Julian Anderson Wigmore Hall

Julian Anderson's first opera The Thebans comes to the ENO next year. Any opera by a major British composer is important, so Julian Anderson Day at the Wigmore Hall provided welcome insight.  Anderson has just been appointed Composer in Residence at the Wigmore Hall, the latest acolade in a career that will probably win him a knighthood at some stage.. He's a big figure in British music, as a teacher, presenter and musician. His music is accessible enough to have broad appeal, and original enough to earn respect.

"Harmony" from The Thebans featured at this year's BBC Proms but those few minutes could hardly make much impact, though they reflected Anderson's interest in writing large choral pieces. Ironically, the chamber works at the Wigmore Hall might give better clues as to what The Thebans might be like.

Writing opera is very different to writing abstract music. Anderson, however, has always been a surprisingly graphic composer. Visual images inspire his music and enrich its interpretation. His Alhambra Fantasy (2000) was stimulated by Islamic architecture, his Eden (2004) by Brancusi, The Book of Hours (2005) by the miniatures in  Trés riches heures du Duc de Berry, and even Symphony (2003), despite its non-commital title, owes much to the paintings of Sibelius's friend, Axel Gallen-Kallela. Perhaps it's relevant that Anderson studied with Tristan Murail and others influenced by Olivier Messiaen, a composer who believed in a synthesis of sound and colour.  This bodes well for The Thebans. Not many composers think visually, so if Anderson's librettist, playwright Frank McGuinness, comes up with a good script. the ENO might have a hit on its hands..

Anderson's Another Prayer (2012) isn't visual, but inspired by the untempered pitches in Bartók's original Violin Sonata (1944), so hearing it played by András Keller was specially rewarding. Keller is perhaps one of the greatest interpreters of Bartók and Kurtág, so the wild urgency he brought to the piece felt intuitively idiomatic. Snatches of melody appear, like ghosts of Hungarian peasant dance, untamed and elusive. It's technically challenging, involving subtle changes in bowing technique and pressure. The pace accelerates until it levitate into the highest harmonic pitches the instrument can reach. Quite dramatic. 

"Music is pictures of music", Hans Abrahamsen has said. "....the fictional aspect that one moves around in an imaginary space of music." At the Wigmore Hall, members of the Aurora Orchestra played Abrahamsen's Walden, written thirty years ago. It's the wind quintet precursor of Abrahamsen's Wald, conducted by Oliver Knussen at the BBC Proms in 2010. The horn (Katie Pryce) leads us deeper into this aural landscape. It feels timeless, like the call of an ancient hunting horn. Bassoon and bass clarinet create dark undertones,while oboe and flute play lilting fragments of melody. But this is by no means mere impressionism. Abrahamsen builds up dense textures from independent and interacting instrumental cells. Just as in nature, multiple layers of sound co-exist. We have to be alert to hear the patterns and nuances. It is in this way that Abrahamsen really translates Henry David Thoreau's concepts. We retreat from "civilization"  and received values into a pure state of listening. Walden feels organic, as if it's resonating physical and emotional processes.
 
Anderson's Tiramisu (1994) operates in layers, though it's based on multiple sub groups within the  orchestra and doesn't refer to the dessert. It's a delicious confection, however, where the segments dance along, separately and together.  I thought of whimsical cartoons, from the era when cartoons were created around serious classical music, and were themselves a form of art in visual motion.

With Anderson's The Thebans coming to the ENO, it's a good time to consider Salvatore Sciarrino's approach to music drama.  Sciarrino's Killing Flower (Luci me tradici) was heard recently in London. (Read more here), but he's written extensively for music theatre. Although Sciarrino's music is exceptionally refined, it lends itself well to drama. It's not "grand" opera in the sense of semaphore emotions and bombast  but more esoteric.  In Luci me tradici, words fragment as they do in  normal conversation.  People communicate in many non-verbal ways. Sciarrino's narratives lie in abstract sounds which the listener translates into concrete images. Anderson, of course, might do something completely different!

For me, the key to Sciarrino lies in his chamber music,  so it was good to hear two movements from ....da un Divertimenti (1969-70) at the Wigmore Hall, sections III Romanza, Adagio and IV Scherzo. . They are fragments of a larger piece which hasn't been published. Quite intriguing, stimulating the imagination. Although textures are rarified to an almost homeopathic degree, dissipating beyond the pitch of the human ear, Sciarrino's music grows from firm structural foundations.  Much of the impact of  Luci me tradici stems from the formalized nature of dance, suggesting the restrictions of courtly life from which the protagonists cannot escape. One thinks, too, of Renaissance architecture and the black and white mosaic contrasts of Italian style. In these fragments, we can hear the ghosts of classical form, elegantly poised, evaporating into something totally new, original.and highly distinctive. Such inventiveness com ressed into a small time frame, but also opening outwards.

Julian Anderson's The Comedy of Change (2009) employs similar instrumentation to the Sciarrino fragments. "Comedy" here refers to the Elizabethan use of the term, ie  happenstance and unexpected outcomes. Anderson's starting point was Charles Darwin, and the odd ways evolution creates diversity.  Long plates of sound, interspersed with small, rapidly moving figures. "20 million years in 3 minutes!", says Anderson in his notes, the "lumbering movement of  Galapagos giant tortoises". But it would be wrong to take this music too literally. Rather, enjoy the whimsy and invention, and use your imagination. Oliver Knussen premiered this work two years ago with the London Sinfonietta, an ideal "fit" between composer and conductor. At the Wigmore Hall,  Nicholas Collon conducted the Aurora Orchestra, in a performance of wit and charm.
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Salvatore Sciarrino Killing Flower (Luci mie traditrici)

Why was only one performance of Music Theatre Wales' production of Salvatore Sciarrino's Killing Flower (Luci mie traditrici) scheduled for the Linbury Theatre? Tickets sold out so fast that even middle-level Friends of the Royal Opera House didn't get a chance. No hope for ordinary Friends or the public. Chances are that the Sciarrino audience is bigger in London than, say, Buxton or Llandudno, where it's toured and touring to. New music does sell, and Sciarrino's big news.  It will be interesting to read what the fashionable crowd make of Killing Flower.

Coming to Sciarrino's Killing Flower via his chamber music prepares you for its strange, exquisite beauty.  Please read some of my earlier posts on Sciarrino's music, especially like this. which describes his ideas and techniques. 
 
A disembodied female voice is heard, singing unaccompanied, from a distance. The melody is seductive, but strange, like renaissance music heard distorted throuuh the filter of of time. What has become of those inn the drama that's about to unfold?  Already we're thinking ahead, beyond the initial drama. Legato gives way to fragments of disjointed sound. Sentences are short, snatched moments of connection that break off leaving images half-formed, like conversation in real life, where meaning is conveyed through unconscious signals. Darkness, blood, lilies, roses, breath, death. Like most of Sciarrino's music, you listen with your senses alert, picking up details. What is that growling, snorting sound behind the singers? It's at once metallic and animal, suggesting something horrible to come. .

In the Italian version of this opera, the word "poco" emerges clearly at the critical points, hinting at changes of direction. Suddenly we hear Renaissance music, of a sort. How sweet and grave this sounds! the formal dance gives way to a new scene. It's noon and the couple are in a garden - we hear twitterings and rustlings  and strange scraping sounds. Two high-pitched voices, which break into soaring arcs. La Malaspina and the Guest are up to something: we hear the servant commenting, in dark muted tones. A longish orchestral passage, circling sounds, growling, breathing."E questo?" sings Il Malaspina, "What's up?", the words repeat and twisting on themselves. Violent crashes in the orchestra, rumbling thunder. Poisonous thoughts are seeping into Il Malaspina's mind: listen to the "water" sounds in the Prelude to Act II,  the wailing contortions and plaintive squeals. The wife thinks she's got away with things, but the husband has other plans. Their voices encircle each other, stalking and hyper observant.

Notice the elegant formal structure of this  opera, suggesting mazes and stratagems. In the third intermezzo, the dance music we heard before becomes more jagged, with turbulent sounds - wind? Blood rushing in one's ears?  The "inferno" mentioned in the text?  Slow deliberate drumbeats, like the tense pounding of a heartbeat?  Tense, whirring vibrations. Sciarrino makes us use our ears and imaginations. In the final scene, the couple hover over the bed where they once loved. At first, they're speaking, but gradually she realizes what's happening. Is this murder or a suicide ? Il Malaspina's last words are oddly matter of fact. The music has already spoken.

ROH 2013-2014 Linbury Studio Theatre

The Royal Opera House main hall season 2013-2014 is good. The more you delve the more intriguing it gets. Same, too, for the 2013-2014 season in the Linbury Studio Theatre. Real cutting edge stuff coming up, but tried and trusted too. What a pity that the Linbury is too small to accomodate the audience it could attract. Plus, the seating is so cramped that anyone over 40 or 5 foot 6 cannot sit in comfort. Perhaps ROH should be thinking like Nicholas Kenyon at the Barbican, who is outsourcing medium sized events outside the main building.  The Linbury is fine for bijou miniatures, but some of the performances here are important enough, and popular enough, to merit the performance spaces they deserve.

First off : The Wasp Factory, based on Iain Banks's cult novel, with a libretto by David Pountney.  It describes "the disturbing acts of a psychopathic teenager ..... as part of a self-invented warrior cult, he uses a home made apparatus called the Wasp Factory to determine whom he will kill next and how.". Composer and director is Ben Frost.  This is a co-production with Bregenz, Hebbel-am-Ufer, The Holland Festival and the Cork Midsummer Festival, which sounds promising.

Then a really big double bill: Mark-Anthony Turnage's Greek and Salvatorre Sciarrino's The Killing Flower (Luci mie traditrici) which tells the story of  Carlo Gesualdo, artist and murderer.  Sciarrino is one off the biggest names in contemporary music, His music is beautifully poised and magical. Don't let the subject matter deter you any more than the subject matter of George Benjamin's Written on Skin. (reviewed HERE).  Sciarrino is a sensitive and very well informed composer, so it's quite possible the work will be filled with references to Gesualdo's music, interpreted through a modern perspective. Read more about Sciarrino HERE. That's him in the photo above. Cool dude!

Another reason Sciarrino's The Killing Flower should not be missed is that it's being produced by Music Theatre Wales, the innovative company that specializes in interesting new music, like Philip Glass's Into the Penal Colony (reviewed HERE) which Glass liked so much that he's written a new opera specially for them, also based on Kafka. The Trial is in the pipeline for 2015. We're truly lucky that they have an arrangement with ROH. The only other place they're doing this double bill is at the Buxton Festival. The Killing Flower is being paired with Mark-Anthony Turnage's Greek, not in the original production but a relatively new Music Theatre Wales exclusive from 2011.  This is the opera that made Turnage's name when he was an angry young man. Read more about it HERE. Music Theatre Wales is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a good touring programme. More about that HERE. 

For the Christmas/New Year season, a family opera from Julian Philips, whose The Yellow Sofa is a big hit at Glyndebourne Touring Opera. Philips used to be a fixture at the Wigmore Hall, a genuinely erudite and perceptive man, of whom there are far too few. His music is good, too, accessible and stimulating. When he writes for kids he doesn't write "down" at all. This is how you capture the imagination of future audiences : give them good work and all else follows  How the Whale Became, to a libretto by Edward Kemp, is based on Ted Hughes's  The Dreamfighter and Other Creation Tales.

In February, a curiosity, Tippett's King Priam paired with Britten's Paul Bunyan. Tippett and Britten aren't natural bedfellows, and one might say this combines the best of Tippett and worst of Britten.  Anyone familiar with both operas will gasp at the logistics, particularly in a place like the Linbury. There's something so strange about this that a friend suggested that each might be done on different nights, which makes sense, but why do both?  I won't speculate as uninformed guesswork is the enemy of good sense. The English Touring Opera toured with King Priam (on its own) last year.

Luke Bedford's F4u5T sounds like a big departure from his usual style.  It was devised as a companion piece to Gounod's Faust which will be on at the Main House in April 2014, so it might be a humorous experiment rather than a through-composed new opera. Working with electronic sound artist Matthew Herbert, F4u5t is about a composer frustrated by convention, who is seduced by Mefistofeles in the form of a super computer. "Soon he is using his music to manipulate and physically control the world with thrilling but deadly consequences". Probably witty and this time not above the heads of the London press.

ROH is collaborating with the Aldeburgh Music Festival and Opera North for another double bill, featuring as yet un-named operas by Elspeth Brooker and Francisco Coll.  This will be Brooke's biggest ever break. Coll is a protégé of Thomas Adès who calls him "strikingly individual". But the libretto is by Meredith Oakes, so the Adès connection may weigh heavily.

Luca Francesconi's Quartett  will have its UK premiere at the Linbury in June 2014. This is a major work, premiered at the Salzburg Festival  in 2011 and then at Teatro alla Scala, Milan. It was produced by La Fura dels Baus no less.  This will, however, be a completely new production co-produced with the London Sinfonietta  and Opéra de Rouen, directed by ROH Associate Director John Fulljames. That alone guarantees it will be good.  Quartett is loosely based on a play itself based on Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses, which isn't a novel so much as a series of letters through which the tightly plotted strategems are revealed. I think it would suit Francesconi, whose chamber music is exqusitely detailed and tightly constructed, The Arditti Quartet champion his work: he's very good indeed. Surprisingly, Tony Pappano is another fan, which ups his street cred no end. Although the opera is as compact as the story, this will be one of the most important new music events in years: the Linbury just doesn't have the capacity to give this opera the space its audience needs.  Why this isn't at Snape or QEH or even Spitalfields, I don't know. It needs only two singers but "a vast symphony orchestra and chorus" plus recorded samples over live music.

Linbury 2013-2014 ends on a fun note with HK Gruber's Gloria - a pigtail. Anyone who knows HK Gruber will know how eclectic his inventions can be, mixing genres with wit and dark humour.  Gloria is the story of "a pig princess looking for love who is dazzled and wooed by a prince who turns out to be a butcher but at the last moment is saved from the chop by Rudi The Wild Boar".   Shades of Gesualdo thru Austrian comic book?  The director will be Frederic Wake-Walker, the production by The Opera Group, Fulljames' original company. Again, their work is so good that this will be a season highlight.  

Harmonics is me - Salvatore Sciarrino

The identity of the violin soloist for this performance of Salvatore Sciarrino's Caprices was a secret until the very last moment when she walked in. Carolin Widmann! This was a bonus as she knows Sciarrino and had polished her interpretations with the man himself. "Why do you only do harmonics?" she asked him once. "Because I am harmonics," was the whimsical reply. Enigma, and gentle humour, that's Sciarrino all over. "The man", says Widmann, "seems to walk just above the ground,"

That should be no surprise to those who love his music, (see the earleir post below or via label) which seems to hover in a rarified atmosphere, pitched so high it's almost beyond human hearing. Nowadays we have so much aural overload that it's easy to forget how to listen to simple purity. It's a bit like watching ants : we don't notice them but they communicate and have busy lives. Sciarrino's high registers are there because the music is always on the threshold of floating away, elusively, if we don't listen carefully enough. This sensibility involves the listener rewarding him or her with a different perspective. It's the complete opposite of the new fashion for music as consumer product, imbibed mass rally style. To think that Dudamel was on this same platform last week.

Sciarrino's music isn't difficult though. It's intuitive and life affirming, so you can just chill. In any case Sciarrino's music springs from tradition, so even those who know nothing of new music can find points of entry. Widmann demonstrated. She played a passage from Paganini's Caprices and then the same from Sciarrino's: a direct quote but reinvigorated in a different way – sheer, pure light, as if from another plane of existence. "This music is like learning a new language", she added, with its unusual aesthetics and quirky technical challenges. At one stage, Widmann's fingers were poised at the extreme upper end of the neck of her instrument, while sweeping her bow in dizzying diagonals. The notes refers to the "brushing" of strings with the bow rapidly alternating between tasto and ponticello. This is music to be watched for maximum impact, because the sounds are so elusive you can't grasp them on recording alone.

Of the six Sei Capricci (1976) tonight we heard only I, II, III and the all important VI, the biggest section, which pulls together what's goe before and ends with a short pause and joyful flourish. Like a smile ! Then ten members of the Philharmonia materialised for ...da un divertimento. This is an early piece, from 1970. more "concrete" in the sense that the forms are easier to grasp. The larger ensemble also means more space to let ideas grow, so can hear subjects and reiterations etc. What's already there is Sciarrino's way of making things sound quite unlike what you'd expect. The bassoon, for example, sounds remarkably lithe for an instrument normally so resonant. Then the bassoonist, clarinettist and oboist pull out the reeds from their instruments and blow them through their cupped hands. This may sound silly on the written page, but in performance it's very effective. It's the essence of a mouth blown instrument, pared down to basics, the sound so quiet you could miss it if you weren't paying attention.

This was the second to last in the "Music of Today" series, created by Julian Anderson at the South Bank. It's been wonderful, hearing good new music presented intelligently and by someone who knows what he's talking about. Let's hope the series repeats next season. Or gets picked up by the BBC, whose "Hear and Now" slot could use major refurbishment.

Salvatore Sciarrino - cool dude

This smooth dude is Italian – of course, look at the natty shirt and watch! You bet he has nice pointy shoes. Salvatore Sciarrino (b 1947) is one of the biggest names in new music. On Sunday 10^th May there’ll be a free concert of his music at the South Bank London. We’ll hear one of his Caprices for solo violin, and …da un divertimento for 10 esecutori (performers).

The photo is specially apt as it shows the composer enjoying an espresso in the ancient town of Città di Castello in the Umbrian foothills, where he lives. The ambience of the town inspired his Quaderno di strada (2003), 12 canti e un proverba per baritone e strumenti. The CD notes are poetry. “Umbrian light…that spawns gentle, ephemeral shadows and is engulfed by the intangibly secret web of voices filling the mysterious night”. Sciarrino’s music is magic, elusive as if it adopts “the mobility of air, captured its nocturnal buzzing sounds with a net veil and transformed them into fluctuating sonorities, roaring and murmuring”.

There are texts to these songs, aphoristic snatches from Roman classics to Rilke. They are fragments that suggest moods the music elaborates. The voice plays with the words of a strange phrase seen on a wall in Perugia. Se non ora, quando? se non qui, dove? se non tu, chi?(if not now, when? if not here, where? if not you, who?” Long sweeping phrases are taken up by trumpet and oboe, later by violin, scratching along like something tossed in the wind. Simple, yet very expressive. 

Sciarrino doesn’t use easy signposts but wavers in ambiguities. Everything floats, shimmers, turns sudden corners. It’s not, though, like impressionist painting made up of dots, pretty on the surface but devoid of depth. On the contrary, meaning is central to Sciarrino’s music, though its precise content depends on how the listener puts together the clues in sound. This is profoundly emotional music, though it doesn’t crudely pull the heartstrings. It’s enigmatic, tantalizingly elusive, best approached perhaps through listening inwardly.

It’s also technically astute. Sciarrino knows baroque technique, adapting sillabazione scivolata (slipping syllables) for extra vocal flexibility. “A supporting note is held”, he explains, “crescendo decrescendo – and then breaks off suddenly in a very rapid sequence of small intervals whose pitches are almost indeterminable, often falling, - stepwise glissandi, so to speak”. 

Structurally, the cycle is elegant. Each miniature is distint yet leads into the next while the last part stands apart like pithy summation. Here the instruments (hard to distinguish for they’re used in unusual ways) do a syllabic cakewalk, short jerky rhythms, yet expanded by miniature glissandi within notes. The words deconstruct, too, into jaunty particles, like a merry dance. Put together they say Du cose al mondo non si ponno avere d’essere belli e di saper cantare. Someone please translate ? 

There is a recording, on Kairos, Otto Katzameier and Klangforum Wien, conducted by Sylvain Cambreling. Sciarrino is published by Ricordi, and there are many other recordings. His work for solo piano is particularly beautiful – the Nocturnes are a good introduction. 

A few years ago I heard Nicolas Hodges play Perduto in una città d’acque.(Lost in a city of water). This came to Sciarrino as he sat with Luigi Nono as Nono lay slowly dying. They hardly spoke, but communication doesn’t depend on words. “The words in a sentence were often punctuated by strands of sleep”, said Sciarrino, “and the meaning wandered, towards dreams, towards that nucleus of warmth”. What may seem to be long moments of silence in this piece seem more like moments of intense, intuitive listening. Structurally, it is based on a series of two note chords, but it is the reverberations between the notes that is fascinating. The sounds linger across the silence, the vibrations continuing after a note is struck. The occasional flurries of harmony highlight the profound dignity of the stillness. One set of chords is deliberately flat and hollow, like the mechanical ticking of a metronome – the passing of time, dripping water drops, a frail heartbeat.