SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL CONCERT  REVIEW


Haydn, Bernhard Lang: Mario Formenti, piano, presented by San Francisco Performances at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, San Francisco. 11.12.2009 (HS)

 

It was one of the more unusual musical inspirations in history. Haydn wrote his Seven Last Words of Christ for orchestra, a series of slow musical meditations meant to serve as interludes for a service by the Bishop of Cadiz. He commissioned the work to enrich the experience as he discoursed on each word in turn, the music to be played as he fell to his knees after discussing the word. The most often-heard version is a transcription for string quartet, but Haydn’s publisher released a piano version in Haydn’s lifetime.

The pianist Marino Formenti, known especially for his forays into contemporary and 20th-century music, played this Haydn piano work Friday in the intimate St. Mark’s Church. Dating from 1895 (old for San Francisco), the wood construction makes the space ideal for listening to music, free of the excess reverberation of a stone cathedral. A week earlier Formenti had played Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jesù, part of a mini-series promoted as “Aspects of the Divine.” Friday he concluded the series with two works, the other a new work inspired by the Haydn piece.

Formenti simply immersed himself in the fragile beauty of Haydn’s crystalline harmonies, stretching the stately rhythms to savor every turn of phrasing. Hadyn’s challenge, and Formenti’s, was to create some variation in seven slow movements (plus a livelier prelude and postlude). In the surroundings, rather than in a concert hall, the pianist’s concentration came through as a sort of devotion. Whether it was received as directed to the glory of the heaven or to the soul of the music, it was heartbreaking and exquisite music making.

There was plenty of heartfelt, delicate playing in the Haydn, which occupied the bulk of the concert’s time. But it was difficult to find any of the “divine” in the new work, a piece by the Austrian composer Bernhard Lang called Monadologie V-7: Last Words of Hasan, which began the evening.

 

The program notes discourse extensively on Lang’s musical processes, which seem to involve computers and fractal theory. According to the program, Lang used cells of musical material from Haydn’s Seven Last Words for Monadologie V-7. Despite the roman numeral V, this is referenced as the sixth effort in Lang’s monadology series.

This one, the notes point out, uses something called “disaster sequences, in which the looping machinery suddenly collapses and short sound units are repeated over and over.” To my ears, the result was the opposite of a disaster. As the complex dissonance and discord of Lang’s often clangorous music falls away, the soft repetition of a single note, which blossoms into harmony and full chords, comes as a relief. Disaster relief?

Anyway, it resulted in some of the most appealing moments of the work. It starts loud and fast, much harder and more stentorian than Haydn’s overture, then settles into a series of short “sonatas.” Several end with a direct quotation from Haydn—another source of relief. The piece finishes with a bang, a short finale that echoes Haydn’s but seems almost nasty about it.

The program does not specify the extra-musical source for the “Hasan” of the title. Lang’s earlier opera, based on the words of William S. Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade, suggests that this piece may nod to another Burroughs work, “Last Words of Hassan.” The title personage led an 11-century cult of Persian assassins. How that can relate to Haydn and the Divine has my head spinning.

 

Harvey Steiman