SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

EXPERIMENT! - Cowell, Wolff, Feldman, Cage, Rzewski: London Sinfonietta, Frederic Rzewski (piano), Aled Pedrick (narrator), Kings Place, London, 29.4.2010 (GDn)

Henry Cowell: Aeolian Harp

Christian Wolff: Excercise 16 for two instruments

Morton Feldman: Four Instruments

Frederick Rzewski: Nano Sontas, book 7 (European Premiere)

John Cage: Five

Christian Wolff: For Five or Ten People

Frederic Rzewski: Coming Together

 

‘Experimental’ is not necessarily a positive in new music. When new musical ideas or directions are tried out for the first time, and the results are both unique and artistically consummate, the work is declared a masterpiece. When the ideas are new but the artistry is lacking, ‘experimental’ is the consolatory adjective. Beethoven’s 9^th is probably the most radical work of the 19^th century, yet few would describe it as experimental.

Even with the rapid pace of ‘progress’ in the 20^th century, collective endeavours between older and younger generations play an important role. The avant-garde shows the way, but the followers are more often the creators of the really great works.

These were the thoughts going round in my mind as I listened to this evening’s London Sinfonietta concert. Despite the purported ‘EXPERIMENT!’ theme, the real purpose of the event was to provide a platform for a very special guest: Frederic Rzewski. He’s not an avant-gardist, nor is he a radical musical experimenter, but he is a composer who knows how to draw on the innovations of his recent predecessors to create truly great music.

The long path of American experimentalism that leads up to his great works begins with Henry Cowell. ‘Experimental’ is a description that could have been coined specifically for his music. In Aeolian Harp he is experimenting with under-the-lid piano performance techniques. The player silently depresses chords on the keyboard with one hand, then strums the strings inside the case, so that only the depressed chords resonate. Beyond that single innovation, the music is morbidly conventional, and the chord sequence could have come out of Bach – in fact, maybe it did. But what really matters about this work is the date it was written: 1923! Had anyone specified plucking the strings of a piano before that date? It is a commonplace today , but in the 1920s it was really, really...well, experimental. Plaudits to John Constable, whose piano technique and stylistic sensitivity to the demands of the wackiest of new music remains as acute as ever. Great lighting too, a spot focussed on the strings at just the right angle so that the audience could see what was going on in the reflection in the underside of the lid.

Christian Wolff is also an ‘experimental’ composer, in the worst sense, or his music isn’t to my taste anyway. I find his experimentations ephemeral and increasingly irrelevant. The two works performed this evening, Exercise 16 and For Five or Ten People, both experiment with different relationships between the written score and the performers’ activities. Of the two, For Five or Ten People is the more interesting. It uses graphic notation and a certain amount of performer freedom to create an atmosphere of energising, if strictly limited anarchy. Some excellent theatrical string attacks and bouncing off the stings from cellist Oliver Oates, but otherwise little of interest.

This piece is for unspecified instrumentation, so it was interesting that the Sinfonietta proceeded it with John Cage’s Five, also for unspecified instruments but played by exactly the same ensemble. Cage, too, was an experimentalist – like Cowell his ideas were far more influential than his music – but the number pieces (of which Five is one, if you see what I mean) date from the very end of his life and show a certain detachment from the radicalism of his early years.

The relationship between Cage and Feldman demonstrates well the experimenter/consummator relationship. Feldman’s Four Instruments is a relatively early work, but shows how he took Cage’s ideas of suspended temporal flow and meditative stasis and created works far better than any of his predecessor. It’s a great piece, and the addition of tubular bells into Feldman’s sound world adds a further touch of magic to the magisterial stasis of his work. There were a few ensemble issues here, but the composer is asking for a lot, especially when he writes piano chords (all of which are inscrutably complex harmonies) and expects the tubular bells to strike at exactly the same time. Not a big deal, but the performance failed to match the immaculate standards of John Tilbury and the Smith Quartet when they performed Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet at the same venue last week.

Which brings us to Rzewski. Each half of the concert concluded with a Rzewski work, the first with his Nano Sonatas, Book 7 played the composer, the second with one of his most famous (and deservedly so) works Coming Together. Both works demonstrated Rzewski’s efficiency as a consummator (rather than an innovator) but both in very different ways. Nano Sonatas is one of the composers more recent projects, and the works we heard this evening were written in the last few months. Ligeti’s Etudes have clearly played a pivotal role in the conception of these works. Ligeti’s voice is heard in the use of fast two-note ostinati accompaniments, stacked fourth harmonies, and contrapuntal textures made up of multiple chromatic runs. But the structure of these works is clearly distinct from Ligeti’s gradually evolving, evenly textured miniatures. Rzewski favours short sectional structures, fast build-ups to climaxes, jarring contrasts between sections and seemingly arbitrary endings. He is an old man, but like Constable, he has retained a young man’s command of the physical demands of the piano. Much of the music relies on loud, clearly articulated individual notes or brief declamatory gestures, and in every case, the conviction of his performance matched the artistic focus of his composition.

Conviction of another kind inspired Coming Together. The work, for narrator and ensemble, sets letters by Sam Melville, an instigator of the Attica State Prison riots in 1971. This is Rzewski at his most political, but anybody who is anticipating the populist blandness of Cardew’s later work need not worry. It is tonal, but it is a hard-edged minimalist tonality. Rzewski’s musical inspirations for this work appear to be Reich (in particular his Come Out), Andriessen perhaps, and also, although I could be wrong, Gil Scott-Heron. This was a spectacular performance. It was led from the piano by John Constable, again demonstrating that stylistic versatility that has made him such an asset to the Sinfonietta since its founding. However, the real star was the narrator, Aled Pedrick, an actor with musical training, which is exactly what the part requires. And his performance was transcendental, sitting at a writing desk, pretending to be furiously scribbling the letter across the pages of the score, while all the time intoning the fateful phrases. Conviction, focus, drive, determination, these are both the subject of the work and the qualities the composer shares with the correspondent. The libretto repeats the phrases of the text over circling motifs in the ensemble, and the texture gradually builds to an intense climax as the ‘coming together’ is graphically represented by the full ensemble playing a fast percussive line in unison. The whole work is a powerful statement, both musically and politically, a high-impact work by one of new music’s great consummators. And not experimental in the slightest.

Gavin Dixon