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Musikfest 3: In Memoriam

Jesse Simon
miércoles, 25 de septiembre de 2024
Wolfgang Rihm © Hans Peter Schaefer | Wikipedia Wolfgang Rihm © Hans Peter Schaefer | Wikipedia
Berlin, jueves, 12 de septiembre de 2024. Philharmonie Berlin. Rihm: IN-SCHRIFT for Orchestra. Bruckner: Symphony No. 5 in B flat major. Berlin Philharmonic. Kirill Petrenko, conductor
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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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