Alemania
Bruckner 200Musikfest 3: In Memoriam
Jesse Simon

When Wolfgang Rihm died in July of this year
he had just been named composer-in-residence for the Berlin Philharmonic’s
24/25 season. The concert on this evening, given as part of Musikfest, was
intended as the first in a series of programmes featuring vocal, orchestral and
chamber works from throughout Rihm’s musical life; instead it was dedicated to
his memory. Nor was this the only in memoriam concert at this year’s
Musikfest: other evenings were devoted to the recently departed composers Kaija
Saariaho, Peter Eötvös and Aribert Reimann. But if the passing of Rihm gave the
first part of the evening a sombre cast, the performance of IN-SCHRIFT led
by Kirill Petrenko served as a fitting tribute to an extraordinary career.
IN-SCHRIFT,
written in 1995 and composed specifically for the acoustics of San Marco in
Venice, is listed as being ‘for Orchestra’, but the forces it employs are far
from conventional. Even before the music had started one couldn’t fail to
notice that the compact woodwind section was right up front and that there were
no violins or violas to be seen. Indeed the ensemble favoured instruments of
the middle and lower registers: horns and trombones, cellos and basses, bass
clarinet and contrabassoon; only the harp and a group of flutes were on hand to
represent the high-end. There were also – not surprisingly, given the composer
– five percussionists (in addition to a timpanist) on stage; but the
number of percussionists did not correspond to a proportionally vast assortment
of noisemakers (as in, say, Varèse’s Ionisation). Instead each
percussionist had their own station equipped with a similar arsenal: a set of
bells, some toms, some woodblocks, a gong and a bass drum. It was less the
diversity of their playing than their concentrated unison attack that gave the
piece its unique, occasionally unsettling character.
The dictum of Sun Ra that all members of
his Arkestra were percussionists – no matter what instrument they played
– was equally applicable to the orchestra of IN-SCHRIFT. In the
agitated opening section, most of the music from the ensemble came in the form
of sudden hits rather than sustained notes: the terse chatter of the woodwinds,
the incisive woody thwacks from the basses and cellos – taking pizzicato to
uncomfortable levels of physicality – and the unnervingly loud snaps of
unison woodblocks were underpinned primarily by sustained clusters from the
massed trombones. Yet for all its sonic volatility the piece never came across
as overly aggressive. And within the general schema of Rihm’s orchestration
there was plenty of room for variety. When the cellos and basses started to
play quiet sustained notes the effect was mesmerising, and the subsequent
unaccompanied passage for the five percussionists – later joined by the
timpanist – shifted almost imperceptibly from a monolithic crescendo to subtly
variegated polyrhythms with no loss of intensity. Although the work lasted only
twenty minutes the density of its construction left one with the feeling of having
undertaken a journey of far more epic proportions.
The second part of the evening was devoted
to Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony.
Although Bruckner never heard the work performed by an orchestra – he was too
ill to attend the belated première in 1894 – it nonetheless marks a
culmination and turning point in his symphonic output: while his ability to
work with vast forms and summon awe-inspiring vistas had reached full maturity,
they were still largely untroubled by the apocalyptic darkness and visionary
mysticism that would define his final symphonies. But if the Fifth
maintains a sunnier disposition – all the more surprising given its genesis
during a time of personal despair and financial uncertainty – it is nonetheless
an ecstatic work, as monumental and bracing as anything he had ever created or
would ever create.
While the thrills in Bruckner’s Fifth
were on prominent display in Mr Petrenko’s reading, its ecstasies were not
always so apparent. The first movement began promisingly, with a deliberately
restrained pace, clear pizzicato notes from the low strings and elegant
sustained pianissimi from the violas and violins. Indeed, the strings offered
purposeful and elegant playing throughout the evening … at least, in those
passages where they didn’t have to compete with the trumpets. Unfortunately the
trumpets – whose playing was generally excellent – were almost never held
in check, resulting in an oddly unbalanced full-orchestra sound that persisted,
to varying degrees, for the duration of the performance.
Mr Petrenko made few attempts to downplay
the symphony’s episodic construction: where some conductors will struggle to
find a through-line, Mr Petrenko approached the first movement on a piece by
piece basis, allowing each episode to flourish and conclude before moving onto
the next. If the reading was not long on continuity, it was nonetheless filled
with exciting passages and brilliant moments of high-impact playing. Yet among
the excitement were also a handful of passages that came across as cursory or understated.
The build-up to the first movement finale was taken at a captivatingly brisk
pace, but the pace was never relaxed causing the climactic brass figure to lose
some of its majesty.
The problematic aspects of the performance
were most apparent in the second movement, which seemed unwilling to engage
with Bruckner’s sense of awe. Although the first entry of the full strings was
magnificent, the determined pace and strangely-weighted full-orchestra sound
seemed to mitigate against any sense of Brucknerian loftiness. The movement’s
climactic section managed to be lively without being especially profound,
leaving one with the sense of having climbed a mountain only to be unimpressed
by the view. In the Scherzo and Trio, however, Mr Petrenko was fully in his
element, alternating passages of forceful thrust and relative calm with a
precision that in no way detracted from the movement’s presiding urgency.
The final movement was perhaps the most
successful, beginning with an echo of the first before being led in a different
direction by a recurring figure from the clarinet. The vigorous response of the
cellos and basses to the clarinet’s call was among the most ferocious playing
of the evening, and it kicked off a contrapuntal workout far more invigorating
than anything in the previous movements. Although the first appearance of the
chorale in the brass (answered by beautifully translucent violins) was suitably
solemn, it was the moment when the various string sections began to pass the
chorale theme back and forth that stood as one of the great highlights of the
performance.
If the earlier movements had been episodic,
Mr Petrenko found far greater continuity in the inexorable momentum of the
finale. And there can be no doubt that Mr Petrenko knew how to harness that
momentum for maximum effect: the long but meticulously-paced build from a simple
chorale to the symphony’s hugely-scaled final bars left the audience with no
option but to burst into rapturous applause. But when it was all over, one was
left with a sense that the performance, for all its surface dazzle, captured
only a part of what Bruckner has to offer.
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