D'Alep à Séville conceived
by Sonia Wieder-Atherton (cello), with Françoise Rivalland
(percussion), Quatour Parisii & Pierre Feyler (bass) 23 September
2001 Auditorium of France 3 Alsace, Strasbourg
Miroirs et reflexions Anssi
Karttunen (cello) 27 September 2001 Palais du Rhin, Strasbourg (PGW)
Sonia Wieder-Atherton is a virtuoso cellist
with a mind of her own; a name new to me, although she has appeared
at Wigmore Hall and the Bath festival. Her Sunday morning programme
was just the sort of event which makes visiting festivals abroad so
rewarding. From Aleppo to Seville brought a full, enthusiastic
house to the auditorium of France 3 Alsace to enjoy her journey around
the Mediterranean, a unique conception, which united in a continuous
sequence her arrangements with Bruno Fontaine of traditional Egyptian,
Turkish and Syrian music, Monteverdi and Granados as a frame for recent
commissions from Dusapin, Aperghis and Fedele - a heady brew indeed.
She was supported by string quintet and a gifted, attention-grabbing
multi-percussionist, Françoise Rivalland, on zarb,
cymbalum, daf and santur. It all worked well and,
with discreet audio-visual presentation by Thierry Coduys, held attention
easily for around an hour and twenty minutes; just right for a well-filled
CD, which could be equally successful, and should be considered by an
enterprising, innovative company.
The surprise was how similar, rather than different
from each other, many of these pieces sounded in this unusual context.
My sole reservations were that the three short Dusapin pieces, Imago
(I), (II) & (III) might have benefited from being heard
together instead of scattered individually amongst the rest - with lights
out, you needed to have memorised the order to be sure what you were
hearing - and that Ivan Fedele's Levante, commissioned by Musica
for this concert, is a major work which might better be heard on its
own.
Absorption of Middle Eastern idioms has clearly fertilised
and enriched Sonia Wieder-Atherton's cello playing, and seemed to have
become a rich source of inspiration for the composers of the new works.
For me, the most immediately striking of those (and the first to be
heard, whilst we were all fresh) was Profils for cello and zarb
by Georges Aperghis, with Françoise Rivalland stunning
in her verve, concentration and rhythmic precision, producing a wide
variety of tones from the skin of her drum with fingers and finger nails,
hard percussive sounds by striking the body of the instrument with her
rings, and a mysterious swooshing punctuation produced I know not how;
the whole amplified to just the right degree to balance the cello.
Pascal Dusapin's unaccompanied solo pieces bring
in jagged ornamental inflections, linked closely to what we heard in
the traditional items, and together the three would make a telling 11
minute cello recital item. Ivan Fedele has string quintet and
cimbalom, used sparingly, to support the solo cello. The idiosyncratic
cimbalom, which Fedele had featured in his violin concerto, contributes
its piquant tone to the whole. Levante takes 20 mins and, as
is often the way with this significant composer, it is music which does
not reveal all its secrets on first meeting; I hope to hear it again.
- - - - -
Anssi Karttunen is a frequent visitor to UK,
often reviewed by S&H. He brought to Strasbourg his Cello Octet
of Helsinki (a rival for Holland's Concierto Iberico, with which Elias
Arizcuren has demonstrated, with commissions from a roster of distinguished
composers, that this unlikely combination is, in fact, satisfyingly
complete) - I did not hear their concert because of a clash with Szymanowski's
King Roger elsewhere in the city.
Earlier that evening Karttunen gave a magnificent solo
cello recital, flawed by circumstances at the Palais du Rhin often encountered
elsewhere (see also A digression concerning Sound Pollution etc
below). Reminding myself of his superb solo CD (Finlandia
4509-98767-2), I fear that in this programme he sacrificed
himself (mercifully, only to a small extent) on the altar of fashionable
multi-media 'withitry'.
The only virtue of Jean-Baptiste Barrière's
four Cellitude fragments, with video 'autoportraits' of the performer,
was their brevity. They were scattered through the recital, as were
Dusapin's striking Imagi in Sonia Wieder-Atherton's, but in this
distracting context made little impression musically; such is the primacy
of eye over ear that the jejune 'real-time' videos, with distorted images
of Karttunen himself, dominated attention. As with a piece by Francesconi
in an earlier concert (both Barrière and Francesconi have impressive
electronic studio credentials), the video skills deployed seemed inept
and primitive in comparison with those to be seen at modern art exhibitions
and, any day, on TV adverts. But worse than that, the ambient noise
from the equipment involved vitiated the quieter music and (intended)
silent pauses in the more significant non-electronic music in the programme.
This was magnificent and made this recital, held in
the imposing hall of the Palais de Rhin (currently under restoration)
an important event of the festival. Zimmerman's tiny Studies of 1970,
played first, were too fragile to survive that problem, but Donatoni's
Lame made an effective, vigorous end to the sequence, and deserves
a regular place in the ever more extensive solo cello repertoire. Jukka
Tiensuu's oddjob is compelling even before it introduces
extra layers of reverberation and echo, building to uncertainty as to
'who is following who'. A musical polymath, Tiensuu is an important
figure in Finnish musical life and his harpsichord CD (Finlandia, nla)
is one of the top favourites in my collection. Most memorable was Tan
Dun's solo recycling of his cello concerto, The Intercourse of
Fire and Water (1995), which had not come my way in any of its several
forms. As did Sonia Wieder-Atherton in her arrangements of middle Eastern
traditional music, Tan Dun eschewed vibrato but has instead a
large repertoire of glissandi and other special effects based
upon his Chinese musical origins. An impressive major work of 17 mins,
the concerto was composed for Anssi Kartunnen, and I hope he will have
an opportunity to give it - with orchestra - in UK.
- - - - -
Concerning multiple venues, dimming and sound pollution
Whilst visiting different concert venues, which one
might otherwise not see, is a particular pleasure of the festival experience,
sound quality must remain paramount when choosing them. Common recurrent,
and all too familiar, organisational problems bedevilled several events
at Strasbourg, and merit a note.
Throughout the festival the trendy dimming, with lights
kept low even during platform rearrangements, has often been irritating
and counter-productive, preventing musicians from seeing the audiences
with whom they are communicating, and often leaving those of us who
had been chatting instead of reading our programmes carefully beforehand
- and memorising the order of items - unsure what we were hearing, with
no compensatory 'atmospheric' advantage.
Electronic equipment can still be unreliable. There
was a serious video failure from overheating in one item (which had
to be restarted) and, later the same evening, a regrettable failure
to anticipate and control the annoyance caused by extremely loud ambient
noise from permanent equipment at the Museum of Modern Art (it
even had a persistent note!) which caused Zoltán Rácz
to refuse to begin Amandida's percussion concert, which had been
scheduled to end at midnight.
We had encountered a similar experience in Lisbon
when cellist Jean-Paul Dessy begun a major work by Giacinto Scelsi
but suddenly stopped, apologised to us and said he could not continue
against the distraction of the air conditioning, which rendered his
quieter playing inaudible.
After long pauses on both occasions, with discussions
backstage, both Dessy and Rácz had to return to their respective
platforms and make the best of unresolved bad situations, resuming their
performances to fulfil their contracts, against the same continuing
noises, which no-one listening could now even attempt to ignore.
All such foreseeable problems need to be tackled by
festival concert managers at an earlier stage, so that alternative venues
can be considered. It is something that festival organisers should take
into account and explore, especially in those festivals which use multiple
venues, some of them not regular concert auditoria. (I would also recommend
that the programme organisers read -without expecting emulation - my
account of the idealistic Sound in Silence policy which pertains
at Lucerne.)
In Strasbourg, the Auditorium France 3 Alsace studio
is a particularly happy venue, well equipped to cope with all the eventualities
liable to be encountered in live electronic and multi-media presentations,
and the concerts mentioned above would have been better located there,
if it had been available.
Peter Grahame Woolf
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