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SEEN AND HEARD
UK CONCERT REVIEW
Henze, Holt, Hoddinott:
BBC National Orchestra of Wales / Jac van Steen, Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff, 24.1.2009 (GPu)
Henze:
Symphony No.8
Holt:
Troubled Light
Hoddinott:
Lizard
The
second programme to be played at the new Hoddinott Hall was decidedly literary
in its inspirations. Though entirely instrumental rather than vocal, musical
allusions to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to Goethe, to poems by Gerard
Manley Hopkins, Lorca and Gwyn Thomas abounded. There was an attractive unity of
design to the programme, moving as it did from Henze’s evocation of the
nocturnal world of Shakespeare’s comedy, set for the most part in a dark wood
outside Athens, where the fairies “run / … From the presence of the sun, /
Following darkness like a dream” to “A wall in Provence, / And the warm sun of
centuries / Yellow within it”, lines which open Gwyn Thomas’s poem ‘Lizard’, the
text behind Alun Hoddinott’s work of the same name. The journey from Henze to
Hoddinott took its route through Simon Holt’s ‘Troubled Light’, which takes its
title from a phrase of Goethe’s, in definition of colour.
Henze’s Midsummer Night’s Dream symphony is in three movements, an opening
Allegro and a closing Adagio sandwiching a movement marked ‘Ballabile’ (and how
could any Midsummer Night’s Dream music not contain at least some passages
suitable for dancing?). Each movement is a response to a particular episode in
Shakespeare’s play. The first seeks to represent the fulfilment of Puck’s
response, in Act II Scene 1, to Oberon’s command to fetch for him the flower
known as ‘love-in-idleness’: “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth / In forty
minutes”. The second movement represents the encounter between Titania and
Bottom; the closing movement articulates the border between dream world and real
world in the play’s epilogue.
In the first movement the music is dominated by a sense of insistent movement, a
kind of perpetuum mobile, through a range of pitches high and low, and between
sections of the orchestra. Tenaciously busy, the music is not without occasional
hints of menace. Scored for double woodwind, a full complement of strings, tuba,
timpani, harp, celesta, piano and five percussionists, this and subsequent
movements make full use of the available instrumental resources. In the first
movement textures are not lingered on in the haste of forward propulsion, but
there are many that startle and interest. In music of considerable complexity
(here and elsewhere on the programme) Jac van Steen’s control was exemplary and
the playing of the orchestra of sustained high quality, at the service of the
sense of magical speed and exhilarating scope inherent in the idea of Puck’s
journey. In the second movement, the hints of menace were replaced by a certain
humour, an amused tolerance of the absurdity of the relationship between the
Fairy Queen and Bottom the weaver, evidence of Bottom’s own perception that
“reason and love keep little company together nowadays” (as if it had ever been
otherwise!). It was tempting to hear Bottom in the brass section (particularly
in the prominent presence of the trombone) and of Titania in the string writing
which, at times, comes close to a late romantic lushness, but that was perhaps
too schematic a simplification. Certainly the sense of contrasting extremes, of
ethereal and animalistic, of spirit and flesh, was everywhere to be heard in a
fine movement, particularly well played. The most simply ‘beautiful’ music was
to be heard in the closing adagio, which seemed to occupy the liminal territory
where natural and supernatural, human and fairy worlds meet, or, to put it
another way, that point of impending transition in which the theatre audience
inhabits both the world of enchantment and the ‘real’ world to which it must
soon return. Henze’s complex scoring here, especially for strings and woodwinds,
was both exquisite and strong and there was a well judged sense of open-ended
conclusion, insofar as material from the first two movements was partially
recapitulated and reconciled, but there was no sense of absolute closure. This
may not be the profoundest of Henze’s orchestral works, but it has distinctive
qualities and it is not surprising that there should have been two recent
recordings of the work; by the Gürzenich Orchester of Kön conducted by Markus
Stenz (on Phoenix) and by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by
Marek Janowski (on Wergo). More than a few of those who heard this performance
in the Hoddinott Hall will surely want to get hold of a recording and explore
the work further. Jac van Steen’s was an assured and inviting reading of the
work.
When Simon Holt’s Troubled Light was premiered at last summer’s Proms,
the BBC National Orchestra of Wales was conducted by Thierry Fischer, rather
than by Jac van Steen. Having been abroad at the time of the premiere I am
unfortunately not in a position to make any comparisons. Where Newton had
affirmed that bodies absorb light in accordance with their own pigmentation,
Goethe argued that colour was produced by the interaction of light and dark and
that colour should be thought of as “troubled light”. Holt’s musical response is
in five movements; each of the first four has a single ‘colour’ at its centre;
the fifth, and longest, movement gathers together and interweaves materials from
its predecessors. The first section, “the fell of dark” takes its title from a
sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins, of which the octave reads as follows:
I wake and
feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness
I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
The stabs of sound from muted brass and the pizzicato strings at the opening of
Holt’s piece certainly evoke a blackness as much psychological as a mere matter
of colour, and it is only with the later ‘lightness’ that emanates from the
flutes and the celesta (in particular) that a kind of musical affirmation of
light (however tentative), an emergence of light from darkness, seems to be
proposed. It is followed by ‘rudhira’, glossed thus by Holt in his programme
note: “The second movement, ‘rudhira’, takes its title from the Sanskrit word
for red, the first colour ever named”. That being the case it is reasonable to
hear in the scurrying momentum of the writing here the transformation of the
light hinted at in the close of ‘the fell of dark’ into a specific colour. The
shortest of the pieces, ‘rudhira’ is the most rhythmically insistent of the
five, the least monumental. The third movement, ‘Ellsworth’ takes its title from
the name of Ellsworth Kelly, the American abstract painter, whose work most
characteristically employs regular (more or less) geometrical shapes. Holt
apparently had in mind one particular canvas, Yellow Relief with Black,
of 1993. My own synæsthetic awareness is not acute enough for me to be able to
say that I ‘heard’ yellow and black in Holt’s music, though I was certainly
aware of its use of two clearly juxtaposed sections which presumably responded
to the yellow and (smaller) black triangles of Kelly’s painting. Certainly
Holt’s use of unexpected combinations of instruments made for some striking
effects here and the writing for flutes and piccolo deserved its prominent
position in the piece. ‘Huye, luna, luna luna’ (“Run away, moon, moon, moon”)
takes as its staring point Lorca’s poem ‘Romance de la luna, luna’ (One of the
most moon-obsessed of poets, Lorca fits to perfection Theseus’ observation – to
return to A Midsummer Night’s Dream - that “The lunatic, the lover, and
the poet / Are of imagination all compact”). Lorca’s poem has the moon speak of
its “blancor almidonado” (“starched whiteness”) before it takes a child by the
hand and carries it across the sky. Holt’s music here is largely scored for the
strings, though with some use of harp and percussion. There’s a lunar glow,
chilly but bright, to Holt’s string writing here, like a moonglade on the
surface of the sea. The fifth section (to use as a title what were allegedly
Goethe’s last words ‘Mehr Licht’, struck me as a bit presumptuous) reuses
material from the four earlier movements, making for some interesting
juxtapositions and unifications.
Throughout, the work of van Steen and the orchestra was of a high order and they
brought out plenty of intriguing and striking detail in Holt’s work, much of
which I found fascinating. This was my first hearing of the piece and I am not,
as yet, entirely sure that the whole is better than some of the parts. But
further hearings – and I certainly hope that I shall get such opportunities –
may encourage a change of mind.
More poetry with Alun Hoddinott’s Lizard, of 2003. In 1995 Hoddinott
wrote a set of four songs under the title Tymhorau (Seasons), setting
texts by Gwyn Thomas, accomplished poet in both languages of Wales. The text he
set for summer, was Thomas’s heat-filled poem which observes and evokes the
sudden movements (and equally sudden stillnesses) of a lizard seen, in fierce
sunlight, upon an ancient wall in Provence. Responding to a later commission
from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (in 2003), Hoddinott produced an
extended (the piece lasts almost thirty minutes) orchestral response to the same
poem. It would be wrong to think of the piece as straightforwardly programmatic
– apart from anything else the twenty one short lines of Thomas’s poem alone
would hardly fuel a piece of such length. But Hoddinott has clearly responded
both to the poem’s contrast between suddenness and stillness and to Thomas’s use
of musical metaphor within his text:
It’s a lizard
Come out
To warm its blood in the sun.
Small, mottled, stock-still
With skin like tissue paper
Respirating energy.
Then a pizzicato
Across the wall, across its sunlight:
Another stop,
Respires again.
Then cranks on
As in an old film.
Hoddinott’s score alternates faster and slower sections, in a relatively loose
A-B-A-B-A structure and is built around two essential motifs, a pattern of
triplets which ascends to a motif of fast repeated notes and, on the other hand,
a group of five rhythmically pronounced semiquavers. At times one can ‘hear’
images from Thomas’s poem very clearly: some of the orchestral textures seeming
to evoke, with some vividness the sensory juxtapositions of “sunlight, a lizard,
a wall / An old, old wall” and some of the changes of tempo evocative of the
abruptness of the lizard’s stoppings and startings. At other times, Hoddinott
seems more concerned to explore the purely musical possibilities of his
material, and the references to Thomas’s poem seem to (largely) disappear. The
explicitly programmatic and the more ‘abstract’ elements aren’t perhaps always
fully integrated, but this is certainly a very accomplished score and van Steen
and his orchestra were certainly persuasive advocates for it, responsive to
Hoddinott’s vivid contrasts of colour and sonority.
If the Hoddinott Hall and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales can bring us more
enterprising programmes of contemporary music of this kind, then we shall have
many reasons for profound gratitude.
Glyn Pursglove
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