SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD UK CONCERT REVIEW

Wolfgang Rihm  - Total Immersion: Arditti Quartet, London Sinfonietta, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Stephen Isserlis (cello), Rayanne Dupuis (soprano), Baldur Brönfmann (cond.), André de Ridder (cond.), Barbican Centre, London, 12/13.3.10 (GDn)


The proportion of Wolfgang Rihm’s vast output you can squeeze into three concerts is very small, making the BBC’s ‘Total Immersion’ event an introductory primer at best. This is made all the more frustrating by the immense stylistic variety of his work and the fact that so little of it is ever heard in the UK.

Rihm isn’t much of a traveller (he is a famously loyal resident of the Town of Karlsruhe where he was born) so his attendance at the event was a welcome surprise. He is a very large man: tall, wide and gesticulating liberally with his long arms as he talks. Coming onto the stage at the end of the first concert, he towered over the Arditti Quartet, an outsized doppelganger for Irvine Arditti himself, and greeted each of the players, first by grabbing their heads in his two huge hands and swivelling them around and then with a warm embrace. His relaxed demeanour on the platform spoke of a lifetime of audience approval, a reminder of his position in German cultural life as the audience-friendly face of new music.

That’s not to say that Rihm’s music is undemanding. His works tend to be long, usually in single, interrupted spans, programmatic or narrative associations are rare, and his tonal palette includes a good range of extended performing techniques and noises. In the opening concert, for example, we heard his String Quartet no.5. The work has a title – sort of – it is called ‘Ohne Titel’, an indicator of the composer’s struggle with concepts of form, genre and musical identity in the creation of the piece. Like many of his works, this is in a single movement of around half an hour. There is a lot of sul ponticello and heavy scraping of the strings, highlighting the physical process by which the sounds are created. This imparts an immediacy, an engaging physicality that brings together composer, performers and audience in the literal act of the music’s creation. His Fetzen with which the concert concluded was a very different work. It is made up of eight movements written over five years, a number of which are scored for string quartet and accordion. Again, the use of unusual bowing techniques is modest, but allows the composer to find timbral sympathy between the strings and the accordion. Notes are started by one of the quartet and continued by the accordion, or vice versa. Or, conversely, abrasive textures are performed by the strings and contrasted by the round, sustained tones of the accordion’s accompaniment.

The concert opened with two works from a project masterminded by Kingston University, who put out a call to composers last year for submissions for a workshop with the Ardittis. Out of the 80 entrants, the two who made the cut were the Mexican composer Victor Ibarra and the Singaporean Diana Soh. The organisers had obviously been careful not to upstage the main attraction: the call was for short string quartet works, and these both came in at about five minutes, while the Rihm works were each half an hour. Surprisingly though, both composers came up with music that sounded a lot like Rihm, similar tonal palates, similarly free structural thinking. My companion for the evening was one of the 78 composers who hadn’t made it, and we spent the interval speculating why his very non-Rihm entry had been rejected.

The London Sinfonietta gave the lunchtime concert on the Saturday, with one short(ish) work Bild (eine Chiffre) and one long one Concerto‘Séraphin’. 20 years separate the composition of the two, a fact that was clear from their separate stylistic identities. Rihm accepted (reluctantly I think) the suggestion made to him in an interview later on that he is a composer with distinctive periods. But an equally important factor is his ability (and willingness) to adapt his style to the demands of an individual project. He seems to have styles that are specific to individual genres, and his complex relationship with musical tradition (he is very German in this respect) comes down to a sensitivity to the stylistic demands of the genres he uses. But there are also many musical characteristics that unite these two works. He likes expansive percussion sections, and treats them as completely integral to the ensemble. He is one of the few living composers who really knows how to use the harp and it makes regular appearances in his orchestral works. The Concerto’Séraphin’ features a number of low woodwinds: bass flute, cor anglais, contrabass clarinet, each of which is occasionally given long flowing lines. This is another innovation that Rihm himself identifies in his later work, the movement to ‘linear’ rather than ‘vertical’ thinking, not melodic so much as lyrical and flowing. As much as anything else, it has created an elevated role for the woodwind section in his later orchestral works.

No film has ever been made about the life and work of Wolfgang Rihm, something the BBC attempted to put to rights, albeit in a provisional way, by editing together some rehearsal and interview footage from German television and showing it as a one hour presentation in the Barbican cinema. It was a brave effort, considering the variable quality and age of the material, but it added little to the information already on offer. And it certainly highlighted the lack of a proper TV documentary about the composer. It’s unlikely that the BBC will ever be in a position to produce one themselves, but perhaps they should gently suggest the idea to SWR – in time for his 60^th in 2012 perhaps?

One of the reasons that the interview footage on the film was so redundant was that the following event was a live interview with the composer, where he repeated much of the same information – in English! A mention should go to Ivan Hewitt, who conducted this interview, gave a talk on the Saturday morning and wrote all the programme notes. Rihm insists on the abstraction of his music, so there aren’t many handles or pointers for those trying to write about or describe it, but Hewitt has done an impressive job nonetheless. The interview turned out to be the highlight of the whole event. Rihm came over as an enthusiastic, gregarious and lively communicator about his music. He had all sorts of stories to tell about his encounters (and occasional run-ins) with the top names of the avant garde. His discussion about the specificity of individual projects was interesting. He discussed, for example, how he had written his Konzert in einem Satz, which we heard in the final concert, specifically for Stephen Isserlis. For such a lyrical player, a lyrical piece was appropriate, and so he had written a work that, while still identifiably Rihm, inhabits a Romantic/Expressionist aesthetic. He insisted repeatedly, in spite of Ivan Hewitt’s scepticism – which I think the audience shared – that he is not bound by any aesthetic ideology. He told a story about how a composition student had shown him a very avant garde work and he had responded that the piece worked well, but did so because it could be rendered in tonal language and still be the same piece. Dogmas, artistic, political or whatever, are clearly alien to Rihm’s philosophy. He values freedom above all else, not in a political sense (he is far too humble ever to impose he politics on anybody) but rather in an artistic sense. He sees tradition as essential to creativity, and he asserts his right to embrace tradition, to the chagrin of many of his more ideologically-minded Modernist contemporaries.

His discussion of musical form was also revealing. Here, too, he strives for artistic freedom above all else. He deprecates prescriptive structural schemes in favour of a more organic approach to musical form. Or rather, he structures each work in a way that is appropriate to that work – each is a special case. Ivan Hewitt, struggling heroically to phrase a question that would encompass the composer’s attitude to form, asked him how he decided how long a work was going to be. The response: ‘Intuivitely’ – ‘Intuitively, as simple as that?’ – ‘No, it’s never simple’. Rihm then went on to describe the tortuous process by which he divines the intuitions by which his music takes shape. It is an attractive idea, and a valuable insight into how Wolfgang Rihm’s music works. Intuitive, organic musical ideas, rendered through immense labour on the composer’s part, guided by tradition but never restricted by pre-ordained formal schemes. ‘Forms not formulas’ was a maxim he suggested at one point to describe his artistic priorities.

For the final event, the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave three of Rihm’s larger orchestral works. Schwarzer und roter Tanz is a work for huge orchestra, in which thoroughly modern textures and harmonies interact with compositional techniques that have been out of vogue at least since the war: octave doubling, repeated note pulse accompaniments, woodwind and brass scored as Mahler or Schoenberg might have appreciated. There was plenty more great harp and percussion writing too. Isserlis then performed the one movement concerto, a work in a surprisingly Romantic vein, even for a composer who prides himself on his inclusivity. Formally, this piece is a spectacular success. There is no immediately identifiable repetition of even thematic manipulation. It doesn’t have a sectional structure, and there is little to nothing in the way of structural or agogic markers to map out its progress. But its 25 minute span is so perfectly formed that every note seems to have been plucked out of the air and auspiciously placed. Everything in it happens at exactly the right time, and everything adds up to a deeply unified whole, but the process by which this is achieved lies well beyond the powers of rational thought, making it frustrating and satisfying in equal measure.

The second half was given over to a concert performance of one of Rihm’s recent stage works, Das Gehege (‘The Enclosure’ or ‘The Cage.’) Given that Rihm insists on the absolute autonomy of his music, without any sort of synaesthesic co-dependency with other media, his stage works could be seen to throw up complex paradoxes. If this one is representative, then the answer lies in the elevated role of music in the proceedings. The dramatic scene on which the work is based (from a play by Botho Strauss) is only nominally narrative, allowing Rihm to structure his music along its own, intuitive lines with little external interference. The fact that there is only one singer also helps. The story, such as it is, concerns a woman breaking into the eagle enclosure at a zoo and playing out a complex sexual/sadistic obsession with one of the birds. Metaphors abound, especially with the symbolism of the German eagle as passive victim, and Rihm is happy to leave that side of things open, or rather to let the playwright communicate this significance directly to the audience, while the music gets on with the psychodrama. The Canadian soprano Rayanne Dupuis did a great job of the Salome/Elektra/Erwartung type role. The orchestra knew what to expect from their many performances of Richard Strauss and Schoenberg, and gave it their all. In fact, the work was written as a companion piece to Salome, and the differences and similarities are instructive. Again Rihm writes music that is stylistically appropriate to the context, music that is its context. He has no hang-ups about personal aesthetic dogmas or loyalty to a compositional school. But he does so without compromising any artistic integrity, and the work remains distinctively Rihm. That’s a rare skill these days, and even looking back through the history of German music, it is difficult to think of anybody since Bach who has managed to retain such a distinctive voice in such a range of stylistic contexts.

Gavin Dixon

Two Seen and Heard International reviews of performances of Das Gehege in Munich from 2007 and 2008 are available: by Jens F Laurson (2007) and by José M Irurzun (2008) Ed.