Garden of Joys and Sorrows
Miguel del AGUILA (b.1957)
Submerged (2013) [9:16]
Claude DEBUSSY (1862-1918)
Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, L.137 (1915) [17:00]
Toru TAKEMITSU (1930-1996)
And then I knew ’twas Wind (1992) [12:21]
Théodore DUBOIS (1837-1924)
Terzettino (1905) [5:07]
Sofia GUBAIDULINA (b.1931)
Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten (1980) [15:17]
Francisco Tanzer’s poem. ‘Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten’
read by Aine Zimmermann [0:37]
hat trick
rec. 2014, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City
Premiere Recording (Aguila)
BRIDGE 9472 [59:41]
Although this was disc was issued in 2016, it remains as compelling as many newer issues, and has not previously been reviewed on this site.
The still point around which this well-constructed programme revolves is Debussy’s Sonata. The work by Takemitsu adopts that Sonata as a point of reference; Dubois’s Terzettino is a little-known predecessor of Debussy’s late masterpiece. The works by del Aguilar and Gubaidulina, in their different ways, extend the sound world of this particular combination of instruments. There are other subtle links too – del Aguilar’s Submerged, Takemitsu’s And then I knew ’twas Wind and Gubaidulina’s Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten are all responses to poems (and, though it wasn’t the case with this Sonata, Debussy was often inspired by literary texts in similar fashion).
The Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, at the heart of this disc, gets a fine performance from hat trick, sensitive, beautiful and alert, content to let the work retain its emotional ambiguity – Debussy reportedly observed of the work that he was unable to say whether it “should move us to laughter or to tears. Perhaps both at once?”. There are, of course, more than a few good recordings of this Sonata: my own favourites include those by Philippe Barnold, Gérard Caussé and Isabelle Moretti (Harmonia Mundi HMG501647) and by the Athena Ensemble (Chandos CHAN8385). But this present recording has one special claim to attention. It was the first recording made using the edition by Carl Swanson, produced after meticulous comparison of the score printed by Durand with Debussy’s manuscript. The resulting changes are not dramatic, but they are certainly numerous. In a note printed in the booklet for this CD, Swanson reports that “comparing the manuscript to the Durand edition uncovered 124 measures, (from a total of 319 in the entire Sonata), that in some way differ from the original autograph.” In the 124 measures concerned there are differences of dynamic, tempo or articulation.
The opening ‘Pastorale’ of Debussy’s Sonata has always seemed to me to have an ethereal quality that seems to speak as much or more of the otherworldly as of a ‘mere’ pastoral scene (Unless perhaps we are to think of it as Eden). In this performance April Clayton’s flute sounds positively angelic and both David Wallace and Kirsti Shade produce sounds of complementary purity, all captured radiantly in the recorded sound (hats off to recording engineer Silas Brown). The relatively ‘free’ form of the ‘Pastorale’ is replaced by a greater rhythmic definition in the second movement, marked ‘Interlude: Tempo di Minuett’, though even here any ‘minuet’ is an almost insubstantial remembrance, rather than a flesh and blood dance. The timbral blend of the three musicians who make up hat trick leaves nothing to be desired; their playing, especially in the last minute or so of the ‘Interlude’ is exceptionally fine. The finale, ‘Allegro moderato ma risoluto’ is equally impressive, powerfully evocative of mood and emotion. It is this movement that the emotional ambiguity is at its most marked (see Debussy’s own comments quoted above) and hat trick wisely refuse to simplify the music into plain clarity.
Debussy is often credited with effectively ‘inventing’ the trio of flute, viola and harp when he wrote his Sonata. (Interestingly, Debussy first planned the Sonata as a work for flute, oboe and harp). Certainly, the finished Sonata was the first major work written for the combination of flute, viola and harp. That isn’t, however, to say that no works at all existed for this combination of instruments before Debussy’s Sonata. one which Debussy could conceivably have heard is included here by hat trick. This is the Terzettino of 1905 by Théodore Dubois (1837-1924). Dubois, who mainly composed Church music, was a competent enough composer, though of limited imagination. Initially a church organist, he later became choirmaster of two important churches in Paris, the Madeleine and the Basilica of Sainte-Clotilde. The author of treatises on harmony and counterpoint, in 1871 he began to teach at the Paris Conservatoire. He was made Director of the Conservatoire in 1896; a post he held until 1905. His attitudes were ultra-conservative. Burnett James aptly described him as “a rigid conventionalist”. He was the bane of Ravel’s life at the Conservatoire and generally opposed any music he thought of as progressive. In 1902, for example, he forbade students from attending performances of Debussy’s Pelléas et Melisande (though one assumes that those who wanted to hear the opera went anyway). When Ravel entered the competition for the Prix de Rome in 1905 (which he had previously sought unsuccessfully), his work was rejected in the very first round, deemed incompetent and unworthy of further consideration. Controversy ensued both in the press and in person – though Ravel stayed aloof from it – and eventually Dubois felt that he had no alternative but to resign. He was succeeded by Gabriel Fauré and, viewed retrospectively, Dubois’ departure seems to mark the beginning of a more liberated and tolerant spirit in the world of Parisian music. In the booklet notes for the present CD (unsigned) we read that Dubois’ Terzettino was “premiered in Paris by musicians at the Conservatory, who, (there is no question) were known to Debussy. It seems unlikely that Debussy would have been completely unaware of this piece, although it is possible”. There is certainly no firm evidence that Debussy heard or read Dubois’ piece, but the booklet writer’s claim that “the charming Terzettino by Dubois was quite possibly a seed planted in Debussy’s fertile mind” is not unreasonable. Dubois’ piece is, indeed, “charming”. But its charm is entirely worldly – quite without the airiness and iridescence of Debussy’s Sonata. If – and it’s a big if – Debussy was aware of Dubois’ composition it didn’t influence him in the sense that he found anything there (save the instrumentation itself) that he could use. It would, though, be a nice irony if all-unknowingly Dubois made possible a work of Debussy’s that he would, no doubt, have disliked as much as he objected to Pelléas et Melisande.
All the other works on this disc were, of course, written after the example of Debussy’s Sonata. Sofia Gubaidulina’s Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten gives the disc its title. This is a hauntingly beautiful work, in its way as remarkable as Debussy’s masterpiece – one might, indeed, see Gubaidulina’s composition as making overt the spiritual dimension that was largely left implicit in Debussy’s Sonata. Gubaidulina’s vividly creative use of glissandi and harmonics extends Debussy’s sound-world. It would no doubt be glib to describe this piece as a dialogue between time and the timeless, or even between joy and sorrow. But support for such views might be found in a note on the work written by the composer herself. It can be found on the pages of Wise Music Classical, but since it is both brief and profoundly suggestive, I quote it in full here:
“The garden of joy and sorrow is a one-movement piece for harp, flute and viola. It was conceived under the strong influence of two directly contradictory literary phenomena: 1) the work "Sayat-Nova” by Iv Oganov (Moscow), about the famous Eastern story-teller and singer, and 2) verses by the 20th century German poet Francisco Tanzer. Vivid Eastern color was counterposed to a typically Western consciousness. But both of these works had significant inner similarities: their contemplativeness and refinement.
Such phrases in Iv Oganov – "the ordeal of a flower’s pain,” "…the peal of the singing garden grew…,” "…the revelation of the rose…,” "…the lotus was set aflame by music,” "…the white garden began to ring again with diamond borders…” – impelled me to a concrete aural perception of this garden.
And, on the other hand, all this ecstatic flowering of the garden was expressed naturally in the sum reflections of the F. Tanzer about the world and its wholeness.
At the basis of the musical rendering of the form of this piece is the opposition of the bright, major coloration of the sphere of natural harmonics against the expression of the intervals of minor second and minor third.”
The “world and its wholeness” strikes me as the key phrase here. Because - to quote lines from the poem by the Viennese poet Francisco Tanzer (1921-2003) – apparent distinctions and borders are illusory:
When is it really over?
What is the true end?
All borders seem
like a line drawn with a stick of wood
or the heel of a shoe
into the earth.
(quoted from the uncredited translation in the CD booklet).
As Gubaidulina’s score suggests should be done, the original German text of Tanzer’s poem is read after Gubaidulina’s musical response to it. Unity and wholeness, in which seeming opposites meet and are reconciled, distinctions transcended, are the very stuff of Gubaidulina’s music. Even in a ‘geographical’ sense Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten moves across ‘expected’ borders. Three decidedly western instruments produce distinctly non-western sounds. In some passages Rebecca Clarke’s western, metal flute sounds remarkably like a bamboo flute and Kristi Shade’s harp seems to metamorphose into a koto! The whole is a musical meditation on the unity which exists beyond appearances and words, an experience of a world where in Shakespeare’s wonderful words “Single nature’s double name / Neither two nor one was called” (‘The Phoenix and Turtle’).
If Gubaidulina requires techniques which make flute, viola and harp sound like Eastern instruments, Miguel del Aguila’s Submerged (which was commissioned by hat trick with the support of Brigham Young University), uses them to create a sound-world redolent of South America. Del Aguila was born in Montevideo, capital of Uruguay. However, he left Uruguay in 1978 to escape the country’s military dictatorship and made his way to California. He studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and, after graduating, moved to the Hochschule für Musik und Konservatorium in Vienna; some of his early compositions were premiered in Vienna. He returned to the USA in 1992 and has, I believe, largely lived on the West Coast of the USA since then, initially in Southern California. He appears now to be based in Seattle. His work has been played widely in the USA and recorded by a number of American companies, such as Troy, Albany, Centaur and others. Much of his work remembers and articulates his Latin-American origins. So, for example, Submerged grows from del Aguila’s reading of a poem ‘Yo en el fondo del mar’ (Me at the Bottom of the Sea) by the Argentinian poet Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938), which was first collected in her book Mundo de siete pozos (World of Seven Wells) in 1934. The poem is a kind of dramatic monologue in which the speaker describes how she lives in a house of crystal at the bottom of the sea, sleeping on “una cama/un poco mas azul/que el mar” (a bed a little bluer than the sea), where a “pez d’oro” (a golden fish) brings her “un rojo ramo/de flores de coral” (a red bouquet of coral flowers). The vision might, in 1934, have sounded rather beautiful, but with hindsight, knowing that the poet committed suicide just four years later by drowning herself in the sea off Mar del Plata, it takes on a different complexion as one sees in the poem’s imagery a kind of self-dissolution.
Early in Submerged descending chords on the harp seem to enact the initial submersion in the sea and del Aguila’s writing skillfully and vividly creates a richly coloured sense of the magical, of an alternative world. But the waters are soon busily turbulent and the underwater world becomes a metaphor of an isolated and disturbed mind. Yet chirruping birds seem, at moments, to be heard from somewhere above the waves (or perhaps their singing is remembered by the drowning woman?). The colours created by del Aguila’s writing, with just three instruments at his disposal, are remarkable. These colours are achieved, in part, because as well as using the instruments in the more-or-less conventional western ways, del Aguila requires of their players the imitation of sounds associated with native South American instruments. Thus the viola (through the use of repeated multiple stop pizzicati) is made to sound very much like a charango (a small lute-like instrument of the Andes), the flute imitates the timbre of the quena (the wooden flute of the Andes) and the harp is often played percussively (on its frame as well as its strings) as it often is in Andean music.
In short, both Gubaidulina and del Aguila have used Debussy’s (and Dubois’) instrumentation in radically new ways to create intensely personal and distinctive music – del Aguila’s being the more extrovert and ‘exciting’, Gubaidulina’s the more meditative and spiritual.
I have often seen Toru Takemitsu quoted as having said “Although I am basically self-taught, I consider Debussy my teacher - the most important elements are colour, light and shadow” but I don’t know when or where he is supposed to have said it. Even if he didn’t ever say it, I think anyone who listened attentively to Takemitsu’s music would reach the same conclusion independently. Takemitsu’s work for the trio of flute, viola and harp, And then I knew ’twas Wind was, like Debussy’s Sonata, a late work, being written four years before the composer’s death, rather as Debussy’s sonata was written three years before his death. And Takemitsu actually quotes from Debussy’s work, in a rising figure played by the viola about one and a half minutes in. Takemitsu’s title comes from a poem by that supremely idiosyncratic genius Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). The first four lines of the poem read thus: “Like Rain it sounded till it curved / And then I knew ’twas Wind – / It walked as wet as any Wave / But swept as Dry as sand – ”. Takemitsu had for some time been interested in the way water and air moved, and in ways of ‘representing’ or perhaps better, ‘finding musical equivalents’ for such subtle movements. Takemitsu said of And then I knew ’twas Wind that it had as “as its subject the signs of the wind in the natural world and of the soul, or unconscious mind (or we could even call it ‘dream’), which continues to blow, like the wind, invisibly through human consciousness” – quoted thus by violist and composer Jonathan Blumhofer
In his pursuit of such an aim, Takemitsu converts the instrumentation of Debussy’s Sonata into what one might metaphorically think of a as a three-person Aeolian harp. (One might usefully relate this work to a composition of the previous year, How slow the Wind). And then I knew ’twas Wind is as intriguing as it is beautiful. Fragments of melody fade and grow (though some of them are longer here than they often were in Takemitsu’s work); possibilities of various kinds are hinted at but left undeveloped; the whole has a dream-like quality, full of uncompleted episodes and unfulfilled possibilities, in which neat forms and conclusions remain fugitive, but nothing feels trivial or without meaning. As they do throughout the disc, the members of hat trick give a committed performance full of empathy and insight and with an impressive sense of ensemble togetherness.
The best musical ensembles (or, indeed, soloists) don’t only produce interesting interpretations and compelling performances of individual works, new or old; they also serve the music they love by putting together well-designed programmes (whether in the concert hall or the recording studio), in which a series of works illuminate one another and produce a whole which has a greater impact than the sum of its individual parts. This CD is a happy example of all of this – in terms both of performance and programming. That makes Garden of Joys and Sorrows a very desirable disc – even if (perhaps, ironically, especially if) one already owns more than one recording of the Debussy Sonata for flute, viola and harp.
Glyn Pursglove
Performers
April Clayton – flute, David Wallace – viola, Kristi Shade – harp
