Stephen Hough's new hat - Herbstlieder

Stephen Hough's famous as a pianist, but at the Oxford Lieder Festival he wore a new hat as composer. Previously all I'd heard of Hough's own music was a piece written for the Sacred Made Real exhibition at the National Gallery. Against those phenomenally powerful visual images, it had no chance. So I came expecting to be polite. Instead, I'm most sincerely impressed,.

A coup for the Oxford Lieder Festival! Hough's Herbstlieder is a good addition to the repertoire.  Set to texts by Rainer Maria Rilke, it's a meditation on themes loosely connected with autumn, the passing of time, days drawing in, regret, the end of fruitfulness, and all that implies in life. Herbstlieder is impressionistic, creating an atmosphere as nebulous as autumnal mists.

It's quiet, too, like meditation. Herbstlieder starts with a simple cadence of separate chords fluttering downwards. "Like leaves falling" said Hough in the pre-concert talk. Diminuendi don't necessarily diminish. The chords that link the first two songs mark a subtle progression. Rilke writes of a star seit Jahrtausenden tot, whose light still reaches us from afar.A strange image : ein weisse Stadt an Ende des Strahls in den Himmeln steht. A white city seen in the heavens at the end of a ray of light. Hough sets these words so the crescendo rises right to the top, to the limits of the register. Whatever the image might mean, the connection is made between the lone individual on earth and distant galaxies beyond.

In Trănenkrūglein, images of jugs being filled and emptied. Circular, cascading piano part,  but at the conclusion, the vocal line pauses, like the last drops dripping from a jug. Machen ...mich....leer. (make me empty), Bestūrz mich, Musik is its companion piece. Big, bold phrasing, the piano part almost staccato. In the midst of the turmoil an unadorned line Mein Herz: Da!, emphasis on the da.The voice part swells passionately, evoking the Posaune des Engels, (the Final Judgement)  Filled to overflowing, the music subsides.

The final song, Herbst, reverts to hushed, autumnal contemplation. Indeed, much of it is parlando. A pianist composer writing his own instrument out of the picture? Yet in some ways, that's the spirit of Rilke's poem. Und in der Năchten făllt die schwere Erde.(and in the end Earth itself will fall) like the distant stars. Individual striving is no big deal in the eternal scheme of things. Und doch ist einer, welcher dieses Fallen, unendlich sanft in seinen Hănden fast. (And yet there is one who holds these fallen gently, eternally in his hands)  Eichendorff or Rūckert might have been specific about the "one", but with Rilke we can imagine a more abstract communion with the cosmos. 

Hough spoke about writing these songs three years ago while he was in a hotel in Seoul, Korea. Even in this maniacally busy world of 24/7 communication, we're often isolated. But it's not necessarily a bad thing if we can switch off the mental muzak around us and think beyond ourselves. Far from being noisy and dissonant a great deal of modern music is like this - pure, abstract, contemplative. There are no jolly jingles in Herbstlieder to worm their way into your mind and distract. Yet that's precisely why it's such a good piece. Wolfgang Rihm, darling of modern German music, said of his hero, Wilhelm Killmayer, "His scores are all white!"  Think of Webern's aphorisms, Kurtág's tiny fragments, antidotes to the frantic turmoil around us. Stephen Hough's nowhere near that league, but he's a lot closer to the real avant garde than he realizes.

Good performance by Alisdair Hogarth and Jacques Imbrailo, who seems to intuit the spirituality of these songs. We will get to hear them again, as there may be a recording in the offing. In the meantime, track down the publisher. See Stephen Hough's site for more.

This is the sort of adventurous music Oxford Lieder Festival is famous for. Also premiered in this recital was a new piece by Ned Rorem, a setting of Shakespeare Sonnet 147, (My love  is as a fever longing still) jointly commissioned by the Oxford Lieder Festival and Prince Consort. They're relatively impecunious but what they have, they invest in long-term benefits for art song. It's an excellent piece, wavy cadences, baritone and tenor artfully blended, the piano tolling like a bell at the culmination.

The Prince Consort also sang songs from Schumann Spanisches Liederspiel and Spanische Liebeslieder. Read about their concert of Rorem's Evidence of Things Not Seen at rthe Oxford Lieder Festival in 2009.

Please read my other posts on Oxford Lieder, Prince Consort and Jacques Imbrailo. (Use search facility or labels below)  Photo credit : Grant Hiroshima

Rilke and a tale worthy of him

There's a long article about Rilke HERE

The picture is by Paula Modersohn-Becker, from whose work I first learned of Rilke's existence. The picture was in a book published in Dresden in 1929, part of a huge series tracing German art from 1400 to 1929. Dozens of volumes, thousands of paintings, each one reproduced in full colour on specially prepared luxury paper and then pasted into the volumes by hand. The reproduction was superb, a lot of love and expense went into making the prints state of the art.

What an enterprise it must have been! Later I discovered that it was a limited edition series, which makes sense - something so lovingly produced could not have been made in vast quantities. My father found some volumes in a second-hand shop in China after the war, presumably looted. People suffered so much in the war that houses were stripped to their bricks, and then the bricks sold on for pittances. Books were used as firewood. So how did these survive? Maybe they were looked after until the end, perhaps by "the enemy", who ended up losing them anyway.

As a kid, I'd sit and pore over the Durers, and Caspar David Friedrichs, even page after page of obscure Bavarian genre painters whose main subjects were dead animals and young dudes showing off their horses. Because the texts were in German, it seemed all the more mysterious.

The Modersohn-Becker pictures were in a special volume devoted to 20th century German painting - Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Lyonel Feiniger etc. I was fascinated to think about a group of women artists living in a cold, windy place by the North Sea. Needless to say, many of those paintings no longer exist, destroyed by the Nazis, fire bombs and the deaths of their owners. "Degenerate art" – one picture was a rabbi. But a lot of the Old Masters would have been destroyed too. And the people involved in making the series, too, even the menials pasting each picture, one by one. What strange fate preserved those volumes? I'll never know but I'm grateful. Every now and then, in a museum, I'll spot a painting and chuckle, like meeting an old friend after years apart ."So you survived, huh?" "Yes", says the painting, "You've aged a bit, too".

Rainer Maria Rilke : Letters to a Young Poet

Notice how this portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke is composed. Only the poet's face and hands are clearly visible, disembodied, floating eerily in the darkness. In the room you can make out what looks like a desk, a clock, but what room is it and why is he there? Like the photo in the corner the closer you look the more the portrait opens windows. Who is this strange, forbidding man who stares glaring at the camera?

Rilke is an intriguing personality, who connects to many aspects of early 20th century thought. His poems and prose writings are dense, impenetrable, best read in small doses and ruminated upon. Setting Rilke to music isn't easy. Viktor Ullmann (of whom I've written a lot) set many of Rilke's poems. Frank Martin wrote a song cycle on Rilke's Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke and there's an opera by Siegfried Malthus. which I saw in its second production in the early 90's. Rilke's been set by composers as diverse as Alma Mahler and K H Stockhausen. In November, at the Wigmore Hall, Soile Isokoski will be singing Paul Hindemith's Das Marien-leben, to Rilke's text.

So naturally any composer fascinated by Rilke is going to interest me. Steven Ebel, one of the Jette Parker Young Artists at the Royal Opera House, is a serious Rilke fan and has written a piece based on Rilke's Diary of a Young Poet. Rilke embedded reference in his letters to many references to works the young poet he was advising needed to know about if he wanted to develop his art. So Ebel's piece, The Truth about Love works in three parts, pivoting Schumann's Frauenliebe und Liebe with Britten's Cabaret Songs and Ebel's setting of Rilke texts. The songs are intact, what's interesting is the way they flow back and forth, like the way ideas in Rilke's work move and develop. Read about Ebel's ambitious venture HERE. Young composers need support and encouragement, but especially those with courage and imagination. Ebel sings extremely well, and there aren't that many composers who really understand how to write for voice.

Rilke was an established poet when the complete stranger wrote to him, hich is why the other man asked him for advice. Far from dismissing the young unknown, Rilke treated him with respect, giving him detailed advice over a period of several years. The letters themselves are an education. Whether the young poet became a great writer or not is immaterial: his life was enhanced by what he learned about life, art and why people write. Read the letters in English translation HERE. Getting ahead doesn't mean sneering at others and squashing competition. Rilke shows that caring is important. That's why he inspires me so much.

PS Tomorrow I'll be writing about the Oxford Lieder Festival.