “Sir, it is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” But perhaps I am allowing myself to be irritated by Bill Elliott’s clever-clogs arrangement, which clogged Gershwin’s immortal melodies with arch high-art references.
Hannigan’s concert the previous day was vastly more rewarding. The event was book-ended by Bach’s 2nd and 4th Suites for solo cello, played by Alisa Weilerstein with a stunning massiveness of tone and perfectly sustained line that made Bach’s little dances seem like huge graven images. In between, Hannigan conducted the Ludwig Orchestra in a beautifully paced and radiant performance of Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night. The most moving part of the evening was her singing of Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil – Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold. The threshold was the one between this world and the next, and at the end of this performance, as the music and Hannigan’s singing groped their hesitant muffled way towards the final darkness – or was it light? – the audience sat spellbound, hardly daring to breathe.
Hear Barbara Hannigan performing Stravinsky, Haydn and Gershwin on “Radio 3 in Concert” on 1 July, and for thirty days thereafter via the BBC Radio 3 website www.bbc.co.uk/radio3
Faust/Queyras/Melnikov, Wigmore Hall ★★★★☆
One of the golden rules of showbiz is – make sure you grab your audience by the scruff from the word go. On Friday night, the wonderful trio of violinist Isabelle Faust, cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras and pianist Alexander Melnikov chose to ignore that rule. They took a risk, by launching their all-Beethoven concert with possibly the dullest beginning that great composer ever penned. His early Piano Trio in E flat launches off with tip-toing arpeggios, shared between all three players, which are so dry and plain it’s almost funny (and perhaps was meant to be).
The fact that this opening wasn’t dull at all but mysteriously riveting proved what the packed audience in the hall already knew; that they were listening to one of the world’s great piano trios. Their super-refined playing turned the occasional bits of musical chaff into gold, and made the gold shine brighter. Faust seemed to have a hundred different ways to play a short note, Melnikov a hundred ways to soften the edge of a phrase with pedalling, Queyras a mysterious way of making even the most rudimentary bass line seem fascinating.
Because of this, the trio’s basic approach to Beethoven – brisk, cleanly articulated, very definitely classical rather than romantic – worked wonderfully well. By deploying all those little subtleties they could reveal the romanticism lurking under the music’s often severe surface. And when necessary they could strike a rough tone, as in the second movement of the big, late Trio in E flat. Here the courtly elegance of the music was constantly ambushed by the stormy, titanic Beethoven we know from the Fifth Symphony.
The one thing the trio never offered was the kind of soft-edged, full tone that the listener can sink into gratefully. The basic sound was austere, with only rare touches of vibrato from Faust and Queyras. This made the moments of romantic mystery all the more moving, such as the tender third movement of the same trio, where Melnikov dropped his little tinkling roulades over the timidly soft melody like fireflies in the dusk.
The only disappointing moment for me was the haunted slow movement of the so-called “Ghost” Trio, possible inspired by the Witch’s scene in Macbeth. We should feel the music’s immense gaunt slowness cracking the limits of the classical style, but the trio’s fairly brisk, matter-of-fact pace made it seem relatively normal. That’s the one thing this piece should never be. IH
Beethoven’s Ghost and Archduke Trios are recorded by Isabelle Faust, Jean-Guihen Queyras and Alexander Melnikov on the Harmonia Mundi label.
Metropolis, Royal Festival Hall★★★★☆
The Philharmonia must have known it was onto a winner with its Weimar Berlin series, now under way at the Southbank. We just can’t get enough of that fabulous era, which was politically Utopian, excitingly modern and deliciously sexy in a way we can only envy. As for the era’s music, we all know what it sounds like: it’s a jazzily muted trumpet perched atop a grimly sardonic anti-communist song, with a hint of a foxtrot.
Except that it wasn’t, at least not always. Thursday night’s showing of Fritz Lang’s tremendous expressionist classic Metropolis, complete with the original score played by the Philharmonia, revealed another side of the music of Weimar Germany. It also revealed the film itself, in its true glory. We were treated to a beautifully restored version, incorporating around half-an-hour’s worth of recently rediscovered footage. Below the screen was a hugely enlarged Philharmonia Orchestra, incorporating a couple of saxophones to give that authentically sleazy sound.
There was indeed the odd sleazy moment, when the film took us inside the club where the lucky rich few in the towering, soulless dystopia of Metropolis went to enjoy themselves. Here chaps in top-hats and pince-nez danced giddily with girls with bobbed hair and clingy spangled frocks, just like they do in Cabaret. But in fact these were the weak moments in Gottfried Huppertz’s score. Huppertz just couldn’t do sleazy, and he couldn’t do jazz. What he was very good at was a yearning romanticism straight out of Richard Strauss’s Rosenkavalier, which perfect for the romantic scenes involving Maria, the saint-like figure worshipped by the down-trodden workers. The scenes we all vaguely remember from Metropolis showing biplanes and aerial railways careering shakily between impossibly massive towers were accompanied by Wagnerian pomp, tinged with Debussy-ish harmonies to give just a taste of the modern.
Modern music itself was in surprisingly short supply. The scene where workers tend the implacable Machine I remembered as having the kind of hissing, clanking modernist score that Edgar Varèse might have composed. But I was wrong; what Huppertz actually composed was a Gothic vision of modernity, weirdly tinged at times with an orientalist cruelty not far from Puccini’s Turandot.
In all, this event was a revelation, not just for the sumptuous sound of the orchestra – co-ordinated with miraculous precision with the images by conductor Frank Strobel – but for its vivid reminder that not everything in Weimar Germany’s music was brand-new. IH
The Philharmonia’s series Weimar Berlin: Bittersweet Metropolis continues at the Southbank until September 29. Tickets: 0800 652 6717; southbankcentre.co.uk
Daniil Trifonov, Barbican ★★★★☆
Alhough still only 28 years old, Daniil Trifonov is fully deserving of being this season’s subject of the London Symphony Orchestra’s Artist Portrait series. It is nearly a decade since he burst onto the scene by storming the Tchaikovsky, Rubinstein and Chopin piano competitions, and in the years since he has cemented his place in the top flight of international pianists and proved himself one of the most distinctive. If that position has occasionally shown him liable to display the mannerisms of a maverick, he nearly always convinces you that’s how the music should go – the mark not just of authentic talent but pianistic genius.
So it proved again here in his generously filled recital. Making a disarming start with Beethoven’s Andante Favori, he supplied pianistic balm without ever straying towards the salon connotations of this popular piece, also finding seriousness worthy of a movement that had originally been part of the composer’s Waldstein Sonata. Pressing straight on without a break into Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 18 in E flat, he immediately created a sense of magical freshness, caressing the keyboard softly in the opening movement yet bringing rapid-fire excitement to the scherzo. Only the minuet and trio suffered from Trifonov’s tendency to drag things out, and the sense of line was nearly lost.
Yet in this recital at least, the Russian pianist almost always justified any wayward tempos. Only a select few pianists can get away with such a level of interpretative intervention, but in Schumann’s Bunte Blätter even the movements in which Trifonov was most subjective sounded convincing. He certainly created magic, especially in the celestial middle section of the big Marsch and with the strange wonderment he brought to the Abendmusik. As further evidence of his intelligent programming, he balanced that Beethoven movement culled from a sonata with Schumann’s Presto Passionato, the original finale of his second sonata, and handled its wild chase with easy virtuosity.
Two things that Trifonov does especially well – dreaminess and extreme virtuosity – were both to the fore after interval in Prokofiev’s Eighth Sonata. The last of the Soviet composer’s “war sonatas”, written in the shadow of Stalingrad, it found Trifonov taking everything in his stride with room to produce wide gradations of volume of colour. Playing a Fazioli instrument, he never made an ugly sound even amid the motor rhythms and fusillades of the finale, and in the central movement he conjured up the innocence of a world lost for ever. JA
Daniil Trifonov returns to the LSO on June 16. Tickets: 020 7638 8891; lso.co.uk
Cinquecento, Wigmore Hall ★★★★☆
Religious music is all the rage these days, but to draw the crowds it needs to have that special quality always described as “ethereal”. It’s the sound of those angelic boy (and now girl) trebles so typical of church and cathedral choirs.
Last night’s Wigmore Hall concert was a reminder that religious music doesn’t have to be ethereal, and that a deeper, darker tone is moving in a very different and perhaps deeper way. It came from the Vienna-based Cinquecento, an all-male sextet in which the highest sounds came from counter-tenor Terry Wey, the lowest from bass Ulfried Staber, with the other voices distributed in between.
The music actually demanded a deeper tone, as it was all to do with loss and mourning. The core was a Requiem by early 16th-century composer Jean Richafort, full of allusions to works by earlier composers, including the greatest composer of the mid-Renaissance Josquin des Prez – who may have been Richafort’s teacher. These earlier pieces were also about mourning or loss (including one secular song by Josquin which was all about the tedium of being broke), and we heard a number of them in this concert, interspersed between the movements of the Mass. So the whole event had a beautiful unity, emotional and musical.
Even so, two hours of mourning music sung in a sombre palette of low voices might have been too much of a good thing. In fact, once our ears had become accustomed to the gloom, the variety of tone and sound was extraordinary. The dialogue of pairs of high and low voices in Benedictus Appenzeller’s lament for Josquin had a limpid, almost naïve feeling, whereas Rochafort’s Requiem was luxuriantly complex, shot through with momentary harmonic surprises and florid, rapid-moving decorations.
Some ensembles would have accentuated these things, to play up the contrasts. These singers refused to do that, which lent the whole concert an air of enticing mystery. Even in those moments when the singing rose to a climax it was restrained, like those medieval sacred scenes where a raised hand expresses a world of feeling. The power of understatement, always threatening to disappear in our noisy world, was one lesson of this concert. The other was the sheer greatness of Josquin des Prez. The intricacies of Richafort’s Requiem were engrossing but sometimes seemed fussy in comparison with Josquin’s concentrated intensity, which in these performances burned with a bright clear flame. IH
Cinquecento’s CD of music by 16th century French composer Jean Guyot is released on Hyperion
Aurora Orchestra, Queen Elizabeth Hall ★★★★☆
Above us, among the stars, there’s a divine music made by heavenly bodies in motion, but it’s too lofty and pure for our ears. Down here, we have ordinary human music fit for human hearing. But sometimes they touch. Some composers catch something of “heavenly harmony” and bring it down to earth.
That was the ancient, lovely conceit behind the Aurora Orchestra’s concert on Wednesday night. This young orchestra aims to freshen up the musical experience by mingling it with other things: the spoken word, moving images, and also a pleasurable feeling of not knowing quite what will happen next.
Darkness is helpful in producing that suspense, and there was plenty of it here. At the beginning, as the lights faded to black, the sound of single notes on violins could be heard. This was the beginning of Max Richter’s newly-composed Journey (CP1919). Gradually, a circular movement began, a solemn tread upwards constantly renewed from below, the patterns emphasised by concentric circles of light appearing and disappearing at the players feet. It was simplicity itself, and gently moving in its way.
More music with astral associations followed, some in the dark, some in a full blaze of light, interspersed with gentle lessons on Pythagorean ideas about harmony. They were narrated with seraphic calm by actor Sam West, with plain uncluttered graphics on a screen.
The piece that was most suggestive of planets wheeling was Thomas Adès’s Violin Concerto, which is subtitled “Concentric Paths”. Did the interlocking cycles of chords in the tremendous slow movement seem more vivid than usual because we’d been sensitised to them, by all that cosmological imagery? Or was it simply the rivetingly focused quality of the playing by both orchestra and soloist Pekka Kuusisto, who made the incredible rhythmic complications of the piece seem flowing and natural? Perhaps a bit of both.
It was natural and fitting to end to this cosmic exploration with Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, delivered (like Richter’s piece) from memory. This performance didn’t have the radiant magnificence one hopes for. Conductor Nicholas Collon’s numerous tempo changes seemed to be aiming at lightness and wit, but ended up feeling skittish. The concert’s real heart was the performance by four principal players of the slow movement from Beethoven’s 2nd Razumovsky Quartet. It was conceived while the composer was “contemplating the starry heavens”, but one might have guessed that anyway, from this sublime and tenderly intimate performance. IH
Stockhausen Cosmic Prophet, SouthBank Centre ★★★★★
Of all the great post-war avant-garde composers, Karlheinz Stockhausen is the easiest to mock. This was a man who thought he was descended from beings on the star Sirius and who once wrote a quartet for musicians flying aloft in helicopters.
And yet what a musician he was. As the weekend celebrations of his music of the Fifties and Sixties at the Southbank entitled Cosmic Prophet proved, Stockhausen was actually a composer of riveting precision and finesse – at least in his early years.
Much of the credit for this impression of blazing exactness must be given to the performers. The German percussionist Dirk Rothbrust turned Stockhausen’s piece for solo percussion Zyklus into a ballet, whirling round inside his cage of burnished gongs and cymbals and drums to place a cymbal crash with one hand, while outlining a pianissimo flourish on vibraphone with the other. In the quieter moments, Rothbrust seemed to be engaged in some arcane ritual, releasing tiny sounds on a gong with the concentrated focus of a celebrant.
That feeling of mysterious ritual was even more pronounced in the eight pieces of so-called “intuitive music” that Stockhausen composed in 1970. In the hands of the five players of the group Apartment House, the gnomic hints of Stockhausen’s purely verbal scores blossomed into sprays and rivulets of sound from piano, laptop, keyboards, cello and percussion, sometimes agitated and quick, but more often slow and meditative and gently repetitive, as if sounds of nature like raindrops and wind had been turned into music.
In Mantra, a piece for two pianists who also have to sing, hit little bells and control electronic gear, another side of Stockhausen was revealed; his humour. At one point Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich hurled the same phrase at each other at speed, like tennis players trying to outfox an opponent. The previous day, Pierre-Laurent Aimard traversed all eleven of Stockhausen’s early piano pieces in a staggering 90-minute display of virtuosity, before joining with Dirk Rothbrust to play Stockhausen’s Kontakte, one of the first pieces to combine live performers and electronics. All round us, from hidden speakers, strange electronic sounds dipped and swooped, some evoking raindrops, some distant galaxies. They were echoed and parried by the players, conjuring a riveting dialogue with unseen presences. Stockhausen may not literally have descended from astral beings, but listening to this staggeringly original piece one could almost believe he was in touch with their spirits. IH
