SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Aldeburgh Festival 2008 (1) : Haydn, Schoenberg, Kurtág, Webern, Ives, Mozart, Britten Sinfonia, Pierre-Laurent Aimard (pianist, conductor) The Maltings, Snape, Aldeburgh. 14.6.2008 (AO)

Haydn : Symphony no 22
Schoenberg : Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra
Kurtág : Doodles for András Mihály’s Birthday, Ligatura – message to Frances-Marie
Webern : Fünf Sätze, Five Movements for String Quartet
Ives : The Unanswered Question
Mozart : Piano Concerto No 26 “The Coronation”

What brilliant programming! If this is a taster for what is to come when Pierre-Laurent Aimard becomes Director of the Aldeburgh festival next year, we are in for exciting times.  This programme overturns the old cliché about tacking new music onto the end of mainstream music. Instead what Aimard is doing is far more sophisticated. He respects the audience enough to assume they can make far more intelligent connections and think more deeply about what they hear. Composers in different eras may write in different styles, but fundamentally they explore the same basic questions of expression, exploration and ideas.

Symphonic form was still relatively new in Haydn’s time and the 22^nd Symphony is in its own way quite experimental.  Haydn is posing questions, long searching lines on horn arch outwards and upwards answered in part by the cors anglais. The symphony was later called “The Philosopher”, because the flux between ideas isn’t resolved.  It’s lively, too. Haydn liked games and surprises, just as Kurtág does, so that’s another good reason for having Haydn open the orchestral part of this year’s Aldeburgh Festival, which honours György Kurtág.  Similarly, Aimard’s choice of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 26 was inspired. Aimard didn’t play the cadenzas but it wasn’t because his left shoulder had been injured the previous week. Instead, this performance focused on the open ended spirit. It is enough to know Mozart would have improvised freely. In the context of this programme, Mozart sounded refreshingly modern and inventive.

This programme operates on so many levels, it’s worth trying to replicate at home with score or recordings because there’s too much to sink in on one hearing.  Joyful celebration is another level, as is aphoristic clarity. Kurtág’s music is exhilarating because he writes with such concentrated economy. It’s like haiku, perfectly condensed and simple, yet the ideas expand far beyond the confines of what’s on the page.  It is remarkably free because it involves the imagination, expanding in the soul of the listener. Often, Kurtág pieces hit you long after you’ve finished formally listening. It’s stimulating because it opens up new dimensions in listening.

Schoenberg was experimenting with looser, freer form when he wrote The Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra. This music is very far indeed from Gurrelieder. It heralds new beginnings. It’s incomplete but that only adds to the sense of adventure.   Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet are even further down the path of invention, though they were written a year before the Schoenberg pieces.  Webern’s position in music history is sometimes underrated because he didn’t write blockbusters, but his influence on new music is profound.  He’s a complete antidote to 19^th century gigantism.  It’s hard to believe sometimes that something so fresh was written in 1909. Like Kurtág, Webern’s aphorisms concentrate the mind, and open outwards. Aimard placed Kurtág’s Doodles for András Mihály’s Birthday, known affectionately as Irka-Firka, and Ligatura between Schoenberg and Webern. Because all the miniatures were played without breaks for applause, this was good, as Kurtág’s idiom is instantly recognisable. Mihály and Frances-Marie Uitti, the cellist for whom Ligatura was written for, were both close friends of the composer.  Again, they are “questions” they are dialogue because Kurtág expresses character vividly. This isn’t abstract music, but full of joyous feeling.  In Ligatura, two violins and two cellos speak across the platform.  Irka-Firka, however, is more subtle, for the last chords are extremely slow and quiet, subsiding into silence.  The Sinfonia played with such intense concentration that even when the music faded, the sense of connection didn’t dissipate.

Yet the centrepiece of the evening was Charles Ives. Ives was a visionary. The Unanswered Question was first written in 1908, though revised in the 1930’s. This puts it before the experimental Schoenberg and Webern pieces heard earlier. Ives had ideas that went beyond the vocabulary of tonality.  He called this remarkable work a “cosmic drama” because there are so many interactions within it, and different levels which exist concurrently. It seems to hover in a state of continual  flux. Hearing it in the context of Kurtág, Schoenberg and Webern enhances the way Ives embeds miniatures of his own into the whole. He can deftly sketch references of marches and hymns, letting listeners develop them in their own minds.  There’s a lot going on in The Unanswered Question, and simultaneously, too, yet it’s concise and epigrammatic. This performance was very tightly conducted so the individual elements didn’t blur.  In the intimate acoustic of the hall at the Maltings, the trumpet solo sounded warm, almost like a human voice. The cello and violin quartet were ensconced neatly in the right wall in the middle of the auditorium, so the relationship with the orchestra worked well.  Isolated as Ives was, he intuited the “unanswered questions” that have intrigued composers for centuries : to pose questions, to find new ways of expression. Before the concert Aimard was asked if Schoenberg would “ever become popular”.  Aimard replied in a flash. “Why should he need to be popular ?”  Artists just have to be true to themselves and pose the questions.  It’s up to listeners to respond.

Anne Ozorio


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