There can be few more reliable indicators that summer is over and the new season is about to begin than the opening-night concert of Musikfest Berlin. But while the festival – featuring three weeks of concerts from local and international orchestras and ensembles – may be an established tradition, this year’s inaugural concert differed somewhat from the norm: in honour of the 75th anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele – the arts organisation responsible for Musikfest and its predecessor, the now-legendary Berliner Festwochen – the evening’s scheduled programme was preceded by a guest lecture from Prof. Meron Mendel.
While the address was, to some extent, a celebration of the Berliner Festspiele and its role within Berlin’s cultural landscape over the past three-quarters of a century, it also managed to situate the halcyon days of the Festwochen as a time of inclusivity and cautious optimism born from the horrors of the second world war; moreover it suggested that, some seventy-five years later, our current age of relative artistic freedom is now under threat from forces that anyone even vaguely familiar with the events of the 1930s will not fail to recognise.
The idea that art is not merely entertainment, but a crucial force on the modern political and cultural battlefield – and, by extension, that any restrictions to the freedoms of art and artists represent a tremendous threat to society itself – offered a surprisingly apposite prologue to Ligeti’s Grand Macabre, given an invigorating semi-staged performance on this evening by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. As Ligeti’s brilliant comedy for the end of days devolved from mere anarchy to total cataclysm it was impossible not to be reminded of Prof. Mendel’s words.
Le Grand Macabre had its first performances in the late 1970s – although it was revised in 1996 – and while the score has always had its adherents, it has experienced a notable surge in popularity over the past decade, with numerous staged productions and a handful of concert performances throughout Europe. It is unquestionably a work of excess, both in the bluntness of its satire and the voracity of its musical appetite; yet it is also wonderfully economic, a one-hundred minute blast of raucous energy into which Ligeti attempted to cram the entirety of the twentieth century, knowing full well it wouldn’t all fit. The result, when performed well, can be disorienting and intoxicating. If time has not diminished the obviousness of the libretto, the manic intensity of the score remains an unending onslaught of surprises and delights.
The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Helsinki Chamber Choir took their assignment for the evening seriously: when they came onstage it was not in the usual formal wear expected in a concert hall, but in matching black shirts with the words ‘Our Great Leader’ printed in bright red; and instead of simply launching into the score, an offstage voice asked everyone in the auditorium to rise for the national anthem of Brueghelland (which was, of course, the car horn prelude that opens the opera). Having pulled us forcibly into the world of the opera, the performance maintained a high level of musical and visual insanity.
With the exception of the vast percussion section, who were spread out across the back of the stage, most of the orchestra were placed to the left, leaving space on the right in which the various scenes could play out. Not that the semi-staging – conceived and directed by Frederic Wake-Walker – limited itself to the stage. The Philharmonie, with its interconnected levels and open arrangement, has often proved an ideal venue for adventurous performances and, throughout the evening, vocal soloists, the choir, and various groupings of instrumentalists appeared in unconventional places: the ‘our great leader’ chorus, delivered from the stairway alongside Block E, and the doomsday trumpets ringing out from the hall’s highest terrace at the end of Scene 3 were especially striking.
The principal singers appeared both in costume and in character: Amando and Amanda were presented as something out of Dr. Seuss, a two-headed, four-legged creature conjoined by an oversized jumper; Gepopo looked as if she was on loan from a low-budget sci-fi rollerskating film from the early eighties; and the two ministers took the stage in giant inflatable ball costumes that could barely fit through the doors. But while each of the scenes were performed with a certain amount of theatrical interaction, anyone unfamiliar with the libretto might have been hard-pressed to discern anything close to a story from the succession of seemingly unrelated vignettes. The staging nonetheless created an appropriately chaotic atmosphere that underlined the mood of each scene rather than illustrating its action.
For all that the staging provided an engaging spectacle, the evening’s greatest impressions came from the score itself. Conductor Nicholas Collon made few attempts to refine Ligeti’s most abrasive passages or smooth everything into coherent order; rather his was a reading of contrasts, of startling moments stitched together into an unwieldy patchwork in which myriad scraps of twentieth century music were plainly audible. A woozy interlude in the first act called to mind orchestral music’s brief flirtation with jazz in the 1920s, the ‘Our Great Leader’ chorus – one of the high points of the second act – had the shimmering force of one of Steve Reich’s phase experiments, while the hand percussion accompanying the second appearance of Gepopo sounded stolen from bargain-bin exotica LPs; there was even an appearance from a Mahler hammer. Yet the gleeful polystylism of the early scenes, while enjoyable on their own, also set the stage for perhaps the opera’s greatest moment, in which Ligeti suddenly returns to his own 1960s style of Atmosphères and Lontano to create an overwhelming soundtrack to what the characters believe to be the end of the world.
The highly charged orchestral performance was matched by a cast who seemed fully immersed in the spirit of the opera. Leigh Melrose was a commandingly deranged Nekrotzar, who managed to bring pointed malevolence – and, in the third act, megalomaniacal drunkenness – to the character without going over the top. Karl Huml was excellent as Astradamors the court astronomer, balancing elegant sustained low notes with frantic rapid-fire passages. And Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke, as Piet the Pot, seemed wholly unintimidated by the role’s technical demands, delivering even the most difficult passages with great humour. But while each of them were compelling on their own, the evening’s finest scenes were invariably those in which the three appeared together: the manic trio that concludes the first act contained more exuberance than perhaps any other passage, while the energetic drinking scene in Scene 3 offered a riotous prelude to the apocalypse.
Andrew Watts was a consistently elegant Go-Go, notable for the clarity of his tone and the effervescence of his delivery. And while Sarah Aristidou brought uncontained agitation to her appearances as Gepopo – in the second appearance, especially, she seemed constantly on the verge of seizure – it was the soaring enthusiasm of her Venus that left the greatest impression. Heidi Melton gave the evening a delightfully evil Mescalina, and as the lovers Amanda and Amando, the duo of Elisabeth Freyhoff and Jingjing Xu joined voices for passages of forceful ardour.
Although each section of the orchestra approached the music with gusto, it was the team of percussionists who were often the evening’s driving force: in their hands the car horn preludes emerged less as cacophony and more as the intricate studies in rhythmic counterpoint that Ligeti no doubt intended. Even the alarm clock prelude had a joyous verve that belied the immense precision needed to make it work. Elsewhere the double basses responded well to the physicality demanded by the score, and the massed woodwinds had more than a few moments of demonic intensity; and when the full orchestra came together to illustrate the possible end of the world at the end of Scene 3, the results were thrillingly fearsome.
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