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AND HEARD CONCERT REVIEW
Xenakis, Benjamin, Ligeti, and Messiaen:
Philharmonia Orchestra, George Benjamin (conductor). Royal Festival
Hall, London, 21.10.2008 (MB)
Xenakis – Pithoprakta
Benjamin – Sudden Time
Ligeti – Atmosphères
Messiaen – Chronochromie
This was in many respects a fine concert. It had an intelligent
programme, based upon the idea of ‘Sensations in Time’, presenting
‘four different views of time passing’. Four excellent composers,
connected but with highly individual modernist voices, were
featured. The Philharmonia Orchestra played under the baton of one
of them, George Benjamin, himself the favourite pupil of another,
Olivier Messiaen. Moreover, the performances were technically
precise – no mean feat in such technically challenging repertoire –
and displayed an impressively wide variety of orchestral colour.
Xenakis’s Pithoprakta (‘actions though probabilities’) is
written for forty-six strings, two trombones (used only once but
with great impact), xylophone, and woodblock. The sound-world is
startlingly original, although the Bartók of the Music for
strings, percussion, and celesta actually sprang to my mind. One
can imagine – and I did on this occasion – the glissandi in
the score and performance as flickerings upon a radar screen or as
figures of fractal geometry. There is also a sense of the natural
world, intentionally or otherwise, of the swarming of bees. I even
fancied that in the sweepings of the strings I heard a recollection
of Messiaen’s beloved ondes martenot. Punctuating these sounds were
the interventions from the regular sounding of the woodblock:
implacable and somehow both disturbing and reassuring. The musicians
of the Philharmonia could hardly be faulted in their execution of
the score, directed by Benjamin with precision and understanding.
And yet, I missed the last ounce – and perhaps the last few ounces –
of aggression, of that raw power that complements Xenakis’s
intellectual achievement. One may differ from Boulez’s fastidious
judgement that Xenakis had a fantastic brain but absolutely no ear,
but one wishes to hear the quality that led a fellow Messiaen pupil
to speak thus.
Many would find the sound-world of Benjamin’s Sudden Time
more ingratiating. There is certainly more of a sense of landscape,
perhaps both temporal and visual. A French heritage, especially that
of Debussy, is apparent, especially in the sonorous woodwind – here
performed with aplomb – and in the work’s harmony. A duet between
harp and English horn was especially haunting in this performance,
reminiscent of or perhaps even prefiguring the antique evocations of
Birtwistle. The whole orchestra was on fine form but particular
mention should also go to leader Maya Iwabuchi, the muted trumpets,
and guest principal viola, Jane Atkins, with whose closing solo time
finally becomes passed – or past. Benjamin’s ‘sense of elasticity,
of stretching, warping, and coming back together,’ born of a dream
in which a split-second thunderclap sounded stretched out to a
minute or longer, was powerfully conveyed by the composer and his
musicians. So was the line from Wallace Stevens’s Martial Cadenza,
from which Benjamin acquired the work’s title: ‘It was like sudden
time in a world without time.’
Ligeti’s Atmosphères received a splendid performance, wanting
nothing in the mystery that is almost its trademark. There was an
almost organ-like quality to the brass close to the beginning.
Piccolos were properly piercing and the double-basses thundered as
they should. Under the once-again swarming surface, the constantly
moving and changing harmonic structures made their presence felt.
Although Ligeti said that he had not known of Xenakis’s precedent,
it was an excellent idea to perform this 1961 classic of note
clusters and polyrhythms with Pithoprakta from five years
earlier.
In Chronochromie, Messiaen explores the relationship between
sound and colour, making this a most apt work with which to
conclude, if not quite to climax. There was much to commend in this
performance. Messiaen’s voice was as unmistakeable from the outset
as that of his birds. The tuned percussionists who provided such a
riot of birdsong were truly outstanding. Benjamin imparted an
unerring sense of harmonic direction and the distinction to which
Messiaen himself referred, between implacable rigour (modes of
duration) and freedom (birdsong) was readily apparent. I thought the
violins a little lacking in vibrancy when playing en masse,
but they truly came into their own in the exhilarating if fatiguing
Epode: free counterpoint of eighteen independent (bird)
voices, connecting with the Xenakis and Ligeti works. The coda came,
as it should, as a relief, after such mania, disorder, or ‘freedom’,
however one wishes to understand it.
What, then, was the source of my nagging doubts? I do not think it
was a matter of Messiaen fatigue at this stage in the anniversary
year. (His piece, though the longest, was only one of four.) I think
ultimately it lay in Benjamin’s direction and certainly not in the
Philharmonia’s execution. Chronochromie in particular lacked
the final sense of awe, that quality again of raw power, of
Messiaen’s music being ‘about’ something other than itself. It was
almost prettified. Perhaps the same could be said about
Pithoprakta. I am all for new music – although none of this is
actually so new anymore – being treated in classical fashion, just
as classical music can profitably be treated as new. Yet the sense
of trail-blazing discovery – and the music featured in this
programme is surely as trail-blazing as music comes – was somewhat
blunted. There was a commendable attention to detail throughout.
Detail, however, should heighten the impact of the greater picture;
this was not always the case here. An audition on returning home of
Boulez’s superlative Cleveland recording of Chronochromie
reassured me that precision and expression are far from antithetical
in such repertoire. For all the nonsense that is spoken of Boulez’s
alleged ‘objectivity’ – itself by now almost a meaningless word in
such a context – that Messiaen pupil imparted a greater sense of the
subject, of conflict, of drama.
Mark Berry
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