Lowell LIEBERMANN (b. 1961)
Frankenstein (2016)
San Francisco Ballet Orchestra/Martin West
rec. live March 6-9, 2018, War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco,
REFERENCE RECORDINGS RR-148 [50:01 + 69.07]
When Liam Scarlett’s ballet of Frankenstein was given its premiere at Covent Garden in 2016 it did so to generally unfavourable views. But critical and public opinion are often out of step with each other and this was the case with Scarlett’s ballet. There’s no question that it was stunning to look at; the sets and costumes were spectacular, although I think anyone familiar with the Branagh version of Frankenstein, perhaps the most opulent and sumptuous screen adaptation of the book yet made, will not have been unaware of the similarities. Liam Scarlett – a brilliant artist whose vivid thinking, and controversial choreographic perceptions, were overshadowed in the last few years of his life before his suicide – brought an emotional rawness to almost everything he did, a kind of highly charged power that found an unsettling degree of expression in much of his work.
That isn’t always on show in Frankenstein, although the part of The Creature in this particular performance – and I think also in Branagh’s film – is given a basic, decent humanity that takes us back to what Mary Shelley originally wrote. But there we have to leave it. Both Scarlett and Branagh take what I will describe as the operatic approach to Shelley’s book – a novel which if you read it is often as hushed as a muted whisper. Frankenstein’s conception came from a waking dream, and its infancy was written during personal tragedy, but Shelley’s novel is Gothic only in the sense that it is part of a genre not that it implies outright horror unlike, perhaps, John Polidori’s The Vampyre, conceived on the same night at Byron’s Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva. Moreover, almost nothing in Scarlett’s ballet directs us towards a more structural reading of Frankenstein: that of the outcast, the outsider, of those brought into this world ultimately to be left uncared for, to be forgotten and to endure suffering. Revolution, too, is an undercurrent that menaces only barely under the surface. It seems typical of Scarlett’s brilliance and intellectual vision as a choreographer – and yet a complete irony for a gay man – that he would give us a ballet on the grandest and most expressionist possible scale whilst completely misreading Frankenstein from the point of view as the outsider.
What part does Lowell Liebermann’s score play in all this? Does he struggle with the same misreading of the novel as Liam Scarlett? I think, by and large, that the score itself is quite superb. It would certainly be very hard to think of one that is more imposing than what we have here. Frankly, at times it is overwhelming, almost too powerful for the subject Liebermann has been asked to compose for. But, like most ballet scores, it suffers from a patch and stitch approach between scenes – Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet isn’t immune to this either – although with this particular Shelley work there’s a certain novelty value to this: Frankenstein’s The Creation could literally be seen as stitched together anyway. Nevertheless, some of it is extremely opulent, the kind of intensely sweeping grand score you rarely hear these days, even in films. No single track better illustrates this than Nr.31 – ‘Elizabeth and The Creature’. It begins pizzicato, and then you hear a short theme first on an oboe and then on a clarinet, with dissonant chords gradually building up [1:58] towards what is the most beautiful writing of the whole ballet [3:16]. The string sound is utterly glorious – introduced by a trumpet solo – with deeply bowed lower strings and a chorus of just audible woodwind; the track ends with something we rarely hear these days from composers – a good old fashioned cymbal clash. Track Nr.32, ‘Victor and The Creature’ is hardly less impressive (cymbals more muted) and the ballet fades out to a completely silent close – much as Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet does, in one sense both a compositional and structural model for both Scarlett’s and Liebermann’s Frankenstein.
Another composer stalks this ballet. Track Nr.31 recalls the great climax to the titanic last movement of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony: a solo horn the prelude before those magnificent soaring strings and Mahler’s fateful drum strokes. But Mahler is a ghost who sometimes emerges in full guise throughout this score; it isn’t just from evoking some of the skilful writing, it’s The Creature’s heartbeat in its musical forms, and the march towards finality through silence that is seared into the score like ominous punctuation. Mahler’s Sixth and Ninth symphonies are as much fated in these pages as the novel itself.
Although there is nothing explicitly Wagnerian in the ballet’s form, there are leitmotifs throughout the ballet. Track Nr.21 ‘Victor and The Creature’ has musical parallels to the final one – track Nr.32 (it is also momentarily heard in The Anatomy Theatre, track Nr.11). The writing for lower strings is very powerfully done here; it’s rarely matched elsewhere in this ballet. We have the hint of Berlioz’s ‘March to the Scaffold’ from Symphonie fantastique in ‘A back Alley in Geneva, Justine is Executed’, one of the few overt references to the French Revolution that Shelley was influenced by, and there is a very sharp distinction between how Liebermann scores music for the Frankenstein Manor in Geneva and the Anatomy Theatre at Ingolstadt University.
Some of the ballet’s most lyrical music comes in the Manor scenes, and especially those where Elizabeth and Victor are together (track Nrs. 3 and 4) – although the engagement scene lacks any real sense of emotional heart to it – Mary Shelley’s Victor is infinitely more complex than the one the music suggests here. The lightness and effortless clarity of much of this music owes a debt to Mendelssohn (less the symphonic, than his more transcendental incidental music). It is only when we get to the Anatomy Theatre that the whole mood of the writing changes. These scenes are where the best music of Liebermann’s score can be heard; they are the very emotional core of the ballet. A short, dark, prelude (track Nr.7) leads to the entry of the students to the Anatomy lesson (track Nr.9). This is a magnificent 7-minutes which inhabits a dark Shostakovich-like world of sepulchral strings and insidious percussiveness. This is music that swells in giant crests and then suddenly collapses [5:25 – 6:08]. Track Nr.11, which preludes the birth of the creature, is in part a thrilling scherzo and then a massive orchestral coda to the creation itself which is announced by crushing timpani and tam-tam. Track Nr.12 immediately afterwards – ‘The Creature Lives’ – is effectively a crescendo that begins with a heartbeat – another leitmotif that threads the music together (you’ll hear it for the last time as Elizabeth and Victor confront The Creature) – and closes the act on The Creature’s maturity.
If Scarlett’s Frankenstein is a vision of operatic excess, Liebermann applies equally excessive musical styles when he needs to. There is something of the “Grand Guignol” to the waltz which he composes for the ballroom scene at Frankenstein Manor (track Nr.24). It’s detached from any notion of the Straussian waltz – Liebermann focuses much less on a string sound – although when he does it can sometimes become rather dizzying – than he does on the clashing of woodwinds. The waltz is revived later (track Nr.28), but this time it takes on an even more sinister guise as it is punctuated with heavy bass drum strokes (again the thrumming of The Creature’s heartbeat, but this time more ominous) as it anticipates The Creature’s final dance with Elizabeth – although we are to be denied the novel’s true ending set in the icy tundra of the Arctic.
Frankenstein runs for two hours; a relatively swift performance of Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet can run for around twenty minutes longer than that. Both are difficult to manage complete from a purely audio point of view. I have now heard Liebermann’s score several times complete and still struggle with parts of it. On the other hand, I could make a selection of tracks – not perhaps a very chronological one – and enjoy it more, although Liebermann tends to write in much longer stretches than Prokofiev does (Frankenstein has 34 tracks, Romeo & Juliet 52). There is also, I think, a very clear symphonic structure to this ballet – the Anatomy scenes alone (some of the very best Liebermann has composed) work as a symphonic movement in their own right. Indeed, it’s entirely possible to argue that Liebermann’s Frankenstein isn’t ballet at all but a symphony trapped within one. Ballet scores tend, I think, to have a utilitarian value – they exist in a large measure to be played for another art form. Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet survives in the concert hall today only because the composer made three suites out of its music. Liebermann’s Frankenstein contains a lot of brilliantly written music, certainly enough to make a 40-minute suite out of.
As beautifully played as the Covent Garden production was, the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra play with a ravishing warmth. Clearly the orchestra has been well rehearsed. The brass playing is monumentally precision perfect; Liebermann’s music, even if it gives the impression of simplicity, is of extraordinary complexity. This is an especially densely written ballet in places in others it is quite the opposite, open to making orchestral players feel very exposed – and yet the orchestral playing is brilliant enough that details emerge with astonishing clarity. Those great sweeping string passages at the climax of track Nr.31 do not occlude for one moment the flutes so perfectly judged is the instrumental balance. Martin West directs what is a thrilling, passionate and dramatic account of the score. Some tracks are just electrifying. The sound gives a very warm palate to the performance; it almost feels autumnal under the glow of the recording. Although it is live, stage action doesn’t seem that much of an issue – although there is applause included at the end of each act. I can’t imagine this ballet receiving better advocacy than it does here.
I asked at the beginning of this review whether Liebermann struggles with a misreading of Shelley’s novel in this score? His vision of Frankenstein is tied very closely to that of Liam Scarlett’s, although in his notes in the booklet Liebermann does suggest there were (significant at times) differences of opinion. Liebermann would write sections that entirely missed Scarlett’s vision; sections were scrapped or rewritten. Liebermann perhaps had a clearer idea of what he wanted Frankenstein to sound like because he had envisaged using the novel for an opera at one stage. This is a book, however, that has been – if not entirely misunderstood – certainly open to misinterpretation in various art forms. Those with a vision of Shelley’s work have gone back to her creation but have then got lost in the language and subtext of it. The novel is certainly more interior, for example. Liebermann’s score probably doesn’t manage to transcend the more aesthetic, fantastical or even more revolutionary aspects of the book. But then, neither does he – and nor does Scarlett for that matter – manage to give us a version of Frankenstein that confuses the “modern Prometheus” with The Creation itself.
If your musical aesthetic allows it, this score will easily sweep you along with it as you listen to it. At its best, the music here is extraordinarily powerful and uncommonly sumptuous. A symphonic masterpiece trapped within the confines of a ballet.
Marc Bridle
