Mordwand ! Bychkov Alpine Symphony Strauss Larcher

Devastating Strauss Eine Alpensinfonie Op 64 from Semyon Bychkov at Prom 57, majestic yet menacing,  as if inspired by the Mordwand, the "murder wall", pictured above, the north face of the Eiger, which has defied so many who've dared try conquering it.  This was an Alpine Symphony to defy those who don't understand Strauss or his self-deprecating good humour.  "It is a life journey", said Bychov on the re-broadcast, "It's deeply existential, it starts with one coming into the world, travelling through all the things that happen in one's life and then in the end, going back into the night and going into the next existence, whatever it is.... It is something that invokes very powerful images and deals with the entire spectrum of the human condition. For us on the stage it is like living a life in the span of fifty minutes or so.  It is full of tension, it is relentless. The 22 episodes succeed each other, but if one can unite them into one arch, uninterrupted, it gives the feeling of  a journey. It's full of joy, it's full of drama, pain, of suffering - it's everything"

Eine Alpensinfonie a Heldenleben? Mountains as metaphors for life, a subject on which I've written extensively (follow link below on mountains)  Bychkov's strong-minded Strauss could be a companion piece to Mahler's Symphony no 3, which Bychkov has also conducted extremely well.  The Alpine Symphony is shorter, but concise, the ideas more concentrated.   Even Bychkov's Mahler Symphony no 6 (read more here) was infused by this insight into the concept of landscape providing structure for metaphysical ideas.   In the "Nacht" episode, horns call us forwards, and cymbals crash. The "mountains" loom ahead, emerging out of the rumbling darkness into sunlight.   As Boulez used to say "Listen for the trajectory". No waffling here.  Bychkov leads the ascent with urgent, though not rushed purpose.  The lyrical segments use metaphors like forests and brook, but their value isn't merely scenic. The waterfall sparkles with life : the stream originates in a source high above, possibly from beneath the primeval glaciers.  Thus the bright sparkle in the orchestra, as if the music itself were infused by light, the wind instruments, literally suggesting wind, speed and  movement.

The "Erschienung" is a warning.  Elemental mountain spirits haunt alpine lore. In musical terms this introduces mystery, a reminder that getting lost in mountains can get you killed. The "meadows" of calm serve as a looking-back, a pause that highlights the arduous ascent. For a moment, we're rewarded with expansive vistas, the strings shining, the brass suggesting vast scale.  What is this "Vision"? Is it a panorama, or a glimpse of higher spiritual and artistic ideals?  But just as we think we've reached the high point, darker, more elusive elements enter.  In the mountains, storms can appear in sunny skies, as in life.  Bychkov shaped the quieter passages : single, sharp  bowings and pluckings carefully observed.  The timpani crash, the orchestra breaks out in tumult, though a tumult meticulously defined so its colours remain ferociously vivid.  Lose your wits in a mountain storm and you're dead. After the outburst, the music stretches again: elegantly but with affirmation.  Strauss includes celeste and organ for sonority, but also to suggest what might lie behind the transcendance. As Bychkov said, we don't know what lies ahead, but we are not really back at the beginning. though the diminuendos might evoke clouds and nightfall.  In this performance I kept imagining that I heard echoes of other works. including  Mahler 8, but definitely not direct quotes.  As in so many things, the wider your experience, the more you get out of life,  and the more you learn from your "journey", a message which does reflect the firm resolve of Strauss's conception.  Definitely not a "chocolate box" performance!  Bychkov's intelligence and clarity of vision made this an immensely rewarding traverse. 

At first, the connection between Strauss's Alpine Symphony and Thomas Larcher's Symphony no 2 "Cenotaph" might have seemed a stretch. Larcher lives in the Austrian Alps, apparently almost off grid, and much of his output  is mystically contemplative, like his Violin Concerto (more here), his Piano Concerto and his Die Nacht de Verlorenen (more here)  Larcher's Symphony no 2 grew from his anguish over the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, and the images of drowned children and fleeing migrants.  But don't expect a "programme" or any obvious signposts. Instead, it's a piece which deals with emotional response to crisis: shock, anger, frustration expressed through abstract sound. Thus the large orchestra and multiple voices,  complex cross-rhythms and density, a powerful repetitive theme which pounds fiercely, dissipated only by rising, sharp figures that then explode in an outburst of fast-moving flurries.  A hollow non-melody where the bow of a single violin skitters over wood is absorbed by the orchestra but then emerges once again, after silence.   Vividly angular lines, wind machines, dizzying changes of tempo. The insistent pounding repetitions seems to rise like an insane dance, then disintegrate into shards, followed by an odd but very beautiful quasi-minuet that breaks off after a few bars, then revives in the third  movement, a scherzo where the repetitions become fuller, and more circular.  The lone violin returns for a brief moment, followed hy low drones and then silence.  (Photo of Thomas Larcher above copyright Richard Haughton.)

"I want to explore the forms of our musical past under the light of the (musical and human) developments we have been part of during our lifetime"  Larcher wrote for the premiere this June where Bychkov conducted it with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra  "How can we find tonality that speaks in our time? And how can the old forms speak to us? These are questions I often ask myself. This piece is very much about different forms of energy: bundled, scattered, smooth, kinetic or furious."   This Proms season, there have been premieres which have been just awful as music ( Lera Auerbach), barely redeemed by good performance, and work ruined by conductors who think one  size fits all, regardless of genre (no names, but thank goodness one of these is moving on).  Bychkov doesn't conduct much new music, but here he showed what a real conductor can do when he cares enough about music to do it properly.  Larcher's Symphony no 2 is a keeper. If the BBC would programme good new music with good performances, instead of commissioning titbits  and populist crossover, audiences would realize what's really happening in the world. 

Between two pieces of non-programmatic work based on theoretical programmes, Richard Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder in Felix Mottl's orchestration, with soloist Elisabeth Kulman.  Pleasant enough but, for once, Wagner didn't eclipse all else.

Markus Stenz LPO Thomas Larcher

Markus Stenz conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall London this week. The concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio. An odd programme beginning with Beethoven Symphony no 1 and ending with Stravinsky The Rite of Spring, the latter better realized than the first.

Between them,  Thomas Larcher's Violin Concerto with Patricia Kopatchinskaja. Larcher's music is programmed quite frequently in London. He's even been the subject of a Thomas Larcher Day at the Wigmore Hall, and has had much support from the Austrian Embassy and the London Sinfonietta. Although I've heard quite a lot of his music, I haven't really written much about it as it's hard to verbalize. It's rather like trying to describe air, or to hold flowing water in your hands. Larcher's Violin Concerto works for me as an evocation of ephemeral moods: fleeting impressions of something invisible flying past, evanescent yet with genuine substance.

Larcher's Violin Concerto, premiered in Vienna in 2009 by Isabelle Faust,  starts with a fairly conventional theme, the violin bowed gently to suggest  a lullaby, as if an infant were being rocked gently back and forth. This momentum seems to flow throughout the piece, holding the elusive textures together, allowing the solist to "converse" thoughtfully with the orchestra.  Other sounds enter - delicately plucked violins, deeper-voiced woodwinds, marimba and harp, beaten metallic percussion that sometimes suggest cowbells, sometimes hurrying , whirling figures. Overall, the evocation of light, movement underpinned by unhurried confidence. Kopatchinskaja carves jagged diagonals with her bow  and the music takes off in frenzied turbulence, skidding off the edges of the scale, so high and so quiet that the notes are barely perceptible. Bell sounds sparkle in the background. Kopatchinskaja draws out long lines that sway upwards and down then extend almost into infinity. Quiet tapping in the percussion, like a steady heartbeat.

Some Thomas Larcher works for me, some doesn't. But his Violin Concerto resonates on a very deep emotional level. Larcher lives a simple life on a mountain in Austria. a fact which is very relevant to his music, which has a purity that feels timeless, beyond  the toxic pollution that so often passes for emotion in this world.  Please also read my piece on Thomas Larcher's Die Nacht der Velorenen, at its London premiere in 2008.

Goerne - Larcher Die Nacht der Verlorenen

Thomas Larcher's Die Nacht der Velorenen really is an interesting work, which we'll probably hear more of. His publishers are Schott, though this piece isn't available yet. However, his 2002 song cycle for soprano, violin, cello and piano, My illness is the Medicine I need is available. In fact it's being performed at the Wigmore Hall on 24 November with Claire Booth, who's very good indeed – another must-go concert. Böse Zellen, also premiered by the London Sinfonietta this week, will be on at Zankel Hall in May (piano and orchestra).

The texts used are recently published fragments from Ingeborg Bachmann, the poet who fascinated Paul Celan and Hans Werner Henze. These aren't formal poems, but fragments, but it was this very brittleness that attracted the composer, "to transcend their rawness by compositional means". So, not conventional word painting but the opposite. It's as if the music expresses what's beyond the text. The singer listens a lot, the words singing like a commentary on the music. This was written for Matthias Goerne, and it sounds as if it was written "with" him, too, for there's a lot of "listening", dialogue between voice and orchestra, as if they are bouncing ideas off each other. Larcher uses an interesting sub group of piano, double bass and, of all things, an accordion, whose dark timbre reflects the baritone's voice.

The introduction is fairly long - fast, rustling figures shrill but clear, then gently deflating diminuendo that becomes softly pounding ostinato. I thought at the time of a clear stream, like a brook in Schubert churning along, entering a deep, still pool. The "pounding" of piano, accordion and double bass made me think of rocks on riverbeds. So what a surprise to read Larcher's note in the programme later: "Here I was encountering not polished surfaces but instead rough stones, on to which I could hold and claw my way forward." It's certainly not literal, descriptive music, so it's uncanny that such images jumped into my imagination.

The poems blend into the music, and sometimes elide into one another. "Ich habe die Wahrheit gesehen .......verschlungen von einer Riesenschlange die in ihren Bauch sie aufbläht..." the piano beats crazy staccato, the winds swirling, circular figures. The dark centre of the cycle is a simple 6 line poem "Im Lot" It's numb, beyond pain "Du sollst ja nicht weinen". Instead of crying, the sense of tight chested breathing, impassive yet unpeaceful, watching, listening, tense. Suddenly tubular bells from the percussion lifting out of the misery, yet distant, and the "riverbed" ostinato returns – this is literally "rock bottom ".

What';s also striking about this piece is the physicality, the sense of "breathing", up and down cadences like exhalation and inhalation. It gives an eerie sense of presence, like there's someone unseen hidden in the music. So all that listening has a very natural, organic feel, the idea of dialogue again. The final song "So stürben wir um getrennt zu sein" is tantalisingly inconclusive, opening outwards yet again. The clear Schubertian brook, but deceptively so. The poet is trying to sound confident but it's illusion, and she knows it.

An absolutely magnificent performance by Matthias Goerne. Of the three concerts he sang in six days, this was the finest, exceptional, perhaps closest to his heart. Audience ecstatic – a wonderful piece of music, so original and distinctive.