SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Knussen, Berg, Benjamin and Britten:  Leila Josefowicz (violin), Oliver Knussen (conductor), BBC Symphony Orchestra, Barbican Hall, London, 29. 3.2008 (AO)

Oliver Knussen - Picture © Clive Barda

Such a programme of riches, even by the high standards of the BBC Symphony Orchestra!  For me, the thrill was hearing two of the best British composers in the context of two of the most important voices of the 20^th century.

Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto is so well loved that it’s even enjoyed by many listeners who pride themselves for despising all modern music.  The joke’s on them.  The violin Concerto is pure twelve-tone serialism, further complicated by theories based on key patterns and Berg’s fascination with numerology. What has made the Violin Concerto palatable is the extra musical mythology that surrounds it.  It was dedicated “to the memory of an Angel”.  Manon Gropius was a great beauty with famous family connections, so her death aged 18, is an obvious source for romantic imagination.  Certainly hearing Leila Josefowicz play didn’t hurt as she, too, is young, blonde and gorgeous.  Clichés could pour out in torrents but  that would trivialise the essential musicality of this performance.   Josefowicz doesn’t milk the piece for crowd-pleasing pathos.  Instead, what came through in this performance was the understated solidity of her technique. Her dialogue with the two trumpets was cleanly balanced, as it’s an important element in the piece. In the final Adagio, she caught the spookily high tessitura with complete assurance, again followed by the trumpets.  Knussen’s conducting reinforced this sense of lucidity.  Even when the timpani and full strings well up in crescendo, Knussen doesn’t overplay the romance, but keeps the stark, skeletal textures bare.  The beauty of the twelve tone system is that it can float magical, shifting colours of its own, as if the indeterminate tones are shimmering and diaphanous.  As pure music, this is great stuff. A pity more performances aren’t as innately attuned to its purely artistic qualities.

Knussen had started the concert with his own suite of interludes from Higgledy  Piggledy  Pop !, a opera for children “of all ages” to use another cliché.  Listening to Berg afterwards made me appreciate the ideas in Knussen’s own music. Both Berg and Knussen use audience-friendly images, but their treatment in musical terms is far more sophisticated.  There’s a lightness of touch in the Knussen extracts, underscored by sinister tension.  Those staccato blasts on the strings act like a kind of mass metronome : time is ticking away, perhaps, or something strict and inescapable is pushing things forward.  Then, the lovely forays into exotic, almost pentatonic colours, and the final, metallic tubular bells.  The correspondences with Berg may be unintentional, but hearing them together made me appreciate what Knussen was writing about.

Many extra-musical things can be written, too, about Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, but again, these can distract from actually engaging with the music on its own terms.  Indeed, Britten had several contradictory ideas in mind, so it’s not really helpful to trot out the usual homilies.  If anything, Britten made a point of being emotionally opaque. Nonetheless, in non-vocal music Britten reveals more of himself than perhaps he realised.  That’s why Sinfonia da Requiem moves me so much. Here are the classic Britten trademarks – ebbing and flowing movement and keenly measured tempi. Yet there’s something much deeper here, more personal and more painful.  As the composer remarked, “it’s rather like those awful dreams where one parades about the place naked”.   So Knussen doesn’t overdo the external imagery, but understands the complex inner contradictions.  Different harmonies stalk each other tensely, taking tentative steps in uneasy procession.  Suddenly cymbals and timpani burst forth, but the chilling atmosphere returns, where flurries of clarinet, trumpet and flute soar outwards from tight, small fragments in the orchestra. This made the very long, surging trumpet passage seem all the more an outburst of pent-up feeling. There are vague gestures towards Shostakovich, to Japanese harmony and to military music, but what marked this performance was Knussen’s shaping of the final Requiem aeternam which is perhaps, even closer to Britten’s inner sanctum than the dramatic Dies Irae. Here it dissolved to gradual stasis with a real feeling of blessing and closure.

From Britten then back to Benjamin.  George Benjamin’s Dance Figures, from 2004 are a series of nine short pieces.  They don’t present dance forms as such but rather the “essence” of dance, for they were written to be interpreted by dancers. From that perspective, they allow musicians to “dance” too.  The pristine lines for strings in Spell lead into a beautifully crafted ensemble.  It’s called In the Mirror because there are two reflecting themes which interrelate and repeat themselves in a kind of delicate canon.  There’s a lively Interruption where various different instruments perform bizarre pas de deux, then the whole orchestra performs in mass formation at an exhilarating high register.  These whirlwind changes of mood are so vivid that they fire up the imagination, especially when executed with lightness of touch and good humour. One hopes that when they are danced, the dancers will be as lively as the musicians of the BBCSO.

Anne Ozorio


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