For its first international assignment, Seen
& Heard went to France in search of modern Spanish music!
Musica, held each autumn in Strasbourg, is France's most important
international festival of contemporary music. It has a lot to offer musical
British holidaymakers. The city, in the beautiful Alsace region between the
Vosges mountains and the Black Forest, is as picturesque as any in Europe.
Its centre, criss-crossed by rivers, is compact, making walking a pleasure.
Public transport is cheap and efficient, with an expanding network of futuristic
trams which are an aesthetic delight.
The concerts and associated theatrical events are heavily subsidised, with full price tickets about £11 and various concessions. A festival card for about £70 covers entry to all 40 events including late night cabaret performances, this year with a Spanish flavour. Free transportation is laid on from the city centre to and between all the venues, most of which are within comfortable walking distance. With favourable exchange rates, the hotels and restaurants offer excellent value.
Musically, Strasbourg's contemporary music festival has a radical policy under the inspired direction of Jean-Dominique Marco, who seeks to support composers and countries which have fortuitously remained outside mainstream exposure, so that new experiences are assured. It operates with generous subsidies and financial support and enjoys ever-increasing public loyalty, with some 20,000 people willing to follow where the festival leads.
Musica99 had a Spanish theme and feted two great composers, Luis de Pablo of Madrid and the expatriate Roberto Gerhard, whose most important and innovative music was composed in England, where he spent his latter years. De Pablo, now in his 70th year, dragged his country into the musical twentieth century almost single-handed, and has taught most of its younger composers who are now thriving.
Although he is an enthusiastic Anglophile,
with excellent English and a wide knowledge of English literature, exposure
to his music in England has been, at best, sporadic. Roberto Gerhard, who
was ignored in his native country and emigrated to England, enjoyed an Indian
summer of creativity in Cambridge and belated appreciation. Neither composer
is even now as well known in UK as he deserves.
Musica explores its chosen themes in depth, and the 1999 festival included works by no less than 46 composers from Spain and Latin America, with biographies and photos of them all in the 256 page programme, an invaluable source book. Several of them were represented by six or more works, with rare opportunities to hear their music for large orchestra, as well as those for smaller ensembles which have a better chance of being put on. Luis de Pablo himself had indeed been featured in UK festivals occasionally, most recently Huddersfield 1998, but never by performances of his music for full orchestra; it was a revelation to hear two of them live.
Spanish and south American programmes were brought to Strasbourg by our own Arditti Quartet and James Wood with his New London Chamber Choir, the latter giving French premieres of works by the Argentinean, Alejandro Vinao, and Mexican composer Javier Alvarez, both active on the British electro-acoustic scene. Famous ensembles known for occasional appearances in UK, such as Accroche Note, Ensemble Intercontemporain and the pioneering Les Percussions de Strasbourg, also participated. But for me, it was especially rewarding to have the opportunity to discover the healthy development of Spanish contemporary music, to join the enthusiastic very mixed audience for it, and to encounter instrumental groups equal to our best.
There were three concerts by three fine symphony orchestras, with demanding programmes carefully prepared and presented in comfortable halls with excellent acoustics. The formal opening concert of the festival was given by the National Orchestra of Spain, conducted by Luca Pfaff, in the Palais de Musique et des Congrez, its large modern concert hall as enviable as any of ours save Birmingham's. The superb Salle Erasme was filled by an audience of all ages, 2000 people prepared to take on trust a tough programme of French premieres of new music. The concert began with one of Luis de Pablo's most important works for full orchestra, the complex Senderos del aire, dark and densely scored, and better known in a recomposed version for chamber orchestra, Segunda Lectura, which was broadcast from Huddersfield last year and is available on CD.
The centre piece was a remarkable 1995 violin concerto by Jose Manuel Lopez Lopez, a representative of the next generation after de Pablo, a former pupil of his whose name was new to me. The concerto began assertively with the large orchestra producing a sound as of violin harmonics reinforced by bowed percussion. It was notable for original orchestration throughout and skilfully conceived balance between orchestra and soloist. Its success owed much to the violinist Saschko Gavrilov, a famous specialist in contemporary music, dramatic and virtuosic with a huge tone and commanding presence. To finish we heard Gerhard's last work, the coruscating 4th symphony New York, premiered in 1967 by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary. This programme would have been guaranteed to empty our Royal Festival Hall.
In the same hall the Orchestre National de France conducted by Pascal Rophe gave two world premieres and, for the first time in France, Cristobal Halffter's Versus of 1983. This disappointed, an arid and mainly noisy piece, which incorporated a medieval madrigal unconvincingly and sounded now rather dated. Halffter is the only Spanish composer heard at Strasbourg who is substantially represented in the R.E.D./Gramophone Classical 1999 CD catalogue, "the most complete listing of currently available recordings". There was another concertante piece by Lopez Lopez, Movimentos for two pianos which featured three percussionists positioned in a triangle to the sides of and behind the orchestra. The orchestral sounds were attractive and the interplay of the pianists, often exchanging but few notes at first, promised well at first, but did not deliver because this lively score proved fatally flawed by a miscalculation of balance. Heard live, the two pianos often became inaudible, despite the valiant efforts of the players. It would have been wise to have removed only one of the piano lids and to have re-arranged the platform, with the conductor retreating behind the pianos, as was Sir Adrian Boult's custom whenever he conducted piano concertos, so that he did not deceive himself with his head in the piano. I am sure it will have sounded fine as broadcast.
That Orchestre National concert included the most astonishing premiere heard during my visit. Alberto Posadas composed Apeiron in 1993, when he was only 25. It was very much in the idiom of Scelsi's little known last orchestral pieces, still ignored by the British musical establishment, with slow timbral transformations of notes and chords developing cumulative power. Posado even ended with a tintabullation which reminded me of the last minute of Scelsi's Pfhat, in which all the orchestral players tinkle triangles! Had he soaked himself in the orchestral music of Giacinto Scelsi, a twentieth century composer especially dear to me about whom I have written extensively, one might fairly have accused him of plagiarism. But Posadas confirmed, in one of the festival's pre-concert discussions with the eminent Belgian musicologist and Scelsi specialist, Harry Halbreich, that he had not known Scelsi's music at all when composing Apeiron. (The pre-concert discussions took place in the forum of Strasbourg's largest record and hi-fi shop, FNAC, close by the buying throngs and were well-attended! Would London record collectors be tempted into concert halls if discussions were put on in the Virgin or EMI shops?) It was uncanny to what extent Posadas had in this piece virtually reinvented a whole world of musical thinking which even now has not become as well known as it merits (the only performances of Scelsi's orchestral music in UK have been of two of his late works given under Martyn Brabins in the BBC Maida Vale studio).
The final concert during my ten days at the festival was given by the excellent local symphony orchestra, the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra, under its permanent conductor Jan Latham-Koenig, who trained in London, and used to be active on the British scene. This was a well-balanced programme of four works, all worth hearing and hearing again. Partita for 15 players by Jesus Torres was composed for Spain's National Youth Orchestra; varied and contrapuntal, with episodes for different groups and two prominent percussionists - it might go well with the Schonberg 1st chamber symphony. Tomas Marco's 2nd Symphony Espacio cerrado (meaning locked in space) is a powerful single movement in which heavy writing for massed strings prevents rapid wind figurations from escaping a feeling of desolation. Marco says his 3rd symphony, commissioned at the same time, is lighter, treating the same material differently "like a photo and its negative". Fons vitae by Jesus Rueda was a rich orchestral tapestry, ending with lyrical expressivity. Lastly, Treboles by de Pablo was a fine example of this youthful elder statesman of contemporary Spain's consummate skill in orchestration and devising large structures, different in each composition. Intriguingly marked Cosmatesco, Melodia con accompagnamento and Tenebre Scherzose, the outer movements of Treboles are nervous and dynamic in rapid tempo, with a central slow movement which features the approximate pitch of two ocarinas to accentuate strange harmonies. Exhilarating and masterly, demonstrating why de Pablo should be and is held in such high esteem in France.
At the splendid auditorium of France Radio 3 Alsace, which was recording
the entire festival, they included two of their eponymous composer's major
chamber works, the Concert for 8, including guitar and accordion,
and Libra of 1968, one of his final pieces with astrological titles.
They also included Lopez's A Tempo for cello and 8 other instrumentalists,
which showed freedom and imagination, all the instrumentalists enjoying the
extended techniques to which we have latterly become accustomed.
The Chamber Orchestra
of the Theatre Lliure from Barcelona, conductor Josep
Pons, introduced a piece by the young Basque composer Ramon Lazkano
which made the strongest impression. Scored for an unusual combination of
a doubled group of strings and percussion, with solo bass flute and bass
clarinet, the prevailing colours were dark. It grew into a genuine allegro
(so much contemporary music is basically slow, with fast figuration
superimposed!) and after a pause a dreamy, quiet ending with finger drumming.
He seemed to have an individual voice, hard to characterise yet distinctive,
so I bought a CD of his works recorded by the pioneering Moscow Contemporary
Music Ensemble, which confirmed that he has something personal to say and
his own way to say it. After playing that CD on the car journey home across
France, I chanced to hear the broadcast of this same concert, which confirmed
my feeling that Lazkano is definitely a name to watch out for. I look forward
to keeping in touch with his development.
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