Philippe MANOURY (b. 1952)
Lab.Oratorium, for two actors, soprano, mezzo-soprano, chamber choir, large choir, live electronics and orchestra (2018-19)
Rinnat Moriah (soprano), Tora Augestad (mezzo-soprano), Patrycia Ziolkowska, Sebastian Rudolph (actors)
SWR Vokalensemble
lab.chor
IRCAM/Nicolas Stemann
Gürzenich-Orchester Köln/François-Xavier Roth
Rec. May 2019, Kölner Philharmonie, Germany
Texts not included
WERGO WER73962 [78:44]
Notwithstanding the effects of more than a century of ‘Chinese whispers’ upon their legendary exchange, posterity has it that Sibelius said something along the lines of "I admire the style and formal severity of the symphony, as well as the logic composers seek in forging an inner connection between each of its primary motives," to which Mahler is reported to have responded less fussily "The symphony should be like the world; it must embrace everything."
Patrick Hahn’s booklet introduction to Manoury’s expansive attempt at symphonic music-theatre alludes to this dialogue and particularly to Mahler’s paradoxically pithy contribution. The miracle of Lab.Oratorium’s apparently hastily conceived realisation ultimately owes much to the urgency implied by Mahler’s words, tellingly uttered at some point before the catastrophe of World War I. Whilst Manoury’s sprawling canvas cannot be viewed as a symphony per se, his brave attempt to prick his audience’s collective conscience (as well its ears) at the work’s 2019 premiere should not be underestimated, although the success of the music as represented on this CD is what concerns us here and that is a different issue.
Lab.oratorium is the last part of a trilogy of orchestral compositions involving spatial experimentation which Manoury has produced for Cologne’s Gürzenich-Orchester over the last decade. It requires pairs of actors and solo singers, two choirs, a huge orchestra and electronics and lasts approximately an hour and a half. It incorporates ten distinct sections although the fifth, entitled Theater is omitted in this recording – there is no music, nor does it form part of Manoury’s manuscript. Theater was conceived as a tabula rasa upon which the artistic director Nicolas Stemann could collaborate with the two actors to create a kind of spoken-word interlude; I have by now seen a film of the complete work and consequently can make at least some sense of how this section fits in to the whole construction.
This is the concept of Lab.Oratorium: the entire auditorium is re-imagined as an enormous cruise ship. The audience are characterised as the ‘voyagers’ on board; members of one of the two choirs are distributed amongst them. The actors enter the stage amidst audience chatter and welcome the passengers. Whilst they do so the members of the orchestra arrive seemingly rather casually in ones and twos (although this is apparently rigorously choreographed). The electronic sounds are already underway before Francois-Xavier Roth raises his baton.
The central focus of Lab.Oratorium is the relentless struggle of migrant refugees seeking asylum in Europe, particularly those doomed to take their chance undertaking unimaginably risky voyages across the Mediterranean, so many of which end in terrible circumstances. We live in an age where humanitarian action can’t even be taken for granted as a source for good. The awakening of the far-right across the continent seems to have rendered the plight of these refugees almost hopeless, especially when many are fleeing conflicts which may have arisen in the first place because of certain Western governments’ attitudes and behaviours. The work’s power feeds off the onlooker’s perception of the tension between well-heeled holidaymakers (or concert audiences?) and penniless, desperate migrants, so many of whom have ended up washed up on the coastlines of western Europe, devoid of life. This phenomenon surely constitutes catastrophe rather than tragedy. I therefore wonder if Manoury’s aim in this work is to reinforce the anger of some towards the indifference of others, as well as calling out the existence of the indifference itself.
Watching the filmed performance online – that, at least is what I thought was going on; but the insoluble issue for me is that all the texts, sung and spoken, are in German. There were no subtitles available in the film I saw – nor are there any texts, let alone translations, included in the booklet with this Wergo CD (although one can access the German texts via a QR code which has been cunningly concealed within the booklet’s German language notes). Perhaps there are copyright issues but regardless the omission presents a somewhat insuperable obstacle to non-German speakers like me. In the cases of the snippets of Trakl, Arendt and Nietzsche I did find some joy online in finding translations, but this only provided partial help in decoding the big picture. This is a great shame because in purely musical terms Manoury has fashioned a score of relentless power, unlimited colour, unbridled rhythmic variety and impressive emotional flexibility – perhaps ambiguity is a better word. There certainly seems to be a degree of black humour involved in the actors’ declamations in the first half of the work.
To summarise the music then; after the opening Vorspiel (Prologue) mentioned above a purely orchestral movement, Ausfahrt und Reise (Departure and Journey) enables Manoury to blend his imaginative if often thick orchestral textures with the electronics. This gives the listener some useful pointers as regards the composer’s style. Most noticeable to fresh ears will be the omnipresent crying of seagulls during these two sections; the mezzo-soprano (Tora Augestad, who communicates assured dramatic versatility throughout the work in what appear to be a number of different ‘roles’) intones a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann which (according to the booklet) links the sounds of the birds “with the image of drowning at sundown”. Then follows a long panel of sixteen minutes duration, Geschichten und Cocktails (Stories and Cocktails). This is a chaotic collage which seems to involve the participation of absolutely everybody. The booklet provides a few clues regarding sung and spoken texts for this panel which taken at face value seem to encompass extremes of expression; frivolous cruise advertisements are juxtaposed with a Bachmann poem about the anxiety of imminent loss at the outset of a voyage. The whingeing of entitled tourists collides with the actual words of refugees who’ve lost everything. Rumba beats fuse with dense, astringent din. In the filmed performance, this section stood out for its packed stage, the singers and actors acting as bar waiters offering tots of Gin and Tonic to the audience. More overtly expressionistic is Manoury’s subsequent treatment of Georg Trakl’s harrowing, pharmaceutically influenced poem Grodek, written prior to the poet’s suicide just after the outbreak of World War I. Trakl contrasts the progress of war with the demise of society, while also pointing up the succour that can be provided by that which surrounds us, such as the changing of the seasons or the onset of night. Gradek’s dense web of choral polyphony (superbly sung here) is refracted in orchestral writing of claustrophobic thickness.
Theater is the pivot of the entire work – in the filmed performance the two actors, Patrycia Ziolkowska and Sebastian Rudolph seem to recite the testimonies of the refugees themselves as well as the thoughts of their potential rescuers (the booklet specifically refers to the humanitarian organisation SOS Méditerranée) – it duly yields to Anlegen (Docking), a gaunt yet haunting choral and orchestral section in which the composer binds together texts by Bachmann and Jelinek which both seem to allude to catastrophe as expressed in dream, mythology and ancient history. In Wanderland, the existential questions (of the refugees?) are fobbed off by the smug indifference of what the note describes as ‘advertising voiceovers’; the music itself builds to a telling juxtaposition of Caribbean steel drums and hyperactive electronics. Next is a dream-sequence, Nachtmusik und Melodram in which soloists’ and actors’ sung and spoken words coalesce in a nightmarish Joycean hell. The most extended movement of the second half of Lab.Oratorium is Mare Nostrum, a complex labyrinth of clashing ideas and motifs which dramatically and musically lays bare the catastrophe humanity seems to be facing at this moment and the seemingly hopeless incompatibility of the interests of different groups of humans, a predicament which is barely improved by the idealised harmonies hinted at in the music of the concluding Abfahrt – Nachspiel (Departure – Epilogue) which melds the words of Nietzsche and Arendt in an attempt to characterise the real essence of rootlessness.
The booklet describes the rather painful birth of Lab.Oratorium. Manoury adopted a pragmatic approach to this project, which indubitably represents a courageous effort on the part of the composer (and his director Nicolas Stemann) to “embrace everything”. The choral parts were completed first in order to accommodate the extensive rehearsal time required for such complex fare, whilst in the spirit of the abstract of a scientific report, the opening Vorspiel was the last section to be written, as it references and previews some of the themes and ideas which follow. Taking into account the fact that elements of the whole were not fully integrated into the production until a couple of weeks before the premiere, this recorded performance oozes remarkable levels of confidence, conviction and coherence. I mentioned the charismatic mezzo Tora Augestad earlier; her counterpart is the silver-toned Israeli soprano Rinnat Moriah. Both these singers offer poised, musical readings of their challenging, contrasting parts. In similar terms, both actors seem perfectly suited to the motley assortment of traits their ‘characters’ need to display over the course of this vast canvas. Both choirs are immense; notwithstanding the extraordinarily vivid sounds that emerge from the orchestra and electronically, it’s the voices which inevitably carry the semantic and emotional weight of the work. All the performers contribute to the success of Lab.Oratorium; Francois-Xavier Roth holds the thing together with characteristically lucid and unhurried direction. Wergo’s recorded sound is certainly sumptuous.
But given the care with which the texts have been chosen and adapted, surely it would make sense to let those of us not blessed with fluent German into their secrets? I cannot for the life of me comprehend why Schott (Wergo’s parent company) do not make the translations available for all online, alongside the libretto. As it is, actually seeing the filmed performance (I am reluctant to provide the link for this as I am rather unsure about the nature and security status of its provenance – the curious will find it online in any case) provided this critic with far more help in making some narrative sense of Lab.Oratorium than the CD booklet itself.
Forgive me if I go further: Schott and Wergo seem not only to be ignoring the needs of a potentially substantial audience of non-German speakers; in my view they’re also selling Philippe Manoury, who is without question a most accomplished composer, rather short. Notwithstanding the commercial implications there would seem to be an obvious solution: the filmed performance is out there somewhere– and very good it looks too. A DVD release with subtitles would be most welcome and would do full justice to this most ambitious slice of music theatre.
Richard Hanlon
